The Book as a Monument Commemorating Reality
My response to Kanan Makiya’s book “The Monument: Art and Vulgarity in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq”.
The book was published at the start of the Gulf war by Iraqi-American Kanan Makiya under the pseudonym Samir Al Khalil. In considering the book as a cultural object I was able to see it as a monument in itself, it had similarly been thought out and constructed as a means of influencing the public. In this way the book expands past its physical form and inserts itself into the context of the world it was published into. This allowed me to view both book and monument through the same lens. In the same universe where monuments were constructed to commemorate Saddam’s own personal utopian Iraq, the book served as a monument to document and commemorate reality.