Sara Bowen

On March 5th 2007, a car bomb was exploded in a cafe on al-Mutanabbi Street, in a mixed Shia-Sunni area of Baghdad. More than 30 people were killed and more than 100 were wounded. Al-Mutanabbi Street, the historic centre of Baghdad bookselling, holds bookstores and outdoor bookstalls, cafes, stationery shops, tea and tobacco shops. It was the heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community. “Forgiveness breaks the enemy,” says cafe owner Mohammad al-Kahshali, the owner and manager of Shahbander Cafe, where the bomb was detonated. The Al Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalitioni brings artists and poets together to commemorate what was lost and to remake the books of Al Mutanabbi Street. Poet Beau Beausoleil, who started the project, says, “[We] hope that these books will make visible the literary bridge that connects us, made of words and images that move back and forth between the readers in Iraq and ourselves. These books will show the commonality of al-Mutanabbi Street with any street, anywhere that holds a bookstore or cultural institution, and that this attack (part of a long history of attacking the printed word) was an attack on us all.”

The word Palimpsest (pæl Imp sεst) comes from the Greek word palimpsestos, meaning “rubbed again” and refers to the re-use of expensive parchment by scraping off the original text or drawings and writing over them again. This book examines the notion of the pavement as a palimpsest, written and re-written with the lives of those walking over it.  A scuffed stretch of cobble stone pavement carries marks of daily life: footprints, grime and cigarette butts. Indeterminate stains could be blood or paint. Caught in the cracks between the cobbles, dirt collects; enough, eventually, to sustain life. 

The plants that grow in the cracks in a pavement are weeds: hardy, displaced, opportunistic. Tenaciously they sprout in barren places, even places where atrocities have happened. In Palimpsest the small sprouts are of pomegranate trees, symbols of fertility and new life. The Persian hero Isfandiyar ate pomegranates and became invincible; in Greek mythology Persephone ate pomegranate seeds which condemned her to spend some months of the year in Hades, bringing winter on the world. Pomegranate seeds, the colour of blood, are used in making kolyva for memorial services, and as a tonic for the heart in Ayurvedic medicine.  Encoded in the surface of the paper are meanings and memories, literal and abstracted reference. They are the beginning of a story.

Part of the Al Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition digital collection of the Herron Library at the University of Indianapolis, USA.

https://iuidigital.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/AMSSH/id/345/rec/373

https://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/projects/al-mutanabbi/644.htm