Tigris/Thames 2011
Sue Bovington, BA(Hons), MA, UK
| Reading through the,
‘Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here’, anthology
from coalition founder Beau Beausoleil,
poets and their writings seemed to be a dominant theme. Not too
surprising as the Al-Mutanabbi of the street name was a famous Iraqi
poet. This was my starting point, but I also wanted to have a link
between this book and the ones I was making about the river Thames
for my MA Degree show. My research found that the Tigris flows passed one end of Al-Mutanabbi Street. I thought it might be difficult to find a suitable poem about the Tigris, but The British Museum provided the perfect answer. In 2006 they staged an exhibition, Word into Art, which showed a fibreglass sculpture by the Iraqi born artist Dia al-Azzawi, who now lives and works in London. The sculpture, Blessed Tigris, is six metres high and represents a 9C minaret on the banks of the Tigris. It is inscribed with the poem, ‘O Blessed Tigris’, (1962) by Iraqi poet, Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, (1899-1997). ‘The River’s Tale’, (1911) by Rudyard Kipling, (1865-1936) is my Thames poem. Both are about history, memory, loss and bloodshed, and lent themselves to being broken down into a few lines at a time, so they could be spread over several pages. I wanted to make big, grand books with hard covers and wooden spines, but the pleas for weight consideration overrode this, and I have made simple dos-à-dos pamphlet structures. My choice of cover, black and gold Bangladeshi cotton rag paper, is in response to a quote in the coalition anthology, ‘in a world being brightened with colour, they tried to turn everything black’. |
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