3 - Glory: Baghdad in Verse

Summary

Where are you, my first years,

The years of streets and cafés,

The years of days and long walks,

In the course of revolts with no pricking of conscience?

Where are you, my first years?

Oh my city, feverish with floods of memory,

Where are you in that drawn stream?

– ʽAbd al-Qādir al-Janābī

1. INTRODUCTION

“Poetry and Baghdad are indivisible, flowing together. One reflects, then feeds the other and so on,” writes contemporary Baghdadi poet ʽAbd al-Qādir al-Janābī (b. 1944). “The very nature of Baghdad strikes the match that ignites the poetic imagination of the Iraqis, and in a sense of poets in the Arab world.” About ninety years ago, the historian Reuben Levy (1891–1966) wrote that even in the storied East there are few cities that hold the imagination like Baghdad “whose annals should be sought not in the humdrum narratives of the scribe but in the unfettered imagery of poet or painter.” As expressed in a truism by English poet William Cowper (1731–1800), “God made the country, and man made the town.” Indeed, cities are “living processes” rather than “products” or “formalistic shells for living,” but Baghdad has been shaped also by the numerous poets who have written about the city during the more than 1,200 years since its foundation. Surely, there are not many cities in the world about which so many verses have been written over such a span of time.

There were, of course, variations in the volume and nature of the productive creativity of Baghdad's poets. In the first few centuries after the city was founded, both the Arab and the international gaze witnessed Baghdad's great cultural and artistic achievements and the inspiration of its so very many poets and writers. In other periods, such as the 1920s–1930s and 1960s, Baghdad became known for its remarkable religious tolerance, multicultural cosmopolitan atmosphere, and peaceful cohabitation between all components of local society. There were also periods when Baghdad claimed attention because of its dramatic decline and disintegration, for example, after the thirteenth-century Mongol destruction; during Saddam Hussein's ill-reputed regime; and, for being a theater for bloody wars—such as the Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s and, in the following decades, the Gulf War and the American-led occupation.