This poem was written deep in the past,
during one of those dark years of my fifteen years of being locked up
in Costa Rica without a passport.
The poem remembers Mufid Majid Awji,
friend and colleague, during a very short but extremely intensive period
of my life, from September 1955 to May or June 1956, while we both worked
with the Iraq Petroleum Company of Kirkuk at the oil drilling camp of
Jambour near Dakouk. We worked in morning, afternoon and night shifts.
We worked for different departments. He was at that time a baby-driller,
which in the jargon of oil drilling is equivalent to say a trainee to
become a driller. I worked as mud-tester with the Chemical Department.
Since we both worked at rigs and drilling sites, our shifts coincided
from time to time. I was nineteen and had just graduated from high school,
Mufid was perhaps in his early twenties.
In summer 1956 I was transferred to work at the Injana oilfield near
Tuzkhourmatu and in Autumn I left the IPC and joined a teacher training
course in Kirkuk. We never met again after that although we lived in
Kirkuk and I continued to live there for six years more before leaving
to Baghdad in 1962.
Mufid belonged to one of Kirkuk´s
oldest and richest Turcoman families, the Awchi family. He was a quiet,
gentle, very polite person, modern and open-minded, witty and a lover
of nature.
The first stanza of the poem makes reference
to our wanderings during the spring of 1956 while we worked at Well
No. 2. During the intensive spring of those arid Jambour hills when
our morning shifts coincided we preferred to walk to the camp when our
shift ended instead of taking the crew truck. We walked the distance
of about two hours, observing the virgin spring landscape, plants, wild
flowers, green hills, little valleys with rests of water from spring
rain, mud and earth with traces and patterns left over by the water
that flooded them during short intensive spring downpours. And we walked
and talked and talked.
The second stanza makes reference to
our night shifts. Before ascending the crew truck waiting to take us
to the drilling site, I would pass by his bungalow and find him dressing
with his radio on and the green magic eye of the radio radiating that
cool green light. And he would say, "Putting again the wolf´s
skin on!" He referred to the rough clothes we put on when working
as "wolf´s skin". In fact, our work was considered one
of the toughest and dirtiest jobs. We always worked under the open sky.
There was always oil, mud, noise, hard physical work. Sometimes we worked
in biting cold and under rain. When gas or oil leaked or shot up everything
got messed up and we would work for eight continuous hours until the
emergency was over. This is the reason why rig and oil drilling workers
are nicknamed "rough necks".
Precisely because of those harsh work conditions I loved that work.
Never again after that one year at oilfields did I have a work that
responded so much to my very nature and character. I simply loved that
work, its natural milieu and the un-mediated relation to nature it permitted
me to have.
Further, the poem refers to the site of Well No. 3, situated just at
the bank of the Tawuk Sou river near the bridge.
The third stanza tries to use early
morning scenery combined with hints about a travelling mother which
is my mother.
Sometimes, when remembering friends
like Mufid who were evidently persons whose character fitted very well
with my character, I wonder why I didn´t care to continue those
emerging friendships. They came into my life and went away without any
effort on my part to conserve those relations. Is this the normal destiny
of some friendships in life. Or is it the learning process and its ups
and downs that produce this.
One thing is certain, when I remember those friendship that died on
the way, I long for them and feel their discontinuation as a painful
personal loss that at times amount to an acute sense of tragedy and
death. Nevertheless, this sharp pain produces in my Iraqi heart and
emotionality its contradicting state and mood: brilliant hope and strong
intimate attachment to life. Thus, loss becomes gain whose value and
beauty nothing can eclipse, neither momentary or prolonged suffering,
nor repression, nor the passing of time, nor insanities of human life,
nor death. Life can not be compared to pain, suffering and death. It
is much more powerful and richer; life in its totality is the purest
beauty and freedom.
Bless you Mufid, good soul and fine
person, wherever you may be.
Anwar Al-Ghassani
San José, February 12, 2005
