The American poet on his prized possession, which saw him through service in Iraq – the subject of his new memoir My Life as a Foreign Country
A thousand years ago in Persia, in the 10th century ACE, Abdul Kassam Ismael served as a Grand Vizier. The word vizier comes from the Turkish word vezīr, a word carried over from the Arabic word wazīr (‘porter’), which is related to wazara (‘to bear a burden’). Ismael was a man who lived up to his title as a porter with a burden to bear: he was known to transport his entire library with him when he traveled. It was an enormous task, too—reportedly involving a caravan of 400 camels loaded down with a library estimated to contain 117,000 volumes. I sometimes imagine that caravan making its way through the desert, from one oasis to another, from one city or encampment to another.
When I deployed to Iraq as an infantry team leader with the U.S. Army in 2003, I wore the standard issue combat uniform, carried an M4 carbine, and, in addition to the fully packed rucksack on my back, I stowed a duffle bag with the remainder of my packing list into the belly of the cargo plane that carried us to war.
“I could take my last breath in this land. And, were that to be the case, I wanted to try my best to understand the deep history of where I was”
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My platoon leader, a former English major at West Point, could bring a foot locker (in addition to the standard packing list). While in Iraq, his trunk would serve as a kind of lending library for me, with volumes of Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Ernest Hemingway waiting for me there. Books were also sent to me by mail. My Dad sent a steady diet of escape narratives: Henri Charrière’s Papillion and Banco, as well as Sławomir Rawicz’s The Longest Walk. A surprising book that detailed the history and preparation of Iraqi cuisine (Delights from the Garden of Eden) was sent anonymously to me through the Books for Soldiers website. I also brought Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and an English-language version of the Qur’an, while picking up other books along the way before handing them off to other soldiers or mailing them home when I had the chance.
Of all of these books, only one remained with me throughout the entire year: Iraqi Poetry Today. It’s an anthology of Iraqi poetry from the Modern Poetry in Translation Series out of King’s College London. Over time, this collection of poetry and Iraqi voices engaged many of the internal questions and curiosities I had about the people and the landscape through which I navigated in uniform.
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Please don’t be misled into thinking that my reading this book while in a combat zone somehow elevates my own personal humanity above that of other combatants, or that it somehow lessens any actions or complicity to which I may be connected. Still, I was in a combat zone, a place where I could die or find myself disfigured or maimed for the rest of my life. I could take my last breath in this land. And, were that to be the case, I wanted to try my best to understand the deep history of where I was in the most nuanced and meaningful ways possible to access—by living with the poems and the work of poets, and by trusting that a bridgework of metaphors might transport me, as the camels in Ismael’s caravan transported knowledge a thousand years prior, so that I might travel beyond the known landscape of the self and into the profound space of another.
Brian Turner is a poet, author and professor. His new book My Life as a Foreign Country is published in hardback 26 June through Jonathan Cape. Click for more
