An Envelope of Bullets

When times were hard, Dr. Mohammed said, she would think of a line by Elizabeth Bishop: “the art of losing isn’t hard to master.”

Because of the United Nations embargo, the Iraqi poetry professor said, she had not seen a new book of English literature since 1980.

But the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003 offered no relief, said Dr. Mohammed, now a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute.

She said she was teaching poetry at an Iraqi university when she received an envelope full of bullets.

The letter inside accused her and her colleagues of grading students too harshly, said Dr. Mohammed, who is still afraid to have her name appear in print. The implication of the threat, she explained, was that holding students to high classroom standards meant they had less time to resist American invaders.

A slight, assertive woman who wore a winter hat in place of her usual hijab, Dr. Mohammed said she found her way to the Radcliffe Institute with the help of friends at American universities. One was University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Susan Stanford Friedman.

“I think of her as a person with enormous courage,” said Friedman, who helped Dr. Mohammed prepare her grant proposal. “First, her courage to continue to do her work and be a teacher in the middle of a war. And to come here alone, to be so far from her family and everyone she knows.”

In Cambridge, Dr. Mohammed has spent hours catching up on the developments in her field she missed under the embargo.

All western scholarship was hard to come by, she said, but English literature was the most neglected field.

Dr. Mohammed is working on a comparative study of Iraqi and American women’s poetry about war.

In June, Dr. Mohammed said, her visa will expire and she will be forced to return to Iraq. She said she has tried and failed to find a job in the United States or elsewhere in the Arab world.

That means, she said, going back to a “furnace of war” where her best friend was shot dead while sitting in her car one morning.

The reason for the assassination was unclear, according to Dr. Mohammed: some said the friend was about to expose the corruption of her university department, others that she was helping her students land jobs as translators for the Americans.

Dr. Mohammed said she was even warned off from visiting her friend’s grave.

“The gravedigger told me, ‘You can’t come here...Even a child could kill you here,’” she said.

If she returns to Iraq, Dr. Mohammed, said, she will not teach at her university. Out of fear of kidnapping and death threats, she said she will put herself under house arrest.

“There are moments when I feel I should not go back,” she said, “but then—this is my fate. I must.”

She said she has already begun to pack her books.

—Staff writer Sophie M. Alexander can be reached at salexand@fas.harvard.edu.

For comprehensive coverage of the Iraq War's impact at Harvard five years later, check out The Crimson's Iraq Supplement.