Badr Shaker Assayab: a pioneer of free verse
Iraq, Literature, 12/5/1997

Iraqi poet Badr Chakir Assayab has always displayed his love for his country and particularly for Jaikour, the village of his birth where he spent his childhood. Later on he moved to Basra for his secondary school education, then to Baghdad to joint the Higher Institute of Education as an English literature student.

His studies of English literature left a deep impact on his style. He composed free verse poems and became later a pioneer of this trend in the Arab homeland.

Love is a recurrent theme in Assayab's poems. He portrayed his love for his birthplace Jaikour, for woman and his country Iraq in many poems including "The Waste Land," "A City Without Rain" and "The Song of the Rain."

He participated in protests waged against the British colonial forces and his adverse activities led to his expulsion from his job. He was then thrown into prison for having taken part in the demonstrations against the government.

Assayab went to Kuwait to work as a teacher, and there he wrote several poems including "The Song of the Rain," "The Blind Prostitute" and "A Stranger in the Gulf."

Apart from English influences, whether romantic or modern, his writings were much affected by the French Symbolist movement, not only as it touched him through T.S. Eliot, but also through his contact with French poetry. Even French impressionistic music seemed to have touched him through the works of some French poets.

Assayab's poetry shows distinctly dark moods brought on by his repeated exiles, and especially by his ill health. The saddest poems he wrote are those poems he wrote in a London hospital shortly before his death. He could, however, write happily, and in "Jaikour and the Trees of the City" is a good example.

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