" Are we Arabs one big lie?
Nizar Qabbani.

No, not a lie. But pain. Pain that this Arab-Syrian poet witnessed up close.

His older sister committed suicide because she had been forced to marry a man she did not love. Qabbani's wife, a teacher from Iraq who he first met at a poetry reading in Baghdad, was killed beneath the ruins of bombed Beirut. His son Taufiq died aged 22 of a heart attack.

If Qabbani was still alive today, when the town of h