1 minute read
INTRODUCTION
Al-Mutanabbi Street stops in the silencing. It cuts across centuries and echoes off every flame, flood and
Raze bomb that has destroyed a book, a story, a library, a history, a culture. It begins again at the tip of a pen, a piece of thread, a word that forms in the mouth and makes the body tremble. It always begins again.
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This book is my hymn to each and every page, image, narrative, person, symbol, codex, quilt, mural, scroll, stone carving, illuminated manuscript, tapestry, and oral account throughout time that has been banned, shamed, destroyed, or subverted. Each word and image found in these pages is a surviving piece of a work or a culture or a tradition whose destruction was attempted or achieved. From ancient Ethiopia to the Americas and present day Baghdad to all that remains between and before, the targets are not always what we consider books. But they are always potent conduits of ideas, histories and sentiments at odds with empire and ownership.
Scattered throughout are fragments of my own first poems, poems my mother found when I was thirteen. Poems she confiscated and tried to burn. I saw then first hand the power of words and the white heat they cause in people who try to silence them. In the end, burnings were averted and the punk attitude that had finally reached our home in the backwoods urged me to shout fuck you and write harder. To never back down.
So, destroy this book. Drown it. Question its legitimacy, relevancy, need. Burn its pages. Strike a match and light this book aflame. It will never go away. This impetus to make, to preserve and impart will forever surface. This street will always wind its way back.
