The Orange Trees of Baghdad

by Nadir, Leilah

  The family became refugees in Syria, and it took them four years to get to Toronto. When they arrived in Canada they were taken to the COSTI reception centre run by the Canadian government. That night the twins were finally reunited after twenty years. They clung to each other and cried for an hour before managing to start speaking. Visitors weren’t allowed at the centre, but the workers relaxed the rules when they saw the bond between the sisters. They talked all night long. The family had only just left the centre the week before my event and so coincidence brought us together at the reading. They could have been a mere statistic, another Iraqi family killed by a bomb blast, but instead they were beginning a new life in Canada.

  Having the woman in the photograph come to life was as astounding as if I’d written a novel and the characters I’d invented had walked into the room. I knew, of course, that the woman in the photograph was “real,” but although I believed in her as a human being, she was still a symbol of something larger, the war in general, Christians in Baghdad in particular. But now that she has walked off the page and stood in front of me, and I’ve heard her whole story, I know how numb to the reality of the news I am. If only we could hear the explosions, feel the fear, smell the burning flesh, see the dead bodies, touch the blood stains on the streets, look through the cavernous holes of emptied buildings, only then would we really know the utter despair and devastation that our war has made.

  Ten years ago, on April 9, 2003, Baghdad fell to the invading armies from the US and the UK, ending the 24-year-old regime of Saddam Hussein. On December 18, 2011, almost nine years later, the Iraq war “ended” as President Barack Obama fulfilled his election promise to withdraw his troops. It was the end of another horrendous period of Iraqi history, an end that came too late for millions of Iraqis, including my father’s family.

  And the violence has not stopped. According to Iraq Body Count, there have been 122,438 documented civilian deaths since the war began. In the last year alone, more than 4,250 Iraqis have been killed by the conflicts brought on by the invasion. The anniversary of the start of the war, March 20, 2013, was marked by Iraq’s worst day of violence this year with over a dozen bombings, including at a bank, a vegetable market and a restaurant, that killed 65 people and injured more than 200. And the bloodshed continues daily.

  In a Damascus street, my cousins Karim and Maha bumped into an acquaintance from Baghdad who urged them to seek out a distant relative in Montreal who they’d heard was able to help Iraqi Christians emigrate to Canada. He helped run a sponsorship program through a church. The program has helped Iraqis escape since the early years of Saddam’s regime, and the flow of refugees has not slowed in the decade since his overthrow. The distant relative turned out to be Natalie’s grandfather, the same man whose wedding my father and his family had attended all those decades ago in Beirut. And so a process began to help Karim and Maha leave Syria; they landed in Montreal in 2009. I will finally meet Karim and his son this year for the first time, and see Maha and Reeta again.

  Christians are leaving Iraq in droves. Recent estimates put the Christian population at under 300,000, about 1 percent of the total, compared to 5 percent in 1980. This is a massive, forgotten exodus, a tragedy hurried on by the war. What an irony that George W. Bush, a proclaimed Christian, has hastened the demise of Christianity in Iraq by his ill-conceived and illegal war. Now we watch as Syria has been enfolded in bloody conflict for two years, and the Iraqi refugees that fled Iraq for Syria are often in the surreal position of fleeing Syria for Iraq, hardly a haven.

  In May 2011, a friend of my aunt Amal went back to Baghdad after twenty years. He was from the same neighbourhood as our family and went to university in England with my aunt. He took photographs of our house that my aunt forwarded to me with a note saying how sad she felt at how rundown it looks. At first glance, to me, who has seen countless images of rubble-filled Iraqi streets on the news, it didn’t look that bad. But as I looked with her eyes, I saw the countless electrical wires draped like a lace web spun all over the house, the graffiti on the pillars, the cracked and blackened walls, the warped gates and the corrugated iron roof on the garage next door. The sidewalks were coming apart. It was a scene of slow decay and dereliction. It looked nothing like the smart new photographs of the earlier days when my grandparents had first built the house.

  She also forwarded a photograph of Al Rasheed Street, the commercial hub that connects the north and south of Baghdad. My aunts remember a lively street full of small boutiques, cinemas and restaurants. It had Baghdad’s only department store, and as young women they frequented the coffee shop there that overlooked the Tigris. Both Auntie Lina and Ibtisam worked in offices nearby. They bought fabric in the nearby souk that their mother and aunt would make into dresses for them.

  The photograph is a shock. Everything the eye lights on is broken down, blackened by explosions. The dilapidated two-storey buildings have porticoes in front of recessed shops; the second floor is now uninhabitable. All the windows have been blown out, leaving only empty frames. Bomb blasts, pollution and age have left black stains on the once cream exterior. Broken benches and chairs lean outside what remains of a juice bar below a massive crack in one of the portico’s pillars. What should be a bustling market scene is largely bereft of people, but then I notice a few men in the shadows of the portico, garbage littered at their feet, one caught with his hands up on both sides of his head, in a gesture of despair.

  Because of the devastating contrast between these images and my aunts’ memories, the photographs are the catalyst for severing the final connection and selling the family home. My aunts looked into the pictures and knew they could never live in the house again, on that street, in that neighbourhood, that they were never going back to Iraq, that the idea was pure fantasy. In ten years, they had lost all their relatives and friends, either to death or emigration. They had once known most of their neighbours, but now only one family remained on the street, everyone else had fled. There was no one to take care of the house and the country was too terrifying to return to. Why would they ever go back?

  After years of hand-wringing my father and his sisters had to face the fact that their home in Iraq was gone. They sold it in September 2011, a decade after the attacks of September 11 unwittingly spun the events that led to the American invasion. They think the new owners are going to divide the house up into apartments.

  I ask my aunts if they finally feel their house in England is now their true home, but Amal says categorically, “No, I will always feel that our house in Baghdad is our house. Nothing can replace it.” Her sisters nod in agreement. “You know when we signed the papers to sell it, we couldn’t keep back our tears. We were so emotional, we all cried together. It was very hard.”

  The last thing that Maha and Karim got out of the house was an icon that had hung on the wall for as long as anyone could remember. Framed in heavy dark wood, it is a faded illustration of the Virgin Mary praying with a large serpent coiled at her feet. It is yellowing, stained, torn and damaged by water. My aunts recalled that it had once been in a church in Baghdad that was torn down and the priest gave it to the family. They thought it was about a century old. Thirteen gold crowns topped with crosses are stuck around the Virgin’s head and body; one has fallen down in between the glass and the frame. Each time a prayer was answered, a golden crown was added.

  My aunts said that sometimes women in the family had prayed to the icon when they were infertile, asking Mary to bless them with children. Maha’s grandmother had spoken angrily to Mary and told her that she couldn’t call herself the true Virgin if she didn’t answer her prayer and grant her a child. She became pregnant that same month, so she named her daughter Mary. I looked at these crowns symbolizing answered prayers of long-gone family members. We don’t know who added them but they are in different styles and must have been added at different times. I happened to be newly pregnant when I first saw the icon, and felt compelled to pray for a healthy child. The following year I g
ave birth to a daughter.

  The suitcase full of documents that my father had asked Karim to bring when he fled is now housed with distant family members living in Baghdad. One suitcase is all that is left in Iraq of a family whose roots in that landscape, culture and language go back thousands of years, an ancient connection that likely reaches back to the earliest Christians, perhaps earlier. A suitcase bereft of even a person to carry it to the next homeland.

  My five-year-old son—born just weeks after this book was first published—is currently obsessed with outer space. We are following Chris Hadfield, the Canadian commander of the International Space Station, who is posting photographs of Earth from space via his Twitter account. He takes one of Baghdad with the caption, “Once the largest city on Earth, millions of us call this city home.” I send it to my father. He writes back, “Our house was in that teardrop shape bend in the river; to think you can see it from orbit. The river flows on both sides of this part of the city.” When anyone from our family next goes to that teardrop shape bend in the river, it will be as a visitor, a stranger in a strange land.

  Now I imagine walking down our street in Karrada, peering at the numbers in Arabic on the houses, stopping at “our house,” seeing the palm fronds beckoning from the garden behind it, and never being able to go inside, never seeing whether the orange trees recovered and bore fruit. I’ll go and find that suitcase, open it and see what artefacts of a life long gone are left behind. I’d like to liberate them.

  Vancouver, Canada

  May 21, 2013

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Al-Radi, Nuha. Baghdad Diaries. New York: Vintage, 2003.

  Ajami, Fouad. The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey, Vintage Books: New York, 1999.

  Dabrowska, Karen. Iraq: The Bradt Travel Guide. Bucks, UK: Bradt Travel Guides, Ltd, 2002.

  Hiro, Dilip. The Essential Middle East. London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1996.

  Kattan, Naim. Farewell, Babylon: Coming of Age in Jewish Baghdad. Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2005.

  Kramer, Samuel Noah, and The Editors of Life Books. Cradle of Civilization. New York: Time-Life Books, 1987

  Mansfield, Peter. A History of the Middle East. London: Penguin, 1992.

  Miller, Janet. Camel-bells of Baghdad. London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1935.

  Munier, Gilles. Iraq: An Illustrated History and Guide. Northampton, MA: Interlink Publishing Group, Inc, 2004.

  Pax, Salam. The Baghdad Blog. Toronto: McArthur & Company, 2003.

  Polk, William R. Understanding Iraq. London: I B Tauris, 2006.

  Ranelagh, E.L. The Past We Share. London: Quartet Books, 1979.

  Rassam, Suha. Christianity in Iraq. Herefordshire, UK: Gracewing, 2005.

  Reade, Julian. Mesopotamia. London: British Museum Press, 1991.

  Riverbend. Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2005.

  Roberts, Paul William. A War Against Truth. Vancouver, BC: Raincoast Books, 2004.

  Shadid, Anthony. Night Draws Near. New York: Picador, 2005.

  Stark, Freya. Baghdad Sketches. Evanston, IL: The Marlboro Press/Northwestern Edition, 1996. Originally published in 1938.

  Stark, Freya. Beyond Euphrates. London: Century Publishing, 1983. Originally published in 1951.

  Tripp, Charles. A History of Iraq. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I could never have written this book without my father’s assent and co-operation, and I thank him for entrusting me with his story and giving me the freedom to tell it in my own way. My mother’s resolute support and love gave me confidence.

  I thank my family, in Canada, England and Iraq, with all my heart for telling me their stories and giving me permission to transmit them to a wider audience. I admire Farah Nosh for her bravery and thank her for being the conduit between me and my Iraqi family. She has permitted me to use quotations and paraphrase stories from her journal, which I am grateful for. If you’d like to see more of Farah’s incredible award-winning photography, please visit www.farahnosh.com.

  Natasha was my constant nurturer, who helped me discover the drama in the everyday. A special thanks to Serena and Daniel for their detailed and encouraging thoughts on the manuscript.

  George Elliott Clarke gave me the initial idea for the book: “You should write a family memoir about Iraq.” His ongoing belief in my story made it easier to write the truth. I thank Rosemary Sullivan and Moira Farr for their support at the Cultural Journalism program at the Banff Centre. Thanks to Irving Finkel for agreeing to be interviewed for this book. Thank you to my agent, Denise Bukowski, for believing in this book from the outset and being resolutely committed to its publication. Janie Yoon, my editor, encouraged me to pen the book that I originally envisioned, and I thank her for this trust and her deft editorial hand. I thank Marijke Friesen for her beautiful cover design. Andrea Skinner read early drafts and gave me vital sustenance, and Tristan Hughes gave me counsel and conversation about writing. Jesse Finkelstein walked with me through the last years, insisting I could write this book.

  My friends are my lifeline: Yaseen Al-Salam, Gaelle Beauclair, Jennifer Benyon, Thea Boyanowsky, Marianne Brooks, Dianne Carruthers, Andrea Egan, Dara Frere, Amber Houssian, Julia Iriarte, Paula Iriarte, Ameen Merchant, Vincent Marchand, Mark Macarthur, Gillian Guilmant-Smith, Yasmeen Strang, Mark Rowe, Judith Wolff. You have all tended this book.

  The Orange Trees of Baghdad was not only written in Vancouver, but at other people’s houses in France, England, Spain and Canada. I thank those people for their hospitality: my aunts in London; Andrea Egan in Barcelona; Jennifer and Edward Benyon at Lovegrove Farm; Claire Taylor on Salt Spring Island; Jocelyn and Alan Steedman in Victoria; and Janice Beley at Blue Cat Lane on the Sunshine Coast.

  My thanks extend to the Canada Council for the Arts, the Banff Centre for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire for supporting me at various stages of my writing career. I’m grateful to the editors at Brick magazine for publishing the article “The Fruits of War,” on which this book is based. Selections from “Finding Family in Lebanon” were first published in the Tyee on August 2, 2006, and the article “A Church Rocked to its Ancient Foundations,” first appeared on August 6, 2004 in The Globe and Mail. “One Year Later, Iraq in Chaos” appeared in the Georgia Straight on March 17, 2004. The opening section of the epilogue first appeared in a slightly different form in the 2009 French edition of this book published by Editions Payot.

  The sources for the chapter opening quotes are as follows: Chapter Three’s opening quote is taken from Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilization, Fourth Estate, 2005; the quote from Chapter Seventeen is taken from The War Works Hard by Dunya Mikhail, New Directions Publishing Corp., 2005; the quote from Chapter Eighteen is taken from “Remembrance of Things Past: On the City of Peace, Baghdad,” Al-Ahram Weekly, Baghdad Supplement, Issue. No 634, April 17–23 2003.

  Websites cited include www.iraqbodycount.org, www.democracynow.org, and www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/press_releases/2006/burnham_iraq_2006.html (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health).

  Additional thanks to Dimiter Savoff of Read Leaf for giving this book another life. I want to acknowledge the generosity of Bob and Joan Mair for their gifts of Iraqi carpets and art. And thank you to my newfound family in Canada for reaching out to me with their wonderful hospitality—and for providing a glimmer of hope, an ending I could not have dreamed of when I began writing. I won’t name names here to protect your privacy, but thanks to all of you, I am very lucky in family.

  Lastly, I want to thank my husband, Scott, who has, with characteristic passion and unwavering steadfastness, supported me and my writing life daily; without him I could not have written this book.

  INDEX

  A

  Abbasid Caliph Mansur, 51

  Abraham, 57, 115

  Abu Ghraib, 142, 246

  aggregation law, 60

  Ahmed, 64


  air conditioner, 290

  air raids, 101

  Aladdin stove, 278, 287

  alcohol, 276

  Ali Yusif Karim, 221–223, 222

  Al Jazzra, 52

  Al-Qaeda, 129

  Al-Qurnah, 116

  Amal

  birth of, 49–50

  described, 97

  with family, 257–279, 281–302

  in garden, 26

  and gold jewellery, 215–217

  on hearing the bomb, 106

  in Iraq, 1980s, 96

  and Lina, 194–195

  living in London, 93–109

  and visa for England, 102–103

  American military doctors, 225

  Americans enter Baghdad, 124

  American tanks

  Amal and, 291

  destroying streets, 247

  in driveway, 152

  taking the city, 271

  Ammu Ibrahim, 52–53, 104, 169–170, 175–179, 253, 255, 286

  Amnesty International, 100

  ancient Babylon, as military base, 183