Iihya’ is the closing chapter of Sama Alshaibi’s eight-year project Silsila (“Link”). Throughout Silsila, a recurring female protagonist moves through a spiritual journey shaped by the landscape as an active, mystical presence, crisscrossing the historic deserts and water bodies of North Africa and the Middle East.

Following a forty-year displacement from her homeland of southern Iraq, Alshaibi’s return coincides with an apocalyptic reckoning with the dying ancient Mesopotamian Marshes. After decades of water mismanagement, targeted annihilation, and borderless climate change, the historic waterways fed by the Tigris and Euphrates are at the brink of extinction, erasing the once bountiful wetlands Alshaibi knew in childhood.

In Iihya’, the protagonist returns to the source of creation and civilization. Witnessing the violated earth, she wills an imaginative intervention that reverses time and order in the marshlands. Her return is not only one from exile, but also an act of revival and a gifting back to the rivers. A restorative ritual of spatial justice and ecological resilience, Iihya’ presents the power of harmony and balance through gestures of poetic imagination.