Read an Excerpt

Taking Mesopotamia

Carcanet Press Ltd

    Swimmer

    for Adnan al-Sayegh

    Trust water and it will carry you: after all,
    it was our first element: our aqueous cells
    cry out to be reunited, go tapping along
    inside our skin like blind prisoners, finding

    ways back to fluidity: now my hands push
    forwards through the gather into a nimbus
    of breaking air and I see you move deeper
    to a region of mud and reeds, or your fleet

    shape harrow sketchy clouds as you break
    the wet lid of the river, spray the Euphrates
    with falling diamonds. Back then, what you fled
    was the midday heat and your father's sickbed –

    your mother frayed by the burden of constant
    want: later, the soldier's rough, the dirt of spent
    cartridges after they'd done their bloody business.
    You a poet, darkened by contaminants, restless

    with visions, Nimrod's inheritor, buoyed by riffs
    of thought as stateless as the fish you swam with.
    Now you have another river, feel the pull of other
    tides that have brought strangers to the weather

    of exile since the Romans. Your voice travels
    out, heaped and precious as the Rhondda coals
    my father's uncles shovelled, miners like those
    who sang to Jesus as Tynewedd waters rose

    up the shaft towards them, their wives leaving
    spitting kettles to run from their kitchens, drawing
    shawls tighter, suddenly old as light pearled:
    the pit's last candle drooping like a hanged girl.


    Mine

    Coal is black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilisation.

    Ralph Waldo Emerson

    My ancestors worked all day in water, up before dawn,
      back
    after dark – Sunday their only chance at daylight.

    The cage and drill hammered their hearts,
    the riddling grind of the Widow Maker drove sound
    through their bodies into the fault of the mountain.

    They walked a mile to the coal face, down branches of
      air
    smelling of clinkers and ponies.

    At Rhondda Fawr and Rhondda Fach they mined
      bitumen
    for coke and blacksmiths' fires, laid explosives under
      buried forests.

    Their hods carried the world's weight,
    their bible faces stared down tunnels, their roughness
    a chafing in my blood.

    Their coal burned harder, hotter, dense seams littered
    with dinosaur footprints carried on the flood

    from deltas as far away as Umm-Quasir and Basra
    to Blaenclydach, where my grandmother, belly taut as a
      sail,

    gasped as her waters
    broke and the child in her womb started his journey.


    Blaenclydach

    A gap like a lost tooth, a space
    I can walk across in twenty paces

    the house where you were born
    now shafts of air, squares of light

    where once your father, John,
    with wild hair and mother

    Myfanwy coupled and clung,
    made you with brains enough

    to be a doctor and us
    respectable.

    Later, I stood at their grave
    as wind drove rain under the fur

    of my anorak hood, watching
    the way ivy, tough as coir,

    thrust up through the slabs –
    its dark leaves

    making my own flesh and blood
    smell of their bones.

March 1916

Tom

You think of deserts and date palms but this place floods in spring, temperatures below freezing, sand turns to bog. Just getting to Qurna was tough going: everything sank (guns, supplies, men) in a mounting tide of mud; the injured sloshed along on AT carts, screaming for morphine. We built a bridge of boats to reach the so-called Garden of Eden – lanes were littered with rubbish; in between derelict reed hovels and dirty gutters we found the Tree of Knowledge – it was leaning crooked through a shell-pocked roof.

Tom: Second Lieutenant Thomas Charles Lewis

March 2003

Maryam

Suddenly, I saw my son across the square, standing lost, unprepared under the horizontals of choking smoke from exploding grenades: I screamed at him above the jostling crowd but he just stood there, head bare, brows crouched in a frown. I called again but my voice fell away; then we were caught in crossfire between the Mahdi Army and the Irish Guards – we realised it was too late to go anywhere. Qurna, our birthplace, was a conflagration, where Saddam ruled, Adam and Eve sinned and Alexander died.

Maryam: a Christian Iraqi (interviewed in the Guardian, 2009)

Hints for the new recruit 1

1914 – When I Join the Ranks: what to do and how to do it

If you want some advice, don't cling to the company of untidy soldiers or soldiers of doubtful character; if you do, you cannot expect officers or anyone else to have a high opinion of you. Your living quarters

should speak of mathematical precision. Down each side are arranged the beds, turned up during the day to form a seat; and overhead is a shelf which contains portions of your equipment with articles hung from

below on little hooks. It is essential to make sure that these are kept always tidy and few. Down the centre you will find plain but well-scrubbed barrack tables and these last complete the furnishing of the room.

From an MOD pamphlet Advice to New Recruits, published 1914 (Imperial War Museum)

Hints for the new recruit 2

When under canvas, life is much the same except at dawn you'll hear the songs of robin and chaffinch and see mist rising over distant hills. Now is the time to practise folding and unfolding your army blanket.

In camp, when weather permits, tent flies should be rolled up, first thing in the morning: all ground should be kept scrupulously clean; food should be covered; empty jam pots should never be allowed to lie about.

You'll find you will never want for company, the sight of canvas soon brings in the inhabitants of the local countryside who are only too glad to spend some time with the lads. If you miss your girl stop reading here.

How Enlil, god of air, sent the Flood to get rid of humans

The Flood terrified everyone, even the gods ... The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Standard Version, Tablet XI

Enlil hated war. He hated noise pollution and discord. He warned them in the cities – those that lived in the back and front streets, those that lived in the shadow of his ziggurat: but they were unstoppable:

battles, riots, irshemmas accompanied by drums, tigis accompanied by lyres, adabs accompanied by ... [unidentified instruments] and worst of all the endless sir-namsipad-inannaka's to the shepherdess-goddess Inanna. All this clamour and killing was unbearable. So Enlil rose up. He shook his fist at the sky and the rain came down, the Tigris and Euphrates thundered out of their beds. People fled to higher ground followed by corpses from the cemetery, floating, with neatly folded hands.

But all were doomed. City and desert slowly turned into ocean. Enlil cocked an ear to catch any ireshemmas, tigis, adabs or sir-namsipad-inanna-ka's but there were only waves of silence that went on and on to the edge of the drowned world.

irshemmas, tigis, adabs: types of song

sir-namsipad-inanna-ka's: praises to the shepherdessgoddess Inanna

Hospital barge on the Tigris

In April the desert blooms, even in war: flowering earlier than a Welsh spring, clustered along the river bank, rain-scented on a bare, wind-blown canvas – mallow, shepherd's purse, early-sown green barley, yellow trefoil and wild mustard, each day budding with promise of more:

And on the Tigris, a slow hospital ship carries the wounded, so recently young boys running home from school down weed-skirted lanes, now tents of white skin hanging slack on frames of bone: flies buzz in their mouths, the noise drowned by the wheel's revolving slap.

April 1916

Tom

Floods three feet deep, often twenty in the old irrigation ditches. A man accidentally drowned. The rest, facing the enemy, camped on islands, Gun Hill, Norfolk Hill, Shrapnel Hill; only reeds, about two foot high, for a makeshift cover. Each battalion had sixty bellums to cross the waters. Five hundred of us British and Indian soldiers practising punting – a strange regatta! We needed to find Noah and his ark before we started to go slowly, one by one and two by two, into the dark.

Strange regatta: this exercise was actually commanded by General Charles Townshend in 1915 and was known as 'Townshend's Regatta'.

April 2010

Steve

Reeds are like lungs filtering and cleaning water, oxygenating the wetlands for hundreds of miles; their tall stems hide bitterns and slender-billed gulls, out of their shadows emerge dragonflies, butterflies, damselflies and the whirligig water beetle; they give shelter for the Iraq babbler and Basra reed warbler. The white-eared bulbul and sacred ibis are coming home to them. Thousands of people make a living from them. When Saddam cleared them and drained the marshes people said Iraq has stopped breathing.

Steve: Steve Harris, of the Birdscapes Gallery in Holt, Norfolk, who mounted an exhibition of photographs in 2010 to celebrate the reflooding of the marshes in Southern Iraq.

Baptism

They could have been made from stone, the same stone of country houses with walled gardens spurting

valerian: they were freezing, coatless, cold as slate when marsh water flowed into the trenches carrying

cholera and they went over the top in darkness to meet darkness lit by enemy flares, stumbling and drowning

with the bolting mules, too numb to know what they were doing or which way they were supposed to go:

back home the font was wreathed with laurel: it stood sunlit, under an angel leading a child away from harm.

How the one wise man, Uta-napishtim, survived the Flood

So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out.

Genesis 6:14

fish flicker in the olive groves, hang like pearls from the branches of cedars: across space where air once was, bones float free from skin, electric eels flash in the eyes of the startled dead

now there is only this, the dark ocean and slick of whale: a north-east wind brings rain and more rain until Uta-napishtim's ark clears the mountain top: he sits with his wives, carving stories

onto clay tablets, remembering how the living were, the sounds they made, how they crushed mint and lavender between forefinger and thumb to release the scent: the tang of honey on the tongue

Anti-tank weapons

Successful for anti-tank weapons, especially when attackers are silhouetted against the sky

Successful for anti-tank weapons, especially short-range man-portable anti-tank rockets.

Defiladed positions behind a hill have some important advantages. This is because dead space created by the intervening crest of the hill prevents an approaching tank from using the range of its direct-fire weapons, so that neither the attacker nor defender will have a clear shot until the tank is within range of the camouflaged defending anti-tank weapon when attackers are silhouetted against the sky

The call-up

i.m. Wilfred Owen

A grief ago, spring turned early into ceanothus summer, skies scoured by keening swifts, and our sons ran out of the pavilion shining in their whiter-than-white whites, their bats held high: we waited in the long grass, our shoes drowned in buttercups as they faced over after over, the onlookers cheering: at least it wasn't France, we said, its boulevards cobbled with skulls: there was a pair of goshawks nesting in the wood that year, fierce birds hooked to the sky like medieval warriors, the female three times the size of her mate who hardly dared to visit his chicks with strips of flesh, knowing he came too close on pain of death.

May 1916

Charles

Battalion contrived to build a lunette of sandbags in a sub-section of the Fortieth. Patrols without protection, sent out at night and normal sniping carried on by both sides. Our difficulty with water supplies was solved by the overnight construction of two tanks lined with tarpaulins, filled by pakhals from Abu Roman Mounds (which was a good four miles away.) They were brought by mules at night as motor transport failed and not enough mechanics. Armistice on the third for burial of the Turkish dead.

Charles: Lieutenant Colonel Charles Kitchen, the South Wales Borderers' war diarist

May 2010

Georgia

I joined on a whim. I think it started as a bet over a game of pool: loads of big brothers to look after us girls on nights out, also respect that you're just one of the lads when it comes to work. I ran the workshop for broken-down tanks day and night; there's no time off in war zones. I was used a lot, as tanks always need a mechanic on board. You can get killed at any time. It's hard to explain what fear in people's faces looks like – even the biggest hardest men.

Georgia: Georgia Watts, mechanic in the British Army on active service in Basra, 2007 (interviewed 2010)

Lunette

i.

A two- or three-sided field fort, its rear open to interior lines.

A two- or three-sided field fort often named in honour of battery commanders:

(for 'battery' see also 'assault';

see also a collection of multiple electrochemical cells or a 'voltaic pile');

even when the frog is dead, its legs will twitch when touched with electrodes

especially on the dissecting slab with its rear open to interior lines

ii.

Portion of a vertical plane beneath a semicircular vault set in an arched opening, possibly a fanlight.

Portion of a vertical plane beneath a semicircular vault bounded by the intrados and springing-line;

or when a horizontal cornice transects a round-headed arch at the level of the imposts, where the arch springs:

as in the curve of a back when, in labour, the body arches;

if it's massive and deeply set, it may be called a tympanum, as in a hearing gland in frogs; or an ear drum –

or a drum-shaped rack on which victims were tortured, their legs twitching, even when dead, and their souls exiting

a small window

set in an arched opening, possibly a fanlight

iii.

It is used for holding the Host in an upright position when exposed in the monstrance.

It is used for holding the Host in an upright position and known in Germany as the lunula and also as the melchisedech:

it is crescent-shaped, a half-moon clip of gold or silver-gilt which must be purified when the Host is changed –

pure as moonlight, transparent, an idea of body that is not flesh, a remonstration, a halving;

the monstrous body made thin enough to slip though a crack (possibly a fanlight), nerve endings exposed –

bloodless, airless, a rack of ribs that turns to dust

when exposed in the monstrance

The fall of Kut 1916

Their officers board the boat for Baghdad leaving them stranded with no superiors: horses, dogs and cats all killed and eaten, now the remaining soldiers scrounge cigarettes and wait, straining their eyes against the glare, as enemy forces trickle

into Kut. Then the hundred-mile march over parched land, the gnawing of bull-penis whips, the bootless, hatless stagger through burning desert, falling under the two-handed swipe of the captor's swords, throats stuffed with sand, heads caved in by rifle butts.

June 1916

Tom

Grass fires fanned by the wind destroyed half our camp. In under an hour we lost twenty-eight tents; thieves, taking advantage of the lack of moonlight, sent out raiding parties to strip anything that was left. Two deaths from cholera, two from dysentery; fever is rampant; the horses and mules suffer, like us, from the curse of flies that swarm in our eyes and mouths; you swallow scores of them every time you eat: life here seems arbitrary and cheap. Each time you wake, touch wood and pray you'll be one of the lucky ones.

June 2010

Adnan

Half my life was spent in wars while the other half was spent in exile. When war started between Iraq and Iran in nineteen eighty, the governments took all the young people for fighting, if not they would be executed. So we went to war though we didn't believe in it. Eight years later and we were still there. One day I was walking, writing poems in my head when a mule bolted past me: moments later he was blown to bits, covering me in blood, showing me how writing and life play together, sewn by chance.

Adnan: Adnan al-Sayegh, an Arabic poet from Iraq, living in exile in London (interviewed 2010)

Witness statement 1

'... there are a lot of facts in the modern history of Iraq that have not been written in a neutral way. For example, what happened in the revolution of July 14, 1958 in Iraq? Or in the fall of the monarchy and the beginning of the Republic? People in my country have different opinions, some call it a revolution and celebrate it, while others call it a takeover. On the same day, concerts and parties are held by some while others mourn. Yet I believe that war is often or always bad. From my studies about the history of my country and the region's history, and from having lived through three wars in Iraq, wars always inherit blood. It is true that the recent war saved us from dictatorship but it brought us another war, destruction, murders, bombings, political and religious conflicts and economic downfall. It added more wounds. Despite all that, I do sometimes feel optimistic because I believe that freedom is always more beautiful. I still change my thoughts and mood about what happened after April 9, 2003, and many people in Iraq share my uncertainty.'

from an interview with Adnan al-Sayegh, July 2010

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Excerpted from Taking Mesopotamia by Jenny Lewis. Copyright © 2014 Jenny Lewis. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
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