Mutanabbi St. Coalition

On March 5, 2007, a car bomb exploded on Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad. At least 30 people were killed and 100 were wounded. This locale is the historic center of Baghdad bookselling, a winding street filled with bookstores and outdoor book stalls. Named after the famed 10th century Arab classical poet, Al-Mutanabbi, it had been the heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community.

We are among the pages of every book that was shredded and burned and covered with flesh and blood that day. And to those who would manufacture hate with the tools of language; those who would take away the rights and dignity of a people with the very same words that guarantee them; and to anyone who would view the bodies on Mutanabbi Street as a way to narrow the future into one book; we say, as poets, writers, artists, booksellers, printers and readers: Mutanabbi Street starts here!

In April of 2007, San Francisco poet and bookseller Beau Beausoleil began to form a coalition to address not just the tragic loss of life but the idea of a targeted attack on a street where ideas have always been exchanged. The coalition recognizes the commonality of Mutanabbi Street with any street that leads to a bookstore or cultural institution, in this or any country.

We organized a reading at the San Francisco main library, and many other libraries, as well as radio shows and a public-access cable interview/reading concerning the Mutanabbi Street project. In response to our call, Upstart Crow Book Store in Vancouver, Canada, held a reading.

The Coalition issued a call, organized by printer and professor Kathleen Walkup, to letterpress printers for their personal response to the bombing on Mutanabbi Street. To date we have received over 40 broadsides.

We continue to seek booksellers, individuals and cultural organizations in other states that will help organize meetings dedicated to Mutanabbi Street and the art and cultural communities of Iraq. We are looking for other regional coordinators for the extension of the Mutanabbi Street Letterpress Broadside Project. We invite other forms of artistic expression that address these issues. Please contact: Beau Beausoleil at overlandbooks@earthlink.net.

Sometimes the weight of our own silence becomes completely unbearable, until we cannot take one more day reading about the blood, bone, and ash. And then the moment comes when we recognize that this distant landscape is our own and that we must walk through it. I knew that if I had been a bookseller in Baghdad, my book shop would have been on Mutanabbi Street; and as a poet, I would most likely be in exile or dead.

The connections between the booksellers and readers on Mutanabbi Street and the booksellers and readers here, are simple and direct. We all share the belief that books are the holders of memories, dreams, and ideas. I felt an urgent need to keep this particular, tragic event in our consciousness; because it has such deep historical and cultural implications, both for us, here in this country, and for the people of Iraq. To this end, I decided to create a coalition of artists, poets, writers, printers, booksellers and readers.

I have always felt that letterpress printers have been "first responders." They have always provided a visible starting place for our collective grief or aspirations for a more just society. I wanted to issue a call to letterpress printers for their personal response to the bombing of Mutanabbi Street. Letterpress printing is a visceral act; it is the body and the text briefly merging, again and again. In this project I have looked for outward acts: poets reading aloud; printers using their presses to bite the words into the paper.

--Beau Beausoleil

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