Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi: Childhood and the Last Game

Childhood for Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi was not a temporal phase that folds away with age, but rather an existential station to which he returned whenever life weighed him down, and a window through which he gazed at the world whenever reality constricted him. He did not treat childhood as nostalgia or a bygone innocent time, but as an epistemic and moral value, a spiritual state capable of resisting cruelty and restoring meaning when things fade.

Whoever reads Shabbi with a careful eye discovers that his poetic voice did not emerge from the cloak of innocence, nor was it written from the position of a completed sage, but from the position of a being who refuses to grow up the way the world does. He was aware enough to see that maturity did not only mean wisdom, but often meant adaptation—where adaptation is the antithesis of the free spirit. Thus Shabbi remained in his poetry a resistant child, not a subdued man.

Thus childhood in Shabbi's poetry represented the condition of his profound maturity. The child is the only being who sees the world without intermediaries and listens to existence before learning its language. Therefore Shabbi, despite his short life, remained a poet possessing the wonder of children and the sorrow of sages—glory to Him who combined these two traits in him. It was as if his soul matured quickly, but his heart insisted on remaining a child.

When he wrote about nature, he did not write about it as an external subject, but as a living being that dwells within us—we address it and take it as a friend. This deep childish sensibility is what made nature in his poetry an existential partner. Only a child believes that trees hear, that the wind understands, and that the river keeps secrets. And Shabbi the poet did not abandon this belief when he transformed it into high poetic language.

How beautiful! When childhood in Shabbi becomes an ability to dream without permission, to anger without reckoning, and to cry without shame. Thus his poetics came out different—not a dry ideology, but meanings charged with emotion and innocence. As if inside him a child whispered defiance. Hence we understand why his will in his poetry seemed cosmic—the child does not ask for half freedom, nor does he bargain over his dreams.

But childhood in Shabbi was not always pure joy and play among nests, meadows, and birds. He faced a high sensitivity and a doubled capacity for pain. The child suffers more because he lacks the defense mechanisms that adults acquire. Perhaps for this reason Shabbi was acutely sensitive to loss, injustice, and the betrayal of reality. He did not learn cruelty nor master dullness; instead, he remained open to the wound.

In this sense, we can read Shabbi's illness and suffering as a deepening of his childhood experience. Illness returned him to the direct sensation of pain and to the question of life and death, but as a child poses it when surprised by the annihilation of things around him. He did not contemplate death with the eye of a philosopher, but with the eye of a frightened, innocent, questioning child.

Perhaps the most beautiful aspect of Shabbi's experience lies in his not withdrawing; childhood seemed to confront him with unfamiliar tools. He confronts with the question a world whose game is justification. And he confronts with poetic screaming a time skilled in silence. Yet, in a reality that teaches people how to adapt, he insisted on suffering—and no one but a child can do that.

Childhood in the poetry of Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi does not reflect merely an age stage, but rather represents a stance toward existence. That is why his poetry remains alive—because it was written from a rare region not corrupted by calculations nor polluted by interests.

Finally, it can be said that Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi did not only die young, but lived as a child until the end. When a poem loses its childhood, it loses its ability to endure. And when a person loses his childhood, he loses his ability to dream. It is as if Shabbi, in his poetry and life, chose to lose his years rather than lose his dream.

Therefore, reading Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi from an unconventional angle brings us back to the essential question:

Do we grow up to understand the world? Or do we grow up to forget what we once knew by childhood intuition?

Shabbi knew the answer, in my opinion, and died in his short life writing it with the hand of a stubborn child who refuses to hand over his last game!

Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi