“As we sit chatting in the living room, they exclaim laughing: “Everywhere in the Middle East, people are interested in politics. We know a great deal about America, England, Germany, France, Italy! But the western people don’t know enough about the East, and East and West never shall meet!”
*
I love Mark Twain and the Mississippi steamboats and Abraham Lincoln’s dogs.
I love the fields of wheat and corn and the smell of Virginia tobacco.
But I am not American.
Is that enough for the Phantom pilot to turn me back to the Stone Age? . . .
—Saadi Youssef, “America, America”
The Iraqi Suitcase by Laura Waddington
Source: Saadi Youssef reciting America, America at the Festival Internacional de Poesía de Medellín in 2003. Revista Prometo (YouTube)