How do we view Iraq today? Who supplies information and what is its nature? What is the medium? Newspapers, television, military reports. Even those highly critical of the United States’ war and occupation of Iraq are speaking in certain terms. Facts. Numbers. Politics. Bush Presses UN to Mediate. 56 Kurds Killed. In this context I take up the book, Iraqi Poetry Today, with excitement and hope. Here is a different forum.
“I still believe in the power of the word,� writes Saadi A. Simawe in his introduction. Simawe, who was himself imprisoned six years in Iraq for publishing verse oppositional to Saddam Hussein’s Baath party, has collected the poems of forty Iraqis (mostly exiles) writing in Arabic, Hebrew, Iraqi dialect and Iraqi Kurdish with over thirty translators represented. The book is heavy with the power of the word as well as with Simawe’s “effort to save what remains of Iraqi humanity and culture in the face of a brutal dictatorship and war.� Iraq as a homeland has over 5000 years of history, a history dense with intersecting cultures, languages and literatures and plagued by war. The poets, united in their writing from a place of struggle, demonstrate a vast range of poetic responses to the Iraqi experience: desperation, praise, fury, calm, sorrow, irony, among others. In the following, Yousif al-Sa’igh’s description has a devastating but precious simplicity:
An Iraqi Evening
Clips from the battlefield
in an Iraqi evening:
a peaceable home
two boys
preparing their homework
a little girl
absentmindedly drawing on scrap paper
funny pictures.
- breaking news coming shortly.
The entire house becomes ears
ten Iraqi eyes glued to the screen in frightened silence.
Smells mingle:
the smell of war
and the smell of just baked bread.
The mother raises her eyes to a photo on the wall
whispering
- May God protect you
and she begins preparing supper
quietly
and in her mind
clips float past of the battlefield
carefully selected for hope.
[18 February 1986]
Yousif al-Sa’igh
We can only infer that the photo is a third son sent to the front of the Iran-Iraq war. This war lasted from 1980 to 88, and some estimate it claimed 150,000 Iraqis lives. In his poem, war is normalized and integrated into family routine, a mother’s hope and the preparing of food being one and the same action. Al-Sa’igh’s poems are referenced in a line of Gzar Hantoosh’s “The Happiest Man In The World.� Though the title makes a bold claim, the poem itself sings like a song of survival. “A handful of beans and lentils will satisfy the stomach,/ al-Saigh Yousif’s crystal verses will feed the soul,/ and I have sorrows that get me/ drunk for free.� He is subtly stubborn in his focus on what makes life worth living and livable. Al-Sa’igh and Hantoosh are two of the only five poets included who still live in Iraq. Their poems are noticeably absent of overt political commentary or criticism and focus more on emotions, selfhood, poetry, the absurd and the beautiful. They are also known for their satire, bitter humor and use of folklore.
Many of the poems written and/or published in exile read like stifled tongues finally unleashed, passions rushing forth, unrelenting. In “The City Ravaged by Silence,� Bulland al-Haydari writes, “Baghdad dies of a wound inside us…of a wound from within/ From a blind silence that paralyzed the tongues of its children/ So that we have nothing in it, it has nothing in us… except death/ And the corpse and the nail.� Exile itself brings forth other complexities. In another poem he writes “How great the indignity of exile/ How wretched that you don’t know yourself as a human/ Except/ In exile.�
Nazik al-Mala’ika’s “The Hijrah [Migration] to God� (one of four Iraqi women poets included) is a praise song to god which becomes an uncomprehending plea. “We sleep at night, and wake at dawn wounded, stabbed, killed. And you grew angry, o king, o praise your angry face. And how do we make peace with tyranny? How do we shake hands with Satan?… And how can we sleep expelled from our homes?� Her fellow woman poet Dunya Michail, living in exile in the US, addresses and questions a different power. “Please don’t ask me, America/ I don’t remember their names… Why do you ask all these questions?/ You want our fingerprints/ in all languages/ and I have become old/ older than my father/ He used to tell me in the evenings… One day, we will go to America.� She speaks in the face of America’s tendency to
dehumanize, asking “What good is it to gain the whole world if you lose the soul, America?�
Reading through these pages one thinks of the National Library in Baghdad, which contained millions of volumes, periodicals, and manuscripts, being looted and burned last year as American troops rolled into Iraq. There will be, for a long time, a great absence in Iraqi poetry and literature. Simawe writes, “We could not include some of the important poets… especially the new generation of poets who began writing under sanctions and do not have access to publication.� One can only hope that the work of this new generation, our peers, will be published someday.
What resonates through these pages is that within the vast complexity that is Iraqi identity, these poets have written with strength, honesty, and hope, despite the horrors their nation has faced. Enduring dictatorship, sanctions, war, fear, poverty, hunger, they have struggled to claim freedom, independence and even humanity as their own.
This book is particularly relevant right now, as the American military occupation of Iraq continues to deny that nation sovereignty and self-determination. And as Americans work to shape our opposition to the Bush policy of pre-emptive war and neo-colonialism, we need multiple sources of information and inspiration. It is not that poems are a replacement for information, news, or social and political analysis. But poems vividly display human lives, in a way those other modes of communication cannot quite capture. Poems show that lives are unpredictable, multifaceted – poems bravely face both contradictions and brutal truths. And as a reader, your own humanness is not just touched on, but demanded. For Iraqi Poetry Today, the editors, translators and, of course, the poets deserve our praise and recognition.
Maya Funaro lives, works, and writes poetry in New York City. She is a member of the NYC YCL At Large Club.
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