Loading ...Mustafa Ja’far, the calligraphic artist in exile from Iraq
Mustafa Ja’far has not been home for 41 years. As we meet, under the glass and iron arc of St Pancras Station in London, the hum of the trains offers a fitting chorus for this revelation. Still, it comes as a surprise. Ja’far is an Iraqi in exile, and his calligraphy turns a traditional form of art into a meditation on ethics.
To grow up in Baghdad in the mid-20th century was to see a city of cultural variety. “I am a secular Arab. I’ve never prayed in my life,” says Ja’far. “Arabic culture was there before Islam; Islam used the Arabic language and calligraphy became a craft applied to the architecture of mosques. I respect the contributions of Muslim calligraphers, because it takes a civilisation to turn communication into an art form.” I ask whether communication and art are like noise and music. Above the clamour of the station he says he thinks of it as the gulf between common, instinctive speech and composed, delivered poetry. We take to a café to talk more easily.
Ja’far has a youthful face and countenance for his 63 years. Yet his openness comes less from innocence than experience. Having studied painting at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad from 1969-74, he went to Rome to study under the master calligrapher Hashim al-Baghdadi. He was trained to see the underlying geometry in flowing Arabic letterforms — something I don’t see, being used to the boxy, separated composition of classical fonts. But he does. He explains that “by the 10th century the Arabs had decided to choose six styles out of [many] different scripts; this took place in Baghdad at the hands of the great Ibn Muqlah. The Turks and Persians added two scripts each. So to become an accomplished Arab calligrapher, one must master at least 10 styles.”
In 1978, Ja’far took a job in advertising in Kuwait, working in Arabic and English to appeal to expatriates in the Gulf. He shelved calligraphy for what would be almost 20 years while he married and raised two daughters. The family went to Europe every summer, each city a cosmopolitan cultural experience. In the summer of 1990, his then wife (he has since remarried) and daughters travelled to London ahead of him while he finished some work — he was by then a creative director. Three days later, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Ja’far was caught in the buffer zone, a no-man’s-land that was soon occupied by American forces. As an exile, he faced the suspicion of Saddam’s vengeful guards. His other option was to turn to the Americans.
Ja’far offered to work voluntarily in a US-run refugee camp as a co-ordinator, putting his valuable language and management skills to use. The three months he had intended to stay turned into 11. During this time his wife wrote to then British prime minister John Major to request his extradition. “Early in 1991 an RAF plane took me; I flew into Brize Norton airfield [in Oxfordshire] where I was met by someone who came from London to stamp my passport,” Ja’far says. He has since remained in London.
He stayed in advertising until, in 1996, his brother Khadoum died in Rome. His bereaved sister-in-law asked him to design a headstone. Searching for the appropriate expression, and finding a design for an Italian marmorista (marble sculptor) to carve, his mind turned back to calligraphy. “I realised it was very soothing,” he says. “I took refuge in it. Calligraphy offered peace of mind.”
At this point, Ja’far’s second wife arrives. I persuade her to stay and he continues his story. “I produced a piece of calligraphy in [Khadoum’s] memory,” he says. “It talks of an old poem in Arabic, about dying in exile. Somebody at the British Museum saw the piece. I still don’t know how.”
That person was Venetia Porter, who is responsible for the British Museum’s acquisition of contemporary Middle Eastern lettering arts. She persuaded Ja’far to teach practical classes at the museum one day a month. In 2002 he showed the British Museum’s publishing arm a book he’d written, a practical manual on Arabic calligraphy. “It’s now into eight or is it nine editions?” he asks Mrs Ja’far. “Well, we saw it in Spain, didn’t we?” she says. “And Istanbul.”
In 2004, the British Museum mounted an exhibition of Ja’far’s calligraphy, which had developed into expressions of poetry on secular ethics and the world he had left — a lament for a torn homeland rather than a statement on partisan politics. The Iraq war in March 2003 had done much to develop this outlook, since “turning off radio or television was not an option. Whenever I listened to a news item about the onslaught raging in Iraq, certain horrible words lingered in my mind. Arabic words [for] ‘looted’ and ‘set alight’ lingered in my mind.”
In 2008, those horrible words forged his installation “Black Words in Red Ink” — each sheet a single word or clipped phrase, like “Armed men”, “Fugitives”, “Handcuffed”, “Mutilated”.
Rather than frame and hang sheets on the walls, Ja’far strew them on the floor of the Menier Chocolate Factory Gallery in south London, crimson splashes of language like bloody debris. His work is now collected internationally, though he doesn’t have commercial shows, commissions come by word of mouth.
I ask what materials he favours. “I use reed quills from Iran of different nib breadths, perhaps hundreds. I fetch them myself and import Iranian black ink too — they produce the best. But the red is Winsor and Newton. And the paper is Italian pergamenata [which resembles parchment].”
The process of calligraphic design is arduous, and untold attempts are scrunched and lobbed. “She thinks I should save every version,” says Ja’far indicating his wife. “But I don’t.” “You should see his dustbin!” she replies.
Ja’far says that finding a particular flourish in calligraphy is like being a portrait painter or opera singer, similes with an audience in mind. But he doesn’t know how his clients discover him, such is his reputation and modern communication.
One woman recently contacted him to ask for a single word: Damascus. She watches her city being torn down and only wishes that the word might once again represent beauty.
Source: www.ft.com