Six Trees and Two White Dogs ... Doves?

What I have to say about my trip meanders the way the Tigris and Euphrates meander and, like those rivers in flood, is sometimes murky in intention, balked in its conclusions, and flows where it has to flow. In Iraq, where the customs and conventions were often 
operating invisibly, or easily misinterpreted to be the same as mine, I suppose I gave up on telling a straightforward story. Instead, one night in a helicopter, what I felt in the air, so different from what was happening on the ground, made me realize that when you take an oath to tell the truth, you’re not telling that truth either to the judge or to the courtroom. Perhaps the point of the oath is to try to surround yourself with a lightness and solitude from which you can speak the truth, adding whatever light and shade you can so as to make “the how” implicate “the why.” After all, the judge and the members of the court weren’t riding in the helicopter, so a realistic description won’t mean anything to anyone unless you add that light and shade which only you, as the witness, could perceive.

But even then, in the helicopter roar, the truth may be hard to hear, even in your own ears.

•

The container housing unit, known as a CHU, is a white prefab box that contains a sink, toilet, bed, one small window, a heater/AC unit, and not much else: maybe a TV set, a towel rack, and a particle board dresser. When you first enter it, it’s about as hospitable as a prison cell in a substation jail. But after getting used to the white walls, white floor, white ceiling, the fluorescent light fixtures, also white, though glazed to cut the glare, the CHU is a triumph of Army functionality.

For the first week of my stay in Iraq, I lived in two CHUs, one at the Baghdad Diplomatic Support Center (BDSC, pronounced “Bedsy”) next to the Baghdad Airport, the other next to the airport in the southern oil port of Basrah where a former British base is now home to the US Consulate. Both BDSC and Basrah utilize hundreds of CHUs for living quarters and CHU-housed services. 
A barbershop advertised two different “looks”: the battering ram of the shaved head, favored by most of the security contractors; and the rams-wool curls and long sideburns of Liberace, a look that many of the younger Iraqi men seemed to favor. There was a CHU-housed PX where you could buy booze and other food and drug sundries, somewhat randomly arranged on metal shelving. And on one shelf in the back, there were souvenir T-shirts and hoodies. Because Iraq in December was about 20 degrees colder than my southern California fantasy of it, I bought a hoodie for $15, a whitish gray color with the US seal on it. The insignia over my heart was of a cross-eyed American eagle who had the stunned look of a cartoon character who’s been hit over the head with a hammer, though of course the spark-like stars wheeling above the eagle are meant to represent the original thirteen states.

BDSC also had its own enormous gym in an air-hanger-sized Quonset hut where my friend, Christopher Merrill, who heads the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and 
I worked out on the elliptical machines the afternoon we flew in from Jordan. Chris flies all over the globe with US poets and fiction writers to conduct writing workshops in places as various as Juba in South Sudan and refugee camps in Kenya, where we’d first worked together. Now, we’d be traveling to universities all over the country to talk with Iraqi writers, professors, and students. The heads of the English departments at the Iraqi universities we were to visit had asked us to talk about literature and creative writing workshops, which many of the professors seemed interested in learning how to teach, and in turn we were curious about the situation of contemporary Iraqi literature. As we pumped the machines’ handles, I told Chris that I was a little nervous about how violent the country had grown in the past few months. Chris nodded and told me about the orientation his State Department host had given him to Juba: “The guy told me there were a lot of poisonous snakes, like black mambas, and that I should try to keep from getting bit, because there’s no anti-venom serum in the whole country. He called them ‘cigarette snakes’ — you have just enough time to smoke a cigarette before you die.” We laughed, and for the rest of the trip, whenever I began to be anxious, I thought “cigarette snake” and settled down.

•

The next morning we flew south to Basrah in a Dash 8, an eager little commuter plane with a fifty-seat capacity. The loadmaster — which is Embassy Air speak for the steward — wore wraparounds and a reflective orange and yellow caution vest. “File across the airstrip single file,” he told us, “avoid the propellers, and climb the stairs into the Dash one pair of feet on the stairs at a time.” The only addition to the safety announcement was the loadmaster warning us that the plane might shoot off decoy flares, and that the explosion we would hear was the sound of the flares deploying. If a heat-seeking, infra-red guided missile was fired at the Dash, the automatic sensors would release the flares, either in clusters or one by one, in the hope that the flare’s heat signature, many times hotter than the engine, would decoy the IR missile away from us and after the flare. On an earlier flight to Baghdad, Chris had experienced the release of these flares: “The explosion,” he said, “was really loud, loud enough to hurt your ears, and absolutely terrifying.”

The plane began to taxi down the runway, and Chris and I fell silent as the rattle and roar of the Dash ascending filled the cabin.

Shamash the sun god, the god of justice who lays bare
the righteous and the wicked when he floods the world
with light came walking down
the muddy-looking Tigris
into Basrah where gas flares from the refineries burning all night long
faded into the Dash 8’s prop
whirring just beyond the window.

So much gas was burning off into the air the plane
was descending through
that a skin of light kept rippling over the city’s cinder block and rebar
tilting up at the plane’s belly swooping down.

In my book I read how the Deluge made the dikes give way.
The gods crouched like dogs with their tails between their legs,
terrified at the storm-demons they themselves let loose.

At the end of six days and nights, Utnapishtim and his wife
send out a raven that never returns.
The ark runs aground on a mountaintop just above the storm waters
that have beaten the world flat into mud and clay.

And Utnapishtim and his wife offer the gods sweet cane, myrtle, cedar,
and the gods smell the savor,
the gods smell the sweet savor,
the gods hover like flies over the sweetness.
— Going to Basrah

The plane leveled off at cruising altitude, and through the pitted glass I saw the Tigris winding through Baghdad, the city hazy in the morning light. As we flew south, the Euphrates and Tigris, which almost meet in Baghdad, again diverged into widely meandering beds before coming together outside of Basrah in a river called the Shatt al-Arab that empties into the Persian Gulf. Field on field of green wheat and barley surrounded small isolated farmsteads nestled inside groves of date palms. Underneath us, I watched the shadow of the Dash ripple across the vast green plain between the Tigris and Euphrates. Mesopotamia means “the land between the rivers,” and here and there you could see long, straight irrigation canals, and artificial reservoirs divided up by dikes, watering the fields. I was astonished to actually be seeing what I had known since grade school as “the cradle of civilization.” I remember reading about cuneiform writing, and thinking that it looked like the marks that a flock of crows’ feet would leave in our muddy garden if it froze solid overnight.

As we began to see the outskirts of Basrah, I thought of the great Ziggurat of Ur, and how, twenty-five years ago — and a year or so before the first Gulf War broke out — I’d come across a cuneiform tablet in the Louvre from around 2000 BCE. Translated into French, it described the destruction of Ur. I copied it out on the back of an envelope and took it home, where it sat on my desk for months while I read the odes of Horace. And then one day, I found it on my desk, and thought that if I could treat it like an Horatian ode I might be able to do something with it in English. So via a French translation of an ancient Akkadian original, and utilizing a meter that I’d come across in Horace, I translated a poem into English that I called “Lamentation on Ur.” I hadn’t meant the poem to have overt political overtones — 
I thought of it as a general comment on the destruction and fragility of civilized life:

Like molten bronze and iron shed blood
           pools. Our country’s dead
melt into the earth
           as grease melts in the sun, men whose
helmets now lie scattered, men annihilated

by the double-bladed axe. Heavy, beyond
           help, they lie still as a gazelle
exhausted in a trap,
           muzzle in the dust. In home
after home, empty doorways frame the absence

of mothers and fathers who vanished
           in the flames remorselessly
spreading claiming even
           frightened children who lay quiet
in their mother’s arms, now borne into

oblivion, like swimmers swept out to sea
           by the surging current.
May the great barred gate
           of blackest night again swing shut
on silent hinges. Destroyed in its turn,

may this disaster too be torn out of mind.
— From New York American Spell, 2001

But then the Gulf War came along, and suddenly the poem was taken 
up as an anti-war poem: current events had transformed what I thought of as a general statement into a topical, political statement.

Now, after two US-Iraq wars, and a decade of trade sanctions between them, I found myself looking down on the brown and green 
alluvial plain of southern Iraq — a place which had figured in my mind for over forty years as a kind of shadow world that had haunted me as not only the cradle of civilization, but the crucible that gave shape to the bogeyman of the “Islamo-fascist.” US policy in the Middle East was like a moral migraine that kept flaring up in the imagination of the American body politic — from the first Gulf War in 1990, which I’d demonstrated against, and watched the police stand by while my fellow demonstrators were beaten up by skinheads; to the Iraq War in 2003, which I also demonstrated against, though this time I was appalled by a group of younger male demonstrators who were itching for a confrontation with the police and stormed a police barricade while the cops radioed for backup that luckily never arrived, or all of us would very likely have had our heads bashed in; to the subsequent disastrous occupation that ended in 2011; until 2014, in which sectarian violence had escalated back to the levels of 2008 and al-Qaeda had made a huge comeback in Anbar Province. In the past quarter century, it’s no exaggeration to say that two generations of Americans grew up either ignoring, deploring, or approving of our involvement in Iraq. But whatever one’s position toward the wars, I’d arrived at my opinions with virtually no idea of what our bombardments had done during either war, and with almost no sense of day-to-day Iraqi cultural life, except for the image of the head-chopping, suicide bombing al-Qaeda/ISIS fighter who wants a reversion back to a seventh-century caliphate.

I remember teaching a class of undergraduates at Dartmouth College in which a young Iraqi woman, who had lived through the bombardments of Desert Storm, sat among us. The students had no idea that she was from Iraq, nor did I, until she wrote a paper about surviving the bombing. I asked her before class if I could use her 
paper as part of the discussion, and whether she would mind talking about the bombardment that she had lived through. She agreed, a slight girl wearing a beige head scarf, with perfectly plucked and absolutely symmetrical eyebrows. She was very soft-spoken and her command of English was perfect, though more formal than the English most of the students spoke.

We were reading the Iliad, and were talking about the anatomical particularity with which Homer describes the wounding and death of the individual heroes. I asked them to think about the only war that they knew at that time, the first Gulf War, and to discuss their sense of whether or not, given the images of backs and lungs and livers and bellies pierced through by spearheads, it was possible to justify the slaughter of war, including the civilians killed as “collateral damage.” Almost the entire class, women and men, said that it was possible to justify the slaughter, based on American interests abroad, on overcoming dictators for democracy, and on the hope that a better life could come out of battle. I then asked them what they would say to someone who had actually lived through the bombardments to achieve these worthy goals — and that this someone was here, 
sitting among them, as one of their fellow classmates? How would they explain to their classmate the necessity of the bombs? Silence fell on the room. Everyone looked deeply uncomfortable: I realized that I’d betrayed them, as well as the young Iraqi woman, who sat very still in her seat, though I hadn’t meant to. I’d assumed that there would be at least some opposition to the “just war” thesis, and I was disconcerted when I realized that not one of them had moral qualms, or at least qualms that they were willing to express. And then one boy said, “I guess if I were that person, I’d think that most of what I just said was pretty stupid.” And when I asked the Iraqi student to talk about her experience, she said something like, “We sat in our house with the lights off. The bombs went on for a long time, and when they stopped, all of us were so tired, we went to sleep.” She plucked her head scarf a little farther over her hair, fell silent — and then the class ended.

•

I proved myself to be inept at putting on my bulletproof vest, attaching this to that in all the wrong places, before figuring out how to velcro the waist panels tightly around my stomach so that they were under the vest, not over it, and adjusting and readjusting the shoulder straps to make sure they were tight. I didn’t look very military: in fact, I looked like I was wearing a bib, a sort of Baby Rambo. By contrast, in his Irish conspirator’s raincoat, his shirt buttoned all the way to the top button, his black trousers and worn-at-heel, split-toed shoes, Chris projected, despite the flak jacket, a timeless, jazz musician hipness.

Now that I was strapped into my vest, it felt fairly lightweight, around eight pounds — thick enough, according to the specs, to give reasonable protection against handguns. But when you consider that a bullet fired from a military-style weapon is the equivalent of a five-pound sledgehammer smashing into you at forty-five miles per hour, serious bruising and broken ribs are pretty much guaranteed. I put on my helmet and snapped the chin snap fast, but I had to keep pushing it back from sliding down over my eyes. Rather than protected, 
I looked — and felt — like a gargantuan infant. 

We were going to the University of Basrah from the consulate 
compound near the Basrah Airport. In front of our armored vehicle — 
a Chevy Suburban SUV reinforced with steel plating — a beefy, but terminally polite security contractor dressed in khakis, a brown knit shirt, a gray windbreaker, lightweight hikers, and sporting a buzz cut, gave us a briefing: “Once you’re inside the vehicle, please stay away from the doors. We’ll let you in and out. If we take fire, or if I give you the signal to get down, I’d appreciate it if you could get on the bottom of the vehicle. I’ll climb in back with you and cover you. Once we get to our destination, you can leave your armor and helmets in the vehicle. Then we’ll open the doors, and we’ll proceed single file to our destination. Everything clear?” His low-key manner and his faintly smiling friendliness was fairly typical of the manner of most of the security contractors. For such large men, they had the gift of disappearing into the background — they didn’t talk much to the people they were guarding: in the twelve or so missions that Chris and I were on, never once was there more than a few words of conversation between us and the driver and his partner riding shotgun. A good thing, I suppose, since that meant they were concentrating on the cars around them, and whether they might be a threat. Many of these men had served with elite units in the military, like the Navy SEALs, and I met one contractor who had been in Iraq since he came there as a soldier in 2003. The big draw was the money: while the ordinary sergeant was making around $2,500 a month, security contractors were making between $15,000–$22,500 per month.

We passed through the consulate checkpoint, manned on the consulate side by security contractors, but on the Basrah side by the Iraqi Army. One Iraqi soldier was dressed in fatigues and wore a purple beret, his automatic weapon pointing at us as he nodded a greeting to our driver. We sped out on the highway, and Chris and I got our first real look at Basrah.

My only coordinates for Basrah were Douglas Fairbanks’s silent movie from 1924 and, more recently, the Alexander Korda spectacle of 1940, both entitled The Thief of Bagdad. Basrah is the city where, in the Korda film, the deposed prince and his companion, the thief, flee the treacherous, power-hungry Grand Vizier. Minarets and spires, flying carpets and horses, a huge genie, a giant spider guarding the magic jewel of an All-Seeing Eye that shows you the entire world, a happy ending in which the prince marries the Sultan of Basrah’s daughter, the Grand Vizier gets punished, and everyone lives happily ever after. I was going to write that the Basrah of the movies and the Basrah I was seeing from the SUV had nothing in common — but the All-Seeing Eye was like a more sophisticated version of drone surveillance, the Grand Vizier was either Saddam Hussein or George W. Bush, depending on your point of view, the giant spider could be military hardware, and the genie — well, the genie imprisoned in his lamp but furious to get out could refer to a whole range of psychic, societal, and spiritual pressures threatening to tear the country apart. And if you were looking for Technicolor spectacle, natural gas, burning off from the refinery stacks, flared and rippled all across the 
horizon. At night the city, ringed by oil fields, can look like it’s on fire. 

The outskirts were a hodgepodge of two- or three-story cinder block apartments, often left unpainted or undressed in either brick or stucco. Unpaved streets, no central sewer system, large puddles of waste water floating soggy flotillas of trash. But I also got a sense of thriving commercial activity from the shop windows, their large, bright signs painted in the graceful calligraphic swoops of Arabic script.

•

We turned off the highway and drove down a suburban street with three-story apartment buildings on either side as well as private homes behind head-high walls. This part of the city looked to be much better off — cars parked along the street looked in good repair. Our convoy paused at a steel gate. The Iraqi guards threw back the black-painted steel stanchions, and we passed into the entrance of the University of Basrah. One of the Iraqi security guards, a muscle-
bound man wearing a tight polo shirt under his black jacket and a gold chain around his neck so that he looked a lot like Sylvester Stallone, waited on the steps while our guards established a five-point perimeter around our SUV, two in the rear, two in front, and one at the center of the hood, facing outward toward the surprised-looking students milling about outside in a small courtyard.

The SUV doors were opened by one of the security contractors. The students couldn’t help but gawk as we walked through the halls and into a large seminar room where we shook hands with the male professors, but were careful not to shake hands with the women unless they initiated it. For a non-believer and a male to touch a woman who is a stranger could be seen as a violation of the hadiths — sayings of the Prophet that govern dress and social conduct among more formal or devout Muslims.

Because our trip coincided with Ashura, the day that Shia Muslims all over the world commemorate the death of the Prophet’s grandson, Husayn ibn Alī, pictures of him were everywhere: silk screens fluttered from streetlights and were plastered on walls. In many shops hung little framed portraits. He was depicted as having a lush black beard and shoulder-length hair. His rugged good looks exude the glamour of a Bollywood movie star. Most significantly, he was strung up on banners along the pilgrimage route to the Iraqi city of Karbala, the place where Husayn died in battle in 680 CE. The battle was fought over who would be the leader of the Muslim world. The divisions among the original followers of Islam would open up, after Husayn’s death, into the doctrinal, political, and economic differences that almost fourteen-hundred years later currently separate Sunni from Shia.

Since the American troop withdrawal in 2011, Ashura had sparked off even more sectarian murder than usual: car bombs, suicide bombers, exploding roadside IEDs, Sunni gunmen executing Shia, and vice versa. The pilgrim trail, with its comfort station tents providing food and drink, and sometimes a place to sleep, made easy targets for Sunni radicals who, inspired by Osama bin Laden, thought of themselves as the Iraqi al-Qaeda.

Before I came to Iraq, the media image I had of al-Qaeda was of Osama bin Laden waging jihad like some kind of evil supervillain. But here, al-Qaeda was far more ambiguous. It was a mainly Sunni movement, fueled in part by anger about having been pushed out of power by the Shia once Saddam fell. But it also included foreign fighters from all over the Middle East, and even the US. They were all waging jihad in order to establish a worldwide caliphate. At least, that was the lofty sounding ideal. But the opposing militias, such as the Mahdi Army, organized at the behest of the Shia Imam, Muqtada al-Sadr, were equally extreme. As Saddam Hatif Hatim al-Jabouri, a college student in a city near Basrah, said in an oral history, Voices From Iraq: A People’s History, 2003–2009, that I’d read on the plane to Iraq:

The biggest issue was females on campus. People involved with the Mahdi Army tended to believe that having females in school was against Islam.... There were beatings and kidnappings targeting women just because they wanted to go to school....

Sometimes these enforcers would check people’s cell phones for pictures. If you were a guy and you had a picture of a woman on your phone, for example, they might rough you up or take your phone. This kind of crap.... Someone from these enforcers would ... haul you off to one of the party offices, where you would be questioned and lectured about religion and society from these goons. It was not just beatings and lectures they doled out, however. Some people who defied these zealots wound up dead. Look, it was the same religious bullshit that al-Qaeda in Iraq and its followers imposed on Sunni areas. The exact same thing, only one group did it in the name of Shi’ites and the other in the name of Sunnis.

•

The boys in the room were dressed in jeans and button-down shirts, most of them sporting the Liberace look, their long sideburns 
razored sharp while the top was allowed to flourish, though nothing as extravagant as an actual pompadour. The girls all wore head scarves and, to my great surprise, especially after what I’d read in the oral history, there were as many, if not more girls in all the classes we would visit. It looked as if times had changed, though whether or not there were jobs waiting for these young women, I didn’t know. But in our travels we met as many female professors as male. Of course, if the conservatives among the Shia and Sunnis had their way, the universities would quickly be purged of women.

We tried to tailor our meetings to the participants. If we were speaking mainly to professors, we asked them about the cultural situation. If there was a mix of students and professors, we spent most of the session talking about creative writing. But one consistent fact about all our meetings: there was always lots of laughter, often sparked off when Chris and I, in an effort to understand the sometimes thick accents, had asked the professors and students to speak loudly and slowly. One or the other of us would say, enunciating loudly and slowly ourselves, “Our ears are old ears, and we don’t hear as well as when we were younger because we spent too much time listening to loud rock music.”

From that moment forward, the room relaxed. Education in Iraq is extremely formal, and a professor expects, and receives, a certain deferential treatment. But the workshops worked best when the professors joined the students in trying the exercises: one particular 
department head read his poem with such theatrical brilliance, in which he’d developed the metaphor of love as a kind of net, and done so with a sophisticated and playful sense of humor, that the whole room was transfixed and burst into loud and sustained applause. But mainly what we heard from the professors was heartbreakingly articulated by the head of the department at Basrah. He spoke a flawless English, with just the faintest British accent. “For years and years I have longed to visit the places in England and America that my study of literature has made real for me. But now, at my age, I do not think that this will ever happen.” Looking grave, he clasped his hands, and stared down at the table, while the other professors quietly nodded their heads.

When I asked him to say more, he shrugged: “First we lived through ten years of war with Iran. This was followed by another ten years of war and occupation by the United States. And now the violence today.... More than anything, we need contact with the outside world: our cultural isolation under Saddam was extreme. We need exposure to new ways of thinking, new ways of doing things.”

When Chris asked about censorship, one of the women writers replied, “There is no official censorship, but everyone is aware that there are red lines that are dangerous to cross. Religion and sex — those are still difficult subjects, and even more difficult to talk about from a woman’s point of view.”

But despite all that, the picture we got of literary life in Iraq — and particularly in Basrah from the head of the Writers’ Union — was one of tremendous vitality. In his rumpled sport coat, his tie askew under his unbuttoned collar, he spoke quickly and decisively about Iraq’s literary movements during the past twenty years and finished up by saying: “In Basrah alone, we have three major literary festivals, many new literary magazines, both print and online, and more and more published books. What we need most of all is to have our literature read beyond the borders of Iraq. The years of Saddam put an end to open artistic expression in our country. When I was a young man, I was put into prison with my colleagues here” — he nodded to three other members of the union — “for a year. We were accused of ‘subversive activities.’ But now there is a huge amount of activity among younger writers, and I’m very hopeful for the future. After all, I started out in prison, and now I’m head of the Writers’ Union!” Throwing his arms in the air, he laughed uproariously, as did everybody at the table.

Such hopefulness was infectious, and the students had their share of such high spirits. As an example of this younger generation’s
confidence, one female student challenged a professor’s love of Shakespeare, saying that when she read The Merchant of Venice it hadn’t seemed in the least believable. Chris and I made some well-meant remarks about naturalism not always being the most effective way to make a statement, when we were politely interrupted by the professor, a burly fellow dressed in a black leather jacket, looking very “James Dean” in comparison to the suits and tweed of the older professors. He had gotten his degree in Shakespearean performance at the University of Leeds, and said that his specialty was the differences between Shakespeare’s plays onstage and on the screen. In a history lesson that the young woman, as well Chris and I, quickly realized was generational insider knowledge, he told the young woman, 
“Look, what you read wasn’t really Shakespeare, but a Ba’athist translation in which Shylock had been reduced to a completely anti-Semitic stereotype. It wasn’t translated into verse, it wasn’t even a play — it was written as if it were a story. What you read was Saddam propaganda, not Shakespeare.” In other words, Shylock was depicted as a proto-Israeli — a figure to be denigrated and despised.

These little insights happened over and over. In another workshop, a student had written about her grandfather’s garden in which there were, as I heard the phrase in her somewhat thick accent, “six trees and two white dogs.” I began to talk about how much I liked the repetition of the detail about the trees and dogs — but Chris and Dale Lawton, our Basrah consulate contact who had set up our meeting, interrupted me sotto voce, almost hissing, when I persisted in my folly, “Doves, not dogs!” I was a little surprised by their insistence, but thinking my ears had betrayed me, I said, “Yes, doves, of course! Doves, not dogs!” Afterward, on our way to the SUV, Dale said, with an apologetic smile, “Sorry to have interrupted like that, but dogs are considered unclean by most Muslims. Dogs would have a completely 
different meaning for them than they would for us. They’d find it disgusting to even think of letting their dogs sleep with them, or come in the house, for that matter.” And in all the traveling we’d do in Iraq, I’d see only one dog on the muddy outskirts of Basrah, and it was obviously a stray.

But our education in dogs didn’t stop there. Another student wrote about a dog named Rocky that he liked to play with as a child, until one hot summer day his father put Rocky on the roof of their house. And poor Rocky, since this was the first time it had ever happened, and because there wasn’t any shade, or so Chris and I assumed, poor Rocky jumped off the roof into the garden, and looked to have died from his fall because of the blood that came out of his mouth. But he got up after a few moments, and began to play again in the garden. When Chris and I talked about the story, we focused on the dog as a kind of subtle metaphor for the troubled relationship between the boy and his father. But as soon as we said that, a student raised a hand, and said that far from being a metaphor, it was simply what was done with dogs in Iraq in the summertime. They were put on the roof under a little shade, and with some water, and no one thought anything of it. About this cultural difference Chris 
remarked that what was customary for an Iraqi was, for writers, their material. And so we learned about such subtleties as how dogs were 
treated — surely a detail that Flaubert or Proust, both sticklers for such things, would have loved.

But no matter how off the mark Chris and I sometimes were in our comments, the students’ concentration, and self-delight in the process of writing, went far beyond anything I could have imagined. It was as if Wordsworth, or Dickens, or Hardy — who came up again and again as a focus of study — had climbed down off their pedestals and were rubbing shoulders with the students. As places to write about, the Lake district, London, or Wessex had nothing on Basrah, Baghdad, or Erbil. And as the ones guiding them, our enthusiasm for what they wrote, and our way of pointing out how some detail — 
dogs? doves? — could create certain interesting emotional effects, added to the feeling that someone was really listening to them. Writing workshops were like a magnifying glass held up to their daily 
lives, providing us more grain and texture than I ever could have thought possible.

•

In one of our Baghdad workshops, a young woman wearing a red blouse, a black and white head scarf, with a round face and large black eyes, and with just a hint of mascara on the lashes, stood up to read her poem. The way we generally conducted workshops, Chris would talk about writing as an artistic and academic discipline, and I would set up the assignment: a very simple one based on Joe Brainard’s poem I Remember. I asked the students to shut their eyes, accompanied by much embarrassed giggling, but as the exercise went on, the room grew quiet, until there wasn’t a sound, nobody was moving, everybody was deep inside their own reveries. I asked them to think back to their childhood homes, to remember their bedroom, to tell us what the room looked like, what the day was like, to perhaps think about a favorite toy or game. I asked them to remember what the weather was like, what their parents were doing. And then I would ask them to imagine that Chris and I were from another planet, from Mars, say — which, in a way, we were — and that what was familiar to them might be completely unknown to us. I told them to go wherever the memories took them, that gritting your teeth and trying too hard wouldn’t help, that you were letting the sights and sounds lead you where they would, and all you needed to do was to get out of the way and go where they took you. As new memories occurred to them, I asked them to repeat I remember for each new memory, I remember, I remember ... and then I asked them to change I remember to I don’t want to remember.

As soon as I said this, we could always sense a major shift in their inner weather — you could see it in how they would hunker down, or the lines around their eyes would clench a little tighter, or furrows would suddenly come into their foreheads. This physical change happened every time we did the exercise. It was as if the war, and the postwar killing, rose up irresistibly in the students’ minds. We had cautioned them that painful memories, as well as pleasant ones, were part of a writer’s material. But what was most impressive about the students was how they didn’t shy away from the hard facts. Did writing in English afford them a little distance, a sort of protective shield? Or maybe it was the novelty, or release that came, in writing about their own lives? In any case, many wrote about the pervasive violence, sometimes directly, but more often as an undercurrent: violence, after all, was one of the defining characteristics of their 
generation. For such difficult material, they wrote with a poise and depth of understanding that almost never happens among students in the US. Most of them were in their twenties, and had never known a time when their countrymen weren’t at war, either with the US or with each other. I can’t imagine them ever telling us in casual conversation some of the things they wrote.

The young woman, whose name I think was Mariam, stood very straight in front of her classmates, and read to us with a unselfconscious, quiet dignity. Her pronunciation was excellent so I have a good memory of what she wrote. She said that she was woken 
near dawn by her older brother in her bedroom, who had bent down to gently kiss her on the cheek, and to ask her if she wanted anything special from the market. And when she looked up at him, to tell him “No,” he said to her, very gently, that this would be the last time she’d be seeing him. But she was so sleepy, she didn’t quite take in what he meant, and a moment later he was gone. Later that morning, she wrote, she was in the kitchen having breakfast with her mother. And then their neighbor came in and gave them the news. She wrote that as she heard the news, she felt herself get smaller and disappear: she had no hands, no face, no body to feel with. There was no kitchen, no mother, no her. The neighbor, she wrote, told them about the “car accident.” She wrote how she remembers her brother’s words coming back to her, how gentle he was when he kissed her on the cheek, how he would always bring her special things from the market. And then she sat down, completely self-possessed, the sadness in her voice hanging in the room. No one spoke for a while, as what she hadn’t said — didn’t need to say, since everyone in her generation already understood — resonated for a few moments. Chris and I looked at each other, but were slower in grasping what it was she’d left out. And then it dawned on us, too: her brother had been a suicide bomber and blown himself up in the car.

•

For all the violence outside the T walls (twenty-foot high, reinforced concrete blast walls), in my little white box of a CHU it was eerily calm. There’s a poem by Tomas Tranströmer in which he’s in a motel room so anonymous that faces of his old patients begin to push through the walls. The CHU was something like that, a refuge from the violence, a deprivation chamber I was grateful to retreat to, but also a little theater of the mind in which what happened during the day came back to haunt me in the ammonia smell of disinfectant mixed with drying mud that exuded from my CHU. Mariam’s face came back many times, and the face of her brother, though I could never quite make out his face because it was always too close to hers. I could see the shape of his head as he bent down to her ear, but his body was lost in shadow. His gentleness and the violence of his final act resisted my attempts to explain or understand. Of course, I was imposing on his entire past the moment when he’d pressed send, making that moment more significant than a thousand other moments which, as he lived them, would have had their own weight and value. A back page newspaper photo of smoke pouring up, a vague ghost-face pushing forward into the white walls of my CHU — except for the glimpse Mariam had given me, that was all 
I could see.

Meanwhile, inside my CHU, I tried to lead a radically simplified life: no decorations, purely functional furniture, and not much of it — and a gas mask against sarin and other forms of nerve gas, packed neatly in a small cardboard box with a convenient black plastic handle. The warning read do not remove.

But after a while, staring up at the white ceiling, letting my thoughts drift, I’d remember the daily body count — the bodies, which had seemed so abstract back in the US, began to take on solidity and form. From the very first night in my CHU, I’d established a routine (maybe more of an obsession) of going online to check on that day’s violence. During the night and day it took me to reach Iraq, twelve liquor stores, run mainly by Yazidi Kurds, had been shot up in drive-bys from SUVs: nine customers and owners had been killed. Although no official group stepped forward, conservative Shia, whose version of Islam decrees death for drinking booze, were probably the gunmen. Then on Sunday, forty-six more people were killed, this time by Sunnis terrorizing mainly Shia neighborhoods: the places they hit were crowded shopping areas, markets, and auto repair shops. If the bombs had gone off in corresponding borough neighborhoods, they would have been the Fulton Mall in Brooklyn, Hunts Point Market in the Bronx, and the lower reaches of Fourth Avenue’s garages in Gowanus.

Death and more death. Throughout my travels in Iraq, as a kind of bedtime ritual just before I went to sleep, not a day went by that I didn’t read about ordinary Iraqis being blown up, shot down, or kidnapped, tortured, and dumped by the roadside.

•

All of our convoys followed the same pattern of tight security, except for our visit to the University of Sulaimani in Iraqi Kurdistan. With the exception of Kirkuk, where the violence is as bad as any place farther south, travel in Kurdistan felt relatively safe. While there were the usual three vehicles in convoy, they were manned by Kurds, not international contractors. Just before the road switchbacked up the central massif to Suly, as the Kurds call it, we stopped at a 
roadside restaurant where we ate thick yogurt with oven-baked bread — a luxury and freedom of movement unthinkable in Basrah or Baghdad. Alongside us ran a snow-fed river that, on his last visit, Chris had swum in to cool down after a run. The water ran swiftly beside the road, the ply of the central current ridging up into waves and whirlpools in the hazy sun — so unlike the slow gray meander of the Tigris through Baghdad, or the huge, silty marshes outside of Basrah.

The Kurdish language, suppressed for many years, now holds sway over Arabic. The Kurds are intensely nationalistic, and Kurdish identity trumps sectarian loyalties. After the fall of Saddam, who made numerous attempts at genocide against the Kurds, security has been one of their prime concerns. Unlike the US occupiers, they learned early that major reconstruction efforts are doomed to fail if security can’t be guaranteed to companies interested in investing in the Kurds’ huge oil fields. As long as Kurdistan can keep from being torn apart by the war in Syria, or co-opted by either the Turks to the north or the Iranians to the east, not to mention their warring countrymen to the south, they stand the best chance of any part of Iraq to offer their citizens a decent life. (My visit took place a few months prior to the rise of ISIS, before the Kurds and ISIS had gone to war, and at a time when Kurdistan seemed to be a bastion of stability.)

This sense of hopefulness was palpable among the students. In one workshop, several of them had just returned from Venice Beach and were agog over Beyoncé and Lady Gaga. In fact, many of the students had traveled abroad and didn’t seem nearly as culturally isolated as the students in Baghdad and Basrah. Despite the fact that these students live in Kirkuk, one of the few cities in Kurdistan still deeply embroiled in sectarian killing, their responses to the writing exercises were far more upbeat and not nearly so fatalistic.

One of the teachers, a woman without a head scarf who was Christian, told us how she had become friends with Harold Pinter. “He would call me,” she said, “over Skype, and ask question after question about our daily lives. We became good friends.” Pinter had championed Kurdish human rights for years, especially when they rebelled against Saddam during the first Gulf War. After encouraging the Kurds to rise up against Saddam, the US refused to support them when Saddam cracked down with helicopter gunships strafing columns of refugees escaping by foot, or riding on donkeys, trucks, and tractors. But after Saddam fell in 2003, the Kurds aggressively 
pursued their own self-governance, putting a high priority on security.

In fact, the Erbil consulate compound looked like just another suburban neighborhood. Though it was cold, on a windless day you could lounge in the sun on the roof and look out over the entire city: white stucco houses, yards full of orange trees, the oranges shining among the leaves, and far off, the Zagros Mountains jutting up on the horizon. And even though the security officer was concerned that a twelve-story building, still under construction, overlooked the entire consulate, in Baghdad it would be suicidal to allow such a tall building to share the compound wall. At a small consulate like Erbil, one man with an RPG could destroy the compound in less than an hour. And yet the consulate staff went about their business. The Kurdish security guards even gave us clearance to go to an art opening at the British Council. The opening was to celebrate a book of photographs about Kurdish life. Chris and I stood in line with everyone else helping themselves to the abundance of local cheeses, baklava, and other honeyed pastries.

•

Before my trip, I confess that I used to wince whenever I used the term “creative writing.” It seems so treacly, and diminishing, and ludicrously inadequate. And it seemed like such an American approach to the arts, particularly in comparison to how the Iraqi writers talked about writing. In a meeting with what American educators might call “gifted and talented” high school students, two of Iraq’s best known writers — one a poet, the other a dramatist — spoke about the art as if it were a form of existential inquiry leading to secular transcendence. By contrast, our focus on exercises, on forming good writing habits by trying to write every day, and our insistence on reading, seemed a little lacking in mystery, if not downright square, in comparison to what Naseer Hassan and Hamed al-Maliki were proposing as primary qualities for being a writer: the Rilkean attributes of vision, inspiration, and the ability to express profound feeling.

When Chris and I traded views on books, or began to reminisce about poets we’d admired and learned from, our conversations almost always took a technical turn. Chris, who’d studied with Joseph Brodsky, once said to me, “You know, Brodsky had the habit of saying provocative things about poetry, things that you wouldn’t think someone who came to English as a second language would pick up on. I remember once in class he talked about how British poets 
often established the metrical norm for a poem in the first line, but that American poets, if they had any kind of norm at all, tended to establish it in the second line.” That Chris and I could be having this somewhat arcane conversation about rhythm in poetry somehow heartened me in the midst of the escalating violence. And yet Hamed and Naseer had a point. Who cares if the metrical norm is established in the first or second line, if the poem doesn’t lift off the page because of the quality of the emotion?

I remember thinking at the time how the Polish poet and dissident Aleksander Wat wrote in his memoir, My Century, that his years as an editor, focusing on the minutiae of stylistic effects, had eventually made him lose faith in literature as anything other than a series of calculated rhetorical procedures. He had become so accustomed to talking about literature as nothing but verbal effects that he

felt in charge only when I had taken hold of the actual end of the thread and could see an entire work unravel into its components. And I gradually became cynical about what I considered the spurious integrity and unity of a given work.

He had come to think about literature in a somewhat similar way to our American faith in workshops. Again, a stark contrast to our kit-bag-of-techniques approach — it was enviable, our Iraqi counterparts’ faith in the primacy of the imagination.

I admit that Wat’s weariness with literature has beset me from time to time, a kind of poetry gloom that overtakes me when certain values in poetry that I love are at times sacrificed to my role as a teacher. Complexity of feeling, a style that embodies emotion (as opposed to riding on top of it with lots of verbal pyrotechnics and rhetorical display), a sense of the deep past resonating behind a line, and the feeling that the poet, as Seamus Heaney once said, aspires to make poetry an independent category of human consciousness, partaking of, but not beholden to, politics, religion, psychology, or sociology — well, it’s an ideal that I myself find hard to live up to. From time to time, it’s difficult not to lose patience, not only with oneself, but all the forces in the culture that want to instrumentalize our relations to art.

Or if that sounds too highfalutin’, call it the Facebookery of art, the Gradgrindization of art, as Charles Dickens might put it. But the meetings Chris and I had with Iraqi students, professors, and writers, 
and the poems and stories that they wrote, began to restore the 
balance for me between the thread that unravels and how my Iraqi counterparts spoke about literature.

This balance was something that Wat also rediscovered in the silence of the Lubyanka prison, the worst of the many prisons and camps he was condemned to during the Stalinist purges. And while Wat’s historical situation was radically different from mine, not to mention Hamed’s and Naseer’s, in Iraq I understood a little about how Wat regained his love of literature:

When we go back to the twenty, fifty, or hundred greatest works of world literature that we read as young people, we cannot, nor do we wish to, be freed from the charms of that 
initial reading. Still, we were prematurely exposed. What could we have known of their roots in human life? Under conditions like those in Lubyanka — cut off from the world, aware of the vast roaring world outside, the deathly hush inside, where time slows terribly while we continue to grow terribly old biologically — under those conditions we sought to recover our initial freshness of perception, the way Adam saw when he saw that “it was good.”

... In Lubyanka, to my joy, I rediscovered the sense of integrity — the whole that “precedes” the parts and is their soul. 
I had fully recovered my ability to see things synthetically.

I don’t claim that my poetry gloom is either as profound, or as extreme, as Wat’s disaffection. But my trip to Iraq shifted the frame, not only on how I viewed Iraq, but about literature in general. In a world so fraught with violence, Seamus Heaney’s idealism about the place of poetry was no longer an abstraction, but as Keats would put it, “proved upon our pulses.” And this sense of ground walked over, as opposed to a flyover on TV, complicated my political feelings — in fact, you could say that for the first time I actually had feelings, as opposed to convictions. For years, my political views about the country were off-the-rack lefty, views that cost me nothing and were easy to espouse. But during our trip, I had constant misgivings about being mistaken for a cultural ambassador, which was almost inevitable, given the fact that the State Department was funding much of my trip. But those misgivings forced me, not so much to come to terms with them, as to understand how difficult it is to live out what Yeats once said the purpose of all art was: to hold reality and justice in a single thought. Well, my hands weren’t clean. And to wish that they were would mean not going to Iraq because, for one thing, I didn’t have the money to afford the security I would want to buy: and if you were buying security, your ideological purity was already compromised because your privilege protected you from violence that ordinary Iraqis risked every day.

On our way back from one mission in Baghdad, Chris and I learned that a suicide bomber had gotten inside the Green Zone, or what, since the US troop withdrawal in 2011, had been rechristened the International Zone — the IZ, as the locals put it. That meant the rest of the city qualified as the Red Zone. But the Red Zone, the IZ, no matter — sure enough, a day later, the bomber blew himself up not too far away from where we’d just conducted a workshop.

But such incidents, after the workshop with Mariam, now took on a subtly different quality. I had begun to feel such rage about the relentlessness of the killing, the zealotry that could inspire it, the religious mania that seemed to brutalize people into killing other 
ordinary Iraqis who most likely weren’t particularly religious, except as a formal, societal, or familial instinct, and who had no doctrinal grudge against anyone. Their only sin was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But since Mariam’s story, written and read with such understated feeling, my rage, and the comfort it gave me because of my certainty that it was justified, could never take hold of me without also seeing the image of her brother, gently, very gently, bending down to kiss his sister, to ask her if she needed anything at the market, and whispering, again with the utmost gentleness, that this would be the last time he would ever see her.