Osama Esber, born in Syria in 1963, is a widely published author of poetry and short stories, as well as a major translator of English writings into Arabic. He currently lives in the United States, where he arrived initially in 2012 as a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago. He is also an editor for the Arab Studies Institute’s Tadween Publishing House and a host of Status Audio Magazine and co-editor in the Arab section of Jadaliyya magazine.

He has published 7 poetry collections, which include:

1. Screens of history (1994)
2. The Accord of waves (1995)
3. Where He Does not Live (2000)
4. Repeated Sunrise in Exile (2004)
5. On My Seaside Paths (2020)
6. On the Bank of the River of Things (2021)
7. And My Body Told Me (2022).

Osama Esber is also an essayist and short story writer. His published short story collections are entitled The Autobiography of Diamonds (1996); A Café for Committing Suicide (2000).

He was also a writer in residence at the International Writing Program at Iowa University in 1994 and was a guest at a number of international symposiums and events.

Moving to the States

I moved to the United States in 2012, leaving a country (Syria) torn by war. I moved first inside the country to avoid bombing and violence and then traveled with my family to Spain where I was invited to the University of Chicago as a scholar in residence.

Photography was a savior for me as a poet. It liberated me from the influence of a long literary tradition and the dominating language of powerful Arab poets through escaping from the memory of language to the open possibilities of visual reality. Chasing and following the running away photograph opened my eyes to nature, to details and the daily objects that we usually take for granted and forget when we write. I started to look at what I ignored in my early writing and write about stones, trunks of trees, shells, fallen feathers, and the cast away seaweeds and roaring waves which I first catch by camera and then I explore their endless suggestive layers in the poetic realm connecting them to culture and the daily life within the culture that defines us.

Sometimes a poem comes to my head while I am taking photographs. I record it by my voice and work on it later. The poem here is the product of the image, where words and photos overlap and work together to create a world of their own that lives in a poem.

I imagine myself as a photographer with his camera around his neck, walking on the beach, in the mountains or forests searching for an escaping image to capture. This is the process of searching for the lost photograph, the one that I dream to capture daily, the one that I call the photo of photos, as I call the poem I search for the poem of poems. Both are born out of the magical relationship between the eyes and the objects on the canvas of their changing existence in shadow and light through a sufi relationship.

The image inspired me to search for the poem, which I weave word by word, image by image, metaphor by metaphor to make the magical carpet that flies the reader to unknown spaces.