After fear's reign, a flowering of ideas

The studio walls and ceiling are charred black; glass from shattered display cases crunches underfoot. But in one corner, a pile of apparent debris has a name, "Sacrifice," and a theme, the folly of war. It is not a scrap heap but a meticulous montage: a helmet with a bird's nest inside, a bandoleer with brightly painted bullets.

At the Academy of Fine Arts, Baghdad, the artist is finishing his centerpiece: a running soldier, headless. "To me, the Iraqi soldier was a man hung in prison, a lion killed in a cage," explains Hussain Mutashar, 26. "Saddam sacrificed so many Iraqis for nothing."

Out of the ashes of war and dictatorship, a new spirit of creativity and intellectual exchange is tentatively coming to life in scattered corners of the Iraqi capital, from the newly revived academy to the downtown alley that hosts a weekly book fair and informal literary gathering every Friday morning.

The venues may be shabby and damaged, but the buzz of ideas is infectious and freewheeling, so much so that it's easy to forget how recently any form of artistic or literary dissent in this country was grounds for instant imprisonment or worse.

At the academy, some of whose buildings still bear the damage inflicted by looters after the American invasion began, couples chat on benches in a shady sculpture garden, now missing the official commissioned figures of Saddam Hussain that once dotted its lawn. Students take tea breaks under a giant mural of Picasso, comparing homemade pigments they perfected during the last 12 years of foreign sanctions and deepening national poverty.

"I have lots of frank ideas, but before they were always rejected by the dean's office," said Abbas Nouri Aboud, 25, a wisecracking art and drama student who has long wanted to stage productions of "Hamlet" and Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" adapted to contemporary Iraqi settings.

Mutashar, the artist, said he was arrested in 1998 for reading "provocative" poems at a festival and was asked to spy on fellow students in exchange for his release. He said he agreed but then avoided campus for three years.

Now he has returned with a vengeance, forging pieces of junk into powerful statements, such as a montage called "Playing in the Ashes," which features an old cello being kept alive on an intravenous drip.

In a hurry

The academy's new dean, graphic design professor Victor Ayad Husseini, is clearly in a hurry to transform the school from a former propaganda factory to a place where creative juices flow freely. Even during summer vacation, the campus, in North Baghdad, is humming with meetings and projects.

"For Saddam, art was a picture of himself on a horse with a sword. For me, it is a message of humanity to all people," said Husseini, whose dream is to have the damaged academy "adopted" by an art college in Europe or the United States.

"Art has to have freedom to be real," he said. "We lost so much time, so much creativity. But at least we now have freedom."

Still, the sense of sanctuary on campus is tempered by fear of attacks by thieves and former activists of Saddam's Baath Party. Members of a student security committee said they slept on campus for weeks to prevent looting after the war ended, and still keep a supply of rifles handy. Baath Party members, who once dominated academy life, are now personae non gratae.

There is also a certain wariness of using art as a form of criticism - at least until Iraqis are more certain what lies ahead. After a recent campus meeting to plan a fall drama festival, the organiser, poet Sadiq Sagh, 67, who recently returned from a long exile in London to be an official adviser on culture, said he would probably not accept a play that was strongly critical of the U.S.-led administration or the new Iraqi authorities.

"It's too early to think about who we're against," Sagh said as he strolled the academy grounds. "We hope this will be a new era of art and freedom, and the atmosphere inside here makes me feel young again. But we will have to see the relationship between theory and practice."

Several blocks away, the Hewar contemporary art gallery and cafe was overflowing with tea and artsy chatter. Owner Qasim Sabti proudly noted that the popular spot had remained open for all but a few weeks this Spring, but he said the premises still need around-the-clock armed protection against thieves.

"We have had too much propaganda and politics. Let us look toward life and beauty," Sabti said with some weariness, gesturing around a room hung with abstract works. "Let pure art and music and poetry be our escape."

Until the 1980s, Baghdad enjoyed a reputation as a literary and artistic nerve centre of the Middle East, drawing writers, artists and performers from abroad even as the Iran-Iraq war raged. But two successive military defeats in Iran and the Arabian Gulf brought international sanctions, economic hardship and increasing political repression to Iraq in the 1990s.

Dissent was harshly punished and artistic sycophancy rewarded, forcing many creative Iraqis to flee abroad, retreat into silence or join the official industry of regime glorification. Classical and fine arts were never suppressed - Shakespeare's "Othello" was performed here just days before the regime was toppled in April - but they fell on hard times like the rest of society.

Many artistic facilities were so badly damaged in the invasion and subsequent looting that they had to be shut down. The National Theatre is now closed, and the Al-Rashid Theatre, which once showcased Western dramas and ballets, is now a half-burned hulk.

Last week the lobby was guarded by dance instructor Mohammed Ali, who pointed to a jumble of singed clothing in a corner.

"Those were all the costumes," he said, holding up ruined velvet capes, sequined doublets and other sartorial staples of classical ballet. On impulse, he grabbed a chair and demonstrated the basic steps: ''Un, deux, trois, jete, grand jete." Then he stopped, shrugged and sat down again.

No difficulty

But some intellectual hot spots had little to lose and no difficulty recovering. By far the liveliest literary ritual in Baghdad these days is the Friday morning book fair in the Mutanabi district, where hundreds of bibliophiles browse displays of tattered novels, textbooks and old magazines laid out along a shabby alley, then repair to the historic Shabinder Cafe for tea and newspapers and gossip.

On Friday, the sidewalk offerings ranged from biographies of Lenin and Nehru to Agatha Christie mysteries and the Guinness Book of World Records. There was a scattering of once-verboten books critical of Saddam, and many vivid, beatific posters of Shiite Muslim leaders that were also strictly prohibited by the regime.

"You could be killed for that before," said Muhi Edal, who has been selling books in the alley since 1991. "The government would send agents through here, in ordinary clothes, and they had lists of forbidden things. Nothing good about Israel. Nothing about Shiism. Nothing from the Communist Party. Every Friday we were afraid someone would be arrested," he recalled. "Now, we can sell anything."

In the crowded lane, friends bumped into one another and embraced. An old man wandered by, selli