Solhi’s amazing spirit began to wilt. He still composed, conducted, taught, cajoled bureaucrats into finding money for his beloved students, but there was a misery in his eyes that he no longer bothered to hide. He took longer walks with his Borzoi dog, Boris, who could still make his master smile. He who had been adamant to teach only Western instruments in the conservatory he had founded, now introduced the zither and the poignant Iraqi lute. He still read poetry, but silently, to himself.

Solhi’s adoration of poetry marked him out as a true Iraqi. Although Arab culture since its beginnings has always been infused with a love of verse, poems—in any language—seem to have a particularly devastating effect on Iraqis, who are an emotional, nostalgic people. Perhaps something in their landscape makes them so. The two great rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, and the majestic date palms that border them, retain an ancient and mysterious sadness that cannot but melt the hardest heart. The poets of Iraq, the singers of Iraq, the instrumentalists and the story-tellers, all become touched with this indefinable sorrow, and communicate it to their listeners. Iraq’s greatest poet, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, was the embodiment of this quality, and expressed it in every word he wrote.

It was no neat coincidence that as American tanks rolled into Baghdad, bringing back the ugliest of colonial servitudes the area has ever known, Solhi, who was conducting, fell off the stage. A massive brain hemorrhage downed him, robbing him of movement and speech. This free spirit could n

I loved him enough to hope that he cannot understand what has actually happened to his Iraq. How it has been dismembered, robbed, destroyed, brutalised and corrupted. How six hundred and fifty thousand people have been murdered as a result of those tanks rolling in. How its mighty rivers now run black with blood, the blood of people just like Solhi Wadi. 

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RANA KABBANI is an author and broadcaster. Her books include Letter to Christendom (Time Warner) and Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myths of Orient (Pandora).