Ode to Baghdad

Two Iraqi poets reflect on a time when Baghdad wasn’t the center of an American war, but a center of learning and culture.
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LISA MULLINS:  Iraq’s capital Baghdad wasn’t always identified with an American war. For more than a thousand years, it was a metropolis at the heart of an empire that captured the imagination of the West and the Arab world alike. It was a place of learning and culture, and it attracted countless poets. Nabeel Yasin and Fawzi Karim are two contemporary Iraqi poets, they’re now living in exile. Here they reflect on the city that they left behind. First, Fawzi Karim remembers growing up along the banks of the Tigris River.

FAWZI KARIM:  We live in there, in the river, swimming all the time, when we was children and boys, you know? And this is the best time you can understand life. To cross the river, something really not belong to this reality, something, you know, you feel you are, a tigress. That time, and even now really, it’s huge, it’s so wide, it’s not small things. So, when you cross, you can’t see the other side. Everything became covered with a dream, and that’s beautiful.

NABEEL YASIN:  I still searching for Baghdad, but I didn’t find it as I left it 28 years ago, but I still have my Baghdad and my city, and my relation with it. This relation, which tied Al Karh and [SOUNDS LIKE] Arasaffe, not just to through the bridges, but through the river, which is still continued to the south. And in my poem the [INDISTINCTIVE] [SPEAKS IN ARABIC] That’s mean Baghdad will be the last town, and the bridges of Baghdad were times tried to cross the river, and froze it.

[SOUND CLIP OF MUSIC]

FAWZI KARIM:  We have gone from old one, you know? Usually do it by hand, but I think the old brother, he brought at end, he brought some records of Abdul (Habinsan?), another singers. But I remember listening to one of these song, [SINGS], the melodies like that. And unfortunately the record itself is damaged in a point, when he repeat again, [SINGS].

[SOUND CLIP OF MUSIC]

FAWZI KARIM:  And this le-le continued for a long time until I move it. But it sticks in my mind, thinking that this is part of the song. Even now when I see it in my mind, you know, I repeat this a lot of time. [LAUGHS]

NABEEL YASIN:  There was one dream, or one nightmare chasing me everywhere. Always the dream, or the nightmare was like this, I’m going back to Baghdad, they arrest me, and they start to shoot me. And now I stop dreaming to return, but I continue my dream to see Baghdad as a town which deserve the life, and deserve to be beautiful like before.

LISA MULLINS:  Evocations of a lost Baghdad from Iraqi poets Nabeel Yasin and Fawzi Karim, both men now live in London.

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