A poetic revenge on a brutal reality

Ali Thareb, born in 1988 in the city of Babylon Iraq, is a poet and poetic performer who also practices essay writing. Thareb has published three books of poetry in Arabic and a book in both Arabic and French issued in France in 2018. His texts are included in poetry anthologies, including in French, Turkish and Arabic. One of his collections will soon be translated and published in Swedish.

In the course of his career as a poet, Thareb has published 3 books of poetry A Bright White Emptiness (Akad Publications, London 2015), I’d Remember that I am a Dog and Bite you, World (Machtotat Publications, The Netherlands 2016), So My Toes Will not Appear from my Worn-out Shoes (Al Daraweesh Publications, Bulgaria 2018). Thareb has published a book of poetry in Arabic and French entitled A Man with a Fly in his Mouth, published by Editions des Lisiere in 2018. His poetry is part of an anthology entitled Poetry in Landmines, published by Cultural Militia in 2015. Thareb also manages independent projects in the art of poetic performance.

The Cultural Militia

Thareb’s poems, he says, are attempts to take ‘revenge’ on reality through personification and vivid imagery, reflecting the bleak, tragic, brutal and ugly reality of daily life in Iraq.

In 2014, Thareb co-founded a poetical and artistic group named Cultural Militia along with friends, Iraqi poets and performing artists, Mazen Mamouri, Muhammad Karim, Kazem Khanjar. Seen as pioneers of a new literary/artistic movement in Iraqi cultural life, the Cultural Militia is a poetic cultural project that opposes violent operations in Iraq in its various forms and includes reading poetry in the most dangerous places in Iraq in terms of poetic performance; in cemeteries, explosion sites, bomb sites, border points, landmine fields, car bomb ‘graveyards’ and even while floating on water, depicting drowned refugees.

Free-zoning 

Shortly after Thareb arrived in Jönköping, he was invited to perform on the occasion of the 5 years celebration of The Square, created in 2015 as part of the exhibition The Square at the Vandalorum Art Museum in Värnamo. The Square is a free-zone where trust and care prevail, where all have the same rights and obligations, and which invites the audience to contemplate their own responsibilities as fellow human beings. The Oscar nominated film The Square (2017) was inspired by it.

See and listen to Ali Thareb and Swedish actor Kalle Malmberg read two of Thareb’s poems read in Arabic and Swedish in Värnamo Nyheter. 

علي ذرب 

ولد عام 1988 في مدينة بابل \ العراق, شاعر ويعمل في الأداء الشعري وكذلك يمارس كتابة المقالات لديه ثلاثة كتب شعرية باللغة العربية وكتاب باللغتين العربية والفرنسية صدر في فرنسا عام 2018 وهو أيضا مشترك بأنطولوجيات شعرية منها باللغة الفرنسية والتركية والعربية, أسس في عام 2014 مع ثلاثة شعراء أصدقاءه ( مازن معموري , محمد كريم , كاظم خنجر ) ( ميليشيا الثقافة ) وهو مشروع شعري ثقافي يناهض عمليات العنف في العراق بأشكاله المختلفة يتضمن قراءة الشعر في أكثر الأماكن خطورة في العراق بصيغة الأداء الشعري وكذلك لديه مشاريع مستقلة في فن الأداء الشعري عملها في العراق ويعيش الآن في السويد في مدينة يونشوبينغ بصفة كاتب ضيف .