Mountains Without Peaks with Kifah Abdulla-Authors Series-IN PERSON

Join us as Denmark Historical Society, Public Library and Arts Center Collaborative presents the Authors Series and an afternoon with Kifah Abdulla IN PERSON with cellist Robin Jellis at Denmark Arts Center.

Artist, writer, poet, activist, soldier, POW, exile, teacher, performer and world citizen; all of these words describe Kifah. Mountain Without Peaks is Kifah Abdulla’s poignant story about life in Baghdad in the early 1980s, his compulsory military service during the Iraq-Iran war, and being captured as a prisoner of war.

“Kifah Abdulla’s memoir “Mountains Without Peaks” is filled with unexpected beauty on every page. My heart ached in the opening section in which Kifah recalls his final seven-day leave visiting family and friends in Baghdad before being sent back to the front lines in the Iraq-Iran War of the 1980s. With concrete and evocative language, Kifah puts me in the front lines where he and artillery shells explode around them both night and day. Most amazing of all is the goodness that Kifah finds in his life even as a newly captured prisoner of war. His book is filled with love, wisdom and compassion.”

— James McCarthy, Journalist and Photographer

“Exceptional: lucid, crisp, meditative, and heartbreaking. As if in chiaroscuro- miniature detailed paintings, he reaches home life in Baghdad during the war, that world closing and disappearing as the war unfolds.”

— Jenny Van West, Musician, Singer and Songwriter

Listen to Kifah’s poem Sufi Dancer

Funded by support from the Maine 200 Bicentennial Commission, Kendal C. & Anna Ham Charitable Foundation, and Maine Humanities Council-Thank you!