
The New Baghdad
1. The ghost of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra may still prowl Princesses’ Street by night, but hardly anyone in this affluent neighborhood in western Baghdad would recognize him. Born in 1919, Jabra was displaced from Palestine in the Nakba and relocated to the Iraqi capital, where he lived until his death in 1994. In his adopted city he became a prolific writer, painter, publisher, and university lecturer; in 1951 he cofounded the Baghdad Group for Modern Art.
A flâneur since childhood, Jabra had crisscrossed the fields of Jerusalem reflecting on “the relations between things, between abstract ideas”, as he recalled in Princesses’ Street: Baghdad Memories .… Seguir leyendo »