Research Article
Ruination in Wounded Baghdad: Visualizing and Problematizing the Spatialization of Destruction
Farah Al-Shamali
Middle East Research Journal of Linguistics and Literature; 63-68.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36348/merjll.2024.v04i04.001
Considering Baghdadi urbanity today translates into contending with spatial destruction and what that leaves behind as far as the spirit of the wounded city. Going beyond the mere physical, pain that is exacted onto space is imprinted upon the psyche of streets and alleyways so much so that the relationship becomes a perplexing one. Place and people alike are beckoned into attempting to reckon and engage with the wound. It has become part of the spatial fabric and so must be looked at as such. History and historiography have additionally illustrated topological ruin that had been visited upon the capital since its founding. Journeying through the recent past and present requires addressing this accumulated spatial confusion. It means taking in the place-based nuances that are as psychogeographical as they are arbitrary. Iraqi creatives have done this repeatedly by rendering the hurt and settling it into their outputs. The problematization of space in this sense is an opportunity to, as the city fell into a new pattern of being, migrate the politics of the situation into a poetics. Disastrous violence essentially fashions a different character. It is only in this way that the cycle of devastation may physically cease to arrest and interrupt existence when it is allowed into the fold of the spatial everyday. It is then that urban life may find a new tone and tenor not merely surviving but allowing woundedness to have potentiality.
Review Article
The Historicization and Theorization of Spatial Ruin in Wounded Baghdad
Farah Al-Shamali
Middle East Research Journal of Linguistics and Literature; 69-81.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36348/merjll.2024.v04i04.002
Be it a consideration of the ruptured spatialities and urban forms of Baghdad in the present or reaching back into a volatile past, the city lives out arresting contradictions that beckon a different kind of understanding. Spatial woundedness carries within it many implications for how that pain is rendered. This is most visible in forms of cultural production that have settled the hurt exacted into a place of innovation. It is a full mutuality between architecture and the destruction that has violently defaced it so much so that a new image of urbanity begins to emerge. Beyond the agony felt by the capital, intellectualizing the spatial wound that has manifested and been given life as it were suggests a pressing need to comprehend this phenomenology. Historicizing and then theorizing what is a poetics of destruction assists in coming to comprehend not simply the features of an urban character necessarily born out of ruin but doing so against an orientalist narrative that seeks to entrench the Baghdadi space in perpetual liminality. The city fights back so that it may have a chance to survive but also creates lasting meaning between the real and unreal.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
© Copyright Kuwait Scholars Publisher. All Rights Reserved.