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.

Prevalently known as dafatir (singular daftar; Arabic for notebook), these books by Iraqi artists have come to signify visual art production of the period of the Gulf Wars, sanctions and invasion in Iraq. While not specifically a new format in Iraqi art, their popularity that constituted a contemporary trend, has much to do with the political events of the time. Collectively they tell theirs and Iraq’s painful story of devastation and humiliation. More importantly, while individually they are private works, more like personal journals, together they become a strong act of defiance. Following the invasion of 2003, dafatir focused mostly on the violent destruction of Iraq’s artistic and intellectual heritage. In the context of the devastation of Iraq’s museums and libraries, their format gained much poignancy and relevance. They addressed general and specific issues, including the “deBaathification” policy that was responsible for further organized destruction of certain monuments and their replacement and new walls reshaping the boundaries of their city. This paper explores dafatir as a discursive space of shifts and negotiations for contemporary Iraqi artists and aesthetics in relation to the physical and intellectual devastation, as well as social, cultural and political challenges they and Baghdad faced.

Rather than a silent object to be contemplated, Hanaa Malallah describes her artbook, The God Marduk (2008), as a game that invites interaction and dialogue. Although this extraordinary work lies dormant in an archival box on a British Museum storage shelf, its full artistic potential is realized in touch and movement, its full message reliant on the passage and manipulation of time. The privileged viewer, more appositely referred to as the book’s parallel performer, encounters first the ‘mushhushshu,’ a creature symbolic of ancient Babylon’s patron deity. The uneven, burned, torn, and marked pages then pull the viewer deeper into the stratigraphy of the book allowing the creature to disappear and reappear, to be destroyed and remade. The ‘mushhushshu’ is a beast from the past reanimated in the present by the layering and stripping away of the book’s pages. If Malallah meant the work to be an interactive game, then the objective or outcome is found in its archaeological vision, the motion of the interaction mirroring the practice of excavation, a task that assumes a cycle of creation, destruction, and recreation. The tactile ridges, pleats, and surfaces of Malallah’s work can be reimagined in this vision as Iraq’s temporal terrain wherein the past and present form a core sample of both a contemporary and historical identity. The evasive, ephemeral, and outright scarred expression of this identity echoes Iraq’s recent history of cultural degradation and violence. I argue that to excavate Malallah’s book is to enter an active meditation on Iraq’s shifting political and cultural geographies as marked in the actual and represented ruins of the country’s past and present. This paper further explores the archaeological vision of Malallah’s The God Marduk as an affective and haptic performance that moves beyond a specified politics and reframes the nation’s cultural triumphs and calamities as processes buried in history and realized in the fullness of time.

The Art of the Catalogue in the Fiction of War In his recent novels The Corpse Washer and The Book of Collateral Damage, Sinan Antoon tries to account, in original ways, for the extensive damage wars caused to his country. His two narratives reflect a unique writing of the disaster that challenges traditional accounts of the war novel. Relying on the techniques of the fragment, and using the art of narrative collage of well- knit segments, Antoon creates a poetic index fleshing out the minute losses inflected by war, from the human cost down to the places and myriad things that collectively form the traumatic memory of war. In both novels, the narratives draw on multiple sources and art/artists, rituals and writers’ experiences such as tradition (Shiite tradition of corpse washing), (sculpture: Jawad Kadhim; Giacometti, etc), and (history: al-Mutanabbi, al-Tawhidi, Benjamin, etc…) to bring to life the voices of all things lost and the dignity of all the victims. Focusing on the techniques of writing the fragment and the collage, this paper will show how Antoon relies heavily on the centrality of art (from poetry, to sculpture, to tradition) to create the archive and document the trauma.