The Blooded Dream / Al-Hulm al-Mudamma

Book Cover

This book brings together a collection of poems dedicated to Imam Musa al-Sadr, a figure whose moral presence shaped a generation and whose disappearance remains an unresolved wound in collective memory.

The central challenge of the cover was how to engage with such weight without resorting to portraiture or iconography. Rather than depicting likeness, the illustration is built through absence, repetition, and gradual erasure.

The image is composed using hand-carved stamps of the word al-hulm (“a dream”), printed repeatedly in black ink to form a shadowed silhouette of Imam Musa al-Sadr. With each imprint, the ink fades, causing the figure to slowly dissolve as it emerges. This process-driven fading mirrors the disappearance at the heart of the book—a promising dream that vanished without resolution, without trace.

Small, deliberate impressions of red ink—stamped as drops of blood—interrupt the black field, introducing fragility, violence, and loss without overt narrative. The figure is never fully present, nor fully gone, held in a tension between appearance and disappearance.

The illustration operates as a visual threshold to the poems within. It does not explain or conclude, but prepares the reader for a work shaped by memory, grief, and moral gravity—inviting reflection rather than closure.