The Orange Trees of Baghdad

by Nadir, Leilah

  Despite his decades at the museum, Irving’s enthusiasm for his subject has not waned. He immediately puts the alien ancient Mesopotamian artefacts into human context, making me feel intimate with the people. As we walk upstairs to the ancient Near East collection, he tells me that in our modern arrogance we don’t realize, or can’t believe, that the people of ancient Mesopotamia were just like us. True, they believed in many gods rather than one, but they were people who played board games and musical instruments like the harp and the lyre, and wore gold jewellery. The women cried out in childbirth, the men went to war, they wrote and read, had two-storey houses, running water, fortune tellers. There were professional storytellers in Mesopotamian towns and cities as there were throughout the Middle East until this century.

  Once upstairs he starts to show me the precious objects in the Victorian wood and glass cabinets. The first is an inlaid board for the Royal Game of Ur, from more than four thousand years ago; ancient games are one of Irving’s areas of expertise. He points out an inlaid jewelled ram made of gold and lapis lazuli and the exquisite Queen Pu’abi’s headdress decorated with delicate gold leaves and stars dating from 2400 BC. He explains that when the first archaeologists began studying the ancient Near East in the nineteenth century, they went looking primarily for connections with sites that could verify biblical texts. When they found the cultural relics of ancient Mesopotamia with its human-headed winged bulls and pantheon of city gods, they saw them as the creations of a barbarian people who were not civilized compared to the Greco-Roman or Judeo-Christian cultures that followed. Ancient Mesopotamian culture has not inspired the world as ancient Egyptian culture has, despite being older and more intimately connected with Western history. Iraq doesn’t have great monuments like the pyramids or tombs of Egypt. Most of the remnants of the culture are buried under the desert sand.

  Iraq is mysterious in the abstract: Mesopotamia, Sumeria, Assyria, Nineveh, Gilgamesh, Babylon, Baghdad. The land of the two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, the birthplace of civilization. Iraq’s roots are humanity’s roots. As I am guided through the museum by Irving he reminds me that these cultures, the first civilizations in the world, not only invented writing, agriculture and architecture, but also celebrated art and music through religion. Iraqi art dates back over five thousand years, to the exquisite Sumerian glazed-brick architecture in colourful designs. The Sumerians also wrote literature on clay tablets. I ask Irving to read out some of the ancient language so I can hear it being spoken. The soft melody of this long-dead tongue comes to life through Irving’s voice, sounding strange in the way foreign languages do, but with the added dimension that the language no longer exists.

  “What kind of language is it?” I ask.

  He says, “The language is as sophisticated as English, full of puns, jokes and irony.”

  I tell him that I revisited the rooms downstairs housing the superb Assyrian bas-relief carvings of kings hunting lions, and going to war and bringing back booty from their conquests. Irving doesn’t see these sculptures primarily as works of art, but as an early form of propaganda, not only created for beauty, but for the narrative they told about the king and his power.

  “Like a newspaper,” I laugh.

  Finally, he shows me the British Museum’s latest acquisition, a carving of a winged goddess, perhaps Inanna, flanked by lions and owls, known as the Queen of the Night. Below the sculpture, a photograph shows it as it would have looked in Mesopotamian times, not pale stone but painted bright red and blue.

  The first temples built for the gods were erected in Sumeria, and were the precursors of synagogues, churches and mosques. Their religious mythologies form the basis for later myths that became part of the Old Testament, Greek mythology and the Koran. Abraham, the founding father of the three great monotheistic religions, lived in Iraq, which was also the site of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, which means Gate of the Gods, and of the Ziggurat of Ur, said to be the inspiration for the Tower of Babel. The Epic of Gilgamesh, rediscovered on a clay tablet in the nineteenth century at the British Museum, gives us the original flood story. The story of Adam and Eve has echoes of Sumerian myth; Al-Qurnah in southern Iraq is reputed to be the site of the biblical Garden of Eden.

  When Irving points out burnt-clay tablets from the libraries of Nineveh, I say, “I heard that these tablets can survive any natural disaster.”

  I was also thinking of the recent burning of the National Library and Archive in Baghdad a few days after the destruction of the Baghdad Museum.

  “Well yes, many of the clay tablets survived fire because the clay was dried in the sun and had not been fired,” he explains. “When the library was burnt, the tablets were fired thus preserving them. And if there was a flood, because clay is porous, it can withstand water as well.” Irving tells me that the Mesopotamians wrote down the first laws on these clay tablets.

  “If you are ever in Paris you should see the Code of Hammurabi in the Louvre. The cuneiform script on it includes the formula ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ ”

  At the end of our meeting I ask, “Have you ever had the chance to visit Iraq?”

  Irving replies, “No, I have only seen it over the border from Syria.”

  “That is the closest I have been as well,” I reply. I explain that in 1992 I visited Deir Ezzor, Syria, a nondescript town near the border of Iraq. It is a drab collection of concrete houses, shops, cafés and offices, all covered in a thin layer of desert sand. Most people labour in the nearby oilfields or are peasants who work the land. Bedouin women with tattooed faces wear colourful sequined scarves and dresses, bells on their shoes and gold amulets around their necks. Since oil wealth hasn’t accumulated there, few outsiders visit.

  I was on my way to the archaeological sites of Dura Europolis and Mari in 1992 when I passed through Deir Ezzor. There, in the middle of a gritty desert, I found out that the townspeople spoke Arabic with an Iraqi accent and listened to Iraqi music. I realized I was so close, and I suddenly wished that I was crossing the border into Iraq.

  It was only a year since the Gulf War had ended; I was too afraid to go to Baghdad and visit my relatives. The Baathist regime was known for killing or imprisoning people they thought might be their enemies, and having a foreigner in your house could put you under suspicion, even if he or she was a member of your own family. Saddam Hussein could arbitrarily decide to shut the borders at any time, leaving anyone stranded there. The situation was too volatile, and I was young and scared. My father had not wanted me to go to Iraq, but he never really explained why. Now I know he didn’t want to risk another family member being caught in the mire of Iraq’s unpredictable politics.

  “How do you feel about the fact that you have studied Iraq for your whole life without ever having set foot there?” I ask Irving.

  “It drives me crazy,” he admits.

  In the year Irving started his career—1971, the year of my birth—he wanted to visit, but back then you couldn’t get a visa if you were Jewish, even if you were non-practising, as he was. His name would probably have been considered Zionist, and so if he wanted to go, he would have needed written proof that he was not Jewish. Even though he desperately wanted to go to Iraq, he would not deny his identity.

  I ask him if he thinks he will ever get to Iraq. He admits that he doesn’t hold out much hope. At the moment, anyone employed by the British government—including British Museum staff—has to get a special permit to go, and because of the violence and insecurity in the country no one is being given permission.

  “How much have we discovered of ancient Iraq?” I ask.

  “We have only found about one percent of what is there,” Irving tells me. “Every tablet that was ever written is still there, unless it was chucked in the river or deliberately smashed. There must be millions of them still left in the ground; altogether we know of maybe three hundred thousand tablets in the collections of the world; most are still awaiting discovery. But at the moment, few sites are b
eing guarded and things are being stolen and the sites are being destroyed by war, making it very hard to do archaeology there in the future. There is so much we still don’t know. We have only scratched the surface.”

  After our meeting, I wander around the British Museum, in awe of all the treasures collected under one roof. What would it feel like if one day it was bombed, or looted or destroyed? How would it feel to walk through this building and see everything thrown out of the cases, the captions ripped from the artefacts, the highest, irreplaceable achievements of man crushed?

  Outsiders often talk of modern Iraq as an artificial nation because it was created out of three provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire by the victors of World War I. In the minds of Iraqis, though, “the land between the two rivers” has existed as an historic, geographic and cultural region for five thousand years and beyond. It is hard for Westerners to comprehend how long the historic memory is in Iraq, where people refer to events hundreds of years ago as easily as they refer to current political machinations. The destruction of the National Museum was an affront to all Iraqis, who saw it as a wanton attack on their shared history, almost foreshadowing the political disintegration of their country. Deprived of the symbols of their cultural unity, Iraqis could be more easily coerced into other alliances, whether religious, ethnic or political.

  But Iraq is universally regarded as the cradle of civilization, and the outrage at the destruction of its cultural institutions reverberated around the world as profoundly as the loss of the British Museum would. Only Iraqis felt the loss of their country to foreign occupation, but millions of non-Iraqis mourned the looting of priceless artefacts and archaeological sites and treasures. The grief gave them a taste of the horror Iraqis felt at the pillaging of their homeland.

  AMERICAN FORCES IN IRAQ

  PHOTO CREDIT: FARAH NOSH

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Porthole into

  Occupied Baghdad

  This war started out as a war on WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. When those were not found, and proof was flimsy at best, it turned suddenly into a “War against Terrorism.” When links couldn’t be made to Al-Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden . . . it turned into a “Liberation.” Call it whatever you want—to me it’s an occupation. —Riverbend, Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog From Iraq, 2005

  It isn’t until June 2003, a month after George W. Bush announced that the war was over and the “mission accomplished” and two months since my cousin’s first call after the war, that we hear from Karim again. I am back in Vancouver, and he has an e-mail address, and miraculously, the computer at his office still works. The phone lines in his office’s district are working too because his office is in central Baghdad. His home phone is still not connected. A week later, the UN Security Council recognize the US-led administration and officially lift the sanctions after thirteen years. Iraq is open to the world again; Iraqis in exile talk about going home to visit their long-lost relatives, but our family is still waiting, because everything still feels unstable and unsafe. No one can guess what the future will hold.

  I decide to send Karim an e-mail. I can tell you that he is a Christian professional in his mid-forties and that I have never met or spoken to him before. The next day I have his reply. He is so happy for us to be in touch.

  “This is one of the benefits of war. They say that calamity will combine a nation!” he says. Over the next few days we started a correspondence.

  He asks me if I know Arabic, and I have to admit that I don’t and blame it quickly on my father for not teaching me.

  “You should speak Arabic, you are Iraqi. You must learn!”

  I promise him I will.

  His English is excellent, considering he spent his whole life in Iraq. I ask him what he thought of the war, and he says that of course he felt very differently from me. He told me that he had survived three wars now spanning twenty years, and that “there is no one that we did not fight.” He said Iraqis had become acclimatized to war, and Iraq had lost millions of people. Death has become “an ordinary thing for us.”

  “We spent most of our life in conscription in the army,” he writes.

  He was supposed to do twenty months of mandatory service, the same amount my father would have been obliged to serve had he gone back to live in Iraq. As a result of “the continuous wars,” he spent over seventy months in the army, which was still less time than many of his friends. To object to army service would have meant prison or death. War was daily life. Many of his best friends were killed.

  “All the Iraqi people were looking to this war to bring the end of a tyrannical regime,” he says.

  Most people didn’t make preparations, just stockpiled food and water. He didn’t even do that because he thought the war would be quick, knowing first-hand that the Iraqi army was no match for the Americans.

  “What was the war like?” I ask.

  “It was different from all the last wars,” he replies. “Iraq became a laboratory for testing all the Americans’ new weapons and disposing of the old ones so that the Americans could keep their factories working.”

  I was shocked he’d phrased it this way, not citing oil or freedom.

  The war took twenty days, and they were the most miserable days of his life. From his own front door, he could see the airplanes and cruise missiles flying overhead, and everyone expected the bombs would fall on their houses.

  “The explosions made a terrifying noise, and each time we thought that the house would fall down, and the doors and windows shook as if they would burst out,” he tells me.

  One night, the British and American forces attacked at ten in the evening and didn’t stop until ten the next morning.

  “Twelve hours, and you might not believe it, but they did not stop for a moment.” His wife and twelve-year-old daughter could not stop shaking, “even though I gave my wife tablets.” At first, they thought an earthquake had hit the city because the house moved. “I felt the tiles on the ground would jump in my face.” They were standing beside the walls and could not move, even for a drink of water, for twelve hours. “It is difficult, I know, for you to believe, but it is the truth. The Americans said that it was a clean war, but it was the dirtiest war for civilians.”

  At the beginning of the war, they had water, electricity and telephones. After a week, they heard on the news that American communications companies were complaining because these centres had not been attacked, and this was part of “the deal.” Then the forces destroyed all the power plants and communications centres.

  “So we lost electricity and lived in darkness. And we lost each other without the telephone, and then the explosions at night were even more terrifying,” Karim says.

  I keep thinking of my great-aunt Lina, living alone in the dark to protect our house as the bombs fall night after night, without even the phone to comfort her.

  Then Karim stops writing, saying that maybe I don’t want to hear any more about their miserable lives.

  Karim doesn’t e-mail me for a few weeks, and when he finally does, he apologizes for not being in touch, but they have not had any electricity or water for twenty-five days. None. I mentally unplug everything that needs electricity or water in my apartment; it would be like stopping blood flowing in the veins of the house. And yet, in the next sentence, he says that he thinks it is wonderful that I am a writer, but that he would prefer that, as a young woman, I would “choose to write romantic stories, not sad ones.”

  He describes the trauma of the Americans entering Baghdad. He never says the word “coalition” or mentions the British; it is always the Americans. No one had expected to see tanks in the streets.

  “Now I must tell you a terrible story that happened to my friend’s daughter who was only in her early twenties and her husband and young family on that same day, the day they entered Baghdad,” Karim begins.

  The family was at her husband’s parents’ house to check on them when they decided to return to their own house near the centre of Baghdad. Sh
e drove with her husband and their children, two boys and one daughter.

  “Suddenly, they saw an American tank up the road,” Karim continues, “and without warning, the tank began to shoot at the car with the huge tank machine gun. Instantly, the father and their three children were killed. My friend’s daughter survived and leapt out of the car, waving at the soldiers to stop.” The soldiers started shooting at her. “She ran through the shooting and found a house. It was a miracle she survived. She was taken back to her father’s home. Her clothes were soaked with blood. She was like someone who had lost her mind.

  “A few days later, her brothers went to the place where the catastrophe had taken place, but the Americans threw them out. After five days, they were allowed to take the bodies, which the Americans had buried quickly, using only a shovel to dig the shallow graves.

  “When her brothers asked the Americans, ‘Why did you kill this family?’ the answer was simple: ‘We are sorry, it was an accident.’ ”

  He says the situation in Iraq is much worse than before the war. Baghdad is “following the law of the jungle.” Soldiers are “savage and ready to kill for any easy matter,” tanks push past cars in the street and if you do not stop your car, “they will crush it so easily.” They are drinking hot water from the local well because there is no running water and it is the height of summer. “And these attacks on the American soldiers, it is because the Iraqi people cannot bear this situation anymore.” The last thing he says is, “Don’t worry if you don’t hear from me for a while, because we are living a different life than yours.”