In this season of uprisings throughout the Middle East and North Africa, governments consider even poetry subversive. Now a young Bahraini student is looking at a year in jail for reading a poem criticizing the Bahraini king.
Ayat al-Qarmezi, 20, a poet and student was convicted by a military court after an unfair trial. She was charged with taking part in illegal protests, disrupting public security and publicly inciting hatred toward the regime. She was arrested in March for reading out a poem at a pro-reform rally in the capital Manama.
The poem’s lyrics include the lines:
“We are the people who will kill humiliation and assassinate misery/ Don’t you hear their cries, don’t you hear their screams?”
She was forced to turn herself in to the authorities on March 30 after masked police raided her parents’ house repeatedly and reportedly threatened to kill her brothers unless she did so.