“Yesterday Saad talked to me about the poems of Bukowski. I wake up in the middle of the night and stare out of the window for a few hours, remembering life in New York … Saad said, ‘I don’t accept to be forced to choose between Saddam’s secular dictatorship and the present democracy of religious groups. I refused the first life but I also have the right to refuse the second. I want something else, not this terrible thing imposed on us by America!’ No Leaders Please, I realise, could be a blueprint for his life.”
The Iraqi Suitcase by Laura Waddington
Video Source: SpokenVerse (YouTube). No Leaders Please by Charles Bukowski, read by Tom O‘Bedlam.