Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here

Poets and Writers Respond to the March 5th, 2007, Bombing of Baghdad's "Street of the Booksellers"

Beau Beausoleil, Deema Shehabi, Beau Beausoleil, Deema Shehabi

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781604867640
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

On March 5th, 2007, a car bomb was exploded on al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad. More than thirty people were killed and more than one hundred were wounded. This locale is the historic center of Baghdad bookselling, a winding street filled with bookstores and outdoor book stalls. Named after the famed 10th century classical Arab poet al-Mutanabbi, it has been the heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community. This anthology begins with a historical introduction to al-Mutanabbi Street and includes the writing of Iraqis as well as a wide swath of international poets and writers who were outraged by this attack.

This book seeks to show where al-Mutanabbi Street starts in all of us: personally, in our communities, and in our nations. It seeks to show the commonality between this small street in Baghdad and our own cultural centers, and why this attack was an attack on us all. This anthology sees al-Mutanabbi Street as a place for the free exchange of ideas; a place that has long offered its sanctuary to the complete spectrum of Iraqi voices. This is where the roots of democracy (in the best sense of that word) took hold many hundreds of years ago. This anthology looks toward al-Mutanabbi Street as an affirmation of all that we hope for in a more just society.

Contributors include: Beau Beausoleil, Musa al-Musawi, Anthony Shadid, Mousa al-Naseri, Naomi Shihab Nye, Deena Metzger, Sam Hamod, Lutfiya Al-Dulaimi, Zaid Shlah, Persis Karim, Ayub Nuri, Marian Haddad, Sarah Browning, Eileen Grace O'Malley Callahan, Roger Sederat, Elline Lipkin, Esther Kamkar, Robert Perry, Gloria Collins, Brian Turner, Gloria Frym, Owen Hill, Abd al-Rahim, Salih al-Rahim, Yassin "The Narcicyst" Alsalman, Jose Luis Gutierrez, Sargon Boulus, Peter Money, Sinan Antoon, Muhammad al-Hamrani, Livia Soto, Janet Sternburg, Sam Hamill, Salah Al-Hamdani, Gail Sher, Dunya Mikhail, Irada Al Jabbouri, Dilara Cirit, Niamh MacFionnlaoich, Erica Goss, Daisy Zamora, George Evans, Steve Dickison, Maysoon Pachachi, Summer Brenner, Jen Hofer, Rijin Sahakian, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Jane Hirshfield, Jack Marshall, Susan Moon, Diana di Prima, Evelyn So, Nahrain Al-Mousawi, Ko Un, Joe Lamb, Katrina Rodabaugh, Mohammed Hayawi, Nazik Al-Malaika, Raya Asee, Gazar Hantoosh, Mark Abley, Majid Naficy, Lewis Buzbee, Ibn al-Utri, Thomas Christensen, Amy Gerstler, Genny Lim, Saadi Youssef, Judith Lyn Suttton, Josh Kun, Dana Teen Lomax, Etel Adnan, Bushra Al-Bustani, Marilyn Hacker, Richard Harrison, Fady Joudah, Philip Metres, Hayan Charara, Annie Finch, Kazim Ali, Deema K. Shehabi, Kenneth Wong, Elmaz Abinader, Habib Tengour, Khaled Mattawa, Rachida Madani, Amina Said, Alise Alousi, Sita Carboni, Fran Bourassa, Jabez W. Churchill, Daniela Elza, Linda Norton, Fred Norman, Bonnie Nish, Janet Rodney, Adrienne Rich, Cornelius Eady, Julie Bruck, Kwame Dawes, Ralph Angel, B.H. Fairchild, Terese Svoboda, Mahmoud Darwish, Amir el-Chidiac, Aram Saroyan, Sholeh Wolpe, Nathalie Handal, Azar Nafisi, Dima Hilal, Tony Kranz, Jordan Elgrably, devorah major, Suzy Malcolm, Ibrahim Nasrallah, Rick London, Sarah Menefee, Roberto Harrison, Fadhil Al-Azzawi, Amaranth Borsuk, Lamees Al-Ethari, Shayma' al-Saqr, Meena Alexander, and Jim Natal.

III. GATHERING THE SILENCES

In the Valley of Love

Genny Lim

For Farid ud-Din Attar

Give me a thousand hearts

That I may sacrifice one for each moment

Open the door to each heart that

The Light of love may enter

Burn away the senses

For the truth of pleasure lies

In the truth of loss

Love itself is the flame

From which the self is wrought

This poem was printed as a broadside by Amanda Matzenbach for the Al-Mutanabbi Street Broadside Project.

Night in Hamdan

Saadi Youssef

We in Hamdan say:

Sleep when the date palms sleep.

When the stars rise over Hamdan

the lights of the huts are put out,

the mosque and the old house.

It is the long sleep

under the whispers of faded palm fronds:

the long death.

This is Hamdan …

tuberculosis and date palms.

In Hamdan we hear only what we say,

our night, the date palms, esparto grass,

and the old river

where lemon leaves on the water drift.

They are green like water

like your eyes, I say.

You, in whose eyes I behold spring,

how can a friend forget you?

I will meet you

when the setting of the stars covers Hamdan

when night bears down on the city.

….….…. ….…..

….….…. ….…..

Together we will roam the depths of Baghdad

when the setting of the stars covers Hamdan.

Basra, 1955

Translatedfrom the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa.

Burning

Judith Lyn Sutton

Mute, I escaped to books beaming from our refuge

Under the sun—a place bursting with color alight To console us every Friday free from responsibility

And help us forget destruction aflame in our land.

Nearby, friends reveled in the scent of pages turning

As did I, cocooned, though edged by streets where

Bombs ruled. Still, on this loved lane, peace reigned;

But that bright morning, dark agents blew it to pieces.

I, wounded, lit candles for comrades buried in ash.

Luis and Celso on al-Mutanabbi Street

josh Kun

Here in Tijuana, al-Mutanabbi Street starts where the bodies go missing, where there are no records of the stolen ones. It starts on the bedroom nightstand of the Chief of Police, where his copy of the book Transnational Crime and Public Security—bedtime reading for a city under siege—is riddled with bullet holes.

Here in Tijuana, al-Mutanabbi Street can be the finger that arrived in the mail bubble-wrapped in a sealed envelope with no return address, next to the gas bill and the grocery store coupons. By then, Luis had already been gone for two months of his thirty-four years. His severed finger— they didn’t even put it on ice, they just let the blood dry, the skin purple, the smell swell—was proof that he was alive, that he existed, that the rest of his body was somewhere, still warm, still beating. The finger meant they wanted more money. If he was still alive enough to lose a finger, then there was still money to be made. They took him from right in front of his house, in front of his wife, his three young children inside, in plain view in the middle of the day on his quiet street in Playas de Tijuana, a tranquil coastal neighborhood known for its remove from the chaos of downtown where the only big news of late was the opening of a Starbucks. They asked for directions and Luis walked over to the car to help out. They pulled him inside. They were not wearing masks. In the logic of kidnapping, the mask is a chance for survival; if the kidnappers cannot be identified, they might consider releasing their hostage. No mask and the release is nearly impossible. Luis must have known that, too; he knew his fate as soon as he hit the backseat. He was never coming home.

My in-laws were active in raising money. There was a breakfast, the whole family brought checks, whatever you could afford. Every dollar counted. They wanted $2 million. We gave them $100,000. We don’t know when they killed Luis, if he was even alive when the money was being gathered. We do know that they drove out of town to dump his body alongside the highway to Tecate. He was picked up and brought to the city morgue as a John Doe and only weeks later did a family friend who works in forensics recognize his face in a photo search.

The memorial was wrenching. There were people everywhere. The men stood on the steps by the entrance, looking like guards or escorts, trying to look tough and proud and strong but their faces gave them away—they were outside because they couldn’t bear to go in. Especially Luis’s father. I had met him just a few months ago. It was my father-in-law Rogelio’s birthday and we took over the concrete backyard of one of his niece’s homes in Playas. There were family photos on the folding tables and balloons tied to chairs. A man with perfectly gelled hair was singing boleros and pop ballads into a portable P.A. system, a stout woman with the face of sweating stone was chopping meat and pressing corn into tortillas, and all of the nieces and aunts and grandmothers took their turn on the pinata. Candy fell. The little ones scurried. I couldn’t keep my eyes off Luis’s father. He’s tall and thick with the muscles of hard work. He had his jeans up high, belted tight; he had his cotton long sleeve Oxford unbuttoned midway down his chest full of furry gray ringlets of hair. He kept his big arms crossed, his face unmoving, stern, serious. He crushed my hand when he shook it. His fingers were like hardened sausages, their skin rough, I imagined, from building things and fixing motors. He looked like El Indio Fernandez, the guy in classic Mexican films who protects the village, who stays alive as the sun sets. One thing he wasn’t though was a man who cried. So when I saw him on the stairs of the memorial hall, it rocked me to the core. The shirt was still unbuttoned, the jeans still high, but his son was dead and now his face was red and pickled; his eyes were pools of salt. It was as if his body never expected to know what it was now knowing, as if his muscles and strength had never fathomed that something as intangible and immaterial as sadness or grief or loss could break them down.

Upstairs in the chapel, deep silence was sporadically punctur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction Beaubeausoleil
• Preface Muhsin Al-Musawi
• I. The River Turned Black with Ink
• II. Knowledge is Light
• III. Gathering the Silences
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments