Longing to Return.(Iraqis artists abroad)(Brief Article)

Up the dank stairs of a London public-housing block, past the signs warning against littering and drugs, artist Faisal Laibi Sahi has cultivated a little corner of Baghdad. Inside his tiny apartment, bold cobalt and russet oil paintings of Iraqi street life blot out London's gray skies: Baghdad bazaars, an Abbassid mosque, a coffeehouse where a mullah, a decorated soldier and a wealthy merchant sip tea, staring down the viewer with surly hauteur. "Baghdad, Baghdad, Baghdad," says Sahi, shaking his shoulder-length gray curls. "Wherever I go, I take it with me."

Similar shards of Iraq can be found across the world, on the walls of distant galleries and cluttered studios, tucked inside computer hard drives and specialist journals. Under Saddam Hussein's 23-year regime, much of Iraq's large and energetic artistic community has scattered, continuing its work in temporary refuges from Stockholm to Chicago. Many of these exiled writers and artists haven't seen their country since the late 1970s, when the Baathist regime's campaign against communists forced intellectuals--most of them leftists--to flee. More than two decades on, an Iraqi sensibility flourishes in plenty of unlikely places. "There's no European capital without its band of Iraqi artists," says Samuel Shimon, assistant editor of the Arab literary journal Banipal. Iraqi exiles in Sweden recently arranged for Iraq's most celebrated poet, Saadi Youssef, to tour the country. And this week the San Francisco-based poet Sargon Boulus will give readings to Iraqis in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Now, with a potential war between America and Iraq looming large, their homeland is on their minds more than ever. Though the exiled artists are united in hoping for an end to Saddam's reign, they disagree about how best to achieve it. Sahi, for one, hopes diplomacy will triumph, and that "the American administration will use its wisdom, and push by peaceful ways." Others, like Shimon, compare reasoning with Saddam to appeasing Hitler, and believe force is the only solution. What they all share is the dream--which for so many years seemed impossible--of bringing their art home.

Their works, vivid and unsparing, express both longing and fear. Iraqi exile literature is rife with autobiographies of childhoods in pre- Saddam Iraq. In "The Long Way Back," Tunis-based novelist Fuad al- Takarli meticulously evokes the scents of Iraqi soap, orange blossoms beside the river Diyala, a janitor's cheap meatball sandwich. In his autobiography, poet Abdul Kader El Janabi, now living in Paris, recalls an evening "as lovely as a watermelon" at Baghdad's Institut Francais: "I was seated next to a young Jewish girl who talked to me in a chanting voice, while the teacher carefully inscribed the word 'je' on the blackboard with pink chalk."

Other forms of exile art are not so coated in nostalgia. Many visual works in particular are haunted by Saddam and the effects of the U.S. sanctions. Sahi's paintings explore power relations. In one, a man in flowing robes and turban fingers a hookah, a naked woman curled submissively behind him. In another, a group of veiled women ...