“Saad tells me that to stave off boredom in the trenches of the Iran-Iraq war, many of the conscripts around him began to read; the great Arab and western classics and Joyce and Beckett passed back and forth, from captains to soldiers. For a moment, he believed that the enthusiastic discussions that occurred there were a turning point in his country’s history and that something new would emerge when they returned from the front.”
The Iraqi Suitcase by Laura Waddington
Source: Samuel Beckett walking in Berlin, 1969 by Rosa von Praunheim and Daniel Schmid. Francesco Ghisi (YouTube)