In the first two sections of this long poem, the poet joins the mythical with
the real. His poetic concern with details and his meticulous attention to the
ancient rites of Sumer, as still lingering in the South of Iraq whence the poet
has come, endow these two pieces with enough color and life. The poem is as
pictorial as a painting, with lively images of people, boats, water, fire, songs,
and animals. The god who gives the title to the first is, after all, a resident of
the marshes, the sites of popular rituals, benedictions and magical vows and
promises. Every action and motion is rife with mythicaldimensions, for life is
so real as to evoke the unreal.
In a summer night he saw reed woods
The fire raised its heads
The drowned child emerged
He sat him around the fire and said:
You will see that death has the taste of burntout fish
A serpent’s bite whose poison sucked by a mother
A vase of reed like a face of a child
An old woman carrying a lantern
Traversing the swamps of fire and creation.
In the marshes the pillars of the night remain turbaned
With the embracing kiss of doves that are not coming back
“The black” is a clay robe^41
In which songs, for their sharp piercing, become heads and axes.^42The seemingly descriptive hides enormous subversion. It plays on the
contrast between what is left of the South of Iraq, the Sumerian site, and the
present scene of poverty and desolation, especially in the aftermath of
the Iraq–Iran war, and the 1991 uprising, with the ensuing human and envi-
ronmental destruction due to the systematic draining of the marshes and the
imposed sanctions on Iraq as well. The series of images culminates in the
reference to Southern singing with its paradoxical lyricism and inherent pain,
as it grows into sites of dissent and revolt.
The poet’s other piece is more involved in dissent. It uses both the wind
and Jannb (South), the Sumerian whore who was married to the god of
Heaven, Inlll. Her freedom, the destructive power of the hot wind, and the
defiance of god, and his choice of the whore to offer life, not only sex and love,
involve the poem in current politics. The poet brings the mythical back-
ground to bear on the present, for Jannb, which is the title of the poem, too,
is no longer the ancient woman of joy, but the widowed in the South,
Wearing a robe of dust
Dancing mad in the squares, the destinies, and the shadows,
“Jannb” lost all her offspring
The hot monsoon wind chases him at the entrance of citiesPOETIC DIALOGIZATION