The Orange Trees of Baghdad

by Nadir, Leilah

  But I can’t stop worrying. Now that I’ve made direct contact with my family, I want to know that they are all right, that they are still safe. I think about them every day. My friend Farah Nosh, an Iraqi-Canadian photojournalist, had stayed with her Iraqi family throughout the war, against her parents’ wishes. She was taking photographs of the war and its aftermath for all kinds of international media, but primarily for the New York Times. She had remained in Baghdad, so I ask her if she would mind going to see my great-aunt Lina, who is still looking after our house, despite being told that the war is over and she should go and live with Karim and the family. Now she is protecting the house from the looting and anarchy that had accompanied the fall of Baghdad. Farah agrees to go and take photographs of her.

  The first time I saw Farah was in Vancouver in the spring of 2001 at a protest against the devastating effect of ten years of sanctions on Iraqi society. Until then I’d only been peripherally aware of what the sanctions meant for average Iraqis. My aunts had told me that cancer medicines were becoming scarce, and that children were dying of malnutrition. Basic chemicals and foods were not allowed to be imported, spare parts needed for machines were banned. Western newspapers hardly covered the story even though these were the most draconian sanctions ever imposed on a country and were responsible for the deaths of a million people and the total disintegration of Iraqi civil society. The sanctions were an attempt to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing his weapons arsenal; instead, the average Iraqi was impoverished while Saddam continued trying to prove his power by building palaces and monuments to himself with funds from illegal oil smuggling.

  I invited two new friends, one of whom was Iraqi, to the protest. It was pouring rain and we marched slowly down Robson Street.

  “That’s my cousin Farah,” my friend pointed out. I saw a slight figure rushing by in a rain jacket, her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail. “She’s very involved in the anti-sanctions movement in Vancouver, you should meet her.”

  Next I heard Farah had been invited to go to Iraq with a group of sanction-busters who were defying the import ban on essential products needed for hospitals and schools. She hadn’t been there since she was a child. I was shocked that she was going to Iraq, and wanted to know more. I begged my friend to introduce me to her.

  We didn’t actually meet until Farah returned from her trip. Farah struck me that day as a very modest, unassuming, quiet woman who could be tough and brave if she needed to be. Beautiful, with a gentleness that belies her fierce strength, she has dark eyes and long dark wavy hair pulled back, and her olive skin was slightly tanned from her trip. She was even more petite than I’d thought when I first saw her. She moved slowly and precisely, unhurried, and she looked directly at me when she spoke, listening intently. I found out later that she’d been one of the only photographers to witness a meeting between the Iraqi deputy president Tariq Aziz and British MP George Galloway. I also found out that like me, she’d only recently “woken up” to the tragedy unfolding in Iraq.

  On September 11, 2002, Farah flew in defiance of the fear of terrorism from Vancouver to Amman, Jordan, and from there took a bus to Baghdad. By then, the likelihood of war was growing more and more obvious all over the Western world. The Bush administration was relentless in its attacks on Saddam Hussein and his regime, and in connecting the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, with Iraq, directly and indirectly. As a photojournalist Farah wanted to document the end of Saddam’s regime and see how her extended family was coping with the buildup to a new aggression. I was envious. I deeply desired to go as well, but I told myself I had a job and a mortgage in Canada, and besides I was not brave enough to join her. She promised her friends and family that she would come back home if a war began.

  On July 18, 2003, I open my e-mail to a photograph of my great-aunt Lina, sitting on a threadbare couch in the house in Baghdad where my father grew up. I’ve only seen the house in the peaceful photographs in Khalil’s album. One look at these photographs confirm that the house is in disrepair and is slowly becoming dilapidated despite all the best efforts of the people left behind. A house cannot survive without a family living in it.

  Farah writes: “She was there alone when I arrived by taxi and hadn’t been feeling well. There was no electricity, and it was very hot without a fan. She was sitting in the dark. But she felt like getting out of the house.”

  The photographs show a woman who looks much older than her seventy years, but is unmistakably my great-aunt whom I had teased on holiday in Greece many years ago because she didn’t know how to swim. She wasn’t smiling.

  When he sees the photographs, my father says, “She was a very tough lady. All the women in my family were strong and powerful. You know, she worked in Customs, very high up.”

  Her eyes are intense and alive, but she looks angry. She looks sad. In her hand is a woven straw fan. The roots of her hair are grey, but she has obviously still been dying her hair red with henna until the invasion. The roots have probably grown in during the months since the war began.

  Farah says it is strange to walk into that house in the middle of Baghdad, so far from her own home, after everything she’s been through in the war, and see photographs of me and my family framed around the room. Some are photographs that my mother had sent to her in-laws during the 1980s when the post was still working. Farah took a picture of a silver-framed black-and-white photograph of my father at age forty, who looks young and handsome, and behind the frame sits a light bulb, useless and forgotten on the mantelpiece. She captioned the photo Abu Leilah, Leilah’s father, which is the way Iraqis refer to one another, as the father of their eldest child, so much are children valued.

  Another photograph is of my great-aunt Lina’s wrinkled hands holding a photograph of our whole Iraqi family from the late 1970s during one of their London trips. In it, I must be seven or eight, and I sit on my grandfather’s knee, looking over at my father who is crouched beside us. Behind us sit my grandmother Victoria, and beside her are my great-aunts Madeline and Lina, who is cradling my younger sister on her knee. Behind them stand my three attractive young aunts, Amal, Siham and Ibtisam, in close-fitting T-shirts typical of London fashion of the day. It was the last time we were all gathered together like that. Farah’s photographs were the first that my father and his sisters had seen of their aunt, who had been like a second mother to them, in thirteen years. The house was a place of stopped time; memories more alive than the living present.

  The next day Farah sends two more photographs. The first is of Lina driving Farah through the streets of Baghdad. Her arm is raised, hand flexed open, and she is obviously talking while a cross dangles from the rearview mirror in the foreground of the photograph. Farah says Lina was driving her to Karim’s house, and while they drove Farah asked her what she thought of the Americans.

  She writes, “I knew her answer before she started. ‘No security, people afraid to drive their cars’—although she seems to have no problem—‘no electricity. . . . What have they done?’ ”

  The second picture is of Karim and his wife, Maha, who is my father’s first cousin; her father, Clement, and Victoria are brother and sister. This is the first picture I have ever seen of Karim. He has short black hair, slightly receding around his youthful face, and soft brown eyes. He wears a short-sleeved white polo shirt. Farah promises she’ll send more photographs soon; it isn’t easy for her to send e-mails. She tells me Lina asked when I was coming to Iraq and then describes what it’s like to cross the border from Jordan.

  “No visa, no papers, no bag check, just a few dollars with the Jordanians and a bit of a wait, maybe a bit longer . . . and you’re in Iraq.” She made it sound so easy.

  On July 22, Saddam Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusay, are reported shot and killed. Farah tells me later that she was one of the few Western journalists at their funeral in Tikrit.

  In August 2003, American soldiers are being attacked while out on patrol in Iraqi
cities and towns, and one or two are killed every day. The media is banned from broadcasting footage of military funerals in the US and so the public doesn’t realize yet just how violent Iraq is for their soldiers. The violence is being blamed on ex-Baathists who had lost power with the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime and on “foreigner fighters” who are sympathetic with Al-Qaeda. These are the first warnings that the war has not been won as easily as first assumed.

  I hear from Karim who, despite all this, is feeling slightly more hopeful.

  “I think the Americans had the wrong idea about Iraq and the Iraqi people when they first came here,” he writes. “They have done nothing for us. But now they are becoming more responsive to the Iraqi people, and we are now beginning to accommodate this new situation, the occupation.”

  He feels cautiously optimistic. Iraqis should give the Americans a chance to prove themselves. He is quick to point out that he is not a traitor for saying this.

  “Now they are starting to move in the right way, and we touch some difference in our lives. In my opinion, it will be better, but it needs patience and time, and people here do not have either because we suffered too much from the last regime. Everyone hoped that America would have a magic way to change everything.”

  He still doesn’t have any work, even though he routinely goes to his office, and he is asking me to find contacts for him in the West. He usually works on contract as a civil engineer, but he has had no contracts since the war began. I do what I can and ask around, but I don’t know anyone in his line of work. What could I do from here? The only company that I know that is working in Iraq is the multinational construction giant Bechtel.

  A few weeks later, on September 17, 2003, the news reports that the UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix said that the Iraqi regime probably did destroy most of its weapons of mass destruction. The fact that this would have been true without the war and subsequent anarchy and death is not made much of in the Western media. All the assertions, speeches and intelligence before the war that claimed these weapons not only existed but were an actual threat to Western society has been to a large extent forgotten. And the occupation has not ended; the war does not stop.

  Eventually, after a few weeks, Karim sends me his office phone number in Baghdad. He wants to speak to me. I am nervous about talking to him. We have built up a level of intimacy in the e-mails we’d exchanged, but we do not know each other. I dial the number, and the line takes about a minute to connect. The blank space of the quiet line gives me the feeling that Karim is beyond some barrier I cannot cross. When he answers “Merhaba,” his voice is heavy and weak, but my “hello” enlivens him. The line is muffled, and we have to keep repeating ourselves. I find that I am shouting into the phone.

  First, he wants to know why I spell my name wrong, “Leilah” instead of “Layla,” and he asks if I’d noticed he’d been spelling it “Layla” in his e-mails on purpose to correct me. I tell him that “Leilah” is the way I spell it, but he says, laughing, “No, it’s not correct. Because you are Layla, not Leilah.” There are two words in Arabic that sound similar, one is Leilah, which means “night,” and one is Layla, the proper name.

  “No, but my name is the word for night. That’s what my parents named me. Not Layla,” I insist.

  “No, no, no, I looked it up in the dictionary, and it says that the English way to spell Layla is L-A-Y-L-A.” I am confused now. I resolve to ask my aunts and my father to explain this to me. But for now, Karim has decided how to spell my name; he continues to spell it like that for the rest of our correspondence.

  He tells me that Lina has just had a back operation and that she can barely walk, but her phone still doesn’t work so I can’t call her. He has a friend who is an excellent doctor, so he got “a very low price.” He laughs again. He says that the Iraqi police had finally been given some good weapons and some authority by the Americans, that they were very brave and doing an excellent job. I tell him that we were only hearing bad news about Iraq since the truck bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad and the killing of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the envoy to Iraq on August 19, 2003. To us, this bombing seemed ominous. The UN was a symbol of international co-operation for many, but of course from the Iraqi point of view it was the UN that had gone to war in 1991 and the UN inspectors who had been in and out of Iraq for twelve years. It was the UN that had imposed the twelve years of sanctions that had ripped the fabric of daily life apart.

  He says of the recent violence, “This is an old film; we have seen all of this before. The Americans want an excuse to stay here.” Then he adds, “We all know that Saddam was an agent of America, and he has finally delivered Iraq to America.”

  I am stunned by his frankness.

  Karim still can’t believe that American soldiers are in the streets of Baghdad.

  “You see, for fifteen years we can’t think about America. It was the enemy. We can’t say the word ‘America,’ we know nothing about America. It was completely banned, it didn’t exist. No Iraqis were allowed to travel to other countries. We didn’t have satellite television, and even when the Internet came to Iraq most of the sites were ‘Access Denied,’ and our newspapers were controlled by Saddam. The world didn’t know us, and we didn’t know the world, especially America,” he concludes.

  It has been twenty years since regular commercial flights came in and out of Iraq. His children have never seen a passenger airplane.

  “I tried to show them one on television, but they don’t understand.” He sighs. “American aircraft fly over Baghdad and the children hear the noise but don’t really know what it is.” Iraqis are afraid that when the airport opens, no one will know how to behave on a plane. “I have travelled in the past, though. I once went to Scotland. Beautiful country, beautiful place.”

  Just before the invasion he finally received a car that he had paid for ten years earlier. The system under Saddam for purchasing cars was convoluted, and you didn’t know what you would get or when. You just paid a sum of money and put your name on a list and waited and waited. But under Saddam, Karim’s life was at least stable. He had a job, a house, and could bring up a family. But society was also extremely controlled and claustrophobic, and the threat of violence ever present.

  On April 9, 2003, the day the American army entered Baghdad, Karim says he was listening to an Iraqi station on a small battery-powered radio, which was reporting that the Americans were not in the city. Suddenly, his neighbour ran up to the house and came in.

  “Look down the street, there are the Americans! In Baghdad!”

  Karim said, “No, no. That is the Iraqi army.”

  His neighbour insisted it was the Americans. Many Iraqis didn’t know that the Americans had arrived and so they were driving around as usual checking on elderly relatives and friends. Suddenly, a car came down his street.

  “The soldiers shot at the car and killed everyone in it. We knew then it was the Americans.” There is a pause; the line crackles. “They have done many mistakes to the Iraqi people.”

  “When the soldiers arrived we were so frightened,” he continues angrily. “We thought the American soldiers would be so special, strong and powerful. But they were not more than twenty years old, just boys. They were nothing.”

  He then tells me about a relative from Fallujah who was in the Iraqi army, and who survived the war.

  “He told me that the soldiers didn’t know why the Americans wouldn’t die when you shot them. You would shoot at their bodies and nothing happened. My relative said, ‘They won’t die.’ I said, ‘What are you saying? That the Americans are immortal? Like angels?’ Soon after the war he told me that they had shields under their clothes, but if they were shot in the head, then they could die.”

  “At least now you have freedom of speech, with Saddam gone,” I say tentatively. “We couldn’t have had this conversation before.”

  Mostly when people in Canada talk to me about the war, they say s
omething like this to justify the invasion, thinking this freedom is worth a war.

  “We are free to speak, but no one is listening anyway.” He laughs his belly laugh again. “We used to hear the word ‘no’ for everything in our lives, and now we feel free. We have to thank the Americans for that. But we all know that the Americans came to Iraq for oil.”

  He can’t believe that still the Americans have not restored anything: no power grids, no sewage or water treatment, no telephones. He says this is why there is resistance to the occupation; after the Gulf War, Iraqis had all of these things operational very quickly.

  “How can we enjoy our new freedom without any of these things?” he asks me.

  Karim goes on to say how sorry he felt for the American soldiers in Baghdad because the temperature had risen to 40 and 45 degrees Celsius.

  “Their faces are so red, like tomatoes, and they have these small tanks on their backs and a little tube coming out and they drink water from it. Just drinking water all the time, but I don’t think it helps them. They are still hot,” he says.

  Then Karim’s thoughts swing back to the strangeness of their presence.

  “It is still like a weird dream when I see the American soldiers at a checkpoint,” he muses. “They don’t understand the Muslim culture. Even though our family is Christian, we respect Islam because the Muslims are in the majority here. I mean, even my young daughter respects Ramadan. She won’t eat her lunch sandwich while her classmates are not eating anything all day.” He points out that the Americans search women at the checkpoints and that no Iraqi man would let another man near his wife. “Now they are starting to have women soldiers checking our wives at the checkpoints, which is much better.”

  Some American soldiers even go to Karim’s church. They talk to him afterwards, saying they like the Iraqi women coming out after church.