My War-Porn Country
by Kevin Carollo
What I’m saying has nothing to do with my asylum request.
What matters to you is the horror. —Hassan Blasim
Furthermore, the translation’s back cover exuberantly offers a pageant
of horrors, as haunting as the photos of Abu Ghraib. It feels like 1968 all over
again, coming out of the womb like a time-bomb, born into a world
of war porn. On my fifth birthday, they murdered Allende in Chile
and installed Pinochet. I required four stitches on my right foot due
to a game of hide and seek that got out of hand. Comrade, I am still
trying to find the unknown soldier behind the basement bookcases
of my hoarder father. It feels like Deer Grove 1979 all over again,
a photocopy of an image of Mickey Mouse giving the finger whilst
saying Fuck you, Iran! We were standing with Iraq, then Afghanistan.
One Passover Seder, everyone cooed when the beautiful Iraqi refugee
said the word Israel. I forget her name, but remember how much she
loved Billy Joel’s Glass Houses, released in March of 1980. Teen angst
is so Cold War, so Missile Command. As Pac-Man, I ate and ate so
many dots and monsters but could never be sated. I got a C in Russian
History. Igor wore a T-shirt that said RUSSIA but with every other
letter crossed out. Every single day, I lived a double life many times
over. I had to redact my virginity, my humanity. Then, over the Gulf,
a thousand points of light. I tried to find my sea legs in the classroom,
the peace march, the psych ward. For a vertiginous moment over half
my life ago, I held a bottle of pills in the palm of my hand like a grenade.
The rest, as they say, is ancient history, an extraordinary rendition of a
timeless classic. I know that a war is a war is a war, more or less. And for
my final 101 at MSUM, I’m teaching MAUS alongside Footnotes in Gaza.
I teach “The Diameter of the Bomb” alongside “Beyond Identification”
until it becomes impossible to descry the borders of a nation. Today
I stand before you to request asylum from the administration of today.
Hassan, your horrific words are my Abu Ghraib. I can never look away.
“The poems ‘Some Interrogation Questions’ and ‘My War-Porn Country’ are the first two of a series of ‘fugue sonnets,’ both riffing on the short story collection The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq by Hassan Blasim. I invented the form last year—essentially a double-sonnet of 14 ghazal-like couplets (each with an epigraph, intertextual and dialogic references, etc.)—to reflect on the colonial-imperial, military, late-stage capitalist, and institutional imperatives of English as mother tongue, particularly in light of teaching world literature in translation at a university which has gutted its arts and humanities. The fugue sonnet is therefore a dialogue ‘between a between’ (Darwish), between ‘East’ and ‘West,’ and between the linguistic imperatives of the institution and the literary possibilities for revolution.” —Kevin Carollo
Kevin Carollo lives in Fargo, North Dakota, and has taught world literature and writing at Minnesota State University Moorhead for 20 years. He is author of Elizabeth Gregory (Rain Taxi/OHM Editions), a chapbook of poems about early onset dementia, as well as the forthcoming hybrid nonfiction work Shred: Running and Being in the End Times (NDSU Press). His father, Jack Ronald Carollo (3/26/42-6/8/18), was a U.S. Army veteran, having served in the Vietnam War a couple years before Kevin was born (on 9/11/68).