Iraqi Painter: Attar

One of the real downsides of the invasion of Iraq has been the destruction of many of its most important artists, as well as the looting of its museums, and the relative poverty of those artists who survived.

Iraq had a small but important painting community. Hafiz Droubi was a Cubist who lived in Baghdad and made wonderful paintings. He died in 1991 during the first invasion of Iraq. One of Iraq's very few prominent female artists, a woman named Suad Attar, was killed in a bombing raid in 1993 when her house was hit by an American bomb. Attar had been a student and a professor in California before returning to her native Baghdad.

If anything good is to come out of our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan a big part of it will be about the liberation of the women painters.

Iraq was of course more liberal than Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, the morning's paper said (Binghamton Press Sun & Bulletin, p. 11A):

"Before the 2001 US-led invasion that ousted the Taliban, virtually no girls were enrolled in school. Today, a record 2.5 million girls are enrolled in first through 12th grades, according to UNICEF, the United Nations' children's fund. That's up from 839,000 in 2002."

It is no wonder that Attar had studied in the US, or that Iraqi painter Hafiz Droubi had spent time in Paris.

What is wonderful is that their paintings provide a bridge between the avant-gardes of the west with an insight into Middle Eastern culture.

But the bridges are being burned. Many paintings were looted from the Baghdad Museum, and Droubi's best work is now missing, as is much of Attar's work.

In Afghanistan, girls' schools are bombed by the Taliban, and sneak attacks using poison are common.

"In 2007, two schoolgirls were gunned down as they walked home from school in eastern Afghanistan's Logar province. In 2008, assailants squirted acid on 15 schoolgirls in Kandahar, disfiguring some of them."

Enormous inequities exist between men and women in the Muslim world. Should America help to narrow the gender gap? Many women in Afghanistan look to the US and Europe as their best hope. But mothers push their girls to get an education so they won't be dependent on a man. And increasingly, remote areas ask for girls' educational centers, and even "Afghan nomads who never sent their girls to school, they ask me to build a school for their girls" says a provincial governor.

If something good is to come out of the invasions of the Middle East, it will have to do with education for women. If Attar's death is followed up by four Iraqi women who can paint half as well as she, then maybe the invasion will be worth it.

It's hard to calculate, but through their arts we can see this supposedly enemy civilization as sharing our own aspirations toward beauty and poetry.

I have been contacted through my blog by several Iraqi scholars and poets who wanted to thank me for my book on Gregory Corso -- considered one of the greatest American poets in the bohemian milieu of Iraq. It's odd that such a world exists. May it prosper, and may heaven grant Iraq many more women painters with the talent of Suad Attar.

Had Gregory Corso lived to see Attar's paintings, I think he would have liked them.

The flying horse above is something I've seen in Assyrian bas reliefs, I think. What does it mean? Corso liked The Epic of Gilgamesh (the first epic in world history) and gave a course about it, claiming that Gilgamesh and Enkidu were like Jack Keraouc and Neal Cassady (civilized and uncivilized, and the friendship between them).

Sumerian, Assyrian, Akkadian, and all that: who were these people? All I know is that the Sumerians were said to be non-Semitic, whatever that means. I see their stuff in the Metropolitan on my way to more contemporary work. I like it, but never exactly oriented myself with regard to it. I have no idea what any of it means. The center of the flying horse appears to have a television in it.