[PDF] The Iraqi Nights eBook

Author : Dunya Mikhail
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Page : 96 pages
File Size : 35,88 MB
Release : 2014-05-27
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 081122287X

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A stunning new collection by one of Iraq’s brightest poetic voices The Iraqi Nights is the third collection by the acclaimed Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail. Taking The One Thousand and One Nights as her central theme, Mikhail personifies the role of Scheherazade the storyteller, saving herself through her tales. The nights are endless, seemingly as dark as war in this haunting collection, seemingly as endless as war. Yet the poet cannot stop dreaming of a future beyond the violence of a place where “every moment / something ordinary / will happen under the sun.” Unlike Scheherazade, however, Mikhail is writing, not to escape death, but to summon the strength to endure. Inhabiting the emotive spaces between Iraq and the U.S., Mikhail infuses those harsh realms with a deep poetic intimacy. The author’s vivid illustrations — inspired by Sumerian tablets — are threaded throughout this powerful book.

Author : Dunya Mikhail
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Page : 96 pages
File Size : 35,20 MB
Release : 2014-05-27
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0811222861

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A stunning new collection by one of Iraq's brightest poetic voices

Author : Shant Kenderian
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 315 pages
File Size : 48,46 MB
Release : 2007-06-05
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1416546103

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Shant Kenderian's visit to Baghdad in 1980, at age seventeen, was supposed to be a short one -- just enough time to make peace with his estranged father before returning to his home in the United States. But then Saddam Hussein invaded Iran and sealed off Iraq's borders to every man of military age -- including Shant. Suddenly forced onto the front lines, his two-week visit turned into a nightmare that lasted for ten years. 1001 Nights in Iraq presents a human story that provides unique insight into a country and culture that we only get a hint of in the headlines. After surviving the horrors of the Iran-Iraq War, Shant was then forced to fight on the front lines of Desert Storm without being given the proper equipment, including a gun, but miraculously survived to be captured by the Americans and become a POW. He underwent starvation, heavy interrogations, and solitary confinement, but what broke him in the end was his love affair with a female American soldier. Yet throughout this whole ordeal, Shant never lost his respect for people, his faith in God, or his sense of humor.

Author : Dunya Mikhail
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Page : 215 pages
File Size : 38,23 MB
Release : 2018-03-27
Category : History
ISBN : 0811226131

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The true story of a beekeeper who risks his life to rescue enslaved women from Daesh Since 2014, Daesh (ISIS) has been brutalizing the Yazidi people of northern Iraq: sowing destruction, killing those who won’t convert to Islam, and enslaving young girls and women. The Beekeeper, by the acclaimed poet and journalist Dunya Mikhail, tells the harrowing stories of several women who managed to escape the clutches of Daesh. Mikhail extensively interviews these women—who’ve lost their families and loved ones, who’ve been sexually abused, psychologically tortured, and forced to manufacture chemical weapons—and as their tales unfold, an unlikely hero emerges: a beekeeper, who uses his knowledge of the local terrain, along with a wide network of transporters, helpers, and former cigarette smugglers, to bring these women, one by one, through the war-torn landscapes of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, back into safety. In the face of inhuman suffering, this powerful work of nonfiction offers a counterpoint to Daesh’s genocidal extremism: hope, as ordinary people risk their own lives to save those of others.

Author : Dunya Mikhail
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Page : 74 pages
File Size : 35,41 MB
Release : 2019-07-30
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 0811228770

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A brilliant poetic exploration of language and gender, place, and time, seen through the mirror of exile In Her Feminine Sign follows on the heels of Dunya Mikhail's devastating account of Daesh kidnappings and killings of Yazidi women in Iraq, The Beekeeper. It is the first book she has written in both Arabic and English, a process she talks about in her preface, saying "The poet is at home in both texts, yet she remains a stranger." With a subtle simplicity and disquieting humor reminiscent of Wislawa Szymborska and an unadorned lyricism wholly her own, Mikhail shifts between her childhood in Baghdad and her present life in Detroit, between Ground Zero and a mass grave, between a game of chess and a flamingo. At the heart of the book is the symbol of the tied circle, the Arabic suffix taa-marbuta—a circle with two dots above it that determines a feminine word, or sign. This tied circle transforms into the moon, a stone that binds friendship, birdsong over ruins, three kidnapped women, and a hymn to Nisaba, the goddess of writing. A section of "Iraqi haiku" unfolds like Sumerian symbols carved onto clay tablets, transmuted into the stuff of our ordinary, daily life. In another poem, Mikhail defines the Sumerian word for freedom, Ama-ar-gi, as "what seeps out / from the dead into our dreams."

Author : Dunyā Mīkhāʼīl
Publisher : New Directions Poetry Pamphlet
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 30,12 MB
Release : 2013
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780811221795

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A collection of dazzling new, contemporary from Iraq, edited by award-winning Iraqi-American poet Dunya Mikhail

Author : Robert Earle
Publisher : US Naval Institute Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 32,78 MB
Release : 2008
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN :

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"Robert Earle presents a firsthand account of the strategic process that sought to reverse the negative consequences of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. He offers an insider's details and insights into the early attempts to deal with the Iraqi insurgency and to develop Coalition counterinsurgency plans. His book is a sustained, comprehensive account of all the conflicting factors that have made Iraq such an intractable international crisis. Recruited as a strategist by John Negroponte, the first U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Earle documents the Coalition's uncertainty about the nature of the insurgent/terrorist enemies and explores the impediments frustrating the massive, $18 billion U.S. reconstruction effort. He recounts helping to formulate a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy, issued jointly in a unique collaboration by Ambassador Negroponte and Multinational Force Iraq Commanding General George Casey." "Upon drafting the strategy, Earle was evacuated from Iraq because of a massive deep vein thrombosis in his left thigh. Arriving home, Earle thought his nightmare assignment in Iraq was over, but Negroponte requested that he return to Baghdad to write a message to the president explaining that U.S. policy was failing and offering an alternative approach. Casey, meanwhile, asked Earle to assess the evolution of Iraqi politics and possible outcomes of the risky January 2005 election. Returning to Iraq over the strenuous objections of State Department doctors, Earle worked to complete his assignments from dingy offices within Saddam Hussein's former presidential palace in Baghdad's Green Zone that he dubbed the "Pink Motel." Digging deeper into his mission, he was faced with the difficult realities of the effort to end the violence and to build lasting peace." "Earle wraps the stories of soldiers, diplomats, contractors, Iraqis, and Coalition partners into the larger strategic crisis. He offers unmatched portrayals of personal and psychological sacrifice and stress, routine acts of courage and solidarity, and the bizarre atmosphere of violence and uncertainty in war-torn Iraq."--BOOK JACKET.

Author : Nuha al-Radi
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 31,90 MB
Release : 2007-12-18
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0307424901

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In this often moving, sometimes wry account of life in Baghdad during the first war on Iraq and in exile in the years following, Iraqi-born, British-educated artist Nuha al-Radi shows us the effects of war on ordinary people. She recounts the day-to-day realities of living in a city under siege, where food has to be consumed or thrown out because there is no way to preserve it, where eventually people cannot sleep until the nightly bombing commences, where packs of stray dogs roam the streets (and provide her own dog Salvi with a harem) and rats invade homes. Through it all, al-Radi works at her art and gathers with neighbors and family for meals and other occasions, happy and sad. In the wake of the war, al-Radi lives in semi-exile, shuttling between Beirut and Amman, travelling to New York, London, Mexico and Yemen. As she suffers the indignities of being an Iraqi in exile, al-Radi immerses us in a way of life constricted by the stress and effects of war and embargoes, giving texture to a reality we have only been able to imagine before now. But what emanates most vibrantly from these diaries is the spirit of endurance and the celebration of the smallest of life’s joys.

Author : Harri Nykänen
Publisher : Bitter Lemon Press
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 15,27 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1904738923

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Eccentric Jewish policeman Ariel Kafka investigates four Arabs' murders in this fresh take on the Nordic crime novel.

Author : Dunyā Mīkhāʼīl
Publisher : New Directions Publishing
Page : 100 pages
File Size : 12,93 MB
Release : 2005
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780811216210

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Poems by an exiled Iraqi poet, many about war.