If poets ruled the world ...
Faleeha Hassan is a poet living in Washington Township The world needs poets more than it needs politicians. The country I come from made me say this.
Faleeha Hassan
is a poet living in Washington Township
The world needs poets more than it needs politicians.
The country I come from made me say this.
I am the one who has been living, since my adolescence, a series of wars. One was the Iraq-Iran war, which the Iraqi government believed it was going to end in 10 days. They even closed our schools, thinking that 10 days is enough to end a border dispute.
That war lasted eight years. It would kill all my male friends who enrolled in the army as they turned 18. Their mothers got the remains of their bodies in boxes of wood wrapped in the flag of Iraq.
Many others were taken captive, facing imprisonment and torture. Some remained missing, and a few returned without a leg or an arm.
If our rulers were poets, and not politicians, would they have forced us to hang black banners for the dead on our walls? Are there poets - even if they became kings - who would allow such rivers of blood to cover the streets of their cities?
I remember how the people of Basra were forced to flee to Najaf and Karbal, fearing death. They lived in public places without jobs, prices rose, and soon cities would no longer accommodate the displaced.
If our rulers were poets, they would not have allowed the war to be waged.
After the war with Iran, the war with Kuwait started. My father and brother were among the victims. My father left us to support the army in protecting the borders, and my brother went with the rest of the soldiers to fight on the front lines. In a day and night, they burned the oil wells and our sky became dark.
I saw with my own eyes the day the sky was turned into a gloomy color and my mother, who had asthma, almost choked for lack of oxygen. Sometimes we breathed black smoke and ash instead of air, and the soot, which crept up on us from Kuwait.
I wonder if there is a poet who would replace the blue sky with a black one?
When my mother almost died of the disease and the longing for my absent father, I went to the battlefield. When I approached Najaf, searching for him, I saw the bodies of soldiers being eaten by dogs, and burned tanks, and shell holes everywhere.
I asked the soldiers about my father, and after much effort, I found him sitting embracing a gun and looking toward the horizon, unaware of what was happening. He hugged and kissed me and reprimanded me for coming to the battlefield. I told him that my mother was very sick, and he asked me to take her to the hospital. God would provide for her, he said. He looked again to the sky and told me to hurry up and leave before the attack.
I returned home with a wound in my memory that has never been healed, even after the Kuwait war ended and my brother returned with the rest of the soldiers on foot without water and food, cutting through the desert. Imagine walking the desert between Kuwait and Iraq and how your feet would crack and swell, and how you would grapple with thirst and hunger.
We do not know how many soldiers ate the dry thistle, which they found in the desert, and how many, like my brother, ate the paper with a prayer on it that my mother stuck in his pocket, because of the severity of their hunger.
Once my brother arrived home, the police came and took him to prison. They said he violated military commands and left the battle. Three months of looking for my brother passed, to no avail. Someone told us that he was executed. But God is gracious.
On a cold night we were as usual sitting and talking about my brother, and remembering him, when we heard knocking on the door. I ran and I opened it. There was my brother in a long beard and torn clothes. He entered but did not utter a word. We tried to talk with him, but he escaped to his room and came out two days later.
My brother lived depressed, not smiling, until a year after his return. Whenever somebody tried to ask about what happened to him, he said: Do not be cruel like them, let me forget!
Yes, if our rulers were poets, we would not have lived in hunger. I remember one point, after we returned to the holy city of Najaf, driving along the Mashkhab (a place we used to hide in because it is dense with palm trees and makes a good shelter during bombings from aircraft). When we returned to our homes, we - like most of our people - did not have food, water, fuel, or electricity for months and months.
My mother cooked bread in a pan, made of dry chickpeas, and we had one barrel of water for everything. Most people drank straight from rivers and puddles. One day my father filled a gallon of water for someone who had knocked at the door. He returned the open gallon filled with dates. That night, we slept with our stomachs full, from dates and the chickpeas bread.
When the sanctions were imposed on Iraq, I was working as a teacher in a high school. My salary was 3,000 dinars a month - about $2. Imagine what it was like to live in such a situation.
Yes, if we had been ruled by a poet, he would not have allowed all this destruction and war, and the streets would have become green and we would have realized our aspirations in love and peace. For the mind of a poet is filled with white, unlike the imagination of politicians who promise evil and make the poor poorer and the rich increasingly greedy.
If a poet became the head of the government, we would not need to attach photos of him to our walls, or erect statues of him in the squares. We would see a smile in his face like a little baby, and we would hear his voice with the singing of the birds.
And we would get rid of all political newspapers and magazines that appear in a new mask every day.
And instead of news we would listen to the poems.