In a Broken City, Poetry Lives

Description:	ink transfer, photocopy, block print and rubber stamp on Mulberry paper. Edition of 15. Who was al-Mutanabbi and how did a street in Baghdad come to bear his name? where is that street and what does the city around it look like? These are the questions I began by asking, setting myself on a circuitous and engaging route that led to the creation of my print, ‘In a Broken City, Poetry Lives’.Al-Mutanabbi lived in the 10th century, I learned, when poetry was considered the highest art form, and his long, lyrical poems became famous throughout the Arab world, so much so that a street of bookstores and literary cafes would come to bear his name many centuries later. The street itself has been the heart of Baghdad’s intellectual community and has a long and similarly distinguished story, dating from the 8th century. All this rich history came to a violent end in 2007, when a car bomb exploded, killing and wounding 130 people, and destroying this beloved neighborhood.Searching for images of al-Mutanabbi Street, I found smoky views of burned out shops, scattered and charred books, rubble and people in shock and despair. As I am trained as a landscape architect, I tend to look for information on maps. So I turned to Google Maps, where I found other, remarkably resonant images. I saw a street in a city, much like many of our own, with conveniently labeled bus stops, cafes, museums, ferry stops, schools and parks. Suddenly, before my eyes, Baghdad, and al-Mutanabbi Street became not just abstract images of war and destruction, but real world places where people shopped, read newspapers, sat on park benches in the shade, waited for the bus, walked to the ferry terminal to watch the ships on the Tigris, drank tea and read poetry. I was immediately struck by the familiarity of this city, which had felt so fractured and distant. The ordinariness of life, of people going about their daily lives, resonated from the maps and images I saw. Al-Mutanabbi Street could be our street—al-Mutanabbi Street WAS our street.The image developed as a sample of al-Mutanabbi’s poetry, showing the elegant Arabic script from ancient times. The intent was for the poetry to be still visible through the fractured city. Returning again to maps of the area, I created a simplified map of the al-Mutanabbi Street area, then broke it apart. Understanding what a bomb blast looked like took me to images of earthquakes and seismic shifts, where elements of a place were intact, but slid apart along a fracture line. In my print, the area of the bomb blast is the absence, but the enduring city and the literary world it contained, are the presence. Although blow apart, the narrow lanes near the old city, the park, and the ferry terminal are still in evidence, much like al-Mutanabbi’s words proclaiming the enduring power of “the paper and then pen.”
Origin:	2015
Created By:	Mahan, Anastasia C
Contributor(s):	Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition
Publisher:	(Baltimore, MD, USA)
Source:	http://iuidigital.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/AMSSH/id/1294
Collection:	Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition Collection
Rights:	http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Copyright:	In Copyright
Subjects:	artists book art bookworks

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