 squeezed together maybe like 20 people. Sahar al-Muqi was just a young girl then, but she remembers the room well, and she remembers how it would fill up with poets and artists and intellectuals. Writers, people from the radio. And then, after everybody had arrived, these two figures would usually stand up in the crowd. One of them would pick up a oud, and the other would pull out a poem he'd prepared. Together, they'd start to perform.