Majnoon Field Guide by Rheim Alkhadi

I went to the field; I became many.   Majnoon is an oil field in the global south. Majnoon is also the violence, and the state of mind that survives the violence. How can this be a field guide in any customary sense? Latitudes have been taken. Words are written in disruptedor troubled syntax. Rather, this book proceeds alongsidea search for what many call emancipatory practice; to beenacted in the field, where we feel most alive. The volume is divided into five parts, preceded by mapsand legends.First in the sequence is a colour-coded soil map,“Majnoonand Hir Environs”, adapted from materialoriginally pub-lished in 1960 by the Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture. It wasthe product—relic, really—of a brief era that saw fieldsand farmlands redistributed among labourers and peasants.Since then, the map has changed with the shifting sub-stance of our earthly constitution; it pivots on the exampleof Majnoon. Any map is appended by its legends, and I rewrite themfrom the perspective of dismantling