In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Alex Poppe’s memoir Breakfast Wine powerfully melds the personal and political.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“With machete sharpness and magical imagery, Poppe extols the allure and apprehension of Kurdistan’s people as she embraces their culture and attempts to prepare them and herself for an uncertain future. A joyous, sobering, and spirited memoir of place and the chance encounters that can shape a lifetime.”
In her own words, here is Alex Poppe’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir Breakfast Wine:
Dress-obsessed and directionless, I moved to northern Iraq in 2011, motivated by curiosity and desperation in equal measure. I was 44 years old.
I went looking for purpose, agency, belonging, and exhilaration. I found something like love.
Breakfast Wine is a work of memory, which warps with retelling, and experience, which is subjective. The songs on this playlist helped me recover, open, interrogate, and understand what I had lived. I am grateful for the generosity and kindness Kurds, Iraqis, Yazidis, and Syrians showed me, and I am awed by their resilience.
Thankfully, when emotions are too strong for words, there is music.
“Too Far” by Fiawna Forte
A chance encounter with journalist Jere Van Dyk set me on my path to Iraq. Listening to his stories about embedding with Jalaluddin Haqqani’s mujahideen fighters when they were battling the Soviets in Afghanistan was narcotic. Swinging on the rope of convention, I accepted a teaching position in northern Iraq and let go.
“Too Far” starts with this bouncy guitar picking, building in intensity, mimicking velocity. Fiawna’s “What-oh-oh-ohs” which shorten into punchy “oh-oh-oh-oh no” before exploding into a primal ‘whoa-oh” chased by a yelp and more driving base guitar capture the fear, anxiety, doubt, and excitement that rattled me in the days leading up to my departure.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen
Part two is my love letter to a group of students, fourteen to eighteen, in a pilot program for tenth graders with second to fourth grade literacy levels in English. I had these students 14 times a week, sometimes, four classes a day. They were also the children of the political elite and knew that their family names were more important than passing my exams, which a corrupt school administrator sold to four of them for a thousand bucks each. The operatic quality of “Bohemian Rhapsody” captures how these kids swung me from homicidal to enchanted and back again, over and over.
“Beggin’” by Maneskin
I unknowingly worked alongside one of Sweden’s most notorious sex offenders at the international school in northern Iraq. He had been convicted of carrying out 58 cases of sexual assault against young girls, including 11 counts of rape. He was sentenced to 11 years in a Swedish prison, which was reduced to ten. After serving five years, he was repatriated to Iraq, where he was a free man.
When his past was discovered, the students shared a video of the sex offender being interviewed on Swedish television after his arrest there. He said he had seen a couple making out in a local park and thought “anything goes” with the young girls in his adopted country. Posing as a model named Alexandra, he met his victims online, grooming them so they would travel to meet him. He met one girl at the airport with a rose in his mouth. The girl probably went looking for awe but found terror.
When the girls arrived, he took them to parking lots, public toilets, or department store cafes, where he pulled down their pants and made them cry. Some he paid for sex; others he raped. I can imagine him using this lyric as a justification: “Like a heart in the best way should
You can give it away, you had, and you took the pay.”
This song romanticizes persistent, toxic, possessive love, the kind of love that often leads to violence.
“Breathe Me” by Sia
As the Syrian Civil War ignited, Syrian-Kurds fled over the mountains into Kurdistan. UNHRC and the Kurdistan Regional Government set up the Domiz Refugee Camp, designed to house 2,000 families, but a year on in the war, 8,000 families were living in it and around its edges. I volunteered with Cindy*, Pietro*, and Jules* from the French aid organization, ACTED, to map the Domiz Refugee Camp. By the end of our fourteen-hour day, I had a crush on all of them. They had made their careers in the humanitarian aid sector, spoke multiple languages, and had extensive field experience in places like Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Pakistan. Over dinner, I realized that as much as I wanted to join their world, I was too tied to indoor plumbing and dry clean only dresses to do so. I fished my phone out of my pocket and asked if I could take their photo. I was desperate to catch the moment even though I knew it had already gone.
“Breathe Me” captures ineffable longing; the impossibility of holding onto something evanescent.
“Shameless” by Ani DiFranco
I like the swagger of “Shameless.” The rhythm comes at you fast. It’s in your face. Part five opens with my teaching The Handmaid’s Tale to a group of university freshman and sophomores in a country where honor killings still happen and twenty-something-year-old men don’t know how to ask a girl out for coffee. I had so many moments of my face looking like a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto as I drew stick figure threesomes on the board to explain Ceremony Night or dissected the Madonna/Whore complex in service of the novel. During those first few lectures, before the students embraced their awkwardness and surrendered to the intimacy of risk that discussing sex entails, I think we all felt like we were in a “room without a door.” I loved these students, who learned to trust me, each other, and themselves in order to be open to the possibility of connection, which is where life’s real learning takes place.
“Hazy Shade of Winter” by The Bangles
Between late September and mid-December 2017, there was constant tumult and a feeling of impending doom. The Kurdish Government conducted a failed referendum, which kicked off a 19-hour war with Iraq over oil-rich Kirkuk; the Iraqi government shut Kurdistan’s airspace and borders; Iraqi troops amassed along the borders of Iran and Turkey to run training exercises; oil exports were restricted, further damaging the Kurdish economy; supermarket shelves emptied; the beloved leader of the opposition political party died, kicking off a power struggle; and there were two sizeable earthquakes. Green-black oil and blood in salty light; these were the colors inside my disco anxiety.
The synth used in the opening of the song conjures the foreboding of what’s to come. It’s that hold-your-breath-moment-before-the-first-strike kind of tension. Then, the electric guitars rip fast and furious, like floodgates opening to chaos and fury.
“Rid of Me” by P J Harvey
This song is unabashedly sexy and fierce. The way P J Harvey growls and purrs before switching to her head voice in the turn of a phrase is ultimate control and power. She ends the song in defiance, demanding satisfaction from her lover.
Part seven opens with my going to Baghdad to give a presentation on student-centered teaching techniques at a conference at one of the oldest universities in the world. The women I met in the Languages and Translations department navigated through patriarchy instead of assaulting it head-on as I did. They worried patriarchy’s cracks, creating tiny pockets of space for themselves, much like how rainwater, churning carbonic acid, slowly hollows rocks to form caves.
“In a Manner of Speaking” by Nouvelle Vague
Part eight is bedrocked in the loss of platonic love and the last shreds of my naivete. My friend and next-door neighbor Luke* snorted some possibly skunked cocaine he had gotten from a Pakistani couple with a home drug lab. When Luke first told me about the incident, he seemed like himself, but day by day, his paranoia grew until I couldn’t reason with him. He begged me not to tell anyone so I didn’t, and he ended up tying a garden hose around his waist and repelling down the side of our building from his seventh-floor balcony.
I think about the night before he rappelled off the side of our building—I see him in my mind’s eye, freshly shaved and sweaty in his closed apartment. I didn’t understand what I was seeing until I wrote about it years later. The impossible do-over. How I wish he had told me what was really going on. How I long for the “words that tell me everything.”
“Here Comes the Light” by Casii Stephan
Part nine opens with my being dragged along a Neapolitan street by a purse snatcher on a motorcycle. When the purse snatcher grabbed my handbag, he didn’t bargain for it being wrapped around my wrist, so when he took off, he took me to the ground. As my back felt like it was being skinned alive, the knot holding my halter dress up was shirred through. When the purse snatcher let go, I cracked my head on the pavement, looked down, and between rivulets of blood streaming across my eyes, saw my naked breasts. Where had my dress gone?
I had gone to Naples to heal after Luke* died, and my great love and I had parted ways. Being mugged was a steeling. My mushy innards morphed into bionic hardware beneath a skin veneer. I no longer walked; I swaggered.
Then my father died.
To my surprise, in the space left by my father’s absence, the US beckoned me, pulling taught, pulling tired. I wonder if home is simply a construct of choice; either the place we hang onto at all costs or the place that catches us after we let go.
Casii’s lyrics, “It can be a long, long journey to ever see the light. It can be a cold, cold world. There can be long, long nights. Followed by a dark, dark morning. But here comes the light. Here comes the light,” capture the hope I feel when I turn the corner on something difficult. There is still hard work to do, but I know I can do it. That is the light.
“Titanium” by Sia
So much of Breakfast Wine is about home. What ties us to a place? What unties us? Part ten ends on my last night in Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan, Iraq. For a decade, I had been negotiating that liminal space between mobility and fixity, and now I was returning to the States. It was time for me to learn how to sit with myself outside a conflict zone so my life could expand.
I went to a favorite haunt gorged with memories. “Titanium” played in the dining room, pulling me back in time to a party in a private home with a bigger collection of Kurdish books than the city’s library. I arrive with a friend and we glide onto the dance floor. Dancing feels like flying. In the bubble of breath and body we form, there is exhilaration and release. I have never felt so alive, so complete, so free.
*Not his real name
Having worked in conflict zones such as Iraq, the West Bank, and Ukraine, Alex Poppe writes about fierce and funny women rebuilding their lives in the wake of violence. She is the award-winning author of four works of literary fiction. Breakfast Wine, her memoir-in-essay of her near decade in northern Iraq, will be published by Apprentice House Press on June 10, 2025. Most recently, she has worked in international development, awed by place, people, and their stories. Visit www.alexpoppe.com