22 January
Asked friends and fellow exiles at lunch today what they thought about that state. Atta spent thirteen years in prison, five of them under sentence of death, so I asked him how exile compares with being inside. He thought a minute and said, ‘You’re free there at least ... But I consider myself no better off than a garbage collector or sweeper here. Since I can read and write, I have a job that allows me to survive – I take what comes my way ... In the end, I took the decision to leave because I knew that I wouldn’t be able to survive financially in Baghdad. We would have had to start selling off our things and in the end we’d have been left with nothing to sell. At least now we’re surviving.’
His wife is another matter. She said, ‘I don’t have work, my things are not around me, we live in a rented flat. I’m bored and at a loose end. The family is dispersed and what am I supposed to do with myself?’
Balchis said she was happy anywhere. Rifat said, ‘Iraq is the source of my inspiration. Yes, I would go back. I would live nine months of the year there and the rest abroad. Because I write, I can rely on myself. It has been OK.’ When Rifat was in prison in Baghdad, a security guard asked him to come with him for questioning. Rifat told him to come back for him after 11 o’clock (he never talks before that time – just works). The guard did not persist. Rifat is rather imperious and can get away with such behaviour. When they finally let him out of prison his response was, ‘Too bad. I needed another three months to finish my book.’
Phoned up Needles. She seemed OK but depressed. (Ma was not there. Abu Ali came and took her to my house to get rid of a rat.) I asked Needles how Qusay was faring, and she said that by the time he got a visa to go to the USA, he had only three days to live. He died in hospital, too late. Assia left Baghdad and now has a job in Libya teaching English for 250 dollars a month. How can she manage? She has finally given up cigarettes and gotten fat – probably couldn’t afford them on her salary. Exile does have some side benefits.
6 February – Amman
Sitting in the Iraqi embassy this morning, waiting for them to renew my passport (there’s no Iraqi embassy in Lebanon, so we have to go to Jordan for all official transactions), I started chatting to a man, a poet who is taking his PhD in literature. He had spent six months earning his living as a taxi-driver in Baghdad. ‘Did you write any taxi poems?’ I asked.
‘Twelve,’ he replied, ‘but most of them can’t be published now. Only one will be.’ He said artists and creative people have to escape repressive regimes because they need to produce. That’s certainly true for Iraqi artists. They are all out now.
The Iraqi dinar went from 2,500 to 200 to the US dollar at the mere hint of the embargo being lifted! All in the space of a few days. Some people lost millions. I doubt that the embargo will be lifted.
I have started to ask Iraqi friends in Jordan what they feel about exile. Uns said, ‘I don’t even think of it.’
Her husband Salwan said simply, ‘I’m lost.’
7 February
Got my passport renewed. It was fairly easy, but I got badly mauled at the Lebanese embassy. The guard first asked me where my husband was and I told him that was none of his business. Then he cursed all Iraqis and said, ‘Saturday is the day for Iraqis,’ and slammed the door in my face. Why do we have to take this shit?
I walked to the Intercontinental Hotel for a bit of cheer to see Khaldun, who holds court there every morning. ‘Exile!’ he said. ‘I’ve always been in exile. First as a kid with King Faisal when the French came in and we had to leave Syria, then from Iraq. I don’t know any other way of life. But I’ll tell you the story of a desk. My maternal grandfather got a desk from his mother from America. When they moved to Syria they took the desk with them. When they were expelled from there in 1920 the desk remained behind and disappeared.
‘Years later,’ he continued, ‘my father passed through Damascus and saw the desk in a friend’s house. They had bought it in an antique shop and insisted that he take the desk. So he took it to Baghdad.’ Where is that desk now? Perhaps with Selwa.
8 February
Hazzema said that outside one’s homeland one is a nobody. The need to remember specific scenes, smells and the atmospheres of the past is always with one, but these particulars don’t exist any more. One has exiled oneself from them – but one still keeps looking back.
Mubajal said, ‘Ever since I was a child, all my life, I’ve been in exile. Now finally I have decided to exile myself in exile.’ It’s true, she never leaves her house. Even the doctor has to pay house calls.
Freako said she will continue to fight and argue against what has happened to all of us. ‘I saw it coming twenty years ago,’ she said, ‘and I took the decision to leave. But I’m still angry.’ Red Cross statistics say that three and a half million Iraqis have emigrated in the last ten years – two million in the last five years.
13 February
Sina misses his house terribly. ‘I lived in the same house all my life,’ he said. ‘I know every corner of it. Here we have to pay rent. I’m not used to that. I’d go back like a shot if there was the slightest hope for a future.’ His brother Lahab does not agree because he thinks being in Jordan is not really exile as we’re so close to the Jordanians. I completely disagree with that statement – not the people, not the country, not the trees, not the buildings, not the stones, not the customs and habits, not even the Arabic is the same – it’s a different dialect. And definitely not the climate or the people. They are placid and we are most volatile – the same goes for the climate.
My Lebanese visa was refused so I had to pull strings. Françoise and Cecil managed to get me an interview with the ambassador. One would think that after suffering for twenty years as a pariah nation, the Lebanese would be slightly more sympathetic towards others going through the same process. One certainly gets one’s fill of humiliation. The nasty guard was again rude to me. When I told him that I had an appointment with the ambassador, he yelled out my name loudly on the intercom and then added as an aside, ‘The artist’. Instantly, heads turned to look at me and they all smirked. The guard was very disappointed when they informed him that I did have an appointment. The ambassador gave me a hard time too. In fact, I thought he was going to refuse to give me a re-entry permit, but finally he said that for the sake of Françoise he would. We talked a bit about art and then he finally gave it to me. Hurrah.
Himmat is working on an exhibition at the Darat and has been shuffling between Paris and Tokyo for the last few years. He said that one is oneself whatever the place. He misses specific things but has only a few belongings that he leaves with a friend when he’s travelling. When he finishes this exhibition, he will return to Paris. ‘How will you get a visa?’ I asked.
‘Oh, that’s the easy part,’ he answered. I forgot that he’s a Kurd and for them visas are not a problem. Kurds and Christian Iraqis get preferential treatment, ordinary Iraqi Muslims are the West’s public enemy number one. Kurds are only refused visas to Arab countries – isn’t that extraordinary? He said that Paris is full of Iraqi artists who should have stayed at home. At least they were respected there. In Paris they do manual work, meet in cafés and talk of home. Time has stood still for them, lost in and between both worlds. They miss the life of extended families, now scattered across continents.
15 February
May says it’s all a question of identity. One doesn’t have to go around proving oneself all the time when one’s at home. She doesn’t feel so homesick in Amman because she lives in a building full of Iraqis. She hears their music, and their talk is all round her. She works as an independent scholar doing her own research, so it may be easier for her than for her husband Rafi, who teaches at the university. It’s a bureaucratic job and he isn’t happy. However, his life cannot be compared to those who emigrated to New Zealand in search of a new passport and work. They are truly cut off from their roots, their link to the past tenuous at best. How long would it take to save for a return ticket h
ome?
There is hardly an Iraqi who has come to Jordan and who has relaxed – here to stay. Getting a work or residence permit is nearly impossible. It’s not really Jordan’s fault. They are a small country and have overstretched their capacity. Even if one gets a job here it’s for low pay and there aren’t many prospects. Insecurity and vulnerability are permanent conditions; most Iraqis would return if things were right again in Iraq.
May told me the story of one of her Basra relatives who came to stay with them in Baghdad after the war. One of her daughters had a bad attack of asthma and died because they couldn’t get her oxygen fast enough. Her mother’s reaction in grief was, ‘Why did she have to die in foreign lands?’ Baghdad is only a few hundred kilometres north of Basra yet she felt that she was not at home. Exile is a state of mind.
Got a letter from Ma. Apparently, the day that she went to check my house for a lurking rat, she forgot to turn off one of the lights upstairs. The next morning Majeed showed up early on her doorstep and told her that Salvi had been driving him crazy. All night long he chased round and round the house, going to the garage, then to the front door and back again, in a complete frenzy. He must have thought I was back home, or that something was going on in the house, and he was trying to warn Majeed. Ma said she almost cried for poor Salvi.* I felt sad all day.
It seems that Hussein Kamel and his brother each have a son called Saddam. They are both at school in Amman.
More stories from Baghdad. Chaos ensued when the dinar suddenly soared in value. People went on crazy buying sprees as food prices plummeted. The banks remained open all night long so that people could exchange their hoarded dollars for the dreaded dinars that they had not been keeping. I smell a rat – the government was the clear winner. People rushed to the market and bought sheep, thousands of them; so many slaughtered, a grizzly sight. There may not be enough lambs born next spring. On top of that, not enough farmers planted grain this year because the dinar had plummeted at seed-buying time and the government didn’t lower the prices. Most farmers could not afford to buy expensive seed, so they left their fields fallow. Yaki lost a lot of money on his potato crop. He borrowed from the bank to install his cold-storage plants. When the time came to sell the potatoes, his price was too high. He had to sell for the normal price and lost a lot more.
Apparently there is little cash left in the banks; they give out pieces of paper, like IOUs. People who bring their grain to government depots are getting free fridges and washing machines instead of cash!
Ramadhan in Amman is a desolate business. People work for two hours a day and whenever one asks for anything, they say, ‘Come back when Ramadhan is over.’ The whole month is shot. In Beirut prices shot up astronomically during Ramadhan and when one asked why, they answered, ‘Because it’s Ramadhan and people can eat that much more.’
16 February
Went to Ghor al-Himma, to Mamduh’s beautiful hot springs oasis. It borders the Golan. Before Syria was their neighbour, now it’s Israel. Freako and Rabab went for a walk to the border while I was swimming, and chatted up the guards. The fence is wired on the Israeli side, but the Jordanians can’t afford to electrify their fences so they man them with soldiers. No peace agreement seems to have been signed for this border, nothing has changed here. Mamduh told us a lovely story. One morning, one of his workers brought him a couple of lychees he said he had picked up from under the fig tree. When he told him that that was not possible, the workman insisted that that’s where he’d picked them up. So Mamduh went to check. Sure enough, bits and pieces of half-eaten lychees littered the ground under the Ficus. He looked around and saw that there was a row of lychee trees planted on the Israeli side. Further investigation uncovered a colony of bats who cross the border nightly, pick the lychees and bring them back to Jordan to eat. I wondered whether the bats were pro-Jordanian and/or whether they would continue to behave in a similar manner once the Golan was returned to the Syrians. I also wondered whether they would stop crossing the border once Mamduh’s lychee trees begin to bear fruit. It would be interesting to follow up this story. The bats may simply be enjoying their freedom to move, their liberty as against the lack of it for humans.
During and after lunch, the talk was endlessly about work and residence permits, visas and identities. Mamduh said that maybe the easiest way for us to travel now would be by hijacking aeroplanes! We were a mixed bunch of Lebanese, Jordanians, Palestinians and Iraqis, every one of us chasing bits of paper – so much effort for a licence to live.
19 February
Back in Beirut after the usual messy scrum of airports and travelling. Why can’t passports and borders be abolished? Crooks seem to manage, regardless of restrictions; ordinary people who don’t know how to get round are the true sufferers. Just talked to Ma, who is still stuck in Baghdad. The government has not yet changed the cost of an exit permit, 400,000 dinars. At the old rate it means over 900 dollars to get out. Who can afford that? She won’t come ‘til May. Maybe by then they will have adjusted the price, otherwise she’ll have to borrow the money. She sounded depressed and has a fever. Needles sounded worse. Dhafir has left the hospital and gone home because the government closed it down – something to do with illegal workers. Imagine shutting down a whole hospital and sending everyone home. Everything there sounds dismal.
I went to check on the Iraqis at the bakery. The one who gave his home phone number in Baghdad to Ma has disappeared. He went into a complete frenzy, fearing that we were going to rat on him (to whom, I wonder?), and up and left the shop. He hasn’t been seen since. Poor guy.
Went and saw Atta and Batool. He is just out of hospital and seems well. He told me a lovely story that was published in the Hayat newspaper today. Apparently, an Iraqi had agreed with his parents on a special code that he would use when he made good his escape from Iraq. The code went as follows: once he was out, he would phone and say that he had arrived in Iran. This meant that he was safely out. If he said that he had moved to a new house, it meant that he’d managed to get to Sweden as an immigrant. They also decided that he should have a new name – Zuhair (his real name was Qais). So when he got to Sweden, he phoned his mother and said, ‘Hello Ma, this is Zuhair speaking.’
‘What Zuhair?’ she said.
‘Just Zuhair,’ he answered.
‘Oh,’ she replied, ‘you think I can’t recognize your voice. You’re Qais. Where are you?’ So he said,
‘I’ve gone away.’ ‘I know,’ she said, ‘you left Iran.’
He thought quickly and decided that if he said he’d moved to a new house, she might remember that this conversation was supposed to be in code, so he said, ‘I’ve moved to a new home.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘You’ve gone to Sweden.’ By then the father had realized what was happening and grabbed the telephone from his wife’s hand, and she suddenly remembered that it was supposed to be their code. She had forgotten ...
The latest story of hardships from Baghdad: the soaring prices of foodstuffs and the shortages have now hit the zoo. Bananas were never cheap in Baghdad, even at the best of times, but now their price is so prohibitive that the zoo can’t afford them. So monkeys are being fed with carrots instead. They don’t like carrots and fling them, one by one, at passers-by. Lions won’t eat carrots, so old donkeys are being killed and their meat given to the lions.
All conversations rotate round the subject of Hussein Kamel and his brother. Is it really possible that they have asked to go back? He started out in life as a driver and then rose through the ranks to become the third most important person in the country. Then he left and became a non-entity, a nothing, maybe even a liability. Gossip has it that King Hussein wants his palace back and/or that Hussein Kamel is missing his own palace in Baghdad. In the meantime, political affiliations have changed so much in Amman that even the muaradha, the opposition, is setting up shop here.
21 February
I can’t believe it – that stupid Hussein Kamel has gone back to Baghdad.*
I’ve come to the conclusion that Iraqis must be the most unpredictable people in the world.
24 February
Sol arrived, but not her baggage. It’s either stuck in Amman or in Yemen.
I knew that the brothers would be knocked off, but I didn’t think it would be so immediate. I thought Saddam would belittle them a bit, maybe even give back Hussein Kamel his old job as a driver. Saddam said that he was going to treat them like ordinary Iraqis. Well, wasn’t that an appropriate description of what happened to them! It’s obvious what Hussein Kamel thought about exile – he couldn’t take it. But to the extent that he was willing to chance going back to his father-in-law?
25 February
I was doing my back exercise this morning, lying on the floor and looking up at a spider on the ceiling. He seemed as nervous as I was, and when I got to the bicycling exercise he went hysterical, rushing round in all directions. Imagine what his eyes saw – legs rolling round and round, coming closer to him and retreating. By the time I’d finished, I was relieved to see that he was cowering in a corner. Long, fine legs – I hate spiders. They remind me of the convent days in Simla; our loos there were permanently occupied by large, hairy spiders that lay hidden and surprised one when one began to relax.
Baghdad Diaries Page 14
