Baghdad (AFP)

Smoke from burning tires suffocates. The bodies covered with soot and blood flutter and the sound of bullets resonate. It could be a scene of the chaos of protests in Baghdad, but this time it's a play.

Ali Essam, a 30-year-old director and actor, came from far away, from the city of Basra, 600 km from Baghdad, to the iconic Tahrir Square, where the "revolution" also includes theater, cinema , reading or painting.

In front of an audience in tears, he and the other members of his troupe replay the crowd of shots on the demonstrators and the horror of the young mowed while they film live on the social networks the violence, before all crumble to the ground, inanimate, in a final painting.

In front of the public, each actor tells the first person the story of a "martyr". Each actor, in turn, interrogates a group among the spectators and sometimes goes on one of them to slip in his hand an Iraqi flag with a post-it.

"Martyr of Kerbala", is it written on the one, "martyr of Baghdad", on the other, "martyr of Nasiriya", proclaims a third.

For today, said Mr. Essam to AFP, the face still made up of blood and his torn clothes covered with coal, everything changed with the "revolution", which has been going on for two months despite nearly 430 deaths and some 20,000 wounded who will remain for many disabled for life.

"Art is finally playing its true role: it carries the voice of Iraq," he said in Tahrir Square, the beating heart of the "October Revolution" in Iraq.

- "Cinema of the revolution" -

Far from official institutions purring and partisan or self-censoring face the rise of religious in recent years, Tahrir, the tents of artists "are a small Ministry of Culture" parallel, says Mouslim Habib, young director in Baghdad .

With others, every day at nightfall, he diffuses via a small projector documentaries, short films and other productions of Iraqis from within or from abroad. Soon, he assures, he will also show "films about the revolution in Ukraine, Egypt or Syria".

Under the tent of the "Cinema of the Revolution" and on the rows of chairs that overflowed, young and old, men and women, protesters and onlookers mingle. Passing police officers even come to take a look.

Elsewhere on Tahrir, poets proclaim their verses, political and philosophical debates are organized, musicians and painters redecorate the place.

Culture is on every street corner. And she even climbed the floors of the "Turkish restaurant", huge building abandoned since the 2000s, where young demonstrators take turns on the heights to warn their comrades below the police movements.

In what was the parking lot of this restaurant that no young protesters has ever seen, a small library is open day and night. Tonight, it is Moustapha, 20 years old, who holds the permanence.

- Dan Brown's fan -

Passionate novels, "especially those of Dan Brown," Moustapha had to stop school before the baccalaureate to help his family to support himself.

Now married, he worked in a printing press and earned a few cents selling bottles of water in the midst of traffic jams under the overwhelming heat of summer in Baghdad.

Books, he told AFP, is his way of continuing his education. And that is why young people absolutely must read in a country where 60% of the population is under 25, but where the aging political class refuses to give way.

The small library of chipped books, ranging from translated American novels to political essays to novels to rose water and theological writings, "is culture," he said.

"It is the proof that we are awake, that we understand what is happening and that we try to surpass ourselves."

Quite the opposite of what older people are surprised to see "the PUBG generation" awake, the name of this online fighting game that many protesters have adopted the codes.

"Yes, we are the PUBG generation, but we are also a cultured generation," laughed Moustapha, before returning to his book.

© 2019 AFP