The Land of Peace

Al-Salam Cemetery in Najaf Al-Salam Cemetery in Najaf

The Land of Peace

By : Sharif S. Elmusa

THE LAND OF PEACE

 

A graveyard, too, can be a strategic asset.

Enter southern Iraq, August 2004. Then

the U.S. force in the area sought

to destroy the local, rag-tag Mahdi Army, loyal

to the Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr.  Which in turn

required taking control of the Najaf cemetery,

ard al-salam (“Land of Peace”)—

 

a dry brown expanse, a maze of two million graves,

mausoleums for the indispensable, ancestral souls that thought

they’d remain quiet, powder of bones and secrets and dialects,

wilted eyes and flowers, prayers and alms for the poor,

new tenants, silence and too much sky.

 

And the imperial eye locked horns with the local eye.

And the graveyard became a killing field.

And the horizon was jagged with the streaks

of missiles and premonitions. And the fighter planes

did what they were made to do, shock and awe,

and level arguments. And the soldiers startled

the bats out of their crypts. And the graves

yielded beneath the invading boots.

 

"Wives, daughters, husbands,"

said a sergeant from Houston, Texas,

"You just know you're destroying that tomb."

His buddy adds, “These guys really make us work

to kill them, but in the end, they're dead."

 

The day after— the women came and wailed

and pulled their hair under the gaze of the sun,

and men beat their chests, like holy drums.

The flat desert had no ears.

 

Coda

May, 2018, Moqtada Sadr’s list “Moving Forward” won the largest number of seats in Iraq’s parliamentary election.

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Helen Zughaib: Arab Spring (Unfinished Journeys)

Late last year York College Galleries in Pennsylvania hosted Arab Spring (Unfinished Journeys), the solo exhibition of artist Helen Zughaib.

The exhibition’s featured paintings, installations, and conceptual works were created between 2008 and 2016. In these years, Zughaib watched the 2008/2009 attack on Gaza from afar, responding with scenes of grief-stricken, weeping women paralyzed beneath the fall of bombs. She also returned to her native Lebanon for the first time since fleeing war-torn Beirut in the 1970s, and produced a series of text-based paintings. Later she was hopeful when uprisings swept across North Africa and the Middle East, cloaking her figures in spiraling floral patterns; but soon began to document the number of Syrian civilians killed since 2012 with a series of public performances and related images. More recently, she has created a number of conceptual works that describe the difficulties of the mass migration that has swept across Europe from North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, particularly for children.

Narrated by the artist, the short film below (produced by York College Galleries) takes viewers into Arab Spring (Unfinished Journeys), revealing what inspired many of the included works and how concepts and forms aim to record the mounting devastation of this time.

Thanks to Matthew Clay-Robison, director of York College Galleries, for allowing Jadaliyya to feature this film.  

Helen Zughaib at York College from Jadaliyya on Vimeo.