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Poets at the Front in Iraq
| Article
# : |
11720 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1987 |
711 Words |
| Author
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Michael Waters
Michael Waters' recent books of poetry include Anniversary of
the Air (Carnegie-Mellon University Press). He teaches at
Salisbury State College in Maryland. |
The seventh Al-Merbid International Poetry Festival in Baghdad opened one day late so that five hundred participating poets and two hundred scholars from Islamic and Western countries could visit battle-weary Iraqi soldiers fighting in the drawn-out Iraq-Iran war.
At a press conference, Iraq's president Saddam Hussein justified the costly expenditures of an international festival as yet another means of waging war. Most of the guests responded to the Iraqis generous hospitality by praising fallen Iraqi "martyrs" and condemning fundamentalist Iranian "aggression."
Rhetoric vs. Poetry
Such rhetoric, unfortunately, does not make for good poetry. The propaganda goals of the organizers tended to obscure what has always been the major goal of the festival - honoring one of Iraq's greatest cultural achievements, the literature of the Tigris-Euphrates basin. The festival is named for a marketplace in ancient Basra where poets used to hold literary contests in the pre-Islamic era.
The minister of culture and information, Latif Nssayif Jassim, officially opened the festivities in the Conference Palace under a banner displaying the festival's theme - "Singing for the Past, Writing for the Future." The first poet to recite was Iraqi Kamal al-Hadithi, who delivered a poetic political statement in traditional meter blaming some of the Arab nations for not supporting Iraq in its war against Iran. The second poet was an Egyptian, Mohammed al-Tuhami: his poem vowed solidarity with the
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