Nizar Al-Farawi-Rabat
The glory experienced by a singer, actor, writer or thinker today does not provide the lowest guarantee for the state of tomorrow, nor does the decline of the creator in general in the Arab world to the shafts of the tragedy in the autumn of life or the cycle of disease and poverty or the cold of exile, amid the silence of institutions and in front of the eyes of comrades and the public alike.
One lives through the years of fame that open homes and hearts for him and fatten his photo album, then it happens that the symbolic balance is quickly dissipated in a society that does not provide artists and writers with creations of symbolic honoring and physical social protection systems that strengthen their lives when people forget them and close without them the doors of theaters, presses and various The forums and lights from them drop.
Models of tragedies
The biography of Al-Jahiz, who lived and died poorly, reproduced in his grandchildren, leading to a great thinker who ended up with an Akkad style poet and a poet who filled space with the caliber of Amal Dunqul and artists who planted a smile in the presentation of the Arab world, such as Abdel Salam Al Nabulsi, Ismail Yassin, Nihad Qali and first-class stars such as "Cinderella Screen" Souad Hosni and the "African Poet" by Mohamed Al Fitouri
| Al-Nabulsi died poor after years of glory and fame (networking sites) |
The list remained open to all the spectrums of creators whose lives embodied the great betrayal, the scourge of forgetfulness, the absence of a culture of recognition, and care in the Arab social fabric.
Some endings were almost expected because they were the price paid by creative people and intellectuals who clashed with a low ceiling for freedom, and they incurred the arbitrariness of pursuit and police chases, and they wandered in their faces in exile.
Iraqi, Syrian and Sudanese writers and artists ended up with unknown identities on strange sidewalks, but most of them tasted the bitterness of autumn among their families amid the silence that everyone colluded with from formal institutions and sometimes NGOs.
And whoever did not know, Raisat Salam, a poet of the seventies generation in Egypt, as a translator, magazine owner and crowned with literary prizes, knew him of a social situation in the last days on the pages of communication, he is mobilized to save him from the clutches of the disease, a group of intellectuals in Egypt and the Arab world.
In the absence of regular health coverage, the poet had to wait for his role in the row of death had it not been for a gift from the comrades that recently yielded an urgent guarantee for a special initiative following a statement signed by a book from Egypt and abroad.
Shocking ends
The artistic community and the audience in Morocco were shocked by the situation of the pioneers of theatrical and cinematic acting, Mohamed El-Khalafi, as he counted his days alone, poor and poor, in a fragile house in a forgotten suburb, after the interruption of his work coincided with the interruption of the livelihood source, while disability and disease came as a heavy and demanding guest.
Moroccan storyteller Mohamed Jubran left the world in late 2019 after he recalled his suffering in the literary milieu, and accusations and counter accusations broke out between a few of his remaining friends and the Moroccan Writers Union the day after he talked about his expulsion from a public hospital bed and he is in complete disability.
Press platforms in Syria documented scenes from the last chapter of the life of the dramatic and theatrical artist Riyad Shahrour, who founded the first theater group in the middle of the last century, and spread years ago in silence after aging from isolation and destitution without receiving any official or civil care, although he contributed to the establishment of the Artists Syndicate .
And the theater critic Abdel Halim Bouchraki in Algeria threw a stone in the stagnant water when he addressed the Ministry of Culture regarding the critical health and social situation of director Mohamed Charchal, who honored Algeria inside and outside the country and received a special honor in the theatrical days of Carthage before being attacked by a distant heart with disappointments and letdowns, as he said Bushraki.
| Egyptian poet Rifaat Salam (left) transformed into a social situation (communication sites) |
A point of light .. but
There is some reason to darken the situation in a number of Arab countries that have registered a remarkable movement since the second decade of the new millennium in the direction of establishing legal and institutional mechanisms to preserve the dignity of artists and enable them to have minimal health and material care.
In 2016, the Artist and Artistic Professions Act was issued in Morocco, and before that the National Artistic Mutual Aid Association was established in 2007 at the initiative of the Union of Professionals of Stage and its partners to provide health coverage for those involved.
In Algeria, the executive decree related to the protection and social services of the artist was issued in 2014 in order to enable artists to have professional cards authorizing them for social protection services, and the Tunisian Council of Government has ratified since 2017 a draft law laying the foundations for the protection of the artist’s moral and material rights and ensuring its social protection.
The Law regulating the artistic professions in Lebanon since 2008 regulates the establishment and work of artistic unions, and stipulates the establishment of a unified mutual support fund for artists that provides compensation for illness, death and bodily accidents and provides a pension for associates and a comprehensive medical guarantee.
Texts, mechanisms and unions are waving wholesale, but their common denominator is collision with practical obstacles, not the last of which is the problem of defining the artist or writer, and limited concrete results on the level of artists and intellectuals living and preserving their rights as citizens contributing to human development, which combines all of its literatures today on the role of cultural and artistic production in advancing its wheel and making change Social and economic.
Cultural industries in the West have become avant-garde sectors in producing wealth and moving the wheel of the economy, but they are unable to secure the minimum needs of their creators who struggle to extract the right to dignity in life and death.