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Michel Aflaq - is bad poetry wrapped in the guise of utopian politics, or great poetry wrapped in the guise of horrible politics.

Elliott Colla

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Elliott Colla
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Culture is invited to the table usually only as raw material that needs no analysis.
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There were illegal poets like Muzaffar al-Nawab, this is the thing - Muzaffar was widely known and he didn't really have books. He would deliver these readings on cassette tape. Go on YouTube and listen to him. He's like a preacher. He's a really interesting figure in modern Iraqi life.
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It does not take much to imagine the humanity of people you don't know. An American author does not need to know a word of Arabic to write a book like the one I wrote.
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Take Ezra Pound's translations of poetry from Chinese. He doesn't really know Chinese, and the very strange results that he comes up with aren't all successful, but as a whole it's incredibly successful, moving us away from familiar forms and indicating other forms we might think in or express in.
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When you're writing your own fiction, you don't have to ride two horses.
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Once you have the first draft it's living, and you can coax it to grow and trim it and reshape it and so on. But get that first draft.
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In the Green Zone in Iraq you have your radio, you have your food, you have your own electricity, your own toilets. Everything is a sealed American reality overlaid on top of an infrastructure that is crumbling.
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The truly astounding thing is the Baathist regime supports poetry like nobody else, probably in the world.
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Why is thinking about crime or imagining crime so goddamn central to pop culture? It doesn't matter whether it's American TV or British TV. And there's entire sections of bookstores devoted to crime.
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So you have in Iraq some people falling prey to the system, some people managing to negotiate independence, and other people becoming outlaws, and being imprisoned and dying. You have all sorts. I don't know any other society where poetry has such a place.
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It does not take much to imagine the humanity of people you don't know.
Elliott Colla
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Arabs don't do crime fiction. I read crime fiction and I read Arabic literature, and I wish this was a novel I could have read in Arabic.
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In trying to imagine this world, I kept coming back to Michel Aflaq. He's a Christian Arab, a Syrian, who ends up finding his home in Iraq and is buried there - I was stunned to see his tomb is right smack down in the Green Zone.
Elliott Colla
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Translated books rarely get reviewed in the press. Books or poems or works of art that don't seem to have a corresponding style or figure or theme, obviously they're hard to digest.
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Noir is where the clarity of moral divisions break down, the black and whites turn into grays.
Elliott Colla
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Each discipline has the capacity to be interested in politics, and each would ask different questions of what politics is, what constitutes power, how power is maintained, how it circulates, how relationships are formed, how institutions are built, how they fall. Every discipline would answer those questions in different ways.
Elliott Colla
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We like to look out on the world and see ourselves, so we have many, many novels, memoirs, and short stories in Iraq that are largely about Americans in Iraq, doing what Americans do.
Elliott Colla