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Baghdad, Mon Amour is a memoir by Salah Al Hamdani centered on his imprisonment under Saddam Hussein, his subsequent exile in France for more than thirty years, and his emotional return to Baghdad and seeing his family again after all those years with feelings of tremendous joy but also guilt for having “abandoned” them. The beauty of Al Hamdani’s prose and poetry is skillfully captured in Sonia Alland’s translation.
Iraqi poet Salah Al Hamdani has lived a remarkable life. The author of some forty books in French and Arabic, he began life as a child laborer, with little or no education. As a political prisoner under Saddam Hussein, he learned to read and write Arabic; once he was released form prison, he continued to work against the regime, ultimately, at age twenty-one, choosing exile in Paris. He now writes in French, but he remains a poet of exile, of memory, wounded by the loss of his homeland and those dear to him. This landmark collection gathers thirty-five years of his writings, from his first volume in Arabic, Memory of Embers, to his latest collection, written originally in French, For You I Dream. It offers English-language readers their first substantial overview of Al Hamdani's work, fired by the fight against injustice and shot through with longing for the home to which he can never return.
Previously published histories and primary source collections on the Iraqi experience tend to be topically focused or dedicated to presenting a top-down approach. By contrast, Stacy Holden's A Documentary History of Modern Iraq gives voice to ordinary Iraqis, clarifying the experience of the Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Jews, and women over the past century. Through varied documents ranging from short stories to treaties, political speeches to memoirs, and newspaper articles to book excerpts, the work synthesizes previously marginalized perspectives of minorities and women with the voices of the political elite to provide an integrated picture of political change from the Ottoman Empire in 1903 t...
PEN Center USA brings together the voices of renowned American poets
Covering 60 years of materials, this bibliography cites translations, studies, and other writings, which represent Iraq's national literature, including recent works of numerous Iraqi writers living in Western exile. The volume serves as a guide to three interrelated data: o Translations that have appeared since 1950, as books or as individual items (poems, short stories, novel extracts, plays, diaries) in print-and non-print publications in Iraq and other Arab and English-speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. o Relevant studies and other secondary sources including selected reviews and author interviews, which cover Iraqi literature and ...
Cultural expressions of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have a rich tradition, communal narratives, and spiritual connectivity. This tapestry, distinct from the secular drama prevalent in Western cultures, is a unique blend of indigenous traditions and Western influences. This book introduces the rich and diverse theatrical practices developed and matured in the region from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. The introduction of Western-style theatre in the nineteenth century marked a shift from traditional entertainment forms. In the twentieth century, subjects of colonialism, nationalism, independence, and Islamic ideology have often dominated the theatrical discourse, reflecting the region’s socio-political realities. The book’s final section looks at theatre from a twenty-first global perspective, including the crucial role of the diaspora. This book shows how colonialism, Islamic ideology, politics, war, refugee crisis, and nationalism have permeated MENA’s theatre in the past and have continued to shape it in the present.
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 o...
The author argues that a part of the history of nation building in Iraq through addressing its political characters, different communities, agreements and pan Arab ideology, including the Baath ideology and its attempts to seize power through nondemocratic methods. It is an attempt to approach the essence of the exclusion mentality of the ruling elite in order to understand the process of genocide against the Kurdish people, including all existing religious minorities. This essence of the process has been approached in the framework of the civilizing and de-civilizing process as a main theory of the German sociologist, Norbert Elias. Thus, this book may be considered as one of the comprehensive books to present a study of state-building in Iraq, along with identifying some of the political figures that had an essential impact on the construction. On the other hand, it is a comprehensive study of the genocide, in the sense of searching for the causes and roots of the genocide. The Anfal campaigns took place in 1988, but the process started as far back as the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies of the last century.
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Grounded Identities: Territory and Belonging in the Medieval and Early Modern Middle East and Mediterranean is a collection of essays on attachment to specific lands including Kurdistan, Andalusia and the Maghrib, and geographical Syria in the pre-modern Islamicate world. Together these essays put a premium on the affective and cultural dimensions of such attachments, fluctuations in the meaning and significance of lands in the face of historical transformations and, at the same time, the real and persistent qualities of lands and human attachments to them over long periods of time. These essays demonstrate that grounded identities are persistent and never static. Contributors are: Zayde Antrim, Alexander Elinson, Mary Hoyt Halavais, Boris James, Steve Tamari.