Written by YAACOUB RUBAI

This biography is for Adonis, please refer to Kamal Boullata's page for his biography. 

Adonis Ali Ahmad Said Esber was born on January one, 1930, to a modest Alawite family in Al-Qassabin, a village near the northwestern shores of Syria. A poet, essayist, literary critic, translator, and revolutionary, he is renowned as one of the most influential figures in modern Arabic poetry. Due to his family’s financial instability, Adonis was unable to afford formal schooling and instead received Islamic and literacy education at the local Kuttab. Despite these limitations, his father nevertheless ensured Adonis’ early immersion into classical Arabic poetry. After recognizing his skill during a visit to Al-Qassabin in 1944, the newly elected Syrian president Shukri al-Quwatli offered the young poet a grant to study at the last French Lycée in Tartus. After being rejected by several magazines for the Islamic associations of his given name, Said implicated his pagan-mystic ideology by adopting the pen name “Adonis” at the age of 17, after the Greek God of fertility, resurrection and spiritual renewal. Adonis attended other national schools after the Lycée shut down in 1945 and graduated at 19. He secured a government scholarship to study law and philosophy at the University of Damascus in 1951, after which he served in the Syrian military. During his military service, in 1955, he was briefly imprisoned for affiliations with the Syrian Social Nationalist Party that opposed the colonization of Greater Syria and sought a secular and progressive national Greater Syria. Forced into exile following his release from jail, he settled in Beirut in 1956, where he married the literary critic Khalida Saleh-Said. The couple had two daughters, and in 1973 Adonis pursued a doctoral degree in Arabic literature at the University of Saint Joseph in Beirut.

As he found creative refuge in Beirut’s vibrant community of artists, writers, and exiles, Adonis immersed himself in poetry and published his first collection First Poems in 1957.  Alongside the Syro-Lebanese poet Yusuf Al-Khal, he co-founded and edited Majjallat Shi’r, arguably the most progressive and influential Arab literary journal and a prime platform for the modernist Arabic literature movement. Shi’r was met with significant criticism for its secular and anti-propaganda agenda that reflected pan-Arabism and championed experimental poetry. Al-Khal and Adonis opposed the suppression of individual creativity in response to a growing mandate that literature solely services the immediate political needs of the Arab nation. Majjallat Shi’r ceased publication in 1967 after a series of suspensions. The following year, Adonis founded another freethinking literary periodical, Mawaqif, which circulated until 1994. He also founded and edited Al-Akhar magazine from 2011 to 2013, which published essays on Arabism, philosophy, politics, and religion.

As a secularist, Adonis refused religious dogmas and their imposition on society. In 2013, Salafist Islamic scholar Abdelfetah Zeraoui Hamadache issued a fatwa calling for Adonis’ books to be burned in the Arab world.

Although he critically examined contemporary socio-political issues in the Middle East, Adonis was more concerned with integrating artistic liberty in his work as a poet. He wanted to modernize poetry toward innovative forms and subject matter. His most acclaimed poem, Aghani Mihyar Al-Dimashqi, marked disruption in Arabic poetry and language by experimenting with free verse and variable meters as well as introducing prose poetry. His use of new syntax, metaphors, and structure strove to break the linearity of traditional poetic texts. In his essay The Time for Poetry, Adonis defined modern poetry as a change in the order of things and rebellion against old forms. For Adonis, new poetry involved metaphysical sensitivity that can be comprehended only through imagination and dreams. He was also a leading advocate of the Neo-Sufi trend in poetry, expressing nationalistic views in tandem with a mystical outlook inspired by Sufi philosophy.

During the 1990s, Adonis collaborated with several artists to create visual adaptations of his poetry. Fascinated by the poet’s Petra Tablet, for example, the Jordanian artist Mona Saudi illustrated the poem in a series of drawings on silkscreen (1997). Twelve Lanterns for Granada (1995), a collaborative work with the Palestinian artist Kamal Boullata, consists of twelve signed silkscreen prints alongside two accordion books based on specific architectural features of the Alhambra, Granada’s central monument. One book contains Adonis’ Arabic texts and Spanish translations, and the other, English and French translations. Syrian artist Ziad Dalloul also worked with Adonis to create Le Livre des Villes (1999), an art book containing nine poems that showcase the heterogeneity of nine Arab, European and American metropolises whose juxtaposition reflects Adonis’ deconstruction of the notion that Arab culture is isolated and stuck in the past. As an exile, he also portrays nostalgia for his home village against ambivalence toward more substantia cities, noting the possibilities they offer while aware of what they strip away. The poetic landscapes of city squares, streets, cafes, neighborhoods, and their inhabitants combine physical and human geography to highlight the architecture and culture of these cities, to which Dalloul responded with 18 silkscreen prints.

In 2002 Adonis experimented with visual art he coined as Raqima, taken from Raqama, meaning to write and color simultaneously. His visual art blends calligraphy, collage and, ink by using discarded objects like fabric and parchment on a background of his invented style of calligraphy and muted colors. He begins by citing verses in homage to great Arab poets like Bashar ibn Burd and Abu Zuaib al-Huzal and weaves his own on themes like wandering, dreams, and love.

Adonis has lived in Paris with his wife and two daughters since 1985. 

Sources

"Adonis (Ali Ahmad Esber)."American University of Beirut. Accessed April 16, 2019. https://www.aub.edu.lb/doctorates/recipients/Pages/adonis-profile.aspx.

"Adonis: The Difference between a Poem and a Painting." Arab Hyphen. April 03, 2015. Accessed April 18, 2019. https://arabhyphen.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/adonis-the-difference-between-a-poem-and-a-painting/.

Storey, Thomas. "Why The Syrian Poet Adonis Is Our Greatest Living Cultural Dissident." Culture Trip. February 08, 2012. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://theculturetrip.com/middle-east/syria/articles/adonis-cultural-dissident/.

Jaggi, Maya. "Adonis: A Life in Writing." The Guardian. January 27, 2012. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2012/jan/27/adonis-syrian-poet-life-in-writing.

KalsiSpecial, Jyoti. "Two Facets of an Artist." Gulf News – No.1 in UAE and Dubai for Breaking News, Opinion and Lifestyle. October 31, 2018. Accessed April 17, 2019. https://gulfnews.com/entertainment/arts-culture/two-facets-of-an-artist-1.1978981.

Adonis, and Mona Saudi. Petra Tablet: The Hands of Stone Draws The Place. Translated by Lubna Fahoum. Edited by Ali Assam and Ruth Stollery Abudeeb. Beirut: Mona Saudi, 2011.

Adonis, and Ziad Dalloul. Le Livre Des Villes. Translated into French by Unesco. Paris: L'Institut Du Monde Arabe, 1999.