Jenny Lewis: The Voyage to My Father

Poet Jenny Lewis describes how years of searching for her father, who died when she was a few months old, led to her new collection of poetry, Taking Mesopotamia, just published by Carcanet/OxfordPoets.

The story starts a few years ago with the discovery of a dusty old suitcase while clearing out the flooded basement of my house in Oxford. It was to turn into a six-year odyssey into a little-known period of my father’s life, an opening up for me of world connections and opportunities - and a collection of poems, Taking Mesopotamia. Among the faded papers and memorabilia my sister Gillian and I unearthed was an album of photos taken in 1916 by our father, 2nd Lt. T. C. Lewis, when he was fighting in Mesopotamia-Iraq with the South Wales Borderers (SWB). Some of these images illustrate the book, including the Bridge of Boats at Qurna, the SWB camp at Kut al Amara and a river scene at Basra. Our father was wounded in January 1917 and invalided back to Deolali near Bombay. He remained in India for 18 months, recuperating first at the Palace of the Maharaja of Jaipur and later in Mussoorie. Years later, he met and married my mother but died from a coronary thrombosis in 1944 when I was a few months old.

Gillian and Jenny Lewis, 1944

Although he was Welsh, we were never taken to Wales as children and it wasn’t until recently that we spent time there tracing our ancestors’ history and visiting the place where he was born (Blaenclydach in the Rhondda Valley) the Trehafodd Colliery where he worked, aged 16, as an Analytical Chemist and the graveyard where his parents John and Myfanwy (our grandparents) are buried. I started to write poems that wove our Welsh mining heritage together with ancient and modern Mesopotamia-Iraq and spanned thousands of years and hundreds of conflicts. For example the poem ‘Mine’ starts ‘My ancestors worked all day in water, up before dawn, back/ after dark – Sunday their only chance at daylight…’ and ends:

Their coal burned harder, hotter, dense seams littered
with dinosaur footprints carried on the flood 

from deltas as far away as Umm-Quasir and Basra
to Blaenclydach, where my grandmother, belly taut as a sail,

gasped as her waters broke and the child in her womb
started his journey.

After the discovery of the album, we started researching the SWB War Diaries at the National Archives and gained further information about the Mesopotamian Campaign at the Imperial War Museum as well as from many different books, journals and websites. In one week in April 1916, according to the Daily Intelligence Reports, fifty per cent of the SWB 4th battalion was killed and an extract reveals that -

It was bitterly cold. The men were wearing only khaki-drill, no greatcoats. They were wet-through and frozen. They woke numb and stiff with cold. They were also grievously hungry as the meat ration had not been issued as rations had been held up.

Not only had they had no food but their only source of drinking water was permanently kept in the sights of Turkish gunners. Getting men, supplies, guns and mules across flooded land was one of the main problems of the campaign, and one of my diary poems ‘April 1916, Tom’ describes what became known as ‘Townshend’s Regatta’ after General Townshend who was in command from 1915 through to the Siege of Kut and the debacle of its failed relief in April 1916 -

Floods three feet deep, often twenty in the old
Irrigation ditches. A man accidentally drowned.
The rest, facing the enemy, camped in islands
Gun Hill, Norfolk Hill, Shrapnel Hill; only reeds
about two foot high for a makeshift cover. Each
battalion had sixty bellums to cross the waters.
Five hundred of us British and Indian soldiers
practising punting – a strange regatta…

During my research into Mesopotamian history and culture I soon came across that great monument of Sumerian (and world) literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh and was commissioned by Pegasus Theatre, Oxford to collaborate on a verse drama for the Youth Theatre exploring aspects of war and the abuse of power by leaders. Jointly funded by Pegasus and the Arts Council, After Gilgamesh provided further scope for research into the recent conflict in Iraq, especially into the attitudes of young people to war. It was published by Mulfran Press in March 2011.

Jenny Lewis
(photograph by Megan Jones)

At a reading in London I met the Iraqi poet, Adnan al Sayegh who gave me insights into what it was like to live in Iraq, grow up there, be forced to fight in the Iran-Iraq War and suffer imprisonment and exile for his beliefs. With the many other Iraqi, American and British soldiers, poets and commentators I interviewed, he contributed greatly to my efforts to bring a sense of authenticity to the book. Eleven of the poems have been translated into Arabic by a range of gifted translators to whom I am very grateful and are included in Taking Mesopotamia.

Throughout this voyage of discovery I have felt the presence of my father in my thoughts and writing. Sometimes it has brought me closer to him and sometimes he still seems a distant shadow. One of the last poems to be written, ‘No other heaven pleased me’, sprang out of a graphically vivid dream I had that my father was stroking my hair.  I woke up to find my own hand on my head. The poem starts ‘Sometimes I stroke my own hair, imagining/ my father’s hand laid against the contours/ of the warm earth…’

I am now embarking on a PhD at Goldsmiths College on a new version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, about to start learning Arabic and continuing to work with Adnan on a programme of creative writing workshops at the British Museum, culminating in a performance in English and Arabic with oud accompaniment by Ehsan Emam on 27 April. We previewed the performance at Pegasus Theatre, Oxford on 27 March with oud accompaniment by Tarik Beshir. 

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The Carcanet Blog Sale

With every blogpost we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors.

For the next two weeks, we're giving you 25% off Jenny Lewis's Carcanet books: Taking Mesopotamia and Fathom.

All books come with 10% off and free delivery at www.carcanet.co.uk, so to claim your extra discount, use the code BLOG (case-sensitive) at the checkout.