Homelanding: Second Prize Winner for Poetry in the Society for Humanistic Anthropology 2022 Writing Awards

Abstract

Almost like a secret, the women beckoned for me to follow.

They took me to the water, knowing somehow that I wouldn't feel at home until I touched the Tigris.

The water gurgled as my hand disturbed its surface in the night. The yellow moon made the wet backs of the reeds shimmer.

The women murmured to me, held my hand in the glow of our lights.

They taught me the names of the plants.

They taught me names of the soils and landforms.

They told me my face was like theirs, but my words were strange.

They taught me to wrap my teeth around the names of the night.

We laughed in the peaceful quiet.

I heard bugs I hadn't heard, but somehow remembered.

For a moment, it was magic.

It is not really so strange to return to a place one hasn't been before,

Hussai is busy with birds chatting and bickering.

So busy are they pecking seeds and building nests that

The equally busy ruminators seem to move in slow motion …

Sheep with their heads down, tearing at the young grass.

Sweet water seeps, slowly, into the rows of soil,

Settling from its long journey away from the river,

Like a wanderer who perishes in a new world,

Soaked up by shallow grassy roots,

Hair of the earth.

A strange visitor touches the dirt and longs to wash his hands

Quickly with bottled water on the side of the road.

A returnee plunges her hands deep into the dirt, craving contact.

But the one who is of this place eats from it.

Her fingernails are stained henna-orange by the very same dust.

Her grandchildren fall asleep on her lap. She has a joyful face and

The deep inhale of generations breathing into one another.

Even as metal shimmers in the dirt, glints of explosions past,

The air is sweet with the smell of bread.

You sit still in your chair, plastic unweaving from the legs, your eyes closed, while the creaking door and false light and electronic clicks of the tea kettle drive sensory spikes around you.

I move swiftly in and out, washing, sewing, on the balls of my feet. My flip flops squelch with stray water, fabric burdens my arms, wet soft things all around me.

It's all inescapably hetero.

But none of this is quite what it seems.

We are in flow.

Spontaneous silence descends over this home, wordless-ness: crisp and smooth at once.

Today a man yelled at me in angry grief over his sons' death and American violence. He asked me to answer for my country, and I left out the most important sentence: I am sorry.

Today we visited the oldest standing home I have seen in Iraq, one that survived the battles, with wallpaper and lights from an era past, when figures of humans and horses were in vogue.

Today a young father told us he witnessed the massacre of his village, 700 men executed and buried nearby. He survived.

Today Bilal shivered as we drove past the home where his uncle died suddenly of a heart attack. His friend.

Today a girl was examined by a doctor to be married young. The men murmured together, worried and wanting to intervene.

Today I saw small white birds flutter across the sky, the dramatic clouds their backdrop.

Today the generator grumbled heavily but persisted.

Today … was full of grief and listening.

And now I tear the inner tag of your shirt to free the spare button.

It is a solace to retreat to before I sit down to write up fieldnotes.

You ask if I want watermelon.

I hear its cells burst against your beard and teeth.

Oh, please don't speak, I am writing a poem.

My fingers move needle and thread,

my soul is gliding.

The stitch in this cloth makes something, maybe a suture of this moment: historical, mundane.

The tag of this dark green dress shirt, with its white buttons, colors of Islam, reads:

“America Today.”

I feel so far from that place. No desire to return.

America is more than enough as an abstraction, a label, an idea of a global villain, or even my origin.

No matter where I am, though, there is so much laundry to do.

The rhythm of fabric, of braids and stitches, holds things together through softness, womb making, home making, time making.

I become nothing; I am baked into the earth … my hands sing instead.

What a humbling thrill to feel my fingertips.

I am right here! I am where I am supposed to be.

This day is, among its close peers, one of my best.

These poems are about relating to a homeland as an ethnographer through ethnography. My research in anthropology is about the materiality of violence and the ecologies of war. My methods have centered intimate material contact with the landscape, alongside Anbari farmers moving to and from their homes amidst military violence. With a commitment to physical intimacy with the environment, writ large, my methods include sharing in local people's regularized exposure to chemical remnants of warfare; participating in farming, laundry, childcare, and food preparations; and actively responding to the call from local environmental activists to research the enduring ecological impacts of warfare. Yet these poems are also a foil: they depict people's material lives in a place almost always framed, even by me, as simply “war-torn.” Poetry is especially fitting to these scenes because, through refrain and form, they capture the patchwork and minutia of sensuous life in the project of making worlds with others and the moral ethos that surrounds these practices.

During my fieldwork, I have come to understand sensuous contact with Iraq's rivers, air, dirt, and fabrics as transformative to my diasporic relationship with the country. The “homelanding” poems are about how local people are rebuilding their homescape after returning from mass displacement, but they are also about how I become integrated into the folds of Iraq's history, both diasporic and local. I initially drafted these poems as self-reflections, rather than audience-aware documentation, as a way of contending with the realization that my ethnographic practices had also become a process of my own homelanding. Homelanding is a slow but radical shift between studying an other-place and studying one's home. As thousands of Iraqis from the diaspora interact with our homeland in newly available ways, the fraught forces of identity and politics begin to dissolve into the textures, smells, and feels of the landscape itself. While thematically connected, these poems need not remain as a set or in any particular order.