The Kickstarter campaign “One Hundred Sixty-Eight Hours and One Second,” launched by Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal to raise money for the library at the University of Baghdad’s College of Fine Arts, has fourteen days remaining. But it already has exceeded its modest $9,000 goal by more than $28,000.
You escape death.
They hit you on the border.
They insult you in the racist newspapers.
They analyse your child’s dead body on television.
“As Victor Hugo wrote in his poem ‘L’enfant,’ ‘Les Turcs ont passé là.’ One day I will be able to say regarding the part of Iraq occupied by the Islamic State, ‘ISIS passed by here.’
“That’s it? ‘Leave,’ just like that! It is inconceivable that one word could take up so much space on the door. Leave!”
Iraqi-Canadian poet Zaid Shlah has a new collection of poems and essays just out from Frontenac House Press, “ClockWork.”
“Dr. Eskander’s courageous achievements under the most difficult of circumstances to keep a library alive…is to be regarded with the highest respect.”
“[Books on Saddam and the Baath Party] have historical value. But you can remove the extra copies.”
“They had also worn the nightgowns of the home’s matriarch — I suppose because they were clean. “
The “Lanterns of Hope” poetry project is looking for poems by young Iraqis, aged 16-23, in Arabic, Kurdish, or English.
Novelist Mahmoud Saeed and poet Faiza Sultan remember Mosul’s libraries in the 1950s and 1990s.
When Ali Bader’s The Ungodly Woman is published by Dar Noon, it will already have been an incipient film project, a part of the Iraqi arts exhibition at the Venice Biennale, and a French play, produced by a feminist organization in Belgium:… Read More ›
The battle over memories and representations of Iraq in US discourse rages.
