Is this where I'll find the soul of Basra -- in the trauma inflicted on the city by Saddam Hussein?

Samir shakes his head no, then, after a pause offers his answer: "Walt Whitman."

Chuckling at my reaction, "Yes, your country's poet -- you are perhaps familiar with his book Leaves of Grass?"

Cormorants, bedding down for the night, flit from palm to palm. From a concrete block house nestled in the underbrush a generator coughs and sputters, and a small trickle of water comes splashing down the irrigation channel.

"In his poem," continues Samir, eyes gleaming in the dark, "Whitman talks as if his soul were a part of nature -- free, filled with love, encompassing every aspect of life. I think of this often."

After weeks of experiencing little but shortages, poverty, frustrations and dysfunctionalities -- Iraqis' and my own -- this evocation of the great American Bard startles me. Kafka, yes -- but narcissistic, homoerotic, barbarically yawping Walt?

"Yes, you see, Basra was once like that. It is, you know, a port city. Open to influences from around the world -- Asia, Europe, Africa, America. In the 50s, 60s, 70s, life was here -- if you went to the Corniche, you found bars and casinos and nightclubs. People gambled, drank Arak, had sex and prayed. They may have sinned, but they did it indoors, with the result that Allah forgave them."

This last theological point is lost on me, but I understand Samir's general meaning. Again and again, I've heard similar sentiments from Basra's intellectual class: the "turbans" who are imposing their Islamic beliefs on the city--often at the barrel of an AK -- are not Basrawi, they are an aberration, a glitch in the city's history, a "transitional" phase from 35 years of Saddam's tyranny to a truly democratic future.

It is dangerous -- possibly fatal -- to express these thoughts too forcibly in public, but they exist on the minds, lips, tongues and soon the voting fingertips of thousands of Basrans come the next round of elections this December.

"This is what I look forward to. That someday, insha'allah, I will live in a country without any differences from any other country. Just a normal place where my family and I can live normal lives. You ask about the soul of Basra? Look for it in the humanity that your poet, Walt Whitman, expresses."



It's late. I must return to house arrest in my downtown funduk. We stand, brush the dirt off our trousers, walk back to the car. Through a picket-line of palms I see the rising moon, hanging full and yellow in the blue-black sky. With the trickling sound of water in the background and the gentle whisper of the breeze, the scene approaches a tranquil beauty I've yet to encounter in Basra. For an instant, you can almost imagine the world inviting you to lean and loaf and observe a spear of summer grass. The moment contains multitudes. Walt Whitman would love it.