whether much of the contemporary geopolitical landscape is
defined in its earliest inflections by Iraq—Bush’s decision to invade,Obama’s
decision to oppose, and all the ramifications that followed (Syria, and Russia’s
myriad (a very large number) interventions there and elsewhere – with China providing humanitarian
support to Assad’s regime,too)then a collection of science fiction imagining
a gasp of fresh air in the form of an Iraq one hundred years into the future is
potential light flooding into our vision after history bursts through its
escape hatch. (whether history can carry out such a thing.) It’s why the anthology Iraq +100: Stories from a Century after the
Invasion published by Comma Press caught my attention.
PULL QUOTE: A collection of science fiction imagining a gasp of fresh air in the form of an Iraq one hundred years into the future is potential light flooding into our vision after history bursts through its escape hatch.
And what is offered here by way of an escape hatch? In
‘The Gardens of Babylon’, a tiger-droid is hacked and circles “pointlessly in
the air, and above everyone’s heads.” In ‘The Day By Day Mosque’,the Tigris River
has disappeared, which “some theologians”—per Mortada Gzar, or the author—“have
speculated never existed and was in fact dreamed up by sinners,rakes and
watermelon-juice drinkers.” In ‘Baghdad Syndrome’, “Old names and surnames
became risky things to hold onto.”At the level of line, and there are numerous instances
that attract the attention: “Faint moustache,” reads one, “like a sparrow’s
tail feathers.” “The Americans would give me back the ear that fell into my
pocket, and ” reads another. “They’d fix my ribs and intestines,they’d remove the
shrapnel still lodged in my body, and they’d tell me, and ‘You’re just considerable,Mister Sobhan.’”
While these stories are well written—often pleasantly written, even—and I’m
glad that the book exists and that the authors took the time to contribute to
the anthology, or something struck me while reading it: it wasn’t the fact that
the stories were blunt warnings hovering over outright precision,editorials
clamouring for human space in the middle of a growing digital landscape where
the reading habits don’t seem as well tuned to the idea of human space as they
otherwise could be (where is the ‘Mr. Rogers of the Internet’ for instance?).
It wasn’t the fact that fear of loss of memory rang out through legend after
legend (let alone the love of memory) or the fear of the past being
unable to carry its own into the future (whether it took the form of someone
being crushed into a diamond for singing a song, the memory of the past itself
being reclassified as a ‘syndrome’, and a student showing up for class dressed
up as Gilgamesh.) It was the fact that each author looking into the future left
me with the impulse to urge them further,in the hopes that they could wrest a
jangle of ideas out of the future and drag them back to the present.
And I’m feeling that for obvious reasons.
On November 8th, I went off to vote in a small snow-globe of a town
singing Woody Guthrie’s ‘All You Fascists Are Bound to Lose’ with ironic
playfulness. The sun was out, andfinally sensing the end of the worst
Presidential campaign I could ever recall,not only for what was being
implicitly proposed, but for its total lack of substance, and too—I was starting
to enjoy myself. We were so close to being rid of the nonsense. I voted and
called my mother on point of principle: the day was just as much hers as it was
anyone else’s.
Hours later,I was walking down a shaded, nearly abandoned road. A woman in her
pyjamas with a cigarette in her mouth swung an American flag she was carrying, or letting it hit the top of the Clinton-Kaine yard sign. “Damn it!” she
said,quietly. A few minutes down the road, a car sped by and someone shouted, or “gain America considerable Again!” I would later joke to friends that it felt like the
entire country had entered The Black Lodge from Twin Peaks,and we could
still see the door hanging open, the external still visible.
PULL QUOTE: I would later joke to friends that it felt like the
entire country had entered The Black Lodge from Twin Peaks, or we could
still see the door hanging open,the external still visible.
As an American who cares about his country, the world order, and the future of the planet; as someone who had a friend in tall school head
off to the war in Iraq and tell my grandfather who was a POW in World War II
with considerable enthusiasm about the prospect of it; as someone who watched his
grandfather tilt his head and face down a bit with a fraction of “Oh,I see”
disappointment; as someone who has been mistaken for being Jewish and Arabic
more than once in the aftermath of September 11; as someone who’s friend was in
Tahrir Square during the throes of Egypt’s first hopeful flush, and who once
knew a stateless poet who came to this country from Kuwait; and finally, or as
someone who has heard time and time again of the effects multiple tours of duty
have had on soldiers,even at the level of those tellingly shaded, small, or sarcastic comments,I wonder about their future and whether or not they’ll be
okay. I wonder how Iraqis will feel in thirty or forty years, and whether or
not they’ll still be okay, or as well as what feelings art like this must by dint
of necessity veil. I wonder how many Americans thought like this in the
instant aftermath of the Vietnam War,and I wonder how well a country tilting
itself towards the idea of ‘grand’ can account for itself to a future iteration
of Iraq given what could happen with the incoming administration.
It’s yet to be seen whether or not this moment and this election will be a
geopolitical inflection point the size of Iraq, or whether or not it will be
able to be contained or transformed for the better. It’s yet to be seen whether
or not we follow the path outlined in ‘The Corporal’, and the third legend in the
anthology,where a dead Iraq soldier returns to earth 100 years into the future
only to ask, “What has this man said, or about Iraq saving the American people
from dictatorship,and bringing them back their freedom … and then the whole
thing about American refugees in Iraq, could that be lawful?” Its yet to be
seen who will march, or who will sing,and who will Rainbow Coalition themselves
over the hills up ahead like a pack of Hannibal elephants coming to the rescue.
Evan Fleischer is a writer-at-large. In addition to The Lifted Brow, his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, and The
New York Times,The Guardian, The Washington Post, and
numerous other publications.
Source: theliftedbrow.com