CAIRO: Away from her war-torn country, Iraqi poet Nazek al Malaika, famous for being the first to write Arabic poetry in free verse rather than classical rhyme, was buried Thursday at a desert cemetery near Cairo.
Al-Malaika died Wednesday in a Cairo hospital. She was 85. An Egyptian imam led the prayer while al-Malaika s coffin, draped in the black, red, green and white of the Iraqiflag, lay at a mosque in Cairo s Sarraya al-Quba neighborhood where the poet had lived in self-imposed exile since 1990.
Scores of Egyptians joined a handful of members of Egypt s Iraqi community in the prayer before al-Malaika s coffin was taken to the cemetery in the 6th of October suburb for burial.
She lived in honesty and modesty and died as such too, said Iraqi exile Ahmed al-Haboubi, an old friend of al-Malaika s family.
Born in the Iraqi capital in 1922 to a mother who was also a poet and a father who was a teacher, al-Malaika graduated in 1944 from the College of Arts in Baghdad, where she also studied music. Ten years later, she traveled to the United States to study and received a Master s degree in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin.
In 1947, she published her first collection of poems under the title Night s Lover. Her second collection, entitled Sparks and Ashes, came two years later, andthe third, Bottom of the Wave was published in 1957. Her fourth collection, Tree of the Moon, came out in 1968.
Al-Malaika spent 40 years teaching Arabic and literature in Iraqi schools and universities, and also wrote literary criticism.
She left Iraq in 1970, just two years after Saddam Hussein s Ba’ath Party came to power. She lived in Kuwait until Saddam s 1990 invasion, when she left Kuwait City forCairo.
Al-Malaika preferred solitude and rarely socialized. She suffered for years from several ailments, including Parkinson s disease. Earlier this month, a group of Iraqi intellectuals wrote to the Iraqi government, protesting what they called negligence of Iraq s greatest surviving symbol of literature.
Al-Malaika is survived by a son. Her husband, Abdel Hadi Mahbooba, died two years ago.
