Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family

by Tamara Chalabi

  My uncle Hassan and his new wife Jamila became regular visitors at our home in Amman. I knew they had been friends for a long time – which didn’t surprise me, because they both seemed very old, being in their sixties – but I learned from my parents that they had only decided to get married earlier that year. I was a little taken aback, as I had always assumed they were already married. However, at the time I was more struck by Uncle Hassan’s attachment to his radio: the small box rarely left his hands as he fiddled with the antenna to get better reception. Listening to the radio with him and to his and Jamila’s conversations with my parents marked the first time I heard the names of Fao, Majnoon Island, Mehran and Abadan, the locations of the towns and islands where battles were being fought between the armies of Iraq and Iran. It was also the first time I heard the name Saddam Hussein – invariably accompanied by the grievances and frustrations aired by my father and his relations about the human rights abuses that were being committed in Iraq and overlooked by the rest of the world.

  Saddam Hussein came from a rural tribal population in Tikrit, north-east of Baghdad. His was the first generation to be given the chance to advance educationally and socially in modern Iraq, and many among them sought radical change and were recruited by socialist and nationalist parties. Saddam himself came from a harsh background, growing up with a stepfather who was brutal by any standards. The blend of his personal characteristics and his upbringing made him ripe for any number of roles within party politics, but he was particularly drawn to the Ba’ath Party, which offered the opportunity for upward mobility while satisfying the populist desire for ‘punishing the rich and the urban’. A daring activist and a violent enforcer, by 1970 Saddam was part of the inner circle of the Ba’ath Party leadership, and in a position to exterminate any potential opposition.

  Jamila Antoine and Hassan, Beirut, 1970s.

  In 1979 the forty-two-year-old Saddam was able to force Iraq’s ailing and elderly President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr to resign, and assumed the leadership himself. His rule was characterized by extreme ferocity and an unyielding demand for absolute loyalty. He created a quasi-totalitarian state which was exceptional in its brutality, particularly towards the Kurdish and Shi’a communities. Through sheer terror, Saddam commanded the loyalty of many in Iraq. What his regime lacked in efficiency, it made up in brutality.

  One day at school a girl asked me why my father hadn’t volunteered to fight the Persian enemies in Iraq. Through listening to the adults’ conversations at home, I was vaguely aware that there were several Arab volunteer units fighting on Iraq’s side, and that King Hussein of Jordan had been the first to fire a rocket at Iran as Saddam Hussein’s guest of honour. But within my family there had always been a complete rejection of Saddam’s rule. The girl’s comment made me aware of my Iraqi heritage for the first time.

  In 1980 Saddam enforced the deportation of hundreds of thousands of families from Iraq, including many Faili Kurds and Shi’a who were accused of being taba’i – fake Iraqis of Iranian origin. Their properties and assets were seized and their passports taken from them. Some of them came to Jordan, where many sought help from my father.

  Even though he had originally only come to Jordan for a period of twelve months, my father continued to run and expand the bank, which had already become the second largest in the country. His animosity towards Saddam remained undiluted, although he was constrained by being in a country that was on friendly terms with Iraq. He did not belong to any of the outlawed Iraqi religious parties, and decided to bide his time, in the hope that he might eventually be able to expose Saddam through his financial dealings.

  I remember one incident when I was a child that summarized the evil of Saddam for me. Muhammad Hadi Subaiti was an Iraqi electrical engineer who had fled his home because of his membership of the banned and targeted Shi’a Da’wa Party, and come to Jordan with his Lebanese wife and children. His wife Umm Hassan was from a well-known religious family in south Lebanon, and she wore a white hijab. I remember her as a proud and reserved, albeit frail, woman, whose young children always wore a look of fear on their faces. They were living in Zarqa, a service town outside Amman where many lower-income families lived, and had few resources besides the income from Subaiti’s job.

  One day, agents from the Jordanian intelligence services came to their house and took Subaiti with them, telling Umm Hassan that this was a routine procedure and he would be back in a few hours. He never returned. His wife was left alone with five children. She became a ghost of her former self, knocking on government door after government door, pleading for information about her husband.

  Jordan was not the best place for dissidents such as Hadi Subaiti, particularly given the increasing closeness between King Hussein and Saddam; yet with Lebanon at war, the Subaitis had had little choice in their destination. After her husband disappeared, Umm Hassan received no assistance from the government. She would often arrive in tears at our house late at night to get whatever news about her husband she could from my father. Finally Umm Hassan gave up her search and returned with her children to her family in Tyre in southern Lebanon.

  Some years later, it emerged that Hadi Subaiti had been drugged by the Jordanian intelligence agents and put on a plane to Baghdad, where Saddam’s half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti had tortured him personally before executing him in the royal palace where the regicide had taken place, now renamed Qasr al-Nihaya, the Palace of the End.

  My early relationship to Iraq was almost entirely defined and filtered through my family and our friends. It was portrayed to me politically by my father and more nostalgically by my grandmother Bibi. I had no other knowledge of the country, apart from Saddam’s terror. Every time I listened to a family conversation, especially during our regular visits to Hadi and Bibi in London, it was always Saddam, Saddam, Saddam. They always pronounced his name with a dip at the end, Sahd-dahm. Thud-like. I didn’t know then that his name was as violent as he was, coming from a root that meant ‘to strike, to clash’.

  I overheard gory details of the tortures that were taking place in Iraq. I learned how a scientist had been returned to his wife in pieces, but she had been forbidden from holding a funeral for him. The body of another victim had been returned to his family riddled with bullet holes and accompanied by an invoice for the ammunition. Saddam’s brutality was harshest against the Kurds and Shi’a, but no community was spared. For me, Iraq meant only Saddam, and it was a deeply shameful connection. This exacerbated my sense of isolation, as the horrors in Iraq continued to be concealed from the international public.

  I began to realize that there was a hierarchy of plights in the region: at the summit was the situation of the Palestinians and the Arab–Israeli conflict, followed by lesser confrontations such as the Lebanese Civil War. So far as the West was concerned, as long as Saddam carried on producing oil and fighting Iran, it didn’t matter what he did in his backyard. The major oil-producing countries of the Gulf were the ones that mattered, foremost among them Saudi Arabia. While avoiding explicit expressions of sectarianism, the dominant Arab social culture had internalized the segregation that lay below its surface. Unnoticed by an unconcerned West, the Saudis promoted an exclusive and sectarian branch of Islam, Wahhabism, which considered the Shi’a to be infidels. Several times I was removed from my religious studies class in Jordan by a Saudi-educated teacher for challenging his claim that as perhaps one of a handful of Shi’a in Jordan, I was an infidel.

  39

  Lessons in Humility

  The Loss of Everything Precious

  (1980s)

  ONE EVENING IN London in the early 1980s the family was holding a dinner party when their maid was suddenly heard screaming, ‘Burglar, burglar!’ Rushing upstairs as fast as her old legs could carry her, Bibi found the maid flailing her hands and pointing to the window. The girl, a fellow Iraqi who had come to work for them through a close recommendation, said she had discovered some men in Bibi’s bedroom, but when they saw her they had escape
d. An antique diamond ring, a large princess-cut emerald ring and three diamond-encrusted watches were found to be missing from Bibi’s room, along with four crocodile handbags and £3,000 in cash. At Hadi’s insistence the police were called. He and his daughters were convinced that the maid herself was behind the theft. Her story just didn’t add up.

  The police interviewed the girl, and eventually asked Bibi whether she wanted to press charges against her. She refused. Her daughters were exasperated, reproaching her for her part in what had happened. She only had herself to blame: by leaving items lying about her dressing room she had practically invited the maid to steal them. To Hadi, the theft represented another nail in the coffin of the old country, as he was convinced that it had been committed by the maid in cahoots with Iraqi accomplices.

  When the police asked Bibi about the value of the jewels she gave them the arbitrary figure of £100, much to the outrage of Hadi and her daughters, who knew they were worth thousands of pounds. She didn’t want to invite any more trouble, and was afraid that if she punished the Iraqi maid she might somehow expose her sons to trouble. The logic of this made sense only to Bibi, overcome as she was by superstition, paranoia and fear.

  Hadi told the maid to leave the house. Bibi had not even thought of firing her.

  Saddam committed many atrocious crimes during his career, but there was one which had a particular impact upon one of my cousins. The rise of Islamic opposition to the Ba’ath regime started in the 1960s, and by the 1970s the leading religious scholar Sayyid Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr had come to represent a strong voice of opposition. Connected as he was with the religious seminaries of Najaf, al-Sadr’s appeal to the persecuted Shi’a meant that he posed a far more serious threat to Saddam than secular political opponents such as the Communists.

  Saddam sentenced al-Sadr to life imprisonment in 1977, but released him two years later because of his undiminished popularity. Al-Sadr set about founding an Islamic political party, al-Da’wa, which appealed to vast numbers of the Shi’a middle class, which had been growing steadily since the foundation of the Iraqi state in the twenties. This group was against Saddam, having become disillusioned with secular parties such as the various nationalist groups and even the Communist Party, with which they had once felt a strong affiliation. Al-Sadr had a powerful intellect and made immense contributions to the field of political philosophy, writing many treatises on Marxism and economic theory, and propagating ideas of Islamic governance. His new party was immediately perceived by Saddam as a serious threat.

  Al-Sadr’s sister Bint al-Huda, who was based in Kazimiya, was an intellectual in her own right, and was deeply interested in the relationship between social issues and religious thought. She had a serene yet compelling personality, and women followed her weekly lectures in their thousands. Among them was Thamina’s daughter Leila Bassam, the former child jewel-smuggler who had married and returned to Iraq.

  Saddam’s security forces arrested al-Sadr and his sister in the middle of the night. After a lengthy interrogation during which al-Sadr was asked to retract many of his statements but refused, he and Bint al-Huda were butchered by Saddam’s half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti in front of each other, first the brother then the sister. Their burial site remains unknown; some say Saddam ordered their corpses to be burned. Even when their death became known, their family and followers were forbidden from holding any memorial for them, public or private. The outrage of their supporters was great, but the murders were quickly followed by the rounding up and killing of Da’wa Party members. As many as 10,000 people may have been slaughtered.

  Deeply shocked by Bint al-Huda’s murder, Leila took to wearing the hijab, which Bint al-Huda had also worn and advocated. It was a dramatic act that took everyone in the family by surprise, as Leila was a beautiful woman who had previously defined herself by her looks and her love of fashion. When Hassan heard of his niece’s decision, he remembered how he had asked to be shown her when she was a newborn baby, and had gently run his hands over her soft infant face so he could imagine what she looked like.

  Talal’s daughter Reem at her wedding in London, 1985, with Bibi next to her and Thamina and her sister Peri standing behind her.

  During their second exile the family’s headquarters in London had become a large flat behind the Albert Hall. My grandparents’ lives continued to revolve around their large family, many members of whom, together with other Iraqi friends, dropped in for lunch each day. Their contact with English people was limited to brief, functional encounters in shops, restaurants and taxis.

  Whenever I saw her, Bibi showered me with affection and shared many stories of her past. By then she had abandoned her embroidery; her eyes were too weak. I would sit at her feet for hours, enthralled as she recited from her vast repertoire of poems, most of which I didn’t understand, in classical Arabic and Persian. Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat was her all-time favourite and she often spoke the verses aloud to no one in particular, simply taking pleasure in the sound of the words:

  And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press

  End in what All begins and ends in – Yes;

  Think then you are Today what Yesterday

  You were – Tomorrow You shall not be less.

  Said one among them – ‘Surely not in vain

  My substance of the common Earth was ta’en

  And to this Figure moulded, to be broke,

  Or trampled back to shapeless Earth again.’

  She also knew an endless supply of Aesop’s fables and the stories of the prophets from the Quran, telling me about Adam and Eve’s fate, Noah’s flood and Moses’ crossing of the Red Sea. Most of all I loved her stories about her own life, when she was young and carefree in Baghdad, about parties at the Deer Palace, sumptuous banquets, games of cards and fragrant gardens:

  Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a small island in a river, which flowed in front of the Deer Palace garden. You remember me telling you about the Deer Palace, don’t you? Anyway, in the springtime these small islands floated up above the river and the earth was so rich that people rushed to plant tasty things on them like lettuces and cucumbers. I used to have lovely lunch parties on one of the islands, and all my friends would come. Your busy grandfather always made sure that all the freshest produce was delivered from the farms in time for us to eat. I never had to worry about a thing. The tables were set out underneath a canopy to shield us from the sun. Even the ground was covered with carpets, so that the island was transformed into a beautiful outside room. Like a queen I just had to get dressed and receive people. My favourite clothes always were polkadotted silks in blue …

  Still intent on keeping busy, Hadi made a habit of travelling around London by double-decker bus; he would sit upstairs and watch the city go by before catching the same bus home. Hyde Park continued to be a place of refuge for him, and he still enjoyed feeding the pigeons there. His outings dismayed my grandmother; after almost seventy years of marriage she was still a possessive wife, and often accused him of going out to flirt with blonde young women. Hadi had been known to have a roving eye in his youth, and Bibi still harboured some jealousy towards him: as he took off his hat and hung up his walking stick in the hallway after one of his outings, she would ask him how many girls he had seen that day.

  After their siesta, when she had decided to overlook what she perceived to be the morning’s grievances, they would play cards together. Bibi was a bad loser, and if she lost a hand she would bring up the subject of the blonde girls again. Hadi would just look at her quizzically and say, ‘Enti makhablah – You’re mad!’ This was their special way of teasing each other. They had been together for a lifetime, and for all their differences and disagreements they were very attached to one another.

  As I grew older, one of the most dreaded questions I had to face was the seemingly innocuous ‘Where do you come from?’ asked by a stranger. I was unsure of what to say, for fear of either being identified with Saddam or of having to give an explanation t
hat would last five hours. I didn’t feel satisfied with a simple answer that I was ‘Iraqi’, ‘Lebanese’, ‘half-Lebanese’ or ‘half-Iraqi’, as each seemed more like a compromise than a true response; but a full explanation could not be encapsulated within a single sentence.

  By the late 1980s the Iraqi diaspora had vastly expanded, and a reported 10 per cent of Iraqis were now living outside their homeland, mainly in Iran but also in Europe, where they favoured Scandinavia, Holland and Britain. The majority of Iraqis who took refuge in Iran did so because of its proximity, but in some cases because of an ideological affinity with the country. The appeal of Britain – still seen as a Western role model – pre-dated the 1958 revolution but was still powerful. Migration to Europe was largely opportunistic: the more generous a country’s treatment of refugees, the larger the community that settled there. Once an Iraqi community is settled the influx becomes a self-perpetuating process.