“Twenty years after I left my country (Iraq), I returned in the summer of 2016 to interview Yazidi people who escaped Daesh (for the sake of writing my new book). One of the survivors pointed to his village on a big map on the wall. He mentioned that these colors of nature on the map, in reality, turn to one color, the color of dust. Then later, when a journalist colleague showed me a digital map of U.S. military bases in the area, the poem turned on like a light.”