Baghdad Mon Amour
Selected writings of Salah Al Hamdani
Curbstone Press, 2008

From his imprisonment in Saddam Hussein's infamous prison fortress Abu Ghraib to his exile in France, the life and poetry of Salah Al Hamdani register a consistent defiance of tyranny and dictatorship, war and imperialism.

Born in Baghdad in the 1950s to a poor family with many children, Al Hamdani developed an early interest in words but could find no steady employment. At the age of 17 he joined the Iraqi army, one avenue for social mobility available to Iraq's poorest people in those days.

In the army, Al Hamdani joined a Marxist faction even as Baath Party leaders in the army, such as Saddam Hussein, rose to claim power with the aid of U.S. agents. In this period, Al Hamdani was arrested and imprisoned for political reasons. After several months at the hands of torturers, Al Hamdani was expelled from the army and sought intermittent work in Baghdad's poorest neighborhoods.

In those neighborhoods, Al Hamdani encountered writers and books. He eagerly consumed the works of great European writers from Rimbaud and Marx to Camus. The writing he produced in this period only got him into more trouble and caused his political enemies to try to kill him. In an act of self-preservation, under guise of a brief trip to Lebanon, Al Hamdani fled to France in 1975.

Friends in Paris helped him enter the University of Vincennes where he studied theatre. He took jobs acting and launched a career as an actor in cinema and theatre. By the 1980s he served as a representative of the Iraq League of Democratic Artists, Writers and Journalists in Exile. He published books on poetry as well as several collections of poetry, including Bedouin Throats and The Cemetery of Birds. His later poetry, including Baghdad Mon Amour (which includes several prose pieces and stories) were written in French and translated into English.

He became an active supporter of the Palestinian cause in the 1980s and the 1990s. When George W. Bush launched his war on Iraq under fabricated conditions in 2003, Al Hamdani joined with thousands of others on the streets of Paris to protest, earning him physical attacks from pro-Saddam members of Iraq's expatriate community in France. Al Hamdani returned to Baghdad in 2004 where he wrote some of the poems for Baghdad Mon Amour.

"The Crossing," the prose piece which opens the collection, is a lament on exile. It opens with a recollection of his impoverished youth: "My days of misery were not light-hearted, but they were alive." And it continues with a recurring obsession with nothingness and loss: "Oh Baghdad! I wanted to come to your aid, garner your patience, save your house, gather in your tears, uproot your mourning and protect your laughter. But, you see, I am only good at raking up a child's dream. Without ceasing, exile tracks my every step." Alienated from his home and even his language, this deep sorrow affiliated with crossing over the border between home and exile remains a central theme of Baghdad Mon Amour.

Among the most beautiful and stirring in this collection are lines such as these:

From "Reflection" (April 2004):

…
I detest the banners of victory
and the coffins
set down in silence
our eyes captive

I dream of my children on one leg,
standing like storks ...

From "Here, from Baghdad, we say to you that we are alive":

…
If you were a woman, Baghdad
you would be my river of sorrow
and I would know the dying of love

I would at last see your immense eyelids
amid a store of solitude
where no one knows us
but love is learned from taking measure of life
from man's hate
from death as well.

And, addressed to the American poet Sam Hamill, who edited the moving Poets Against the War collection in 2003, from "Farewell to Arms" (2003):

...Friend
take this body of an Iraqi exile
with its history and its fears
offer it in sacrifice to the assassins of Mesopotamia, our
mother
like a torment of light riveted to the rain
then tell them there are too many child soldiers here
buried under the starred flag of the night.