2023-09-05 09:51:46
Producing a text that differs from the prevailing one in the environment of its owner is not an easy matter, and it may cost him his life, and perhaps before that cause him to flee from the place and be forced to beg for salvation in other parts of the planet, with the constant payment of expensive taxes.
In the same environment, many decades ago, there was a coastal voice that was more radical in its stance towards the father’s regime, reciting poems and songs, but the factors of repression and attempts to domesticate, or at least to persuade silence, as a necessity and need in order for the fate not to be a long prison, were all factors. Pressing for the popular singer and poet Issam al-Khatib to remain silent regarding composing the songs of opposition poets, and regarding writing lyrics for songs that expose Hafez and his men!
Perhaps the most important reason for what happened is the absence of the comrades, i.e. the youth of the Communist Action League whose fate ended up in detention centers: Karkoun Sheikh Hassan in the center of Damascus, Tadmor al-Sahrawi, and following that Sednaya al-Askari and Adra al-Madani. ?!
Little is the information that the Syrian public knows regarding Essam Al-KhatibHowever, his poetic and lyrical experience deserves to be restored, regardless of the opinions of some regarding his musical value, the details of his exotic life, and the changes in his personal attitudes, and certainly it should not be presented as a fleeting flash or a moment emanating from its temporal context.
At some point in the year 1985, our shoes had become completely dusty as we climbed the dirt roads leading to some parts of the 86 neighborhood, which initially arose as housing irregularities on the mountain that bore a name, this number, west of the Damascus neighborhood of Mezzeh, and our destination was a hastily built cement room next to it Kitchen also used as a bathroom. When we arrived and our friend who led our journey knocked on the door, a smiling girl opened, whom I will know years later to be the Syrian poet and former detainee Ghada Bobo, and she led us to the room where I and those with me would meet Issam, who was smoking long red cigarettes greedily, drinking black tea, leaning on a stick whose back had been changed. To fit him, it became like the back of a guitar. A man can memorize your voice as soon as you say hello to him, but his advantages do not come from being a blind musician, but rather through what he used to sing of different and shocking songs, such as his dangerous song at the time:
“Oh Hoedilk, Oh Hoedley…
Or heart disease
Sadat chops the people
And Resna Nazil with frying “..
I remember the song and its lyrics that I heard on cassettes that were circulated secretly in the partisan environment, while I heard them from him personally, but what surprised me most were the beautiful attempts he made to compose famous poems by the poets of the Palestinian resistance, such as the poem “Nsheed” by Mahmoud Darwish, and the poems of a number of young poets such as Faraj Bayraktar and others who belong to the same environment, where the lyrics of the poems stick to the trembling of the beginnings, the revolution once morest the regime, and the quest to build a more just world, so the song becomes part of a secret world that the dreamy young man lives in.
Al-Shabab did not promote Issam Al-Khatib as the party’s singer, and no one tried to say that the man was the Syrian “Sheikh Imam”, given the similarity between her two situations in terms of blindness. Rather, the idea was that the general Syrian climate, despite the brutality that prevailed in a decade In the 1980s towards the Islamic opponents, and to a lesser extent with the leftists and nationalists, he was expressing opposition voices even in the environment closest to the regime. Hostility to the Assad family and their hatred of the Syrian coast was not a fleeting whim of enthusiastic leftist youth who formed the League as well as the Communist Struggle Front and other formations. Rather, it was a reality whose thoughts haunt many people, and the same thing happens in other places in the Syrian land, so the angry sentence crosses sects and groups, but due to what happened in terms of repression, terrorism, and attempts to buy consciences by offering royalties and turning society into a rotten apple, it was fading and disappearing, so there was nothing left of it. Only as memory allows!
Issam Al-Khatib immigrated following an experience that little is known regarding, with the Palestinian resistance, to Brazil in 1987, where he worked there as a singer for expatriates in some places, and among what he sang was a song written by Faraj Bayraktar entitled “Oh ShamHer words say:
“O Sham, remember me… Remember me, Sham
O rose of our humility.. my file of yam..
Remember me, remember me, Sham the prisoner
Your family, your loved ones, your sun, your soil
Oh talking eyes.
O dearest names, O far and near
O longing clouds for the eyes of the beloved
Remind me, O Sham.. O Prague of the Bath..
Wait for me.. wait for me, Sham..”.
Al-Khatib returned to Syria in 1995, and tried to make a living by presenting his melodies to Radio Damascus, in which the music department was not looking for melodies as much as it was looking for songs glorifying the leader, and I do not know the accuracy of the information I heard regarding it being a melody by Fouad Ghazi, a song glorifying Assad! But what I do know is that the man retired for a long time in his village “Jaybul” in the “Qutaylibiyya” district in the Jableh countryside. And that he was always writing the sad admonitions that some circulated without knowing that he was the author of them, and when he was mentioned in a passing session with an old friend in the year 2006, he called him, and he talked regarding his constant attempts to compose rural songs that carry the meanings of love and warmth away from the typical mountain singing that It became more like beating drums in the heads, and regarding his endeavor with a young singer named Samer Ahmed to promote this type of singing, and the song “Metal Al-Qasab” was the beginning of the project, in which he says:
“Like the reeds, makhsour and standing on your tricks
And your braids dance on the wings of the wind, and the wind challenges you
Leaning on the anats of the reeds, how beautiful your inclination is
Leaning on the anat of the reeds to get drunk and make you rich
I flirt with you, I am the most beautiful dream of mind
And every dream of this world is spinning
Spinning air, spinning Hana, spinning silk, and joining the shawl
Go ahead and go ahead
Yarn and nightshirt
And let the reeds steal your mawwal
However, it was not long until I received the news of Al-Khatib’s death sometime in 2007, following a long illness.
Over the past years, some have tried to exploit some of what Issam al-Khatib produced, including a song by him titled “All capitals have sworn… that injustice will remain,” as some of its words were distorted to become suitable for the regime’s discourse! According to Khaled Ayoub, who was close to Essam, the latter meant that all Arab capitals, including Damascus, were once morest Palestine, and he had previously refused to change the word “all capitals” to “some capitals” to become suitable for the theater, but following his death the opera house took it. And I used it to sing, taking the meaning that the Arab capitals are once morest Damascus!
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