In the beginning, with the Kurds
Richard King; 5/7/08; Text; Richard King is a Perth-based literary critic.
Elvis Is Titanic: Classroom Tales from the Other Iraq; Ian Klaus; UWA Press
One has to wait until page 67 of Ian Klaus’s excellent book for an explanation of its peculiar title. Klaus, in Iraqi Kurdistan to teach US history and English, is searching for common ground with his students. Having already established the cultural ubiquity of the film Titanic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, they move to a discussion of Western music. “Frank Sinatra?” No. “The Rolling Stones? Bob Dylan?” No recognition whatsoever. “Elvis Presley?” I muttered finally. Finally a knowing “Of course”, in the tone one uses to answer a ludicrous question. One student was very pleased with himself for thinking of the terms that would make the matter dear: “Of course we know who Elvis is. Elvis is Titanic. He is like Titanic of music.”
See: The Australian; No Internet Text
So, then, not a clever metaphor for US imperialism (Elvis = US; Titanic = hubris; US + hubris = Iraq misadventure), but a happy conversational accident. Paramount Pictures will be pleased. Noam Chomsky, John Pilger and Michael Moore less so. Klaus, a Rhodes scholar and Oxford graduate who enjoyed 15 column centimetres of fame when he dated Chelsea Clinton at university, crossed into “the other Iraq” on the eve of the Iraqi elections of January 2005.
Travelling initially with Peter Galbraith, former US diplomat and brilliant expositor of Iraqi politics, he was invited to lecture at Salahaddin University, one of the largest universities in Iraq. This is where we pick up the story, with Klaus attempting to stimulate debate, not only about James Cameron’s filmography, but also about the more urgent topics of civil war, federalism and minority rights, preoccupations the Kurds and Americans share.
Such a project is fraught with two kinds of danger. The first is that you might get killed or, worse, get other people killed. The second is that you might be accused — what am I saying, will be accused — of being the pawn, the befuddled plaything, of cultural imperialism, the soft-power counterpart to military might. To the first kind of danger Klaus is alive, hiring two bodyguards, Azad and Sarhang, and staying away from known danger spots. To the second, he is, if not indifferent, then certainly not unduly attentive. He recalls with affection a conversation he had with one US soldier:
“We were, he noted, part of the same effort.”
But Klaus is no cultural missionary either. For him, history offers “an honest way to talk about the American nation abroad. It was up to me to ensure that my history class never became an exercise in triumphalism or an occasion for America-bashing.”
To this end, he addresses both sides of the ledger: Jeffersonian democracy, yes, but also, to paraphrase Klaus’s subtitle, “the other America” of slavery and racism. Most crucially, he asks his students to remember that Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail was couched in the language of founding principles. “America’s authority as an example,” Klaus writes, “depends not on forgetting its darker moments but on how it struggles against them.”
Of the African-Americans’ struggle for liberty the students have an instinctive grasp born of their own history and second-class status. Far more numerous than the Palestinians, the Kurds are the largest nationality in the world without a proper state of their own and have been sold out repeatedly by Western powers in the interests of regional stability.
Only when the no-fly zone was imposed after the Gulf War in 1992 did democracy and a free press begin to develop. Klaus calls Kurdistan “the great counterfactual”: this is how it was supposed to be after the invasion of 2003. And this, in Kurdistan, is how it is. But if it doesn’t bleed, it doesn’t lead.
Klaus is not the first Western writer to develop an admiration for the Kurds. Writer Christopher Hitchens rarely appears without the flag of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan pinned to his bourbon-stained lapel. But Elvis Is Titanic is particularly moving. Part travelogue, part memoir, part meditation, it tells of an embattled and courageous people deter-mined to build democracy in the face of the fear and paranoia inculcated by Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Tags: Human Rights, Iraq, Turkey