Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.

We do not have many intellectuals who can speak out for us internationally. We have no writers who are recognized, respected and loved outside the Arab world.

I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.

We have no Arab intellectuals of international stature because we live in a state of generalized mediocrity. We are suspended in the pit without touching the bottom.

For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.

My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own.

I liked Sartre's views but not his writing.