The Storyteller's Reverie: Muhammad Khudayyir's Basrayatha

In his genre shattering work Basrayatha Muhammad Khudayyir writes "Before Basra, there was Basrayatha". Basra is situated in southern Iraq between Iran and Kuwait, while Basrayatha resides in the hands and minds of its readers - it is the utopian reconstruction of a physical space which has been lost to war, dictatorship, and occupation, and this space exists in the daydream which is created by Khudayyir's masterful storytelling.
Basrayatha is marketed as a memoir/travel book, but such labels are misleading, for Basrayatha reads more like a compassionate retelling of a hidden or lost Borges novel. It is a fantastic world where myths, tales, memories, theories, diary entries, and short stories run free and without boundaries across its landscape.
It documents the life of both Khudayyir and his Basra. The narrative is constantly shifting between perspectives, modes of telling, and time periods, creating an impressionistic image of the child's Basra, as well as the war-shattered Basra of the Iraq-Iran war. The beauty of this work lies in its diversity. While one paragraph may detail the realities of the streets of Basra, the next might sit the reader next to an ancient storyteller who embarks upon a metaphysical journey. Each section of the book concentrates on certain aphoristic subject matters which are woven magically with memories, myths, folktales, hopes and frustrations.
Khudayyir is a universal storyteller - a collector of tales, myths, and memories. Basrayatha documents the power of the imagination in a world where exile is, and has always been, the fate of many men and women. Khudayyir breaks down the barriers which are often constructed between myth and reality, history and the present, and the imagination and the physical world. "There is no contradiction between the image of what is external and what is internal" says Khudayyir in his closing pages. What Basrayatha offers its readers is a mode of being which negotiates the so-called unrealities of reverie and the pragmatic realities of our world. Though the overwhelming powers which govern the world may be out of the reach of our influence, we have the creative power to construct our own experience which is not ruled by the tyranny of reality - an experience which is constructed from the storyteller's reverie.

I say nothing new
something so visible seen hardly lining
lapsed edges at the eye
something so deep set
below the surface of the heart
lost never
hidden behind the edge of the world
in golds and pinks
last illuminating the inevitable
approaching darkness
something written words stretch
endless as compassion
of the something I say
nothing new
the somethings needed said are nothing new
bodies born bear light the something stretching
from our palms
waiting in the self of shadow
of hope
watching love
wondering how we say
the something of the
i say nothing new

Fall from Grace?
not i for thee or we
for fall forfogs forever beginningness
and beginningness is ever endlessness
and endlessnessbeginningness
is never to know
never to moving
so my time
down desert streets
beneath black crowned horned
crumbling kapital king

skylines

march u&i forevernesses
the grace from which we do
not never fall
above in blue lavenders
violet petals stretching
to fill the expanding forever palm of the soul
to know of which
the grace never can one fall

Still Ghosts

I
skies forever are to have had
blues too endless in reflections;
the yes of eyes in a world made new

II
in hush forsaken country roads
left lonely forgotten lamp posts dimming;
a stillness
known in light cast against forever seeming shadows

III
on the foots of approaching sun rise dancing
waltz illumination - subliming;
now
where still ghosts lay within
within begin to move again.