At Arbil arts festival, 'Iraq is more than blood'

Amid deep-seated themes of suffering, Iraqi artists expressed a different face of their country through their creative work.

from the May 29, 2007 edition

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Saadi, who says he is one of the few who can master all 56 maqam songs, gives a maqam titled Mukhalef as an example. The verses are about the trials of a forlorn lover but they are interspersed with a muffled cry that can be traced to an ancient lament from the time the Mongol hordes sacked Baghdad more than 750 years ago, he says.

Like Saadi, most of the Iraqi artists and intellectuals that still live in the country are focused mainly on survival.

"I am like a snail or turtle, able to hide when it feels it's in danger," says Mohammed Khodyer, considered one of the country's best contemporary novelists. He has lived all his life in the southern city of Basra, which is now in the throes of a bitter struggle between rival Shiite religious parties. He says he's not writing as much these days and that his only outlet is a weekly column published in a Gulf Arab newspaper.

Nouri al-Rawi, an octogenarian regarded as the father of contemporary Iraqi art, still paints in his Baghdad studio but exhibits elsewhere.

"We are home all the time. We do not know when a mortar would fall on us or when killers would knock our door," he says.

The artist says painting about the current situation would "tear him apart." He sticks to poetic and colorful themes including his favorite: memories of growing up in the ancient Iraqi cities of Anah and Rawa, later submerged by Saddam's mega Haditha dam project.

Mr. Rawi says Iraqis are paying a dear price now for having become the primary arena for the US-led war on terror. "The American people, mainly the intellectuals and artists, must understand the depth of our tragedy and help us," he says.

'No culture' amid religious extremism

Rawi's colleague Faisal al-Laibi, who has lived abroad since 1978 and returned for the first time for the Arbil festival, says apathy reigns in Iraq now after decades of repression and wars, and that this has provided a fertile ground for extremist religious parties. "There is no culture. There is regression. There are only religious rituals. In the absence of reason, fantasy rules," he says. "The evil of today is the product of the previous fascist era."

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