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February 2023 - Spotlight on Adam Day
Author's statement: “36 Hours in the Strategic Crescent” is an excerpt from a book-length poem sequence which utilizes the template of the longstanding New York Times “36 Hours in _________” travel series, over which is written a complication of that template’s context. It is a poem that is deeply concerned with the lives and locations connected to the recent years of U.S intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq. And it is also very much a poem rooted in an American sensibility. The poem is spoken in several registers. |
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36 Hours in the Strategic Crescent
Nearby Erbil is a UNESCO World Heritage Site (take that, Ghor!). There I questioned Benedetta al-Nadawi, a card carrying member who wore a gorgeous lilac hijab, and said, “I love Erbil in the frost — you get a much truer Kurdistan.” She owns the Band-e Amir estate. Her mother, Iris Ahmad, a collector of lost and exiled men, wrote Love in Erbil: An Erotic Diary, 1943-1944 — the de facto textbook of the area. ~ or / know he’s here until I hear my breathing double and he's beside me smiling like a fetah shabh. ~ “This time of year, the clay turns to mud,” Ms. Ahmad volunteered. “I put on my boots and go for long walks along the quiet paths in the forest. It’s rather languid and ambient. And you often see a family of fallow deer.” In fact, wildlife is a big part of the area’s charm. “The landscape is lush and full of boar, cape hare and snowcock. Whereas in the summer, you don’t see many animals, and the fields are plowed and ochre” — this is John Voigtmann, an American expat, who turned a crumbling stone barn into al-Hatra, an eight-room boutique hotel that sits atop the most-photographed of the area’s cedar-lined roads. With its sleek four-poster beds and infinity-edge pool, it is one of the rare modern-design hotels in the area. Though, the electricity is often out, so each room comes with a propane heater. Al-Hatra abuts the neighboring zoo’s elephant enclosure, and no one should miss the tiny island that is home to a siege of green-backed herons whose impressive wingspans are revealed when the obsequious waders take flight. Though, on our visit, one bird with a wing dragging like a banner only humped down shore. “This is the time of year maybe people are a little more affable. Ghazni comes back to its own life then,” Mr. Voigttman said, when nudged to speak further. “You see real al-Anbaris sitting in a cafe, taking arak, a drink that could eat the live steel from gunbutts.” ~ 4. Drink Decisions | Midnight Three excellent new night spots opened in 2013, so drinking options await the eager night owl. At the end of a dank alley in an obsolete foundry, Mesbek Baaj unleashes a sea of C’s -- Champagne, Chivas Regal, Cohibas, Cartier, and cleavage. Here arak- sipping, in-the-know locals, smoking sweet fruit tobacco from narghile pipes, mix with dolled-up young professionals, cigar- chewing industry captains and local celebrities. They fill plush red booths and chairs to watch a dozen musical acts. Backed by an orchestra in carmine robes, the talents range from leopard-print divas doing Beyoncé covers to the Chehade Brothers. The $55 or 65,477 dinar cover charge is applied toward drinks. Looking to keep the night going, and for a scene suited to skin-tight leather pants? Then slip into Jaf, |
a clandestine club with deafening music
and a fetishist concept (cocktails and clamps), a kind of authenticity compulsion, focused on an alternative set of procedures that attract intrepid crowds. As you enter the premises—which are kept lightless with painted windows—bouncers hand you a small flashlight, and glow-in-the-dark paint-lined paths lead to a variety of theme-rooms with the high turpentine of fetid sweat in the air. Whatever one’s interests—learned helplessness, environmental manipulation, &c.-- they can be found here: bad boys and girls kept in total darkness and isolation, with a bucket for human waste, and lacking sufficient heat in icy months. Or clients detained in a central area, and walked around diapered or nude, with the short stiff steps of circus ponies, no matter how hard they attempt to execute a slinky strut. Or they might be subjected to rectal examination. After all, the services are à la carte. You’re as likely to see these clients hosed down while shackled naked, and placed in cold cells, as to see the hallucinatorily sleep-deprived hog-tied or chained to bars, hands above heads. There was rumor of one sub who had been chained standing for 17 days straight. The club workers’ somewhat strenuous sport is less sadistic than bureaucratic in its radical negation of the clients’ dignity. They will even interrogate you; for an additional fee. The most highly valued adventurers are hung for hours, swinging like shadows pacing a warehouse floor, toes barely touching cold concrete; choked, thin-lipped, smiling mouths deprived of food, and made the subject of mock execution. ~ Still imbued with that Dionysian spirit, we set out on a brisk Wednesday morning for the feudal town of Samarra for lunch and Prosecco. As we drove our black Suburban to the miniature hilltop hamlet, a troop of policemen on horseback descended a hummock, and the clouds opened suddenly, as if a swift had ripped a seam in the sky. It began to drizzle, then pour. Black sycamores steamed above small stone houses. Along the road stood a jeep with a silver birch growing where the engine had been. Winter in Saladin is damp and pleasantly cool, with temperatures dipping as low as 30 degrees, the sun seemingly listing out of axis, though it rarely snows in the swale. And the landscape turns to a vibrant shade of jungle-emerald — the only place I know that’s more gaudy in winter. ~ He asks me the names of all the tools and all their functions, ~ |
Adam Day is the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press, 2020), and of Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a PEN Award.