Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here
Today, March 5, marks the eighth anniversary of the bombing of al-Mutanabbi Street, a literary center in Baghdad named after the 10th century poet. The bombing killed thirty people, wounded more than 100, and destroyed a center of book selling and reading. This summer, the Harold F. Johnson Library and the Hampshire College Art Gallery will host an exhibition of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here project. The exhibition will include 100 artists books and broadsides created in collective response to the bombing of al-Mutanabbi Street.
Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here was founded by San Francisco poet and bookseller Beau Beausoleil, and comes to campus with the support of artist and Hampshire parent Cathy DeForest. Unsatisfied with the limited news coverage of the bombing of al-Mutanabbi Street in 2007, four years into the U.S. occupation of Iraq, Beausoleil put out a call to artists to express outrage at the attack on literary culture and solidarity with Iraqi writers, poets, publishers, and readers. While the street officially reopened in 2008, this response to violence has grown to an international community of over 400 artists and 26 exhibitions.
Lutfiya al-Dulaima, an Iraqi novelist, writes in response to the al-Mutanabbi bombing,
And Abu Nuwas leaned on my shoulder and repeated: ‘Weep not over renown; weep only for this.’ But I whisper back: ‘Don’t forget that books and libraries have been burned thousands of times over the course of human history, not least in 1933 in Berlin, the day the Nazis celebrated in a central squareamidst the beat of marshal music and chants of soldiers, and although the burning of books in al-Mutanabbi Street won’t be the last, books will persevere, and libraries and bookstores will flourish, for the beauty of books does not die, and al-Mutanabbi Street is a Phoenix that will be reborn from the ashes, O Abu Nuwas. Indeed, I’ll meet you here one day soon, for I have made a vow to a man who loves me in a foreign land, that we will meet on al-Mutanabbi Street. We three will drink a toast together to al-Mutanabbi and to our new books in the al-Shabindar Coffeehouse. Do not forget our date, my dear Abu Nuwas.’
In hosting Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, Hampshire joins such venues as The Westminster Reference Library, Salt & Cedar Letterpress Studio, The Santa Fe University of Art and Design, The San Francisco Center for the Book, The Hague Public Library, American University in Cairo, the Herron School of Art and Design, the Arab American National Museum, and the Idaho Center for the Book. The National Library and Archive of Iraq will hold a complete collection of all 260 artists’ books.
Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here will open at Hampshire on June 18, 2015. Keep an eye out for details on an opening program, as well as events on campus in September.