Went to see Hassan about my aching bones. He took five X-rays plus blood tests – the results come out tomorrow. I told him I just wanted to know whether it was old age or something that one could do something about.
We had the first anniversary of Waloodie’s death, a cancer victim. I was not in Baghdad when he died but he didn’t want to die as he had so much to do still. ‘Why me?’ he kept saying. How we all miss him, a lovely man.
My wrists are hurting from too much typing. I am falling apart at the seams. Apparently something did happen yesterday but it’s all very hush-hush.
Exams are nearly over and all those who paid bribes have passed. They didn’t have to study. There is a set fee that one pays to the teacher and, regardless of the grade, one passes. That even goes for the baccalaureate. A quarter of a million dinars for the exam questions – who cares about learning?
Neighbours are complaining about the smell of dead dogs. I said it has nothing to do with me. It’s all M.A.W.’s fault, he was the one who reported on the dogs and he should be responsible for burying them. The shopkeepers on the corner are giving milk to the dogs so they won’t die from the poison, and now Majeed says black wife didn’t die; maybe she was just ill. Everyone avoids M.A.W. now, even his friends don’t seem to be coming round any more.
It’s a relief to know that I’m not the only artist waiting for an exit permit. Ismail says all the big artists are waiting. I’m honoured to be considered a big artist. Maybe they think there will be a big exodus of artists out of the country and that we won’t come back, like the university professors who had to sell their very lives to leave, poor buggers. We artists have always been given a free rein, otherwise we wouldn’t have lasted all this while.
17 June
The word ‘big’ in Arabic also has the connotation of ‘old’ (in age). I think that’s more like it; the young offer challenge and energy.
I’m trying to get away with paying 25,000 dinars. I made 200,000 dinars in my exhibition so it’s peanuts to pay out for leaving. I still see no reason to give it all to the government.
My problems are with my back. My old scoliosis has returned and I can’t blame it on the Americans.
I wish there was some way to lay a complaint, a plea or even a cry for help in the name of all those who have died from wars or become sick in the aftermath – to move the conscience of the world to make it a better place to live in. Why can’t the USA stop selling arms and make money out of better things? Can one plant arms, eat or sleep with them? I wish someone could give me a rational answer.
Had an exciting false alarm when they rang and said that my exit papers were in order and to come to the ministry. But alas, they were only beginning the process, not finishing it, and I had to fill out a whole lot of forms about whether I was a Ba‘thi or not, etc. If they hurry the procedure, it may be finished in a week to ten days.
While I was making photocopies in a shop, I looked out of the window and saw a few sparrows. One of them had no tail, but all of a sudden it took off and flew away. So I said to the owner of the shop that the bird had no tail, so how could it fly? He answered, ‘Don’t worry, the whole population of Iraq is in that same position and they are surviving.’ The bird will survive, too; it will not have a good guidance sense, it will have difficulty with balancing, in turning right or left, but it will survive. I thought it was the most appropriate and descriptive metaphor of the present state of the people of Iraq.
Baghdad, June 1995
______________________________
* Stuffed vegetables.
* Ancient archaeological site: Saddam Hussein has had his initials carved on some of the stone and marble slabs.
* Madeleine Albright was the US ambassador to the United Nations.
* Jabra Ibrahim Jabra: famous Iraqi author and literary figure.
* Killed in accordance with Muslim law.
* Lieutenant-General Hussein Kamel al-Majid: son-in-law of Saddam Hussein and the former head of Iraq’s secret military programmes – see below.
* Long, all-enveloping, cloak-like garments.
* ‘In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.’
** The ruling party in Iraq.
*** King Faisal II, king of Iraq, 1935–1958.
**** Wife of King Ghazi of Iraq.
* Backgammon.
** Chairman of Unscom, the United Nations special commission charged with dismantling Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
* Foundations in the Dust: A Story of Mesopotamian Exploration.
* Editor of MEES, an authoritative oil journal published in Cyprus.
* Town some 160 km north of Baghdad where Saddam Hussein and most members of the Iraqi Ba‘thi regime come from.
* Craft centre, where cultural activities are also held.
* Abd al-Qadir al-Gailani was a renowned Sufi.
* Someone who can trace their ancestry back to the Prophet Muhammad.
* The Polish ambassador, representing American interests in Iraq.
* Muslim pilgrims who make the pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca.
** Nightingale.
* Eldest son of Saddam Hussein and his wife Sagida.
* Famous Iraqi oud-player.
** Stringed instrument, similar to a lute.
*** The bite of this sandfly causes a boil that leaves a scar after it has healed.
* Visiting Dutch musicians.
Exile
23 June 1995 – Amman
I now have a thumb print on my passport instead of a signature. I came out as an illiterate – that way, one can leave without paying an extra million. They took 150 dollars from me at the border. I was given a receipt for it, supposedly one gets refunded when one returns. Every time one leaves Iraq, it involves melodrama and endless humiliation. One wonders why one ever returns. Memory playing tricks again.
The first thing all Iraqis do upon arrival in Amman is to make a beeline for various doctors’ waiting rooms – each to their own particular ailments. Once that has been taken care of, they queue up for visas. Any embassy will do.
4 July
I have been undergoing millions of tests for my bone-marrow problems – my blood tests show I have low platelets, somewhere in the 80s. Nobody will tell me what I have. Is it cancer? Tomorrow I have to have more tests. Went to work in very low spirits. I have been given space at the gallery, Darat al-Funun, where I can do the work for my coming exhibition. Lovely outdoor spaces and terraces where I can put all my stones and metal bits. This complex of old houses used to belong to the British authorities and T.E. Lawrence often came to tea here.
Picked up an interesting rock in the garden and under it was this huge scorpion with a big green belly and black pincers and tail. They are the only things I’m terrified of and so thought it must be a bad omen. Azar came and touched it with his foot. It moved, and he squashed it. ‘It’s gone now,’ he said, but I couldn’t work any more so came home to write and get it out of my system.
My doctor said that I have a murmur in my throat and a thickening of the arteries. ‘Do you smoke?’ he asked.
‘It’s from the bloody pollution and other people’s cigarettes,’ I said. I hope that I pop off quickly and don’t linger around in an ill way. I wish I could blame it all on the USA; the scoliosis may be pushing it, but there should be no problem with the pollution.
12 August
The BBC is comparing Saddam to King Lear and his daughters. I like that. The situation in Amman is electric; one can actually feel it. Iraqis no longer talk about their illnesses, only about what is going to happen. I didn’t believe it when I was first told about the daughters skipping out of Iraq with husbands and kids, etc.* I thought it was yet another rumour, but I turned out to be wrong, yet again. The order of priority for conversations among Iraqis abroad now is: first, the latest rumours about Hussein Kamel and the daughters; then their own diseases; third is immigration; and fourth is the search to find a job anywhere, but especially in Jordan, Yemen or Libya,
the only countries that don’t require entry visas for Iraqis.
Every other person working at the Darat is an Iraqi on the way out, waiting for the clearance of papers to Sweden, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Malaysia or even Holland. It’s tragic. They are all young and want to make a new life for themselves elsewhere. I sit here like an old crone, giving advice, filling out forms for them and writing petitions. I can’t tell them not to go – everyone needs a chance in this life and what chance have they in Iraq? It will be centuries before that country is normal again.
22 August
The impact of my exhibition was fantastic, but I’m not sure about sales. There is a poet here at the Darat, and yesterday he asked me, ‘You mean these stones and tin cans of yours are for sale?’
I was very miffed and said, ‘Well, for a poet you certainly don’t seem to have much imagination.’
More and more Iraqis are coming out, including a weedy-looking artist who said that he had come out for medical treatment. ‘So what’s new?’ I said. I have not written about my medical problems. Q kicked up a terrific fuss when he heard about my low platelets and I had to have hundreds of extra blood tests and a horrid bone-marrow test. No one can find anything except a nasty throat infection. My platelets are still low. Freako thinks it’s the tension – that can cause a low platelet count too.
30 August
Phoned the Pakistani embassy to find out whether I needed a visa to go there. ‘We can’t issue it from here,’ he said. ‘You either get it in Baghdad or we have to write and get permission from Pakistan.’ Even Pakistan is playing hard to get. I suppose I’ll have to pull strings.
Journalists are paying a lot of attention to me. They read about an exhibition by an Iraqi artist, called ‘Embargo Art’, and came in droves. Usually they don’t like what I say. It doesn’t suit their purpose. The CNN correspondent was totally uninterested in my art. She just wanted to know whether all Iraqis were rallying around Hussein Kamel. ‘What for?’ I said. ‘But I will explain some of my sculptures to you if you don’t censor what I say. These particular sculptures are made of large coiled springs from lorries that I have painted to look like snakes; inside these coiled springs are a few stones painted to look like animals. The snakes symbolize dictatorship.’ I told her they swallow people whole, not just our sort of dictatorship but all of them, yours included. ‘In fact,’ I added, ‘yours is the biggest of all because it has swallowed up the whole world.’
7 September
The situation seems to have calmed down a bit and everyone has gotten used to the way things are. Hussein Kamel has been forgotten, hidden away somewhere in the palace grounds, the talk is back to medical problems and diseases. At lunch yesterday at Nazha’s I heard some lovely stories from her cousins who have been living in exile in London for many years. They talked of Baghdad in the old days and of the first midwife, circa early 1930s, who went round in a carriage wearing a large hat. Her Mercedes was also her ambulance, Nazha said, and as kids they used to follow her round.
Heard about a nasty incident that befell Abla Jalila in her house in Baghdad – some men came in pretending to be security types and started to look around. She said that she didn’t have much and offered them cigarettes. They put a gun to her head and told her to hand over everything. She showed them where she had hidden 5,000 dinars (which is nothing much) and they went all over the house looking for anything worthwhile to take. Found all the maid’s gold jewellery, took that and left. Abla Jalila had to pay her maid the cost price of the gold. She was lucky they didn’t kill her.
20 September
Spent the morning sitting in the Intercontinental Hotel with Khaldun and listening to his stories. A friend of his went to a butcher to buy some meat and saw a man behind the counter cutting meat very slowly. ‘Who is this?’ he asked the owner.
‘Oh,’ he answered, ‘just an Iraqi surgeon without a job, trying his luck at this one.’ Another Iraqi, an aeronautical engineer, serves coffee in an art gallery. We went on to discuss our favourite topic – health, or rather lack of it, as one grows older and bits of one’s body stop functioning properly. Khaldun said that Virginia Woolf started a diary describing each deficiency as it started, but she didn’t live long enough. He told us that his mother only got herself eyeglasses after she hung her coat on what she thought was a coat-hanger, but which turned out to be a fly on the wall. It flew in her face.
Faiza has broken her leg in three places and is in a plaster cast – she has to stay in it for six weeks.
17 November – Beirut
I’m not certain what Ma is wearing. She’s turning her old shirts and dresses into cushions, but her skirt actually looks like a cushion. So I asked her whether she was wearing one and she said, ‘It’s good silk, isn’t it?’
Ma came across an Iraqi who works in a bakery and he gave her a letter to take to his family in Baghdad when she goes back. When he tried to call them from Beirut they refused to take the call or even acknowledge his existence. Apparently, he’d already been declared a war hero and his family has taken (and spent?) the cash bonus for a war martyr – they didn’t want to know him any more. He wants Ma to talk to his sister because she may be more sympathetic to his plight. Poor man, he ran away from the army and has been cut off from family and friends for six years – he cannot even be put on an immigration or amnesty list. It’s too late.
12 December
Dood just phoned and said that I sounded pretty cheerful. I don’t know why because I am hounded by leaking and/or blocked water pipes. Have been trying to repair our bathroom, which got a rocket hit during the civil war. We now have a shiny new Italian bathtub – at least we don’t have to shower in that rusty bin as we were doing before. But the drip from the bathroom continues. I set up an elaborate contraption to trap this drip but it will not oblige, and continues to go straight down the wall. The floor is always wet. It’s been pouring with rain and the balconies are flooded with five inches of water. The men who came to put in the bathtub mixed the cement on the balcony and blocked up the drains. Stupid idiots. I’ve already had to wade out twice to try to unblock them. I managed to get the water down by about three inches.
I went to the bakery to tell the runaway Iraqi that I couldn’t get through to Baghdad to speak to Ma; the lines are down. Found another Iraqi there – his father died because there were no medicines. He left Baghdad with only one year to go before graduating with a BA. He wanted to commit suicide, but said it’s a sin. ‘I sometimes don’t have enough to eat, I’m 30 years old and what is there in life for me?’ I told him we all had to leave and earn money in the outside world in whatever way we could. They won’t let me pay for the bread in this bread shop full of Iraqis.
20 December
Mini told us the following story, and I can’t resist repeating it. During the civil war in Beirut, a Tarzan film was showing to a packed movie house when in walks a fundamentalist-looking type with a loaded gun and sits down. When Tarzan put his hand on Jane’s thigh, this guy stood up and yelled, ‘Take your hands off the girl!’ Of course, Tarzan paid no attention, so the fundamentalist took up his gun, aimed and started shooting at Tarzan. Everyone in the cinema was terrified and crouched down under their seats. The film died, and slowly the place emptied. I said, ‘That’s a beautiful story, but it must be apocryphal.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘my cousin was in the audience.’
Beirut is much safer these days. There has been much improvement since I was here last year. It may even be the safest place to live in the Middle East. Instead of guns, everyone carries mobile phones – le cellulaire as they are called here. They ring in cinemas, at funerals, in handbags ... The streets echo to the sound of ‘allo, allo’. They don’t function well inside buildings. A Lebanese simply cannot be seen in a car without one clutched in their hand, even though there’s a fine for driving and talking at the same time, but who cares here?
Went to Christmas mass with Magda and her Buddhist maid – an English mass for Fili
pinos. Guitars were playing, Sri Lankans singing and dancing a most pagan-looking dance, all in front of a statue of Christ. The priest looked stunned and amazed. The Filipino congregation sang and we all held hands and sang for peace in this world.
15 January 1996
Can’t wait for the summer to come because there’s a new waterproof cellulaire telephone, and I can just see the Lebanese drowning by the hundreds as they try to press buttons/numbers and swim with no hands.
Phoned Ma and Needles in Baghdad. They sounded utterly distraught. I felt guilty being here. When I’m in Baghdad I shunt them around in the car and make them laugh. There is no cheer left there, what with Tawadud dead and Dhafir in a bad way.
Iraqis are not good at immigrating. Being virtually landlocked, immigration to them is a serious matter, one that’s been almost forced on them for the last twenty-five years. On the other hand, generations of Lebanese have gotten into boats and sailed across the world and settled from the Americas to Africa, quite happily.
There are nearly 150 different Iraqi opposition groups (muaradha) in exile, typical of such an individualistic people. How the hell can anything get done, and when they do get together they just quarrel and sling accusations at each other. Childish remarks such as, ‘Your hands are steeped in blood’ or ‘You were seen cocktailing at the Iraqi embassy the other day.’ Bitchy and stupid for the most part. They squabble about every detail: whether one can have a revolution without a policy or strategy, or whether it’s simply better to get rid of the ruler and hope for the best. History has consistently shown us that when Iraqis knock off their leaders, what follows is usually much worse. Then they can feel even sorrier for themselves.
Baghdad Diaries Page 13
