The Orange Trees of Baghdad

by Nadir, Leilah

  The next day, I got up and went to work as usual, numb from shock. I called my aunts, and they’d managed to speak to Auntie Lina one more time. Thankfully, the phone line still worked. They urged her to go and live with our other family members and not worry about the house. They didn’t want her to be alone. Lina said that all the neighbours were staying in, hiding in their homes. She was determined to stay in our house. They didn’t have a bomb shelter to go to anyway. The house is between an oil refinery with a human shield on it, which they thought was good, and one of Saddam’s palaces, which they thought was bad—very bad. My aunts asked why Lina didn’t leave Iraq. She said no one was taking Iraqis. Some neighbours who had tried to get out via Syria had been turned back; the border was sealed. The people have to stay in Iraq now and face whatever comes.

  The last thing my great-aunt said, now sick with fear, was, “Why are they doing this to us?”

  VICTORIA AND TWENTY-MONTH-OLD IBRAHIM

  THE FAMILY ON THE TIGRIS RIVER, GOING TO AL JAZZRA (THE ISLAND)

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Father Country

  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. . . . On the second day of the [2003] war, American B-52 bombers were taking off from Fairfield Airbase in England and heading toward the skies over Baghdad. Someone on Fox News described them as “beautiful birds,” and [US Secretary of Defense Donald] 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. —Sinan Antoon, “Of Bridges and Birds,” Al-Ahram Weekly, April 17–23, 2003

  With the war raging, I wasn’t sleeping, and I found it difficult to go through the rituals of my daily life. I realized that my mother’s culture was terrorizing my father’s. The present was invading the past. This had already happened in my lifetime during the 1991 Gulf War, but then the international agreement to go to war and the complicit silence of the Western media had shielded us from the reality of the devastation wrought on Iraqi society. This time I was thirty-two, twelve years older, and I knew that there was something deeply wrong with what was happening.

  My siblings and I would not exist if the British hadn’t created Iraq from the defeated provinces of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Battles and empire produced our family, and so we are the fruits of war. When I look in the mirror, I try to guess which of my features I inherited from my Iraqi father and which from my English mother. But the same clash of cultures that created me is also part of what makes it impossible for me to visit my ancestral home. Now, as I watch this war, it’s as if one part of me is invading the other. I feel like this war is between two cultures whose blood flows in me, and it makes the experience entirely different. To look at me is to look at both the aggressor and the victim. I am both the enemy and the ally.

  And my father was the enemy once again. Despite being close to him, I knew little about his relationship to Iraq or his extended family. His past had been submerged inside him, and he had kept it from us for reasons we didn’t understand.

  The outline of his story is simple. The Iraqi government granted him a scholarship to go to England, but he was expected to return and bring his knowledge back home. Instead, my father fell in love with my English mother, and my grandfather paid back the scholarship to the government. As the Iraqi regime was so ruthless, my father never knew what would happen if he went back, so he never risked returning to his homeland. He might have been forced to stay at the whim of the regime, or be drafted into the army or be forced to work at the Iraq Petroleum Company as an engineer or some other job that he didn’t want.

  In retrospect the story should have seemed strange, vacant of details, but I never questioned it. My father is not loquacious, especially when the subject of conversation turns to himself, his past or his emotions. A good listener, he is an observer and thinker who rarely says anything superfluous and who, when he does speak, usually says something unusual, ironic or surprising. So it was not strange to us, his children, that he never spoke much about his homeland.

  At fifty-nine years old, his hair is still black with few silvery strands, his thick black eyebrows make him look very serious, but his dark eyes are gentle. He looks like an Arab, but from living for so many years in Northern countries, his olive skin is pale and burns when first exposed to the summer sun.

  A successful engineer and businessman, he has a scientific, rational approach to life. He is very reliable, loves math and famously, as his colleagues sometimes tease, “never makes mistakes.” He isn’t superstitious, a conspiracy theorist or a reactive thinker; he loves games of strategy like bridge and chess and laughs off mysticism and miracles. Perhaps because he married an Englishwoman, he didn’t socialize much with other Iraqis or live out an Arabic life in Canada. He assimilated willingly and easily, and was happy in the West.

  After 9/11, the public discussions about whether the US should invade Iraq began to heat up. In all the confusion and conflicting arguments I’d asked my father if he thought that Iraqis would be happy to see Saddam removed. He shook his head. Then I said, “Will you be happy to see him gone? I mean, you couldn’t ever go to Iraq because of him.” Then I stumbled; it was hard to say, “You couldn’t even go to your parents’ funerals, even see them before they died because of his regime. You must want to see him gone.” He shrugged; he still didn’t want to betray his feelings. He’d never stood at their graves. I thought he wasn’t going to answer me, but he did.

  “No one hates Saddam Hussein as much as I do, no one would be happier than me to see him gone,” he’d replied angrily. “But this war is illegal, immoral! It would be unjustified, it is a pre-emptive war. It would be seen in the Middle East as an unprovoked invasion by the West, against international law, confirming everyone’s worst fears about Western imperialism. It would not be acceptable. You can’t just decide that you don’t like your neighbour and go into his house and murder him. You can’t take the law into your own hands. Innocent people will die and then how can the world ever turn to a country ruled by a despot and tell them that such actions are unacceptable? It would be hypocrisy.”

  My father believed that the goodwill the world had shown the United States after September 11, 2001, gave them an opportunity to show restraint, to get the world on their side and to begin the new millennium peacefully.

  The first protest my father had ever attended was against the US invasion of Iraq. He was skeptical.

  “I can’t believe I’m protesting the removal of Saddam—that just shows you how bad Bush’s policies are! It’s ridiculous,” he’d said, shaking his head. “If George Bush can’t win a popularity contest with Saddam Hussein, he must be pretty bad.” He’d then added sardonically, “I’m sure Bush is going to be really scared by all this peaceful protest.” But he marched anyway.

  All the years of the Iran–Iraq War, the Gulf War and the sanctions, when I think about it now, must have been agonizing for him. But he never complained or expressed bitter anger. In fact, I’d never heard him complain about anything in his life. His parents, two of his sisters (during the Iran–Iraq War), his aunts and uncles, his childhood friends and countless cousins were all left behind in Baghdad, while he was living in the safety and prosperity of Canada, bringing up a family of four children. His pain was deeply hidden from us all.

  All my life I’d never perceived my father as an immigrant and so whenever there was a war in Iraq, I was startled to be reminded that he came from an enemy land. I became more and more fascinated by him. Once, I asked him if he had an Iraqi passport, like dual citizenship. He’d laughed, saying, “You can’t get rid of an Iraqi passport,” but he never mentioned going back.

  On March 29, 2003, I decided to go to London with my father to visit his sisters, who had been living in England since the 1991 Gulf War. On the plane, I picked up The Globe and Mail and began t
o read an article by Paul William Roberts, one of the few journalists who was reporting from Baghdad, unembedded. The article, “Rocking the Cradle,” is both a lament for the city of Baghdad and an introduction to Iraqi history and culture. It was also the first article I’d read that offered the Western reader a sense of what Iraqi civilians felt about the war. He described the aftermath of what the Pentagon was calling shock-and-awe bombardment: “As I write, Baghdad lies in ruins around me. Not the ruins it was in last week, last year, a decade or even thirty decades ago. These are new ruins, and they’ve pushed Baghdad into the critical mass of ruin; more of it is now ruined than isn’t. No longer a city with ruins, it’s a ruined city in which even the intact buildings partake of desolation, silence and despair. It is empty, abandoned, but the people have not yet gone.”

  I read aloud the summary of five millennia of Iraqi history to my father, and when I got to the word “Nebuchadnezzar” he corrected my pronunciation, adding a guttural growl and an Arabic accent. It was like when he pronounced Aladdin Alah-ah-din with an emphasis on the “ah.” It reminded me of when he spoke the language to our relatives on the phone, or when I saw him read a letter in Arabic or write in Arabic script. It reminded me that my father had an alternate existence that I was not privy to, a family that I did not know.

  My father had only seen his parents a handful of times since he’d left home at age sixteen, and they had never had the opportunity to develop a relationship with us, their only grandchildren. His sisters had never married. Despite desiring to know Iraq, I’d never thought of how different my life might have been if Iraq had not been such an isolated country, but now I wondered what it would have been like to visit my family in their own home in Baghdad. Maybe I’d speak Arabic in the Iraqi Christian dialect, maybe I’d know how to cook Iraqi food, I’d know about the poetry, the music, the culture, the history.

  The Iran–Iraq War made it impossible for my family to visit Baghdad, and like all Iraqis, my relatives were forbidden to leave the country during wartime. For my grandfather Khalil this was especially hard because he had always loved travelling. From his days as a young man hiking in Syria and Lebanon, to his travels through Europe in the 1970s, he had always wanted to see more of the world. For a Syrian or an Iraqi of his generation, he was intrepid. Until his death, Khalil had to make do with travel within the borders of Iraq to satiate his nomadic appetite, with trips to Babylon, the desert and the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

  By the 1980s, Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian dictatorship made it extremely risky to ask questions on the telephone about our relatives’ true circumstances, which could put them in danger for perceived criticism of the regime. Iraq had an elaborate network of mukharabat (secret police), and no one knew who they could trust, so people never spoke about politics openly, even to their friends and neighbours. Even though we were not a political family and should not have been at risk, the ruthless brutality of the regime made it impossible for my father to visit his mother when she was ill, or to attend her funeral when she died in 1983.

  By the time I started university in Montreal in 1988, Iraq was the dark place of war, suffering and isolation we think of today. The Iran–Iraq War ended in the summer of 1988, though I knew almost nothing about it at the time. Iranians accepted the UN–brokered ceasefire, largely because they realized they were not just at war with Iraq, but also with the Western powers Iraq was developing increasingly close relationships with, especially the United States, which had naval forces in the Persian Gulf that were effectively supporting Saddam Hussein. I didn’t know that the front resembled the trench warfare of World War I in all its indiscriminate horror and use of chemical weapons, or that the West was complicit in arming Iraq. The “victory” was hollow though, because the toll on Iraq was tremendous: a quarter million Iraqis were dead, including the victims of the government’s brutal campaign against the Kurds; sixty thousand more were prisoners of the Iranians, and Iraq had run up a debt of eighty billion dollars.

  In August 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, marking the end of the cold war and the beginning of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. That same year my grandfather became suddenly ill. My father wasn’t told how serious Khalil’s condition was, because his relatives wanted to protect him from feeling obliged to risk going to Baghdad to see Khalil. When my grandfather died, my father couldn’t attend the funeral once again.

  When the travel restrictions were finally lifted in 1990, my two aunts Amal and Ibtisam came to London to visit their sister, Siham. On August 2, Iraq invaded Kuwait, completing the occupation in just twenty-four hours. Amal and Ibtisam were given emergency amnesty to stay in England until the crisis was over. They are still in London seventeen years later, their limbo extended indefinitely.

  Iraqi and Kuwaiti assets were frozen, and the UN Security Council imposed a total economic and trade embargo on Iraq. Saudi Arabia asked for US military assistance, and the US committed itself to the unconditional withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait. Within six months half a million American troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia. On January 16, 1991, the US-led coalition of twenty-eight other UN members began a fierce aerial bombardment of Iraq followed by a brief land war to push Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. A ceasefire was signed on February 28, 1991; by then, Kuwait had been liberated. Encouraged by the American president’s appeal to the Iraqi people to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein, there were rebellions in the North by the Kurds and in the South by the Shia. But no American help materialized, and it soon became clear that the United States, fearing the possible fragmentation of Iraq, preferred to allow Saddam Hussein to maintain his hold on the country.

  Though the “Gulf War” had ended, strict UN sanctions—the harshest ever imposed on a country—were left in place, ostensibly to prevent Iraq’s development of putative weapons of mass destruction and missile capabilities. But the sanctions only strengthened Saddam Hussein’s regime, while crippling the economy and civil life and making international communication even more difficult. So what little we did hear from our relatives was always, all of it, bad.

  Through all of this, I always had a mysteriously strong urge to visit Iraq and meet my remaining relatives. Even though I could never see my grandparents again, I could see the house where my father grew up and discover for myself the sights of ancient Mesopotamia and biblical Iraq. I’d been taken with the people of the south since I’d first read Wilfred Thesiger’s book The Marsh Arabs on his travels among this ancient people who have lived, until recent decades, in the same manner since Sumerian times, and the books by the English traveller Freya Stark had increased my fascination with Baghdad. I’d felt proprietary towards the country; it was somehow mine because of my heritage, and I felt proud of it and wanted to know it. But there was always something stopping me. I was eight when Saddam Hussein took power, and since then my family has always advised me to wait, without any explanation, saying, “Not now, wait until the situation gets better, when it isn’t so risky, so unsafe.” That day has not yet come.

  As the plane destined for London rushed forward into the night, propelling us into the future of the next day, my father finally started telling me the story of his past. The flight attendant was pushing her trolley in the aisle, and my father pulled down the tray in front of him. The neutrality of the airplane, high above land and its borders, seemed to allow my father to talk more freely than usual. He started at his beginning, as far back as he knew.

  “Well, I spent the first years of my life living in my grandmother Samira’s house because there was no such thing as a mortgage in Iraq, and so my parents couldn’t afford to have their own house right away, they had to save for it,” he said. “I don’t remember much about that time. I think she lived in Old Baghdad, though.

  “My mother didn’t cut my hair until I was three. I don’t know why, but she must have been superstitious. Sometimes Arab women believe that they can fool bad spirits, and so they disguise their sons as young girls to confuse the evil demons so they won’t hurt th
eir children. Warding off the evil eye. In my baby photos I look like a girl. I think before I was born she must have prayed for a healthy baby, a son even, and when I was safely in this world she had to fulfill her part of the bargain and not cut my hair. Who knows, who knows? I never got to ask her. Ask my sisters. Maybe they know,” he said.

  His grandparents on his mother’s side, Nasser and Samira, were originally from Mosul in northern Iraq, then home to a large Christian population. Northern Iraq is still full of Christian villages, some of which date back to the beginnings of Christianity. Samira and Nasser were born at the end of the nineteenth century in circumstances that were almost unimaginable even for my father. At the time, Iraq was divided into three provinces that had been ruled by the Ottoman Empire since 1638. Despite having Arabic names themselves, they made the curious decision to give their six children English or European names: Victoria, Harry, Antoine, Edward, Clement and Lina. Victoria, my father’s mother, was the eldest.

  “I am not sure why they did that, but the timing is interesting,” said my father.

  The British conquered Iraq in March 1917, eighty-six years to the month before the Americans in March 2003.

  “I don’t know much about my grandfather, Nasser, but the one thing I’m sure of is that he was a translator for the occupying British army.” He paused for a moment, deep in thought. “But my mother was born in 1914, just before World War I, so the dates don’t add up to her parents naming her for patriotic reasons. I’d love to know if giving babies English names was fashionable at the time.”