Dia Azzawi’s friendship with Muzaffar al-Nawwab inspired him to create a new visual lexicon for Iraq’s marshes indicative of their revolutionary times. In the mid-twentieth century al-Nawwab lived in the southern marshes of Iraq where he mobilized political resistance with a faction of the communist party. There he composed several infamous poems that are meditations on nature, particularly on Iraq’s wetlands expanse and riverine ecology, its genealogical connection to civilizations past, and the relationship of this swampy environs to political movements in Iraq. Azzawi later interpreted these poems visually in several works that took up the project of creating a “New Vision” by defining a contemporary pan-Arab artistic style that drew on Sumerian iconography. This paper draws upon Talal Asad’s notion of tradition to demonstrate how Azzawi and al-Nawwab’s collaborations offer a powerful vocabulary that challenges contemporary, US occupation images of Iraq’s restored marshes thereby re-framing Iraq’s cultural and physical geographies and how they can be known.