What I have written here about Rashid Street is not a novel, as some of my colleagues have done. There is in the novel's context what suggests it is a fictional text narrating real and imagined events, but it is anything but. Rather, it is a modern text with no gaps between genres - and perhaps literary criticism will be the same in the future, breaking down its scholastic lists and theoretical barricades - for it contains poetic daydreams, indicating that they are personal papers, written intermittently about a street and wars, a street and a city, a street and people, about a war we lived through, or about wars that should not have happened but did, or about incidents that were embryos in the heart of the military structure and were born with fire in their mouths. Or about a reality being shaped anew in a distorted economic and ideological way. Or about people I know, who used to wander at night in their white cloaks, coming to us from the depths of their graves with their nooses in their hands. Or about people born without heads or feet, their voices a groan, their language a writing on the walls of prisons, exiles, and detention centers. Because of this, I only wrote about the war here to the extent that it serves as an introduction in the Ghost chapter, which summarizes everything that happened and will happen. I let the other chapters write themselves about Rashid Street, about Baghdad, and what the street did to the life of an important city. I created a text in which reference is mixed with information, and subjective vision with critical perception based on place, to understand the movement of things and their role in shaping the text. A text that is dominated by the term place: a text that chronicles the place destroyed by declared wars, and the hidden wars waged by sons against fathers. Hoping that a new street, a new city, and a new text would rise, Rashid Street organized the text first, following its path from Bab al-Muazzam to Bab al-Sharqi, to become an eye for the city of Baghdad, which is on the verge of being erased again.