Al Mutanabbi Street I by Elsi Vassdal Ellis

I have avoided revisiting Iraq for a few years now. The multi-layers of war and politics, internal and external to Iraq, created a black hole in my creative life. I needed to take a sabbatical from my attention to this war. When invited to participate in An Inventory of Al Mutanabbi Street by Beau Beausoleil, I girded up my loins, so to speak, and opened the Iraq door again. This is the first of three editions on Al Mutanabbi Street. It is a meditation upon the book as container, as cultural artifact, as ideas in corporeal form. It calls out the names of booksellers, book buyers, book browsers who were killed on Mutanabbi Street, Baghdad, Iraq. It also acknowledges the many journalists who have also sacrificed themselves for the revealing the truth about Iraq. There are many landscapes explored between the non-linear narrative and the images of slowly decaying books. The reader is gently reminded that we are all moving, some gently, some violently, towards decay, ashes to ashes, dust t