Memories with Hoda Al-Nomani

I was seventeen years old and that was around the birth of 1969 when Ibn Safi Bassam al-Nu’mani, a companion from childhood and politics, invited me to a dinner with his family. It was a meeting with his father Abdul Qadir al-Nu’mani and his mother Huda and his brother Anis, and he was two years younger than us, and it was a beautiful and promising meeting, and a pioneer for me, an era beautiful and promising, and for me. With enlightened thinking and a new culture. Bassam’s people had come from Cairo after his father’s retirement from the Dean of the American University there. He joined our brother Anis at our “International College” school before we headed to Beirut, and I was not absent from his family’s home for fifty-two years, as a resident or an immigrant. Until yesterday, when Hoda was absent and forever at dawn on October 31, he lay quietly with his partner in Bashura, in a view of a recovering city.

There, in his literary hall in Ras al-Nabeh, among bookshelves and art paintings and around us, are fragrant roses, and from the balcony comes Fouh Yasmine, a reminder of his hometown of Damascus in 1930, I observed while he had not passed of twenty Qabbani and Darwish, and Adonis, the son of his class at the University of Damascus, and later in the early eighties and George Ansihanej. But there was always, from start to finish, Shawqi Abu Shakra and his existential confusion as his companion, and at the residence of his son Anis and his wife Nahid Zain in London, I had the pleasure of later meeting Baland Al-Haidari and Amjad. Nasser. She is the Damascene daughter of Salwa Al-Ghazzi and Fouad Al-Numani, and the first lawyer in Damascus to graduate from the office of her uncle Saeed Al-Ghazzi, who formed his first government during the independence era during the It was from President Hashem Al-Atassi, and the second during the era of President Shukri Al-Quwatli before his last election as President of Syria during the Qi era. Until March 8, 1963. To Cairo, where her husband and the American University were, and New York with him for a doctorate in mathematics, Cairo and Beirut and her return to poetry, painting, sculpture and music. mysticism, and no wonder his great-grandfather Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi, and on a shelf he wrote his manuscripts in his own handwriting.
Bassam was absent, so he did a doctoral thesis at Columbia University on Lebanon talking about its fluctuations, then he was a professor in the American and ambassador in his country and recently retired from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs here, for which he issued his valuable journey documented on maps of the Sykes-Picot accord with extensive study. In the summer of 1983, I departed with Shawqi Abi Chakra from the “Al-Nahar” newspaper building to the wedding of his son Anis and Nahed Zain at the “Summerland” hotel, and the songs of Damascus and old Cairo resounded in the Beirut suite sky.
She is the Lebanese, from Thursday Poetry to “An-Nahar” sponsored by Onsi and Shawqi, and she is the Palestinian who sought to defend the rights of the Palestinian people. She is the Syrian, who forgot Damascus, who continued to be her link with hope and found it in the love of all who knew her and their patience and patience. When he asked me about the ribs of his granddaughter, Hoda, the daughter of Anis and Nahid, in Arabic, when my student was in Beirut, I replied: No problem. She, God have mercy on her, said: Don’t be hard on her. With his wisdom, I imposed the foundations of discipline, the end of literature, and the desires of nations.

* Palestinian researcher

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