[casi] "They came to Baghdad" (Fwd)

[H Sutter <citext@DELETETHISchebucto.ns.ca>]

An Iraqi poet (and exile) remembers Baghdad - his,
the past's, the poets'... and the invaders'.

And he wonders about the irony that Baghdad has
now fallen into the hands of a man who is unlikely
to appreciate the city's "precious symbolism and
rich history".

--Elga


http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/print/2003/634/bo1.htm

<Start Fwd>
THEY CAME TO BAGHDAD

By Sinan Antoon

Published by Al Ahram Weekly Online

April 17-23, 2003

945 Buwayhids; 1055 Seljuks; 1258 Mongols led by Hulagu;
1340 Jalayrs; 1393 & 1401 Mongols led by Tamerlane; 1411
Turkoman Black Sheep; 1469 Turkoman White Sheep ; 1508
Safavids;1534 Ottomans under Sultan Sulayman the
Magnificent; 1623 Safavids; 1638 Ottomans under Sultan
Murad IV; 1917 British; 1941 British again to depose
pro-German government; 2003 Anglo-American invasion.


Of bridges and birds

Sinan Antoon sifts through the rubble of his native
Baghdad

It is agonisingly difficult to write about one's
hometown as it drowns in flames and suffocates with
smoke. After tons of bombs and thousands of liberating
missiles, now many of Baghdad's own inhabitants are
pillaging the city under the encouraging and voyeuristic
eyes of its latest invaders. This is by no means the
first time that Baghdad has fallen so violently, but in
the past its fall had always happened "before" or "back
then". One needed to plough through the many volumes of
the city's history and poetry, or listen to its elders,
in order to learn more about those past falls. This
time, however, it is in the painfully present tense. A
soft click on the remote control is all you need to get
variations on one theme: the fall and destruction of
Baghdad is live!

As if trying to enter through one of its remaining
gates, I start to approach Baghdad, or rather one of the
many Baghdads I have carried about with me for years, by
measuring the extent to which its present reality
betrays the enchanting and idealised signifiers that
have taken it in turns to represent it. Or those which
have tried to capture some of its magic. For now it
betrays, or is forced to betray, like never before all
of the accolades bestowed upon it by its numerous
rulers, chroniclers and lovers. It is no longer now the
"Abode of Peace, Mother of the World, Abode of Beauty,
Gift of the Gods, Triumph of the Gods, Round City", etc.

Whichever way I choose to approach the city, I must
tread warily, for its streets are still littered with
bodies, books and blood. Even the safe, labyrinthine
streets of my own memory are not free from the ghosts of
wars, but at least they cannot be destroyed, or looted
and pillaged, except by amnesia.

Built as the capital of the burgeoning empire of the
Abbasids in 762, Baghdad was to be repeatedly conquered
and sacked by would-be emperors, some local, many
foreign. The ritual of imperial ascent dictates
trampling on the symbols of a glory as this is being at
once eclipsed and emulated. And so the city was
conquered, sacked and rebuilt time and time again. In
its heyday, Baghdad was the heart of an empire, and its
rulers, too, wrought havoc on distant lands. But, most
of its caliphs and sultans were also patrons of art and
knowledge, connoisseurs, and sometimes composers, of the
most beautiful poetry to have survived in the collective
memory of the Arabs. Now, it is Baghdad's ironic fate to
have been subjugated by a would-be emperor, who has yet
to master his mother tongue. While he is fully aware of
the geo-strategic importance of Baghdad, Bush is
probably the one least aware, in the history of the
city's conquerors, of the precious symbolism and rich
history of his booty. Does it matter to him?

Baghdad was for many years the enchanting "mother of the
world", as the city was once called. It was so
sophisticated and elegant in its golden age that an
Arabic verb, yatabaghdadu, was derived from its name to
signify how people used to emulate the coveted styles
and ways of Baghdad's elites.

Thousands of invisible umbilical chords still bind the
city to many a soul. With every bomb, missile and fire
that has erupted over the last three weeks in Baghdad, I
have felt the pain of those chords being violently
severed in my heart. Now, alas, even some of those who
are still in the city's womb are unleashing decades of
pain, violence and war upon its body and scarring its
memory, together with their own collective history, in a
masochistic or matricidal orgy.

I grew up in the Baghdad of the 1970s and 1980s. At that
time the city's many faces, like its history, were
already being appropriated and changed by Saddam and his
regime to make it his Baghdad. His desire to inscribe
his name and face onto the city's history and streets
was insatiable. He fancied himself the descendent and
natural heir to the likes of Abu-Ja'far Al-Mansur, the
city's founder, and Haroun Al-Rasheed, its most
illustrious ruler. And so I witnessed his murals,
monuments, statues and sayings invading the city's space
like rampant scars. By the time I left Baghdad in 1991,
it had almost become a permanent exhibition of his
likenesses. But, for those who knew it well and looked
hard enough, there were always spaces to which one could
escape and converse with the city, stealing a few kisses
away from his watchful eyes, at least until the early
1980s.

While at secondary school, I used to skip the classes of
one boring teacher to wander in Baghdad's old streets. I
was not alone in committing this "crime against our
country", as the headteacher of our school called it
when he chastised us the next day. He thought that we
were skipping school to go to the movies, while Iraqi
men were dying on the front in the war with Iran. Little
did he know that we were actually acquainting ourselves
with our city and its history without lethargic and
dogmatic mediation.

My accomplice, a classmate, was obsessed with Baghdad's
history, and he had devoured his father's collection of
history books. We used to take the bus from our school
in Al-A'zamiyya to the heart of old Baghdad. We
wandered in Suq Al-Saray, sifting through used books and
hunting for rare ones. We would pass by the famous store
of Al-Haydari and eat kahi, a delicious Baghdadi pastry
with cream and syrup. We would sit at one of the old
cafes on Al-Rasheed Street and sip cardamom tea and be
subjected to suspicious looks from the cafe's more
regular and older customers before parting company. My
friend was the perfect guide, not just because of his
vast knowledge of every coup, cabinet and uprising in
the country's history, but also because I had no qualms
about telling him to shut up when he went over the word
limit I had randomly set, or started to expound on what
I deemed uninteresting. There were many times when I
wanted to hear the city speak on its own.

In later, less innocent years, I would walk alone in
Al-Karrada, starting from Kahramana Square with its
beautiful statue and fountains and making my way to
Abu-Nuwwas Street to meet companions at one of its many
bars. The last few years of the Iraq-Iran war (1980-
1988) haunted our youth and added nihilism to our lives.
During this period, the dark and dreary bars on
Abu-Nuwwas Street were our haven, and we remained
true to the poet's spirit and his wine songs expressing
disillusionment with the here and now, but also gaiety,
lightheartedness and hedonism to combat its ephemera.

The dissident contemporary Iraqi poet Muzaffar Al-Nawwab
was our guide on our way back home at night. His fiery,
banned poems were smuggled into Iraq on cassettes and
circulated secretly among friends. Some of those friends
stayed in Iraq, withering under the sanctions and now
another war, while many ended up in various exiles, in
countries from Brazil to Australia.

A tear always wakes in my eye whenever I listen to the
traditional Baghdadi maqamat we used to sing together --
words that express a deep sorrow aged to perfection and
echoing Mesopotamia's painful history of floods, famines
and the fire of unrequited love. Arab friends always ask
about the secret of the excessive sadness of Iraqi
songs. Now they know it and will have to cry along.

***

Having a fascination with birds, I liked to go to Suq
Al-Ghazl where birds and animals of all kinds were sold
on Fridays. I also liked to sit on our roof and watch as
the pigeons kept by our neighbour's son would take their
usual flight in the afternoon Baghdad sky. At times,
these birds would dodge, and compete with, the kites
flown by kids. Sometimes I could spot a flock of birds
flying high above, en route to their breeding grounds in
the north. Perhaps I remember this now because of
something I read a few days before the US-led invasion.
Reuters reported that these annual migration routes
could be disrupted when the war erupted. In the period
between mid-March and mid-April, one finds the greatest
number of birds in Iraq. Since many of these birds
cannot make it to their breeding grounds in one flight,
they stop and "refuel" on the banks of the Tigris and
Euphrates and in the southern marshes drained by Saddam.

Every year around this time I would look for the one or
two white storks that used to nest on the dome of the
old church in Bab Al- Mu'azzam. I wonder if they have
made it to Baghdad this year? I doubt it. I clipped that
Reuters article from Al-Hayat and left it lying around.
When I read the article again on the second day of the
war, American B-52 bombers were taking off from
Fairfield Airbase in England and heading towards the
skies over Baghdad. Someone on Fox News described them
as "beautiful birds", and Rumsfeld spoke of "the
humanity which went into the making of these weapons".

If they don't perish first, the storks will try to
return next year. Perhaps many Baghdadis who have been
forced to seek refuge away from Baghdad are now also
wondering how long it will be before the skies are
clear, or how long they will have to recite lines
written by a fellow Baghdadi, Muzaffar Al-Nawwab:

I have accepted that my fate
Will be like that of a bird,
And I have endured everything
Except humiliation,
Or having my heart
Caged up in the Sultan's palace.
But O dear God
Even birds have homes to return to,
Whereas I fly across this homeland
>From sea to sea,
And to jail after jail after jail,
One jailer hugging another.

***

I felt pangs of pain a week ago as I watched an American
tank crawling across Al- Jumhuriyya Bridge in the heart
of Baghdad. I have crossed that bridge hundreds of
times, and I used to linger a bit half way along,
especially when walking alone, and look down at the
river. The Tigris splits Baghdad into two sections:
Al-Karkh, on the western bank, and Al-Rusafah on the
eastern. I used to recite Ali Ibn Al- Jahm's famous line
about the enchanting, almond-shaped eyes of the Baghdadi
women who used to cross from one bank to the other in
the nineth century. On a lucky day, I would encounter a
descendent or two of those women. Now the moon-like
faces celebrated in thousands of verses are hiding in
houses on both banks, white voyeuristic satellites are
hovering above and scrutinising every inch of the city's
body.

It was also impossible, whenever I crossed any bridge
over the Tigris, not to remember Al-Jawahiri's (1900-
1997) most famous poem about Baghdad, written when he
was in exile in Prague in the early 1960s. Although
hailing from Najaf, he, like many before and after, fell
in love with Baghdad and claimed it as his muse. In
fact, every Arab poet considers Baghdad his home.
Al-Jawahiri's Baghdad was "Umm Al-Basatin" (the mother
of orchards), and he saluted its banks and embraced them
from his exile. He reminisced about the boats meandering
along the Tigris and wished that their sails could form
his shroud the day he was laid to rest. Alas,
Al-Jawahiri died in exile and was buried in Damascus in
1997. Today, many parts of the "mother of orchards" have
been burnt by the mother of all bombs, or M O A B as it
is termed by the Pentagon.

In hoping to die in Baghdad, Al-Jawahiri was probably
echoing one of his poetic ancestors, the great poet
Al-Ma'arri from the fourth century. Abul-'Ala'
Al-Ma'arri
left his hometown in Syria and came to Baghdad, but he
was disappointed at the cold reception he received and
yearned for his own people, resolving never to return to
Baghdad. However, as soon as he left, he could not
contain his desire to return:

Were it my choice I would have died among you.
But, alas, that is beyond my reach.
Give me one last drink from the Tigris:
If I could, I would drink the whole river.

In 1991, the US bombed the bridge about which I am
writing, slicing it in two. The justification then, as
for the other acts of destruction now, was that it was
part of the city's "command and control network". I
rushed out the next morning on my bike to see for
myself. Hundreds of Baghdadis had also come and were
looking on in silence. Now unable to link Baghdad's two
banks, the bridge resembled a broken smile.

My best friend and I used to roam Baghdad, surveying the
daily destruction and checking on friends and relatives
to see if they had been consigned to the dubious
category of "collateral damage". The bombing had severed
all communications in the first week, and the phones
were dead. Now, tanks spit their fire towards a row of
houses on the eastern bank of the Tigris, and blazes go
up. A correspondent announces that Apaches are hovering
over Baghdad for the first time, but, alas, this is a
familiar species in our part of the world. They have
come to make sure that Baghdad's residents join the
Palestinians as the fortunate recipients of the latest
form of lethal "liberation".

Rivers of blood are flowing along the Tigris as America
tattoos its imperial insignia into the bodies of Iraqi
children, stamping their futures with its corporate
logos in order to "safeguard" it. There is an abyss in
and around Iraq, and it is widening by the moment. But
one must look for, and cling to, a bridge. And so I try.
A few bridges north of Al-Jumhuriyya Bridge lies Jisr
Al-Shuhada' (Martyrs' Bridge). Throngs of Iraqis burst
onto the streets in January 1948 to express their
rejection of the Portsmouth Treaty signed between the
despicable Iraqi government of the time and Great
Britain. Some of them were killed by the regime's
bullets on that bridge, and Al-Jawahiri commemorated the
uprising with one of his powerful poems. It was an elegy
for his brother, Ja'far, who was one of those killed and
had died in Al-Jawahiri's arms.

Many Iraqis know the poem's opening lines by heart. Like
many of Al-Jawahiri's poems, this one has prophetic
lines: "I see a horizon lit with blood/And many a
starless night./A generation comes and another goes/And
the fire keeps burning." Baghdadis and Iraqis have
indeed lost their way, but they have not lost their
collective memory. The US tanks will have to go soon,
and so will the generals, the soldiers and their Iraqi
informants. I can already hear the chants of the
demonstrators and read the signs. The clock is ticking,
and the message is simple enough for even Bush to
understand: Leave Iraq!

In The Thousand and One Nights, otherwise known as the
Arabian Nights, that great work that is eternally
synonymous with Baghdad, when morning comes, Sheherazad,
mother of all narrators, must embrace silence and leave
her readers to wonder where the narrative will go next.

For me, it is mourning time, and Baghdad is now
enveloped in a long, cruel and starless night. But,
just as she's done in the past, she will wake up once
more and try to forget. And I must tend to her scars,
ward off her future nightmares, and shower her with
kisses and love from afar.

) Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
<Off>






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