Trying to Flee

Description:	Yousef, Saadi (author)Mattawa, Khaled (translator)Tsang, Yvonne (printer) Letterpress with linoleum cut. Edition of 50.This collection supports and promotes awareness to the important mission and framework of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalitions focus on the lasting power of the written word and the arts in support of the free expression of ideas, the preservation of shared cultural spaces, and the importance of responding to attacks, both overt and subtle, on artists, writers, and academics working under oppressive regimes or in zones of conflict, despite the destruction of that literary/cultural content. I was immediately drawn to Saadi Yousef’s poem, Trying to Flee. I set the text in Dante for its subtle elegance, which seemed a perfect fit for the poem. The poem describes the tension between the interior and exterior life, which made me think of a window as an image to accompany it. A window is both a barrier and a conduit for transparency. The narrator repeatedly asks, How can I travel this evening? He can travel freely in his mind, but even when he takes us into his memories, he runs into obstacles. He thinks of his “best days” in Tangier, but in this distant memory, he cannot name the streets and neighborhoods; when he thinks of visiting a good friend in Costa Rica, he only recalls his friend’s feeling of alienation there. Our political world of streets, neighborhoods, and countries, and their accompanying rules and permits, prevents him from freely traveling in his own mind; in these travels, he is ultimately trying to flee to a place he can call his own, “a room in space.” To emphasize this struggle, I kept all the text within the image of the window.
Origin:	2007
Created By:	Yousef, Saadi; Mattawa, Khaled; Tsang, Yvonne
Contributor(s):	Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition
Publisher:	Epistolary Press (Berkeley, California)
Source:	http://iuidigital.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/AMSSH/id/191
Collection:	Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition Collection
Rights:	http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Copyright:	In Copyright
Subjects:	broadsides letterpress printing art

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