The Utopians of Tahrir Square: Poetry of witness and protest from Iraq.
Featured Image: a Crowd of protesters in Tahrir square (30 October 2019). By Revoulation2019, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
Translated by Dr Anba Jawi and Catherine Temma Davidson (Palewell Press, London:U.K.).
“To the young people of Iraq and around the world whose protests of hope flared up in the darkness of 2019… We who watched this senseless sacrifice in the name of a more hopeful future can only redouble our efforts to make the world worthy of your light.”
As Muhammad Karim writes in This is How You Go Out:
“With your hot blood
With your terror
With your voice in the ears of deaf gods
With your clothes soaked in soot and blood
With your bare chests
This is how you go out…this is how you go out.”
There were both young women and men among the protesters, sometimes in love with each other but with a sense of doom as Enas Philip Muhammad writes:
“You know, my love
You know very well
The roads I walk cannot accommodate two.”
“The martyrs don’t want anything
Except that the holes in their bodies
Made by bullets
Become the punctuation marks
Of an incomprehensible language.”
As Ali Riyadh wrote:
“There is a seed of freedom that has been handed down
From alley to street, from square to cafe, from town to town
The seed fell upon her soil hundreds of times and never tooted.”
There is little hope for future action. As Ayad Al-Qala’ay writes:
“Absorbed in counting their heavy days they did not know – were were the last generation of a sunken ship.”
In the same spirit Hamid Al-Madamii writes:
“Neither the just end
Nor the right start
Will ever happen.”

President, Association of World Citizens (AWC).
Estudied International relations in The University of Chicago.
Estudied Special Program in European Civilization en Princeton University
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