Bruno Cooke investigates Million’s Poet, a reality television show in the United Arab Emirates with massive cash prizes
In the Arab world, poetry as a form of expression is deeply respected. It’s a traditional art practised by people across the socioeconomic spectrum, from Dubai’s ruler Sheik Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum to nomadic Bedouin. For the Bedouin, Nabati – a historically aural, vernacular form of Arabic poetry – is like the blues or the French chanson. Nabati are the songs of desert tribes, created (though not written down) and recited to record historical events, immortalise how people lived and interacted with each other, and preserve the region’s cultural heritage by “always reminding us of how things were”, says Emirati poet Ahmad Al Bidwawi, interviewed by Gulf News. “When poems were written back then,” he says, “they were able to create peace or lead to war.”
Nabati served a purpose on a smaller scale, too. “They were able to solve problems between siblings or fix relationships between a husband and a wife,” Al Bidwawi adds. Nabati “not only empowered our culture but also helped us in the daily process of living.” Researchers have come across Bedouin who are able to memorise 20,000 poems in the Nabati tradition. But its popularity waned in the wake of the discovery of oil and the subsequent development of the region. It used to be the primary form of entertainment. Now it is one among many: literacy is higher, urbanisation has eaten away at the culture of nomadism, and technology has brought faster, more objective ways of documenting reality.
Against all odds, however, Nabati is enjoying a renaissance in the technological era. This is thanks, at least in part, to reality TV.
Million’s Poet
Million’s Poet launched in the United Arab Emirates in 2006. Unimaginatively dubbed ‘the American Idol of the Arab world’, Million’s Poet is immensely popular and utterly fascinating. It more or less follows the familiar format of contestants performing for judges and a live studio audience. One difference is that they do so from a large armchair. Another is that the contestants are all poets.
Over the course of a season, judges whittle competitors down from 48 to five finalists. During the final, TV audiences vote for a winner, but all five receive considerable sums of money. Since 2014, more than 100 million people have tuned in to watch poets – poets – compete against each other on the show. And not for small change, neither. The Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture & Heritage puts up 27 million dirhams (about £5.7 million) each season in prize money alone, plus that and more to actually make it happen. It’s so successful that a dedicated 24-hour satellite channel has been set up for reruns, alongside a magazine. In an article about the show, Der Spiegel writes that, “for the local elite,” it’s the “social event of the week”; in 2010, its audience numbered 18 million.
The winner gets about a million pounds – more than the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Million’s Poet’s jackpot is bigger than the world’s next biggest literary prize, the Premio Planeta de Novela (€1,000,000 for an unpublished novel written in Spanish). It’s bigger, probably, than the sum total of every other significant award for a single poem in the world (especially if you exclude the UAE’s other poetry competition, Prince of Poets). In other words, the United Arab Emirates is putting more money into funding its own poetic heritage than probably any other country. Clearly, poetry is important to Emirati culture.
‘When I unveil the truth, a monster appears’
Arguably the most remarkable development to spin its way out of Million’s Poet’s success is the story of Hissa Hilal. Born Hissa Hilal al-Malihan al-‘Unzi in a Malihan Bedouin community in northwest Saudi Arabia, she started writing poetry age 12, but hid it. When she was 16, her brother searched her room and found her notebook full of poems and sold her out to their father. They burned everything. She was devastated. “Women in our society weren’t allowed” to write poems, she told an audience at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair in 2011. “But what really made him angry was that I was writing about love.”
She read Dickens and Hemingway at high school in Bahrain but her family couldn’t afford to send her to university. So she returned to Saudi Arabia and found clerical work at a hospital in Riyadh, then worked as an editor and correspondent for a handful of Gulf newspapers, all the while sending poems off for publication under the pseudonym ‘Rimiya’. “It was wonderful to read, from my hiding place, what other people were writing about me,” Der Spiegel quotes her as saying.
Creative freedom came in the form of marriage – to the publisher of a literary magazine. “[My family] were happy to get rid of me,” she jokes. “They felt great because now I can write about anything and it is my husband’s responsibility.”
Hissa Hilal competed on Million’s Poet in 2010, and was the first woman in the show’s history to reach the final five. She did so with flying colours, receiving more points during the qualifying rounds – from the jury – than any other contestant. With support from her Bedouin community (“even the old men and women”), she was emboldened to speak her truth, and received praise from the judges for her honesty and bravery. “Her strength lies in the invention of images,” said Sultan al-Amimi, president of the Abu Dhabi Poetry Academy and one of the jurors. “Her poetry is powerful. She always has a message and a strong opinion, even on controversial subjects.” Controversial indeed: her semi-final poem criticised a fatwa issued by one of Saudi Arabia’s most senior clerics, Sheikh al-Barrak, which called for the execution of anyone advocating for the mixing of men and women in private spaces. Al-Barrak once earned the praise of Osama bin Laden. Speaking out against him in front of 18 million people, all while, you know, being a woman, was pretty cool.
Hissa Hilal competed on Million’s Poet in 2010, and was the first woman in the show’s history to reach the final five
Ms Hilal’s outspokenness was made even more striking by its delivery. She wears a niqab while performing. Her voice is disembodied; only her hands, fluttering up from her lap, offer the audience something on which to fix their eyes. While this could be said to add a certain gravitas, or stripped back appeal, Der Spiegel writes that, in Nabati poetry, “presentation and expression are crucial”. “It’s more difficult, of course,” Hilal says, on delivering poetry without a face. “People want to see my expression. They want to know whether I am smiling.” UAE newspaper The National offers the following translation of key lines of her poem:
“I have seen evil from the eyes of the subversive fatwas in a time when what is lawful is confused with what is not lawful.”
“When I unveil the truth, a monster appears from his hiding place; barbaric in thinking and action, angry and blind; wearing death as a dress and covering it with a belt.” [this is a reference to suicide bombing];
“He speaks from an official, powerful platform, terrorising people and preying on everyone seeking peace; the voice of courage ran away and the truth is cornered and silent, when self-interest prevented one from speaking the truth.”
Predictably, Ms Hilal got a lot of flak for her anti-extremist stance. “It was like a rush of attacks against me,” she says, quoted by the Poetry News Agency (archived). She attained celebrity status. Strangers harassed her and she had to conceal her identity. “Some people were saying, ‘Why is she attacking sheikhs and fatwas? Why is this woman talking like this? She’s a woman, not a man.’” By her estimations, 55% of the responses were against her. “But I was happy about the 45% who did defend me, because one of them is worth 1000 others attacking me.”
On balance, the public liked her less than the jury did; the first place winner had a clear lead when it came to the public vote. She was third, winning the equivalent of over £600,000. Around the same time, Saudi newspaper Al Watan reported that a member of the I Am The Muslim online group had called for Hilal’s death. Another member reportedly asked, “Can anyone tell me her address?” Meanwhile, a poem written by a pupil of the cleric she criticised published circulated widely. It included the following lines: “Here she is, prattling, blathering and chattering, without watching her words […] Supported by a million devils broadcasting her ideas.”
Hilal has said her family discouraged her from courting controversy, to which she replies: “I want peace for everyone, Muslims and others. We are all living in a global village, so we cannot live without each other.”
‘It’s like somebody has come and stepped on roses’
Ms Hilal’s story is remarkable for several reasons. There’s a sociopolitical angle, of course, with a second-class citizen speaking out against a senior cleric in front of an audience of millions. There’s a feminist-empowerment angle, too: despite his relative progressivism, her literary editor husband had previously prohibited her from competing on the show.
But there’s something else – a literary, linguistic and postcolonial point of interest. Hilal’s impact was far-reaching because she couched her progressivism in a traditional art form. If she had mouthed off against Sheikh al-Barrak on TikTok or Instagram Live then, as a rule, young people would have heard it. Ditto if she’d sung on the radio. If she’d written her ideas in a newspaper column, might have reached an educated / literary audience, but without the Trojan Horse of Nabati to part the waves and grant it smooth passage.
Ms Hilal is no heretic. Her love of tradition is fundamental to her character – and her poetic persona. “I come from a Bedouin tribe,” she says. “I respect tradition. Otherwise I would lose everything.” Delivering her message in a highly regarded literary form enabled her to criticise religious conservatism while simultaneously earning the respect of its adherents. The postcolonial literary theorist Patsy J. Daniels might even say she had learned the language of her oppressor.
Hilal’s reach and impact were so great because she couched her progressivism in a traditional art form
Having won the spotlight, Ms Hilal leveraged it to draw attention to the role Nabati poetry used to play in tribal communities, editing an anthology of Bedouin poems on the subject of divorce. Tribal women used to request a divorce from their husbands by reciting poetry, she explained to the Poetry News Agency in 2011, following the book’s publication. “When their husbands heard it, they would divorce them.” Poetry was the vessel by which women expressed themselves formally and publicly. “You used to be able to express yourself in this culture,” she says. “You could say to a man that you hated him, and he would divorce you. Now, it’s impossible to find a woman who writes poems about divorce, or how she feels about her husband. No way.”
The most recent example of such a poem she could find was from around 1970. Since then, it seems, the practice has all but died out. In just three generations since the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia, “Arabs have changed,” she says. “We used to be simple, we used to be free. […] Something is gone. It’s like somebody has come and stepped on roses.”
People like to put the television down
In the Arabic-speaking world, televising poetry appears to have transformed the fortunes of a venerated but slowly dying art form. And in doing so, it has allowed dissident voices like Hissa Hilal’s to safely reach the ears of society at large. “Before, you only read poetry in the paper,” Ms Hilal says. “And if you couldn’t get on there then it was impossible for people to know you. Now we can use the Internet and satellites to show our work everywhere.”
Instagram is performing a comparable function in the West. Comparable, but not similar. The task of news organisations is to give people what they need, not what they want. By and large, social media algorithms (and sort of the Internet as a whole) give people what they can’t look away from. And that means the bar is almost always lower. Attention is the product being sold. Without traditional gatekeepers, we decide, en masse, subconsciously, what makes the cut – and who gets paid. There is no method, per se, by which the whole operation supports or opposes artists, or arts.
Unlike the slapdash approach of social media platforms […] Million’s Poet has a jury whose task is to recognise and reward craft
This is in contrast to what’s been happening in the United Arab Emirates, where the government has stepped in to actively support a centuries-old art form in a way that engages the masses. Unlike the slapdash approach of social media platforms, on which success is measured by the total number of minutes watched, and which facilitate a scrolling mentality that moves past anything that isn’t actively entertaining, Million’s Poet has a jury whose task is to recognise and reward craft.
From personal experience I know what power poetry has to enliven, entertain, and evoke emotion, both on the page and off it. It doesn’t have to be dull, staid and opaque. Nor does it have to be generic, shallow and forgetful. As one of the world’s oldest art forms, perhaps more governments should be following the UAE’s lead and pumping cash into recognising its heritage and potential. Otherwise, only those poets who can a) play the algorithm game, or b) play the publishing game, will be rewarded in cash terms for their efforts.
