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 When al-Jubouri, one of foremost poets writing in Arabic, met
Jolie this year, she urged the actress and U.N. humanitarian
envoy to go with her and see the worsening hardships in her
homeland. Jolie has already visited Iraq in previous years.
"I said: 'Iraq is burning, Angelina.' She told me she would love
to go to Iraq," al-Jubouri said of her meeting with Jolie, a
special envoy for the refugee agency UNHCR.
"I would love to join her on a trip to Iraq - not as an official
visitor where they would not let her see the reality - but as a
woman and mother whose voice would be crucial in this dramatic
moment of historical displacement," al-Jubouri told Reuters at a
cafe in London, the city that is now her home.
Al-Jubouri, 47, who fled Saddam Hussein and took political
asylum in Germany in 1998, was one of the first exiled writers
to return to Iraq after his fall.
Her anthology "Hagar before the Occupation, Hagar after the
Occupation", about the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion of
Iraq, has received awards for both its Arabic and English
language versions.
Today, in addition to poetry, she uses blogging and video to
help traumatized Iraqis cope with the horrors they still face,
founding an online TV station to show what is happening inside
the country, aiming to overcome sectarian divisions which
threaten to break the country apart.
Soutuna (www.soutuna.com), Arabic for "our voice", posts videos
from disparate groups that show their experiences of the
conflict and document the life and culture of minorities, which
otherwise go unreported.
"Soutuna has come up as a way to empower the people and build
hope for a new society," al-Jubouri said.
She also posts testimonies from Iraqis on a Facebook blog which
include accounts from a massacre at the former U.S. Camp
Speicher in June, where, according to a U.N. report, about 1,500
Iraqi soldiers and security officers were captured and killed by
Islamic State.
The rapid rise of the al Qaeda offshoot that has declared a
caliphate straddling Iraq and neighboring Syria has been well
documented, including the group's policy of killing anyone not
conforming to its strict version of Sunni Islam.
What has been less reported are the stories of ordinary Iraqis
who have risen above the sectarian violence, something al-Jubouri
hopes to put right.
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DIFFERENT STORY
"I was in Erbil when I met people from Tikrit who told me the
stories of how Sunnis hid fellow Shias despite the prospect of death
at the hands of Daesh (the Arabic acronym for Islamic State) if they
were found out during the Speicher massacre. There is a different
story," she said.
"Daesh is a global movement beyond Iraq and the Sunni-Shia conflict.
The Iraqi people want to get beyond this and also beyond the
sectarianism, which has caused so much suffering."
Even for a poet, some of what al-Jubouri has heard - such as the
experiences of the ethnic Yazidis who fled from Islamic State
fighters - has left her lost for words.
"Daesh kidnapped one young man's children and wife and they called
him and said they had slaughtered them. All I could do was hug the
man. We were both crying and he hugged me like his own sister," she
said.
"I was determined to provide a voice for the voiceless."
That includes through her poetry. A recent collection in Arabic
called "The Paradise Beneath Your Feet" is a meditation on mothers
losing their sons in Iraq's sectarian killings, executions, mass
graves and wars.
"Poetry in the Arabic world, especially modern poetry, is connected
with emotion and rhetoric," she said.
"It (her own style of poetry) needs something very concrete and
direct – a style which does not have a long tradition in Arabic as
it does in English."
Al-Jubouri believes in the power of poetry which, she says, saved
her when she came to the attention of Saddam Hussein as a teenager
in 1984.
"A very close friend, who was also a writer, recorded me and
presented it to Saddam Hussein. I was not even 18. He nearly put me
to death by doing it and exposed me to questioning, interrogations
and a life under surveillance,” she said.
"Poetry during that whole period was my only salvation and I
attempted to commit suicide five times. It also allowed me to
understand what it means to be scared."
(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
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