DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

Poetry and prose from the Middle East and North Africa. Commemorative readings to honor those lost and to continue the struggle for free expression of ideas, worldwide.

Launch Event and Public Performance Announced

Free & Open to the Public

March 4, 2015, 6:30-9pm

Brookland Busboys and Poets

625 Monroe Street NE, Washington, DC 20017

(Washington, DC)— Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here: Commemorative Readings reflects upon the 8th anniversary of the bombing of al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad, Iraq.

On March 5, 2007, a car bomb exploded on Baghdad’s al-Mutanabbi Street, the legendary center of the city’s literary and  intellectual  community, famous for its enormous selection of books in various languages and subjects. The blast killed 30 people and wounded more than 100.

A coalition of partners is coordinating Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here DC 2016 as a book arts and cultural festival planned for January through March, 2016, throughout the Washington, DC area. Exhibits, programs, and events will commemorate the 2007 bombing, celebrating the free exchange of ideas and knowledge and standing in solidarity with the people of Iraq and everywhere that free expression is threatened.

2015 commemorative readings by: Sarah Browning, Casey Smith, Mousa Al-Nasseri, Robert Obayda, Elliott Colla, Rawan Alferaehy, E. Ethelbert Miller, Zein El-Amine, members of Split This Rock’s DC Youth Slam Team, and others.

Other aspects of the project include:

 Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Bookmark Project

https://markerofwitness.wordpress.com

In July 2010, the poet Beau Beausoleil and artist Sarah Bodman put out a call for book artists to join An Inventory Of Al-Mutanabbi Street, to reassemble and honor the vast breadth of reading material that previously mingled on the street. The coalition asked each artist to create three books (or other paper material) over the course of a year. These works reflect both the strength and fragility of printed matter, and the endurance of the ideas within them, using Al-Mutanabbi and its printers, writers, booksellers, and readers as a touchstone.

The anthology: Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here: Poets and Writers Respond to the March 5th, 2007, Bombing of Baghdad’s “Street of the Booksellers”

This anthology begins with a historical introduction to al-Mutanabbi Street and includes the writing of Iraqis as well as a wide swath of international poets and writers who were outraged by this attack. Exploring the question Where does al-Mutanabbi Street start? the book looks at both communities and nations, seeking to show the commonality between a small street in Baghdad and other individual cultural centers and explain why this attack was an attack on us all. Chapters examine al-Mutanabbi Street as a place for the free exchange of ideas, a place that has long offered its sanctuary to the complete spectrum of Iraqi voices, and a place where the roots of democracy took hold many hundreds of years ago.