Fu’ād Ḥaddād

Abstract

Very few critics, practitioners or aficionados of shi‘r al-‘āmmiyya would debate that Fu’ād Ḥaddād is the “father of shi‘r al-‘āmmiyya.” He has also been called the “master,” and “imām” of the movemenṭ³ His poetry was recognized as a reorientation of the poetics of colloquial verse that inspired other poets of his generation and continues to inspire much younger ones. In the introduction to his collected works, Ṣalāḥ Jāhīn acknowledges that he was influenced by Ḥaddād’s early poetry, and recognized it as something new and different from that of earlier generations of poets who wrote in the colloquial. Ḥaddād’s poetry was indeed different from the colloquial poetry that was being produced by the earlier generation of Egyptian colloquial poets, among whom Bayram al-Tūnisī stands as the most influential and highly acclaimed. Already discernible in Ḥaddād’s first published collection of poems were some of the new characteristics of language, form, themes, and attitude that would later become the distinctive features of both shi‘r al-‘āmmiya and the modernist Arabic poetry in the standard register as well. The success of Ḥaddā’s experiment was certainly a positive influence on Jāhīn and on other ‘āmmiyya poets of his generation.

You are the grand imām and our common origin

You are the leader whom we follow in our prayers¹

I am the father of poets, Fu’ād Ḥaddād

Yes, I am the father and the children are many.²