Dunya Mikhail,
iraq/usa
  

 

 

 

 

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Dunya Mikhail, born in Iraq in 1965, has published four collections of poetry in Arabic, along with one lyrical,
multi-genre work since the mid-1980s. Most recently, The War Works Hard, the first American collection of
her work, appeared from New Directions in 2005, translated by Elizabeth Winslow. Winner of a 2004 PEN
Translation Fund Award, The War Works Hard is a collection of translations of poems from her (Arabic) books
The Psalms of Absence (1993), Almost Music (1997), and her latest, title collection (2004).

As Lebanese American writer Etel Adnan notes, “Dunya Mikhail is a woman who speaks like the disillusioned
goddesses of Babylon. Blunt as well as subtle, she makes of war a distinct entity, thus turning it into a myth.
To her own question: What does it mean to die all this death? her poems answer that it means to reveal the
only redeeming power that we have: the existence of love.”

After the publication in Baghdad, 1995, of The Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, appearing in the wake of the
first Gulf War and the years-long Iran-Iraq War, Ms. Mikhail found herself suffering increased harassment from
the Baghdad regime.

“Like most Iraqi writers,” Saadi Simawe writes in his preface to The War Works Hard, “she could no longer
keep her promise to stay in her country and thus fled first to Jordan then to the United States. In 2001, Dunya
Mikhail was awarded the U.N. Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing.

A member of the Iraqi Christian minority, Ms. Mikhail is a native speaker of both Aramaic (language of the pre-
Islamic indigenous Iraqi Christians) and Arabic. English, her third language, she learned in Iraqi high school and
college. In 2001, she earned an M.A. in Arabic from the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Wayne State Uni-
versity. She currently teaches Arabic to high school students in Detroit, Michigan.
 
 
The War Works Hard

How magnificent the war is!
How eager
and efficient!
Early in the morning,
it wakes up the sirens
and dispatches ambulances
to various places,
swings corpses through the air,
rolls stretchers to the wounded,
summons rain
from the eyes of mothers,
digs into the earth
dislodging many things
from under the ruins…
Some are lifeless and glistening,
others are pale and still throbbing…
It produces the most questions
in the minds of children,
entertains the gods
by shooting fireworks and missiles
into the sky,
sows mines in the fields
and reaps punctures and blisters,
urges families to emigrate,
stands beside the clergymen
as they curse the devil
(poor devil, he remains
with one hand in the searing fire)…
The war continues working, day and night.
It inspires tyrants
to deliver long speeches,
awards medals to generals
and themes to poets.
It contributes to the industry
of artificial limbs,
provides food for flies,
adds pages to the history books,
achieves equality
between killer and killed,
teaches lovers to write letters,
accustoms young women to waiting,
fills the newspapers
with articles and pictures,
builds new houses
for the orphans,
invigorates the coffin makers,
gives grave diggers
a pat on the back
and paints a smile on the leader’s face.
The war works with unparalleled diligence!
Yet no one gives it
a word of praise.


translated by Elizabeth Winslow
 
“The War Works Hard,” Arabic text © 2000 by Dunya Mikhail, translation © 2005
by Elizabeth Winslow, from The War Works Hard, New Directions, 2005