Returning from the War

The recently published poetry anthology "Returning from the War" features poetry from more than 40 Iraqi authors concerned with the same subject: destruction, war, loss of rights, and expulsion. Volker Kaminski has read the book for us

This poetry anthology is a comprehensive survey spanning 700 pages looking back at Iraqi poetry from the past half a century. The poems in both Arabic and German invite the reader to indulge in the full breadth offered here, or perhaps just to leaf through again and again.

The title, "Rückkehr aus dem Krieg" (Returning from the War) does not just refer to the country's current state of war. Violence and war has been recurrent in Iraq since the military coup in 1958.

Eclipsed by war

The title points to the subject addressed by all the poets: destruction, war, loss of rights, expulsion, displacement. These are the experiences that characterize life in the present situation in Iraq, although most of the authors no longer live in Iraq.

In this sense, the "return from the war" is often only a fantasy. Many authors look back to their happy childhoods before condemning their losses by the end of their verse. In the poem "Old Scene" by Hashim Shafiq, memories flow forth:

"My mother/had an oleander bush/and a place for the ducks, strewn with barley kernels/and a garden for cucumbers and peppers/she had/blond honey waiting quietly in the beehive."

But in the closing lines the scene becomes suddenly grim and a total loss of the sense of home becomes apparent:

"We were still little/but when I awoke here/my hair had grayed/and my eyes had become weak/and I couldn't find anything anymore."

Often the return home brings bitter disappointment and disorientation, for example in a poem by Khalid Al Maaly:

"I returned from exile to look around/crossing over the heaped up years along the way/forgetting my trees and my lost rivers/searching for memory/the dream, the small dusty path/but I got lost, when I/returned from exile/to look around/my cane disappeared, and darkness closed in/and I no longer knew where the path was."

Full of Melancholy

In many poems the subject of returning home or losing one's home is not explicitly addressed. But these poems are often melancholic in tone and full of longing, for example a poem by Saadi Yussef:

"A cloud is passing this morning…/If I were a child/I would grab it/and throw it in the garden/like a ball…/and I would kick the ball/and command the dogs:/Bark… so that I can fly."

The counterpart to the theme of return is the fantasy of fleeing - the desire to escape the conditions at home. For example in a poem by Hussain Mardan:

"If only I could disperse my body/all over the world/if only I could take the sun between my lips/and paint the sea's blue on my fingernails/…/I want to depart/for all corners of the world/without a passport and suitcase."

Violence and Death

In a poem by Lamia Abbas Imara, a traveling game takes place only in the mind as the lyric "I" sits in street cafes like a tourist, strolls like a flaneur and lives in a big hotel:

"I'm tired of it…/it's a disappointment/it's not exciting anymore./And here I am/no place on earth for me/I have no shadow/like a star lost in the vast heavens."

There are also political poems about violence and death, for example by Sargon Boulus, who writes of an executioner who "set up tent/and spread out/his device for drinks/in our little yard/prepared to celebrate his victory/after the bloodbath."

Hamid Al Iqabi makes us witness to a gruesome scene: "The bridge is swarming with masses of deserters/and death took them as he pleased."

Fadhil Al Azzawi creates a new world order with his poem: "I would found states without police and prisons" - and America would be given back to the Indians - "in order to give history back/the justice it has lost."

Renouncing traditional rhetoric

The editor stresses that authors of modern Arabic poetry, which began after the Second World War, attempt to consciously distance themselves from traditional rhetoric and classical verse, taking their orientation more from modern European and American poets such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Pablo Neruda and Walt Whitman.

The oldest of the authors were born in the 1920s and were the founders of modern Iraqi poetry. The youngest authors were born in the 1960s and early 1970s and live partly in Iraq and partly in exile, for example in Scandinavia or Germany.

The renunciation of tradition has brought about a plain and simple language that sometimes sounds almost like prose and occasionally takes on epic forms. Artifice, dense language, aesthetic alienation, and language or word games are hardly to be found.

A Touch of Self-Irony

This could be understood as a flaw, but, then again, it should also be remembered that the sound of a poem, its rhythm, or its unique use of language are often lost in translation.

Noteworthy is the different tone struck by Abbas Khider, the youngest author in the anthology. The overall heaviness of the work collected here is unexpectedly broken by self-ironic humor in one of his poems:

"Jazz music trickles down from the third story/a television is becoming louder and louder/inside a room my wife watches death/just being shown on television:/Thousands have died of mustard gas/scores of massacres on the streets/and another massacre/in the rocking chair between Abbas bin Kidir/and the poem."

Volker Kaminski

Rückkehr aus dem Krieg – Neue Irakische Lyrik ("Returning from the War: New Iraqi Poetry") edited by Khalid Al-Maaly Cologne/Frankfurt: Kirsten Gutke Verlag, 2006. ISBN: 3-928872-40-0, 24 Euros

Translated from the German by Christina M. White

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