Elvis is Titanic: Classroom Tales from the Other Iraq
Ian Klaus
Alfred A. Knopf
In the spring of 2005, Ian Klaus, a twenty-six-year-old Rhodes Scholar, traveled eight hours from Turkey, ria broken-down taxi and armed convoy, to reach Salahaddin University in Arbil, the largest city in Iraqi Kurdistan. Elvis is Titanic is the poignant, funnv, and eve-opening story of the semester he spent there teaching U.S. history and English in the thick of the war for hearts and minds. Inspired by the volunteerism of so many young Americans after 9/11, Klaus exchanges the abstraction of dutv for an intimate involvement with individual lives, among them Mahir, a rakish Kurdish pop star whose father, an imam, disapproves of music; Ali, an Anglomaniac professor of translation devoted to the BBC, with whom Klaus has a public showdown over Hemingway; and Sarhang, Klaus’s bodyguard, whose interest in American history is excited by Mel Gibson’s performance in The Patriot. Among the Kurds, a perennially oppressed but seemingly indomitable people, Klaus encounters both openhearted welcome and resentful suspicion—and soon learns firsthand how far even a trusted stranger can venture in this society. With assignments ranging from Elvis to Ellington, from the mysteries of baseball to the apergus of Tocqueville, Klaus strives to illuminate the American way for charges initially far more attuned to our pop culture than our national ideals. These efforts occasion Klaus’s own reexamination of truths we hold to be self-evident, as well as the less exalted cultural assumptions we have presumed to export to the rest of the world. His story, as full of hope and discovery as he finds his students, offers a slice of life behind the headlines.
Ian Klaus, who now lives in New York City and Cambridge, wrote for publications across the United States while he was in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is currently pursuing a doctorate in history at Harvard.
Contents
Introduction / 3
1. Beyond War / 7 2. How and Why: Feet on the Ground, Head in the Sky / 10 3. The First Day of Class: History in the Present / 26 4. Election Day in a Country Within a Country / 49 5. English I: Travel, Globalization, and Hollywood / 66
6. The Hemingway Lectures / 93 7. Spring Break in the Sheraton: A Country Comes to the Hotel / 113 8. History II: “Sitting in Judgment”-Can a Nation Move Forward? / 136 9. English II: Putting Out Fires-America, Democracy, Islam, and the Future / 158 10. Battles in the Universities / 186
11. English III: Finals-The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning? / 196 12. The National Enquirer Writes; and Ali Finally Calls Back / 210 13. History III: “Our Flowers Grew Up by Our Youth Blood for Getting Freedom’’ / 220
Acknowledgments / 233
Notes / 235
INTRODUCTION
Armies have never gone abroad alone. They have been accompanied by political officers, reporters, adventurers, opportunists, and intellectuals. Ahvavs in tow have been thinkers who travel, and travelers who write, bold young individuals out to make their names and old ones who’ve long since lost their sense of home. Some writers, historians, and philologists who followed armies have come to be called imperialists or Orientalists. By whatever name, I, too, was treading in the footsteps of soldiers, some of whom I had called roommates and friends. They, like me, had once been Rhodes scholars and had followed Americas campaign to Afghanistan and Iraq.
1 came to Iraq on the eve of the first election in January 2005, not intending to write but hoping to teach. After what some would call liberation and during what most would call occupation, I began to teach American historv and English at one of the countrv’s largest universities. W as it foolish or reckless for an American to be in Iraq at this moment leading discussions on American history? Perhaps. Maybe it was imperialist in a small way. But if I hadn’t been there, who would have answered the young man who asked, “Whv does America only go where there is oil?” Who would have taught English to Mohammed, a young Islamist who held down two jobs and had resolved to acquire the language long before I arrived?
Would someone else have written about Trefa, a Kirkuki woman in her early twenties who had lost her older brother to Saddams terror, who, for religious reasons, would not shake hands with men but had no more cherished dream than to study in America? Or about Maliir: this son of an imam who denounced music had nonetheless become one of Iraqi Kurdistan’s beloved pop stars.
It was in this setting, among the Kurds and at Salahaddin University in Arbil, that I began to write. Kurdistan was, in fact, the great counterfactual: the region that the Iraqi National Congress and other opposition groups in exile hoped to use as a model, as something of a foundation for the rest of the country. It still endured shootings and bombings, but its fledgling democratic and economic institutions as well as its process of political reconciliation were operating in relatively stable conditions. Its people, for the most part, admired America. In some way s, this was the way it yvas supposed to be.
It is there, and amid the larger conversations about democracy and theocracy, about ancient faiths, and about America and the world, that this book is set. Indeed, in almost every classroom I entered, America yvas the first topic raised—and not because I brought it up. These tales are not intended as either analysis or objective reportage. They are merely stories of love lost and souls on hold, of people bom anew and others newly disenchanted. They are situated in a complicated time and place, but also suffused yyfith emotions that can be felt and understood anywhere.
It may be that those I came to knoyv in Iraqi Kurdistan can only be partially illuminated, silhouettes in the swirling Iraqi dust, shrouded like so many specters in the evening shadow of Kurdish mountains. Even in the context of the most rational and respectful conversation, even in friendship, there are limits to mutual comprehension. But it is precisely because yve speak of individual lives—of aspirations and dreams, dashed hopes and unexpected resurrections—that we must try. “What the history of ordinary life delivers is the shock of recognition—mv kind is human kind,” wrote the American historian Joyce Appleby.1 Hence here are the stories and thoughts of my students, mostly in their own words, who became my friends and who, like all good friends, also became my teachers.
1. Beyond War
"Incoming text message.” Class had let out and I was making my way across the city from one of the university's campuses to another when I started to receive text messages from students I had dismissed not fifteen minutes before. It was a short walk, and though some of my friends preferred that I not take it alone, I picked my way through the more heavilv guarded sections of Arbil, capital of the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Students on cell phones passed, kicking up dust on newlv paved asphalt; security- guards settled into their chairs in front of blast walls, sharing observations about the citv’s construction cranes. Text messages kept coming.
“Bounty? No! Kit Kat? Never! Mars? … How about sugar?? Still can’t find anything as sweet as you!”
Almost a year after first arriving in Iraq to teach American history’ and English, I had returned to the same university in Kurdistan to present a couple of lessons on American education and language. Moving across the city that day, trying to gather my bearings, I found myself as acutely aware of the fortifications and arms as I had been twelve months before: Why is that building so heavily guarded? Who is in that yvinding convoy? Is it wise to be staying in a hotel made of glass? The anxious imagination as perpetual motion machine—yvhat catches my eye is commonplace to the locals. The bus drix'ers picking up familiar passengers, the cabbies gossiping at black-market gas stations, the ...
Ian Klaus
Elvis is Titanic Classroom Tales from the Other Iraq
Alfred A. Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf Elvis is Titanic Classroom Tales from the Other Iraq Ian Klaus
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Klaus, Ian, [date] Elvis is Titanic: classroom tales from the other Iraq / by Ian Klaus.—ist ed. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-307-26456-5
1. Education, Higher—Iraq—Kurdistan. 2. Teachers, Foreign—Iraq—Kurdistan. 3. College teachers—United States. 4. Kurdistan (Iraq)—Politics and government—z1st century. 5. Iraq War, 2003- I. Title. LA1469.K87K58 2007 370.956.7'2—dc22 2007006807
Composed by Creative Graphics, Allentown, Pennsylvania Printed and bound by R. R. Donnelley, Harrisonburg, Virginia Designed by Anthea Lingeman
