With Saddam Hussein out of power, and Iraq facing an uncertain future, Iraqi artists are beginning to stare down the barrel of a hard question: without tyranny to rail against, what is our function? “By his own authoritarian standards, Hussein was a supporter of the arts,” with a stable of state-sponsored playwrights, poets, and other artists directed to churn out a constant flow of product which could be compared to the Socialist Realist works of the USSR under Stalin. It was a repressive, hateful system, yes, but it was at least a system. In the post-Hussein Iraq, where American troops roam the streets and the future is on hold, one Baghdad playwright sums up the new paradox: “Whatever is around me is vague, unseen. We don’t know our country’s future; it is hard to write.”