Occident to orient

Description:	Shlah, Zaid (author)Cutrone, John (printer)Thompson, Seth (printer); Original Broadside: Al-Mutanabbi Street Broadsides Arthur and Mata Jaffe Center for Book Arts at the FAU Libraries Letterpress with found image. Edition of 100.This broadside is from the collection of a historic suite of hand-printed literary broadsides which are a part of the Al-Mutannabi Street Starts Here broadside project at the Arthur and Mata Jaffe Center for Book Arts at the FAU Libraries. As soon as we read about The Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition, we knew it was something we wanted to be a part of. That was the easy part. Then began the more difficult parts. Choosing a poem from the many great poems that were offered, for instance. But the work of Zaid Shlah really called to us. We loved, especially, the images his poetry evoked in our minds––proffering bushels of snow, glasses of arak, cardamom, zahferon, u sukar. It proved equally difficult to conjure an image of our own, one that would coexist peacefully with Zaid’s poem. We are not Iraqi, and the last thing we wanted to do was illustrate this poem with some Western idea of what it is to be Iraqi. Then one day, walking to the car, one of us noticed the sound of birds. It was a sound we recognized as the background to so many radio reports from Baghdad that we had heard over the years; in fact, we were sure it was the same kind of bird offering its song. It was a symbol, for us, of what remains constant, even in the midst of chaos and destruction. The idea for an illustration was suddenly obvious. If there was one difficult part left, it was knowing, the whole time we were printing, the reason why we were doing this. We were “doing what we do,” as Beau Beausoleil had written, because something terrible had happened, and a response was necessary. But when all is said and done, it’s better to do what you do just because. No other reason.
Origin:	2007
Created By:	Shlah, Zaid; Cutrone, John; Thompson, Seth
Contributor(s):	Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition
Publisher:	Convivio Bookworks (Lake Worth, Florida)
Source:	http://iuidigital.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/AMSSH/id/61
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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