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 Iraqis.
Su'as al-Sabah from Kuwait read a long, spirited poem that served as a call to arms: "Give me a sword and take from me all books of poetry." She shouted emotionally, "Our seats have grown bored with our sitting on them," reminding the poets from last year's festival that then "we recited poetry until God became angry with us." The former premier of Libya, poet Abdul Hamid-al-Bakoush, gently admonished her not to throw her paper into the flames if she wanted to write such fiery stanzas in the future.
Impromptu recitations in the old Arab tradition occurred often throughout the festival - on buses, on paths along the banks of the Euphrates, in hotel coffee shops, in the shadows of arches thousands of years old. While the sessions continued, these informal gathering conveyed the true spirit of the festival, and the war faded briefly into the background.
In mid-week in the early morning hours, a Soviet-made Scud B missile hit a two-story apartment building near festival headquarters, killing forty-eight civilians, including seventeen women and thirteen children. Fifty-two were wounded.
The following night, the American delegation read their poems via television to more than 30 million people in the Arab worlds. The poets included Robert Hedin, North Carolina; Gary Holthaus, Alaska; Ethelbert Miller and Gregory Orfalea, Washington, D.C.
'Love for Language'
Before reading from my work, I prefaced the poems with the following statement: "This festival has given me much
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