Mick Hartley

From the Daily Star, a report on a blast at the heart of Baghdad’s cultural world, and the fightback of the poets:

They recited verses beside the bloodstains, they vowed defiance amid the rubble. Just days after bombers ripped Baghdad’s cultural heartland to shreds, the poets and artists were back. Artist Jabbar Muhaibs, one of the leaders of the gathering, put a wooden crate over his head during a performance to mourn the death of cultural life in what is left of Mutanabbi Street, Iraq’s ancient center of the arts.

On Monday, the bombers made a far bloodier cultural statement, killing 30 people and wounding 65 in a blast that destroyed much of this ancient riverside district and its elegant Ottoman architecture.

“The light,” said Muhaibs mournfully, his voice muffled by the crate, “will not be lit here again.”

The blood of the dead stained the street while the ashes of burnt books dusted the rubble of what was once a lively maze of bookshops and cafes where war-weary writers, publishers, teachers and intellectuals once gathered.

Muhaibs, a lecturer at the Baghdad Fine Arts Academy, leapt atop a burnt-out car. “What has happened to the poems and the poetry,” he recited, “all covered in blood and lying with the scattered souls and the bodies beneath the rubble?”

Mutanabbi Street’s book vendors too were devastated by Monday’s car bomb. “Everything related to culture has turned into ashes,” said Mohammad, the 40-year-old owner of the Al-Tarbiya (Education) bookshop. “The best books and the rarest manuscripts became victims of terror.

“We suffered as we tried to recover the charred bodies,” he added. “We could not tell friends and colleagues from customers. Some people were trapped in the shops, choking on smoke. We could hear their cries.”

Abu Mohammad, a 65-year-old who scratches out a living selling books and magazines on the pavement, said he was heading to one of his favorite bookshops to see friends when the blast ripped through the street.

“I rushed to the scene to rescue my friends who sit beside me every day, but I found none of them,” he said. “I used to put my stand outside a print shop – the Ibn al-Arabi print works, one of the oldest in the street – but it collapsed completely. Four brothers who work there were crushed.”

When Muhaibs completed his performance, renowned poet Abdul Zahra Zaki took over, mounting the wreckage of what was once the popular Al-Shabanda cafe to recite a poem entitled “Words, words, words.”

Zaki described the wasteland before him, mourned the desolation wrought by the bombers, and concluded, “There is nothing here, there is nothing but burning words.”

Other poets, such as Kareem Shugaidel, Majed Mujed and Ahmed Abdulsadr, took turns to pay homage to Mutanabi Street, which before the bombing was regarded by Iraqis as one of the most important centres of the literary world.

They spoke lovingly of their once-favorite hangout, opened in 1932 by King Faisal II and named after Arab poet Abu Taib al-Mutanabi, and tearfully mourned its destruction.

Iraqis have long been regarded as among the most avid readers in the Middle East. As a popular dictum of the 1960s had it: “Books are written in Cairo, published in Beirut and read in Baghdad.”

Poet Tawfeeq Timemi then strode forward, urging his fellow writers not to give in to despair.

“We won’t give up even though these criminal acts are targeting our culture,” he said. “We won’t give in to the repression. We must rebuild and restore Mutanabi Street so that culture will again flourish.”