Stephanie Sauer
mouth to let the stories come through. I have to record in my studio, with roosters crowing and dogs barking outside, because that is where the stories can be heard. I have soaked them into me for over two months without pause, and now I am full with them. I am alive in their testimony and they will come out. Most of the place names I know not how to pronounce. Rather than researching each one, I accept my accent and loosen my tongue. My mouth feels round with sadness inside. I speak. It takes only a few trials. I am too full to stop. Like the song says: “I guess I should shut my mouth / and rethink a minute, / but I can’t shut it now / because there’s something in it.” To pause, to take more time would be to give in to fear, to self-doubt. To silencing. It would be to let those killers of all things living win. Because this, this kind of listening and being and making and acting, this is being alive in the world. This is why Al-Mutanabbi Street will start here. And here.
INTRODUCTION Al-Mutanabbi Street stops in the silencing. It cuts across centuries and echoes off every flame, flood and 137