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Literary Sampler

Silent Movie (2004)

Author Information
Writer: Dunya Mikhail (1965 - )
Writer's Country: Iraq
Original Language: Arabic
Genre: Poetry
Event: Middle East Conflicts

There,
in the sky's playground,
the gods toss us around like curses
and cast us down from above
without speaking a word.
They watch us, but don't hear us.
We are a silent movie
with a bad director.
No wonder the gods get bored
or switch us off and go to sleep
or forget about us
as we bend like a question mark
on an empty screen
or sneeze as we pray
for the return of the gods
even without any words.

Biography:

Dunya Mikhail was born in 1965 in Baghdad. She received a degree in English literature at Baghdad University, and has worked as Literary Editor for The Baghdad Observer. Facing increasing threats from Iraqi authorities for her writing, she fled to Jordan and then the United States. She is graduate student in Near East Studies, Wayne State University where she teaches Arabic. In 2001, she was awarded the UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. She has published four collections of poetry in Arabic and her first collection published in English, The War Works Hard, was translated by Elizabeth Winslow in 2005 with a PEN Translation Fund Grant.

Bibliography:

The War Works Hard, San Francisco: New Directions, 2004.

For a patient, a sick person, it helps to have X-rays of that wound and of the medical problem. These pieces of literature and art are X-rays of the times these people lived through. Literary documents are as valuable as historical documents. They may tell you about what the cameras cannot. Even journalists' cameras cannot take pictures of everything. Literature traces the intimate details. From a Legacy Project Interview with Dunya Mikhail, April 21, 2005.