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15 pages 30 minutes read

Bag of Bones

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2005

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Background

Authorial Context

As someone with direct personal experience of both war and living under dictatorship, Dunya Mikhail knows personally the human costs of violence. Dunya Mikhail fled Iraq in 1995 after facing censorship of her writing, as her profile as a journalist and writer made her a target of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Although she has since built a successful life for herself in the United States and is now an American citizen, Mikhail’s poetry still frequently draws inspiration from her former life in Iraq. The 2005 poetry collection from which “Bag of Bones” is taken—The War Works Hard —features poems documenting war and dictatorship from multiple angles. Since Mikhail has been unable to return to Iraq since her escape, her poetry remains one of the only ways she can command attention to the suffering she personally witnessed and the ongoing tragedies in her homeland.

Socio-Historical Context

“Bag of Bones” is about the atrocities of a dictatorship. Its inspiration can be traced to Dunya Mikhail’s own direct personal experiences under the regime of Saddam Hussein, the former dictator of Iraq. As mentioned above, Mikhail was ultimately forced to flee Iraq to escape from Hussein’s government, and has never returned since to her homeland.

The modern history of Iraq is tragic and marked by frequent periods of violence and oppression. Apart from the brutalities of Hussein’s dictatorship, which lasted from 1979 to 2003, Iraq has also been scarred by war. The Iran-Iraq War lasted from 1980 until 1988, and killed approximately half a million people; while the more recent Iraq War initiated by the United States lasted from 2003 until 2011, causing many civilian deaths and bringing considerable instability to the country. In more recent years, Iraq has faced further violence at the hands of ISIS.

While “Bag of Bones” can be read as a commentary on Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, it is also a more broad commentary on the nature of dictatorship and the tragedy of mass violence. All of the characters mentioned by the speaker in the poem remain nameless, including the dictator, and the country the poem is set in is never explicitly identified. “Bag of Bones” is both as a testament to Iraq’s painful history, and an exposé of the crimes of authoritarian regimes around the world.

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