Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths: Poetry and Music with Sholeh Wolpé and Amal Al-Jubouri
Cosponsored by Split This Rock & Busboys and Poets
Iraqi poet and human rights activist Amal Al-Jubouri will read her poetry in Arabic and in English, followed by a sumptuous music and poetry journey performed by Sholeh Wolpé to music composed for this piece by Payam Yousefi. The poem which itself is in seven movements, utilizes the seven tokens Iranians put on their table in anticipation and final celebration of each new year, as a metaphor for her own journey away from her country, and the futility of searching for home. Sholeh will be accompanied by Payam Yousefi on the santoor, a traditional Middle Eastern musical instrument.
This event is part of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here DC 2016, a book arts and cultural festival organized for January through March 2016, throughout the Washington, DC area. Exhibits, programs, and events will commemorate the 2007 bombing of Baghdad’s historic bookselling street, and celebrate the free exchange of ideas and knowledge, to stand in solidarity with the people of Iraq, who have endured so much; and with people at home and abroad who are unable to make their voices heard. Book sellers, who survived the bombing, rebuilt their stores and are once again in business. They sell works by Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, and Jews, children's books, and progressive publications from around the world. Scroll down for details of this extraordinary week of events.
The Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here project began as a call from San Francisco poet Beau Beausoleil in 2007 for writers, and it quickly moved on to incorporate artists, artist books and printmakers all who are responding to bear witness to a tragic loss of a center of literacy and humanity in Iraq. Al-Mutanabbi Street represents a street of booksellers, printers, and readers, a street where people still felt “safe” among all the words and books. This is the project’s starting point: where language, thought, and reality reside; where memory, ideas, and even dreams wait patiently in their black ink.
Project Partners
George Mason University’sSchool of Art and George Mason University Libraries, Split This Rock, Smith Center for Healing and the Arts, McLean Project for the Arts, Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at The George Washington University, Busboys and Poets, Georgetown University, Cultural DC, Smithsonian Libraries, Brentwood Arts Exchange, Northern Virginia Community College, George Mason University Student Media and Fourth Estate Newspaper.
Support
Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here DC 2016 is made possible in part by grants from the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities. Additional support received from the College of Visual and Performing Arts at George Mason University. Busboys and Poets and The Bozzuto Group are also major sponsors.
For more information about this event, please go to www.amsshdc2016.org.
Sholeh Wolpé is a poet, playwright, and literary translator. She was born in Iran and spent most of her teen years in Trinidad and the UK before settling in the United States. She is the recipient of the 2014 PEN/Heim, 2013 Midwest Book Award, 2010 Lois Roth Persian Translation prize, 2015 Chateau De Lavigny residency in Switzerland, and 2014 Hedgebrook Women’s residency on Widbey Island.
Wolpé is the author of three collections of poetry and three books of translations, and is the editor of three anthologies. Her translation of The Conference of the Birds, by Iran’s 12th Century mystic poet, Attar, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2017.
