Abdul Zahra Zaki

Silent Film Abdul Zahra Zaki

A silent film from Baghdad about love, war and poetry... _________________________ A new poetry book by the Iraqi poet Abdul Zahra Zaki has been published by Moment Books & Publications in an exclusively Digital Edition, entitled "Silent Film", and which subtitled "Poems of Blood, Bullets and Car Bombs", translated from the Arabic into English by Dr Adhraa A. Naser. This book is not trying to explain war, but simply to present it the way it is; the destruction it causes and the pain it leaves behind. For all who has changed forever because of war this book speaks the words of the killed and the killer. Zaki introduced the book with a line from his masterpiece The Hand Discovers describing the waves of bodies that stormed the country after the massive deaths' rates because of the sanctions and later because of the sectarian conflict ignited in 2005, during which scenes like unknown dead bodies on the side roads, missed last phone calls, road assassinations, kidnapping and hostages became familiar for the Iraqis. The book is presented in three sections, under each one of them lies texts that are a collection of expressions that tells the story of a community, an individual and an imaginative solitude that gives space to memory to record the devastating moments of mourning on the graves of the lost beloved ones. It is concluded with these poems that pictures graves, monuments and war museums that personalizes memory as the only left power to fight a recurring catastrophic conflict as the one Iraqis suffered during these years. No imagination or exaggeration, the mere painful truth and incidents that destroyed people's life forever and changed the country's ethnographic, sectarian and social life since then.