There were illegal poets like Muzaffar al-Nawab, this is the thing - Muzaffar was widely known and he didn't really have books. He would deliver these readings on cassette tape. Go on YouTube and listen to him. He's like a preacher. He's a really interesting figure in modern Iraqi life.
Elliott CollaPalestinian society is filled with poetry, but not experimental poetry. The Palestinian poetry that people know is not the modernist experimentations, it's certain kinds of poetry that lends itself to recitation and song and things like that.
Elliott CollaThe more I've reflected on that and asked Iraqi friends, the more I realize that the corruption in Iraq has nothing to do with ideas - it has to do with the regime and institutional structures and power. There's no core to what Michel Aflaq has to say that results in this. That was a key to looking at Michel Aflaq as a sideshow. He's the intellectual father of an ideology that no one probably ever believed in. At that point I began to appreciate him in a funny way.
Elliott CollaTranslated books rarely get reviewed in the press. Books or poems or works of art that don't seem to have a corresponding style or figure or theme, obviously they're hard to digest.
Elliott CollaThere was this very deliberate move to just overlay an American reality in Iraq. I've never actually seen the map, but apparently Americans thought the names of places were just too complicated so they got decent maps of Baghdad and just renamed everything with familiar names. This neighborhood would be Hollywood, that neighborhood would be Manhattan, and that one's Madison, you're going to drive down Oak and take a left on Main Street.
Elliott Colla