In the Fall of 1959, the Iraqi modernist poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab published his perplexing and disturbing memoir, I Used to be a Communist (Kuntu shiyu‘iyyan). For seventeen weeks, from 14 August to 17 November, al-Sayyab published regular installments in the Baghdad daily, al-Hurriyya. The episodes detail the history of his involvement with the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), his decision to leave in 1954, and his reflections on the present. The text is remarkable on many levels. The timing of the publication coincides with the period during which the ICP discovered that, even though it had supported and saved the Qasim regime only months before, it would remain on the outside of power, outflanked and, months later, eventually defeated. From the outset, it is clear that al-Sayyab’s motivation came from bitter recent experience, and the memoir is meant to settle personal scores and reveal uncomfortable secrets. But it does more than that. In the war between Qasim, the ICP, and other Arab nationalist parties, the memoir serves to establish al-Sayyab’s political allegiance. More importantly for my purposes, the memoir also articulates an aesthetic-ideological vision with deep implications of his iteration of modernist poetics. What are the implications of this memoir for making sense of al-Sayyab’s development as a poet during this period? How does this memoir square with the other memoirs by other modernist poets of the Arab world? Rather than reading Kuntu shiyu‘iyyan solely as a key document in the shifting political tides of that year, this paper will read the memoir as a literary work, and indeed, the only major prose work by one of modern Iraq’s most important poets.