CFPR Book Arts: Exhibitions and Events: 'An Inventory Of Al-Mutanabbi Street' : Gallery 1 : Loretta Cappanera : Book Arts at the CFPR:

It’s Spring 2012
Loretta Cappanera, Italy

It was a clear morning, the first day of spring. In the little flowerpot on the bedside table was a little bunch of violets, the white sheets, the hands placed one next to the other, tied to a blue thread. Those hands had accompanied mine when sketching my first designs and tenderly followed my first readings. There always was a book in his hands, even after a tiresome day. I wished to bind those hands to mine.

The day before, in Rome, there had been a big demonstration against the war in Iraq. The thousands of people present had tightly held one another’s hands around an extremely long flag, bearing the colours of the rainbow, with the writing “It’s Springtime”.

On 22nd March 2004 my father left our hands.
On 5th March 2007, Al-Mutanabbi Street.

My father’s hands and the poem of Etel Adnan are to remember Al-Mutanabbi Street.

A Library set on fire
Lines running in all directions,
silence, displacements, verticals turning,
rotating, manuscripts burning, each flame
annihilating a word, then a sentence, unread and unpublished secrets,
leaps of thought,
discoveries immaterial although laid on
paper, logarithms, registered conversations
between people since dead,
exchanges of anger, of nocturnal flights,
discoveries made by the imagination within imagination's boundaries,
measurements of planetary motions
and locations, within their ephemeral nature,
sequences of political theories pitted against rulers,
physical desires transformed into divine love,
adultery and chastity at war, blood looking for arteries made of clay,
the fire eating old brains from the past,
the deconstruction of civilisation;
Al Hallaj running wild through the fire
proclaiming "I am God" over any standing loudspeaker,
with his toes, his nails, and his hair catching fire,
all this made for ever unknown by the rape
of Baghdad an April day when the Tigris was pregnant
with apprehension and dreading its merger with
the betraying waters of the Gulf.

Etel Adnan

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