Yemeni Tunes of Passion [Archives:1997/43/Culture]

Yemeni Tunes of Passion is the first published collection of poetry by Monira Al-Deilami. Raised in a family of religious and literature scholars, Monira started writing poetry at the age of 9. She wrote prolifically during the ’70s. Her poems were published by Yemeni, Arab and foreign magazines and newspapers.
She was educated in Aden, Sanaa, graduating with a degree in law from the Bin Aknoon University in Algeria. Married to a diplomat, she traveled widely in Arab and foreign countries, enabling her to have a diverse cultural background. Monira recited her poems in various countries such as the UAE, France, Oman, and Algeria. Her modern poetry, free from the restrictions of rhyme and scale, and other writings have touched the essential women’s issues in Yemen. “Writing about women and the family is writing about the part that represents the whole,” said Monira. Being an educated wife and mother of six grown children, Monira has the capacity to write from the heart. Arab critics like to use the phrase “women’s literature” to describe what is written by women. “From my humble point of view, there is no separate literature for men and women. What is created by both, whether it be poetry, music, painting, etc., is for all mankind.” In her eponymous poem, Monira intensifies a whole range of angry human feelings. It is an anger directed towards the deliberate distortion of sensitive human affections by the modern era. Describing life in Paris, in which Monira lived for quite a while, she said in her poem Yemeni Tunes of Passion : extravagance, perfume, tobacco, and alcohol women, and irrational freedom naked legs scents of perfume on cheap bodies women… and hounds men running practical and realistic men a high tower the Arch of Triumph… museums… etc and I am here here alone still the bedouin …………. Yemen’s famous poet Al-Baradouni said, “Monira is a ebullient peace of nature that becomes angry, smiles, softens to point of dissolving, and become cruel to the point of emitting lightening. She is affectionate in her movement and stillness, reticence and talk, and sighing and fluttering. “The disproportionate impact of a world, on whose rock where the beautiful relationships were destroyed, on the daughter of an Arab / Muslim Orient has created these conscience shaking and thought provoking poetic writings,” said the Yemeni poet and writer Dr. Abdulaziz Al-Maqilih about Monira’s Yemeni Tunes of Passion.. He further said, “it is so beautiful that such a disproportionate impact would produce such enchanting and peaceful words.”

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