For intimacy… elegance and taste

In a dialogue session full of intimacy, I felt that I was reliving my childhood and sitting in the classroom in front of professors who poured showers of generous clouds on my heart. I felt that I was summoning time and sitting it in front of me to tell it the story of the boy who left Mu’ayrid’s village to live in the heart of Medina, here in the heart of the towering bottles entering. In the bowels of the sky as if it were a childhood dream.
In the dialogue, the words played the melody of eternity and awakened in the soul worlds more delicious than the spaces of the novel itself, whose chapters, origins, breaks, corners, and texts. In the middle of all of us is the effort of His Excellency Hoda Ibrahim Al-Khamis, founder of the Abu Dhabi Group for Culture and Arts, and alongside this great effort, the pillar of poetry and thought was erected in the presence of an elite group of people. Creators, writers, and writers. The place was lit up by a group of lovers of the word, led by my compassionate brother Ibn Julfar, the poet Abdullah Al-Saab, the dear Sameh Kaoush, the maestro of the wonderful word, Dr. Youssef Hatini, and the journalist Faten Hamoudi.
Love mediates our world, and when love is present, words become butterflies made of the velvet of warm feelings, eyes are lit with lamps of affection, and life becomes at the same moment a cloth that surrounds our hearts, giving us rebellion against everything other than love, urging us to grasp the dictionary of spontaneous history, pushing us like waves towards the shores of memory. A memory of the beautiful time when the courtyards opened their windows wide and the doors were open so that the air could come in with the company of women with sensitive stories, the sisters of morning coffee, the dates of sweetness and friendly revelation.
God, the critical dialogue session was more beautiful than the crash of the wave, fresher than the waves of the sea, deeper than the depths of the ocean, nobler than the gallop of purebred horses, and more serene than the jingle of camels dreaming of a shady forest.
It was a session in the presence of the elite and the elite, and things in the details of revelation, raised agonies in the soul, and stirred in the heart the demons of spontaneity. How much she hid it, how much she hid behind her abaya, how much she preserved from frills and scratches, how much she prevented it from flying for fear of getting wet, and how much she raised it over her night pajamas so as not to Touched by an animal on the ground, how much I defended it so that snake venom would not hit it, how much I refrained from declaring it so that the breeze of the air in Mairid would not worry it, how much I loved to be away from the noise and commotion, and how much I hid my heart between my ribs, which is the box in which I kept my first look and first smile. The page of the history book opened before me, and it chronicled for my life conquests without spear or sword, which were in general terms and steadfastness on the back of feelings that came out from among the grains of dirt to color the face of life to give me precedence in love and priority in delicious torments.
During the book fair session, I felt the presence of my friend, Muhammad Nour al-Din, as if he was an umbrella hovering over those words that moved between the book’s pages as if they were ears of grass, moving their teeth in a spacious space, and streams that filled the soul with ecstasy and anticipation of a tomorrow. It seemed to me that he was in the presence of this constellation of elements of joy in our cultural movement in In the company of poetry and the poet, in the company of research and researcher, and in the company of the narrator and narration.
With the presence of figures of stature and splendor, such as Hoda Al-Khamis, culture becomes clear and words become exalted, and we feel at that time that the sky heralds more of the goodness of the cloud and much of the virtue of love, which is the antidote to our renaissance and the elixir of the maturity of our cultural journey, and the secret of our presence and the sounding of our beacon in this beautiful edifice.
Thank you, Abu Dhabi Group for Culture and Arts, and thanks go to everyone concerned with culture and everyone who puts their affectionate touch on the word, as it is the beacon of our development, the vessel of its identity, and the source of our presence in this vast, vast world.