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20 - 26 October 2005 Issue No. 765
Maqam Iraq, Tamim Al-Barghouti, Cairo: Atlas for Publication, 2005. pp79 This is the fourth book of poetry by the extremely gifted Egyptian-Palestinian poet Tamim Al-Barghouti. A political scientist by training, he has recently obtained his PhD from Boston University, but his most remarkable achievement is the versatility he has shown in composing verse in both classical Arabic and different Arab vernacular dialects, producing a collection of poems in each of classical Arabic, Palestinian colloquial and Egyptian colloquial. In this, a single long poem written in response to the invasion of Iraq, he employs Iraqi colloquial as well, alternating it with classical Arabic and drawing on an Iraqi ballad form known as Abou Dhaiah as well as canonical poems. In the words of al-Barghouti in the introduction to this book, "I spent more than two years writing this text, which is a collection of testimonies by living species and objects -- the crescent, the palm tree... Bashar ibn Bord, al-Mutanabi, Zeinab the daughter of Imam Ali and al-Hallaj -- all speaking in classical Arabic and in Iraqi colloquial, as if I had taken a snapshot of them all to keep it in memory before a teenager from Texas hoods and wires them with electric barbs."
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