Return to the Marshes

by Gavin Young

  He dyes his beard black and chuckles about it like a boy. His rain-barrel body and his deep-chested boom of a voice are undiminished. He alarmed his family and friends in 1975 by flying off to Baghdad to have a serious eye operation: he had become almost totally blind. The excursion became a triumph. The hospital was quickly infiltrated by swarms of visitors demanding to see the Sayyid. The doctors had prescribed post-operational calm, but the invasion force was irresistible and the Sayyid asked for and was instantly granted a special room for callers, and meals – at the Sayyid’s expense, of course – were specially prepared for all comers. Luckily the operation was a success; Sayyid Sarwat can now see well enough to read the huge illuminated Koran which the Government has presented to him.

  For the last few years I have gone straight to his house each time I visited the Marshes. ‘Welcome, welcome’, his mighty voice reverberates round the willow trees at the water’s edge, bouncing roundly off the amber-coloured walls of his reed mudhif. ‘Bring cushions. Where’s the tea, where’s the coffee? Hurry up! Hurry up! My friend is waiting and you stand about doing nothing.’

  In fact, people are already scurrying about in all directions – giggling happily, taking the Sayyid’s mock anger in fun. Most of the dark, surcoated, running figures, some rather too plump for all this darting about to bring jugs of sherbert or trays of tea, are the Sayyid’s sons of whom he has eleven or twelve, or at least a great many. The oldest must be in their forties or fifties by now.

  The youngest, Sayyid Abbas (the title Sayyid is inherited), goes to school in Baghdad and is a good-looking boy of about seventeen, bright and perfectly mannered. When we meet in Baghdad, Abbas will sip a glass of beer (of course, in theory his religion and status reject alcohol) saying mildly, ‘One must experience everything in life, or how does one know about it?’ I cannot imagine Abbas performing a malicious act. Goodness shines out of him like a light from a lighthouse. It is a sign of the time that he wants to become an engineer. Also that one of his brothers, Mottar, works today in the sugar factory at Mejar that I had seen from the launch on my first day back.

  Between Sayyid Sarwat’s house and the factory stretches a green, undulating ocean of sugar. ‘It’s full of wild pigs and black partridge,’ Mottar says excitedly. ‘Let’s go and shoot some.’ And so we sometimes do, he still wearing the blue factory overalls. He showed me over the factory once, proudly and expertly – it’s a big, complex set-up but Mottar knows it all. Other workers called out to him in a friendly way as we went round; he is obviously popular there – and not just because he is a sayyid. Unlike the Marsh Arabs, the socialist-inclined industrial workers of the Amara area are no respecters of religious titles. They like him because, like his father, he is a good man.

  Sayyid Sarwat and all his family do southern Iraq honour with their sanctity. The Sayyid himself personifies all that is irreplaceably fine in Iraq, in the Arabs and in Islam. His house is a sort of unregistered place of pilgrimage. I have seen senior Iraqi officials consulting him – once I met a judge from Amara city, and once the Governor of the Province himself dropped in. One day Sayyid Sarwat interceded for Amara – he pays avuncular attention to small, ordinary people. Amara had, through some misunderstanding, failed to pay a fine to the local court and was suddenly in danger of a short but most inconvenient imprisonment. The Sayyid had a muttered word with a visiting town counsellor from Mejar over tea and sherbert. The official came over to me before leaving to say, smiling, ‘Don’t worry about your friend – what’s his name? – yes, Amara. It’ll be all right. The Sayyid says he has known him since he was a boy. He says he’s a good man.’

  When one of his sons – a favourite son – was killed in a motor-cycle accident a year or two ago, people commiserated with Sayyid Sarwat. The old man brushed them aside gently, saying, ‘It was written.’ When he himself dies, there will be a funeral to surpass all funerals. His cortège to Nejef will be famous.

  Sayyid Sarwat’s mudhif has a few interesting details attached to its history. It is big, but certainly not the biggest in the area. Still, he told me that when it was constructed in 1957, men came from villages near and far to lend a hand. It took four months to fix the eleven great reed wall-pillars in the ground, another month for the vertical pillars at the ends, and another six days to arch the pillars together and bind them. Twenty-seven sheep it took, he said, to sustain the workmen, and on top of that the cost of rice, bread, sugar, gallons of tea and coffee and hot lime-tea and sherbert and yoghurt for as many as two hundred men a day. Perhaps it cost £3000 or more. You sit on reed mats on the floor in this sublime guesthouse, which I think is the best way, because it is comfortable and because if you put tables and chairs in a mudhif you destroy the symmetry of it. The Sayyid has a superb set of coffee-pots on his hearth ranked like chessmen, and they and the walls and ceiling of the mudhif, where the bats lurk, are stained black with the smoke of years. Dusty electrical fixtures hang from the roof. Luckily they do not work – the mellowness of oil lamps is appropriate here. The Sayyid’s modern four-pillared plaster and cement guest-house is better suited for electricity and it has wooden benches and light metal chairs to sit on, too. It was built for officials who think the old Arab way of sitting cross-legged is uncomfortable or undignified. In the warm weather, the Sayyid’s servants and sons set out metal folding-chairs and we sit watching the herons stalking about like hunched, feathered skeletons across the waterway, and listen to the black partridge calling.

  At such times I ask him about old tribal customs; he is an unmatchable authority. The swearing on the flag of Abbas, for example, colourfully described in Hedgcock’s book Haji Rikkan, was one ritual I thought might have been forgotten by now. Its purpose was to end a blood feud. Warring headmen would gather to take an oath of peace on behalf of their people, and their manner of doing so would be more or less as follows: ‘Bring a reed as long as a man. Lay it on the ground crying – “This is the sword of Abbas, of Abul Ras al Harr!” Take a white dishdasha. Lay it by the reed, cry: “This is the flag of Allah, of Mohammed his Prophet and of Ali, and its avenger is Abbas. This flag is for me, on my eyes and on my life, on my brothers and on my kindred. Nothing is concealed nor hidden, and its avenger is Abbas”. Tie a corner of the dishdasha round the reed. Then, the other participants tie a knot saying, “I tie this flag on me, on my brothers and on my kindred!”’ To a tribesman this oath is no light matter. I wondered if it is still the most solemn oath in the Marshes, and if the ritual is the same as it was in 1919? ‘Certainly it is,’ the Sayyid boomed. ‘Wonderful that you should have read that in an Englishman’s book. Of course, there used to be a lot of English about. A channel near here is called El Grimliya after an Englishman, Mr Grimley. I think he was the Consul in Amara.’

  A year or two ago, I arrived at this heart-warming place to find the Sayyid, arms spread, crying, ‘Take a look at the tarada – your tarada, I mean. Just look at it.’ He had had it painted white from stem to stern, and sky-blue inside. I only had seen the classic black taradas up to then; I was not sure that I liked the white. But it grew on me – and on Farhan and Idan and Jabbar and Musa. We grew proud of its difference. In the reeds it looked like a white ghost, and, gliding into a village with all eyes upon us, like a proud white swan.

  On one of many excursions in the Marshes since my return there in 1973, I re-visited Huwair to see if boat-building was a vanishing art. Sayyid Sarwat had told me that the old master boat-builder, Haji Hamaid, had retired. His honourable place had been taken by Haji Abdul Mehsin, who had built the tarada for Sayyid Sarwat. We found the Haji and his workmen busy on several canoes at once in a backwater of Huwair among palm trees and small canals. A stack of nearly finished canoes filled one of the Haji’s larger sheds. The Haji said, yes, there were more launches in the Marshes nowadays. ‘But our trade still does well,’ he added. ‘Do you know we turn out 200 mashhufs every month? Some big, some small. Size varies according to demand. On an average we charge fifteen dinars (about thirty-five pounds) a
nd a good one should survive five years’ heavy wear-and-tear.’ What about the Rolls-Royces of the canoe-world, the taradas? ‘I see you have the tarada I built for Sayyid Sarwat,’ he said, slapping her prow. ‘A good one, that, even if I say so. Well, since the big sheikhs departed, not many people can afford a tarada any more. It would cost you nearly £200 now. That is, if I can get enough of those big-headed nails to line the inside planks with. But let me know when you want one – I’ll make you one, don’t worry.’ And this good-natured man, who daily performs a carpentering skill almost as old as the world itself, gave himself ten minutes off to drink tea with us.

  The Marshes have their eccentrics, of course, like everywhere else. There is the man at Al Aggar who regularly disrupts the guest-house by arranging, when it is late at night and dark inside and the mudhif is full (and most of the older, local men have paddled off to bed), for most of the lights to be doused. He then crawls in on all fours, his face a mask of ghostly white powder, his nostrils forced to twice their size by two reed twigs in his teeth and his eyes rolled up until they are almost invisible. He groans horribly. ‘The King of the Marsh! The King of the Marsh!’ the younger ones scream in mock hysteria, and, I suspect, with a touch of real terror. The mudhif is suddenly an uproar of people fleeing in fits of laughter from the advancing ‘phantom’. In olden times, Marsh people were fervent believers in this ‘King of the Marsh’, whom many claimed to have seen – a gigantic negro, according to some; a great shining-faced, roaring shadow blotting out the stars, said others. Today people deny they believe in such things, just as in Europe and America most people reject the idea of ghosts and yet would avoid spending the night alone in a reputedly haunted house.

  *

  Shibil, the seventeen-year-old son of Chethir, has an interesting quirk of character. He has his father’s high cheek-bones, green eyes and a nature that is half wistful and half quicksilver. He also has the same curious, touching habit that his father had at his age. When I used to take Chethir to the doctor in Basra for treatment of those sinister white spots in his throat, he would emerge from the clinic quite silent and apparently sunk in thought. Soon, when we were sitting somewhere away from the crowded street, he would turn to face me and, still without a word, begin very gently and with great concentration to trace with his forefinger the contours of my face. ‘What is it, Chethir?’ I might say – in the circumstances it was difficult to remain totally silent. He would smile very faintly and say absolutely nothing. The silent finger moved on. In a moment or two he was back to normal, laughing and chattering once more, telling me what the doctor had said to him, asking what we would do tomorrow and so on. Shibil sometimes does the same now, though this has no connection with seeing doctors. His finger lightly and slowly passes across my eyes, down the line of the chin, caresses the jaw, follows the (deepening) lines from nose to mouth, and all the time there is this expression of total absorption on his face. The green eyes say nothing and neither does he. It happens in idle moments when two or three of us are lolling around gossiping. It is curious; it embarrasses no Marsh Arab who happens to be there; and there is no explanation. Most of the time Shibil is to be seen splashing and shouting in high spirits. Everyone says he, like his father, is a good hunter and fisherman.

  In 1976 I asked officials in Baghdad if they could arrange for me to see what the Marshes looked like from an eagle’s point of view. I had seen it, of course, from the Iraqi Airways flight from Baghdad to Basra, but from that height you see too many clouds. Presently, I was lent a helicopter by the government; two days to tour the Marshes from the air. ‘Let it come to my house!’ Sayyid Sarwat said at once when he heard. I passed on his invitation to the pilot, an Air Force officer with a large moustache, and a genial manner, and he accepted.

  The helicopter had made a considerable sensation by clattering down immediately outside Sayyid Sarwat’s mudhif, its rotor-blades barely missing the outside brick-built privy. People came running excitedly from neighbouring villages. The Sayyid, of course, had ordered a feast to be prepared for the pilot and his crew.

  ‘Anywhere special you want to look at?’ the pilot shouted. I tried to direct him to Al Qabab, but it was much harder to find than I had imagined. From above, the little hump-backed houses were scattered far and wide, all looking the same. We dipped and circled until our fuel ran low. At last, thank heavens, I saw it. The pilot let the machine fall sharply and we flew in lowering circles over the school and Sahain’s house and the other ishans. The buffaloes leaped into the water in panic. But men and women ran out of the houses waving, and back and forth over them we flew, waving back. After five minutes we made one last low ‘run’ over the village and then whirred back to Sayyid Sarwat’s.

  Next day we travelled to Al Qabab in the tarada, a three hours’ haul. When everyone was packed into Sahain’s house that night round the fire, I said: ‘Did anyone see an aeroplane over here yesterday?’ There was an immediate outcry – ‘Yes, yes, of course! We saw you in it! Why didn’t you land here?’ I said: ‘How can you have known it was me up there? We were too far up for you to see.’ (I hadn’t been to the Marshes for several months and I was not expected.) Chethir said, ‘Who else would it be? Of course it was you.’ Ajram added: ‘We hoped you’d land.’ ‘But where, Ajram? The school-island is too soggy. Your buffalo-platforms are far too narrow.’ But they repeated, ‘We had hoped you would land.’

  *

  Never go back? Who can say ‘never’? There are good things to be reminded of.

  I had forgotten the quality of inwardness of the unveiled Marsh women which replaces the rosy richness of the flesh of their extreme youth, and which is no less attractive. It is good to remember how the Marsh Arabs have names for everything they live beside. Ask an Indian or a Malay ‘What do you call that bird?’ and he says ‘Bird’; you ask ‘Please, what is the name of that flower?’ – and he replies ‘Flower’. But a Marsh boy knows the brilliant little kingfisher is called ‘the sheikh’s daughter’ and nothing else; he knows a Goliath heron as zurgi, and that the pigmy heron has its own name, rikhaiwi. He knows the ox-tongue plant, and the goose-flower, and the white and gold buttercup; he knows that jat is a gay, pink flower, not just a buffalo’s favourite food. Marsh Arabs are lovers of life. Their zestful bodies and spirits might be delicately wired to the mood of the places they inhabit: to a joyful lagoon or a mournful one; to the wind thrumming happily through the reeds or howling menacingly over solid, black waves. It is good to hear across the reeds an old, old song of love – or even ‘Three Blind Mice’.

  Let me add that there is a vision in the Marshes that all men might see with profit and take away. I mean the towering dimensions of the sky: the sky’s hugeness dwarfs everything. And nothing so much as the figure of a man with a spear balancing a canoe on a sheet of water that seems to stretch to the edge of the world.

  A Blessing

  Changes have come, even to the seemingly unchanging Marshes. As I was writing this book, old Jasim bin Faris – I have described his elder son’s wedding – died at Awaidiya. I have never met a finer man than Jasim: he had fought the British, then made friends with them, and he had shown Thesiger and myself what nobility there is in simple Arabs. A few months later in London, my telephone rang and I heard a voice saying in Arabic, ‘This is Falih bin Jasim.’

  ‘Who?’ I said. The name did not seem to mean anything to me. Then I suddenly realized it was old Jasim’s second son. ‘Falih! What are you doing in London?’ I knew he had hardly travelled as far as Baghdad before, and he speaks no English whatever.

  ‘I have something wrong with me,’ he said. ‘I thought I would come here to see a doctor. Can you come and see me?’

  I sped in a taxi to a small hotel off the Bayswater Road, and there of all places, I met Falih again, a small, nut-brown figure in a suit – the first suit of his life – with a neon sign over both our heads saying ‘Lounge Bar’ and a television set belching out something about a British athletics contest.

  ‘Wer
en’t you nervous, coming here all alone?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I thought I would find you, and then you would tell me of a good doctor.’ He brought out a huge packet of dates and handed them to me – ‘These are for you,’ he said, ‘all the way from Qurna! Shall we drink tea?’ Despite the bustle of German and Arab tourists around us, we might almost have been sitting together, as of old, in his father’s cock-eyed mudhif surrounded by reeds and water. His tribesmen contributed to the expense of his air fare and hospital bills. He was determined to have sons; the operation concerned fertility. The tribesmen agreed that that was worth paying for.

  Twenty years ago, no Marsh Arab would have dreamed of visiting London. Of course, the rich landowners like Majid al Khalifah travelled abroad. But Falih is very much a people’s sheikh. He and Nasaif, his brother, live and work with their people.

  I asked Falih when he left hospital what he would like to see in London. He replied, ‘London is a city like any other. What I would really like to see is your countryside, your peasants, and your water-buffaloes and cattle.’ So we went to my old home in the depths of South Wales; he was amazed by the greenness of the rolling, rich arable land. One day, farmer friends took him to see a sheepdog trial involving twelve expert dogs and several score sheep. He was thrilled by all this, full of admiration for the farmers who, like himself, rolled up their sleeves and worked their own land and with their own animals. At one point his heart was so full that he burst into a traditional Marsh Arab song, and for a few moments the soft South Welsh hillsides echoed to a strange sound from a distant and quite different land. My gum-booted farmer friends listened fascinated, grins on their faces; but, I think, they were moved by his happiness. When Falih said goodbye to them, he astonished them by clasping them firmly in his arms and planting grateful kisses on their ruddy, yeoman cheeks. On another occasion he was taken to inspect a large, modern farm where cows were being milked en masse by electricity. ‘I shall have a lot to tell my friends when I return to the Marshes,’ he said. When Falih left London he went happily back to a small reed house on a small island completely surrounded by water.