P O E T R Y

I am Iraq”: The New Poetry of Protest

Colombian is the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid, backed by attack helicopters, spy planes and advisers for its counterinsurgency fight.  Yet here the fight that has dragged on for decades is not only grim, but has produced a rare awakening among the people. In July during the 16th International Poetry Festival of Medellín -- founded here as a fight against fear, over 1, 50,000 people heard two great poets, one from Iraq, the 39 year old Muhsin Al-Ramli and the other from Colombia Allan Luna, 49 year old.

The poets now part of legend of protest are now much popular figures that they are greeted on the streets and in jails where they went to recite their poems to jail inmates, many of them guerillas.

Here are the poems: first by the Iraqi poet Muhsin Al-Ramli whose bother also a known intellectual and poet died young in that hapless country now lives in Madrid.   His poem "No to Liberating Iraq from Me", which he penned in Madrid on Mar. 30, 2003, just 10 days before the fall of Baghdad, caused a sensation at the festival.

"This ink spilled in your newspapers / is the blood of my country. / This light pouring out of your screens / is the sparkle in the eyes of the children of Basra."

"This one who is sobbing in the darkness of his exile / is me; / Orphan after you have killed my parents: Tigris and Euphrates; / Widow after you have crucified my soul mate: Iraq.”

"Ay... you, gentlemen of the war / Listen to me: / No to the party of military men on the roof of my house. / No to the executioner that you have proposed / or are going to propose. / No to the bombs of your liberty falling over the heads of my people / No to liberating Iraq from me or me from him. / I am Iraq."

"Go back to your movies across the ocean. / Leave me what is left / of the minarets, the mausoleums of my ancestors, / of the tombs of my family... / And drink from the cups of petroleum until you are quenched."

Take what you like and leave, / leave me alone / with the shot-down dreams of my sister, / with palms engulfed in flames on the banks of Mesopotamia, / with the bones of my father / and my afternoon tea."

Colombian poet Allan Luna, born in 1957 in the department of Nariño on the border with Ecuador, had heard an officer from the Colombian air force as he described "with pleasure the capacity of the bombs, the model, the mechanisms of precision" used in his lethal work.

"He enjoyed talking about how the bombs were fired. About the consequences? He had no idea. The war is conducted in his head, like the movies of Vietnam." Luna summed up.

Baghdad, the city of "One Thousand and One Nights", fell under U.S. control on Apr. 9, 2003. That same month in Colombia, Luna wrote the poem, "Vuelo" (I Fly).

I am not an ordinary criminal. / I fly. / My prey is there below. / I don't see their eyes or hear their cries. / I fly. / I know they are watching me. / I don't know their names, or who they are. / I don't need to know. / It is enough to know where they are, / To let fall upon them / an agonising rain.

My mission is death and afterwards a beer. / I don't know war. / They haven't yet shot me down.

The festival's collection by the magazine Prometeo (Prometheus) produced by the festival organizers carries these poems. [From the editor’s desk]

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