Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War

by Annia Ciezadlo

  In 1988, as the war waned, Saddam’s troops sprayed poison gas on the Kurdish town of Halabja. About five thousand people died—some within minutes, their bodies frozen in agony where they fell, and thousands more later as the poison attacked their nervous systems. Roaa and her family are Kurdish, and several of her aunts and uncles died at Halabja. She was eight years old.

  Roaa’s father worked for Iraqi Airways as a flight engineer, a good job that put them comfortably in the ranks of the Iraqi middle class. Her parents traveled to Turkey, Greece, Lebanon—even to China and Japan. When she was a child, they took her to Canada for two months and France for a month. Those early trips made her eager to learn foreign languages and see the world. But after the first Gulf War, when sanctions banned flights into and out of Iraq in 1990, her father lost his airline job, and they joined the rest of the disappearing Iraqi middle class.

  Roaa and her brothers belonged to a generation of young Iraqis whose intellects were going to waste, and they knew it. Anyone born after 1968 had grown up never knowing a world without Saddam. Girls like Roaa dreamed of the things their miniskirted mothers had reveled in—travel, parties, advanced degrees. “When my mother talks about her life, and the fun that she had in the sixties and seventies, it makes me feel that I have missed my life,” Roaa told me once. “It’s not just me. All of us feel this way.”

  One of their few connections to the outside world was Shabab TV, “Youth TV,” a television channel owned by Saddam’s son Uday. Shabab TV would occasionally play bootleg versions of American movies, and one of them became an icon for young Iraqis: The Truman Show, the 1998 film whose hero is the unwitting star of an elaborately constructed reality TV show. “For Iraqis my age, it is exactly how we lived under Saddam,” she told me. “You were always being watched—you were never alone, not even at night, in bed.”

  Roaa and her family lived near one of Saddam’s many palaces. In early 2003, as the invasion loomed, they were afraid their small house would be bombed. In case they had to leave suddenly, they each had a suitcase packed. They had to decide what they would need if they never saw their home again.

  Looking over her room, Roaa realized that her most important possessions were the stuffed animals her schoolmates had given her. She took a teddy bear from her best friend, yellow with gray ears, that she had named Champagne, “because he was exactly the same color as champagne.”

  A year later, telling me about her bear, her eyes filled with tears. “It might not be very important to other people, but it is for us, because it is our memories,” she said, a little defensively. “I don’t like to throw things away. I like to keep every small detail of myself. It’s important, because that’s all what is left to us from the past.”

  The past had not left her much: a few pictures and a teddy bear named for a drink she had only tasted once, years ago. At the age of twenty-three, she was preparing to die without ever having lived.

  When the war came and their house was not bombed, Roaa found herself thinking for the first time about a future. Before, she had dreamed of being a diplomat and visiting foreign lands. But for her generation, weaned on myth and propaganda, Iraq itself was terra incognita: even within the country, the regime had kept close tabs on where people went and who they talked to. Now her journalism classes gave her a chance to explore her own country and communicate with the rest of the world.

  For average Iraqis, travel still wasn’t easy—they needed new passports, which required bribe money, and countries willing to issue visas to Iraqis. But in the summer and fall of 2003, foreigners began to converge on Baghdad: Nepalese Gurkhas, American contractors, Lebanese civil war militiamen, Chinese restaurateurs, British travel writers, and Iraqi exiles who had fled to London, Paris, and Beirut decades earlier. By the time I got to Baghdad in late 2003, half the world was already there.

  The city was changing. In the months after the invasion, marriage rates went up; rents went up; newlyweds moved in with their parents, and divorces went up. On commercial drags like Arasat, Photoshopped vinyl banners shouted the names of brands that were flooding in over the country’s newly porous borders: Samsung. Davidoff. Gauloises. In the public squares, hand-lettered signs in Arabic and English announced proud new political parties and groups whose very names thrilled with optimism: The National Front of Iraqi Intellectuals. The Movement of Democratic Lovers of Iraq. The Iraq Humanity and the Aggrieved Families Society. The Nexus of Retarded Civilians. The Organization Defenders with Outzoom from Iraqi People.

  It was the first time I had been in a foreign country for longer than two weeks. Everything seemed new and strange to me too. Customs were different: Iraqi men walked down the street arm in arm, nuzzling each other’s necks like lovers, but Mohamad and I couldn’t hold hands in public without attracting attention. Iraqis talked about Hammurabi and Ashurbanipal as if they were relatives who just stopped in for tea last week. People had a wild, cockeyed sense of humor. The guys at the Internet café across from the Hamra decorated the walls with printouts of homemade jokes, one of which said: “Dont worry if your computer crashes it is only a matter of BOMBS!”—punctuated by a smiley face and the clip art icon for a computer bomb.

  I started spending time with a crowd of artists, poets, and playwrights—hanger-outers at cafés and bookstores, chain-smoking intellectuals who held long, passionate conversations about art and literature and Jim Morrison. They called themselves Al-Najeen, “The Survivors.” Most of them were young men in their twenties: Basim Hamed, the sculptor who had replaced the famous statue of Saddam in Firdous Square, that Iraqis and American soldiers had pulled down the day Baghdad fell, with a modernist sculpture of an Iraqi family against a sun and crescent moon; Basim al-Hajar, the playwright who debuted a play in the ruins of the Al-Rasheed Theater less than a month after the regime fell; and Oday Rasheed, a thirty-one-year-old filmmaker who was shooting Iraq’s first postwar feature film. After many rejections (most editors wanted stories about insurgents) I had managed to convince a newspaper to take an article about Oday’s film. Roaa and I made an appointment to meet him and his friends at their apartment.

  Roaa liked the Najeen boys; we both considered them friends. But as we walked through the busy streets trying to locate their apartment, she started to look around uneasily. When we got to the dark, narrow alley outside their building, she stopped and looked up at the sooty windows with an expression of uncertainty and fear. She didn’t want to go in.

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “In our culture, it is this sort of thing—going to the house of some men . . .” she trailed off. “If anybody were to see me going into this house, they would say I was doing wrong things.”

  The phrase “wrong things” came up frequently in my conversations with Iraqi women. Its very vagueness was corrosive: you could imagine anything, and people did. It had the power to keep women like Roaa from visiting a group of gentle, intelligent men her age. It kept women out of public life; out of any life except the kitchen.

  “Look, you don’t have to come in,” I said, probably less patiently than I should have. “The guys speak enough English, I can talk to them. You can go home.”

  She took a deep breath. “No,” she said, and set her little chin.

  “This is one of the old ways of things, one of the things we have to leave behind,” she said. “I still respect my culture. I would never do something that would harm Islamic culture. Never. But everything is changing—the world is changing. And if we stay in the same mind as a hundred years ago, we will never change anything.”

  And with that, she walked across the alley and into the building.

  Chapter 9

  The Sumer Land

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER we arrived, our Lebanese friend Rebecca took us to dinner at the hotel where she was staying, which was called the Sumer Land. “Wait until you taste their shish taouk!” she told us, and then gave it her highest compliment: “It’s almost Lebanese!”

  Nationality aside, it was real shish taouk:
chunks of chicken breast stained orange with spices, marinated in yogurt until it was tender and juicy, nothing like the hard brown pellets at the Hamra. We resolved to move into the Sumer Land as soon as we could. This required a triangular onslaught of meetings: first between Rebecca and Muhammad, the hotel’s manager, to convince him to give us a room at her special rate (“Don’t be a fool—they’re ready to move in, but you have to give them a good price!”); then between Mohamad and Muhammad; and finally among Muhammad, Mohamad, and me, to consummate the deal by drinking coffee out of little china cups in his office.

  Muhammad the manager was a tall, stooped man with a sagging mustache. He seemed like a dour fellow at first, as he shuffled around the dark, echoey marble-tiled lobby. Everything about him sloped and sagged, like an empty suit hanging from a hook. But he warmed up to us once we moved in and even showed a slouching sense of humor. Muhammad and his employees had a cynical camaraderie, and we formed friendships in the lobby, the restaurant, the Internet café. We settled in and started to feel at home.

  Our room even had a little kitchen, with a real stove and a sink and a small refrigerator. We started going to the markets more, and eating more Iraqi food: near the hotel there was a bakery where you could buy falafel and another where you could get tanoor bread. The falafel place made its sandwiches on samoun, a baguette-like bread that Nawal Nasrallah refers to as a “domesticated version” of French and Italian bread, and slathered them with mayonnaise. We started buying just the falafels themselves, then wrapping them in tanoor bread with fresh vegetables from the market. At home, we would eat them with hummus that I made myself, with imported Lebanese olive oil and a pinch of Iraqi bharaat, a spice mixture heavy on black pepper, cumin, coriander, and cinnamon.

  Mohamad missed the food in Lebanon, and I loved finding food in Iraq, so we made our own fusion creations with Iraqi ingredients made Lebanese style. We developed a ritual: after reporting all day, we would stop at the markets for a bag of bread and whatever fruit or vegetables were in season—tomatoes, okra, figs, and the legendary Iraqi dates. I got hooked on tamur rutab, the fresh dates picked early in the season. They were unlike any other dates I’d ever eaten—juicy and featherlight on the inside, with a skin so sheer it crackled when you bit into them.

  But on days when we were too tired to cut tomatoes or traffic was too heavy to get to the markets or the bakery was out of bread—or all of the above—there was always the Sumer Land’s restaurant. It was another world: the 1950s orange-and-brown décor; the chunky brick walls; the rustic summer-camp tables carved out of thick slabs of wood. I would go into the kitchen sometimes, just for a look, and the portly cook would laugh. He always wore a clean white chef’s vest. I eventually convinced him to make me an entrée of the vegetables the restaurant normally served only on the side: zucchini, carrots, and cauliflower perfectly sautéed in butter. It got to the point that whenever the restaurant staff saw me coming, they would chant: “Shajar, jazar, wa qarnabeet?”—“Zucchini, carrots, and cauliflower?” Hussein, the tall, talkative young waiter, would try to tempt me with new dishes: “Today we have shrimp, direct from Basra,” he would say, leaning over our table, whispering conspiratorially, “and they came in a refrigerated truck!”

  The Sumer Land served a brilliant appetizer, a cross between the modern Middle Eastern staple of kibbeh and a deviled egg, with roots that went back to medieval Iraq: the Egg Basket. It resembled the fried ball of meat and grain called kibbeh qras in the Levant. Shaped like an egg but varying in size, the classic kibbeh qras consisted of two layers: a thin, crisp layer of cracked wheat and meat blended together forms the shell of the “egg.” Spiced ground meat, sometimes mixed with pine nuts, made the yolk. Most places left it at that. But the chef at the Sumer Land would cut out two quadrants from one side of the kibbeh, leaving a strip in the middle like the handle of an Easter basket. Then he hollowed out the inside and slid in half a hardboiled egg, sliced lengthwise. He topped this concoction with gooey orange Russian dressing, so that it resembled the stuffing in a deviled egg. The Egg Basket was like an Easternized Scotch egg or a Westernized kibbeh, depending on where you came from; a cross-cultural pun par excellence, a play on the form and function of kibbeh and egg. In fact, it was a culinary echo of medieval Iraqi cooks, who concealed hard-boiled eggs in their meatballs to surprise and delight the guests. It filled you up and made you happy and cost about two dollars.

  An Iraqi friend told us that before the war the Sumer Land had been famous for its parties—wild, Beirut-style bacchanals where Iraq’s prewar elite would end the night by dancing on the tables. The image of the lugubrious Muhammad presiding over such debauchery seemed unlikely. But when Mohamad asked him about it, the manager’s gloomy face drooped into a nostalgic smile. “Yes, our parties were the best,” he sniffed, squinting down his pendulous nose. “People used to come from Mansour, from all over. The Hamra was nothing.”

  Late one night, at around 10:30, I was sitting in the Sumer Land’s Internet café when a tall woman walked in. Something about her commanded attention. Maybe it was the baby-pink sweatsuit, which seemed unusual for Baghdad. Or it could have been the long, honey-gold hair tumbling over her shoulders in careless waves; her slender waxed arms; the birdwing arches of her nose. Whatever the reason, the men in the room sat up straighter, the women tried to ignore her, and one by one, all the male hotel staffers found an excuse to drop by the café.

  I noticed her a few more times after that. She would always come in late at night, and although she seemed to know the hotel staff very well, she didn’t speak to anybody else.

  The next time this mystery woman came in I said hello in Arabic. She looked back at me, her tawny eyes calmly assessing, and without much preamble she demanded in English, “Did you make love with your husband before you were married?”

  I knew the hotel staff had probably told her who Mohamad and I were. But I didn’t know who she was, or anything about her, and in Iraq you didn’t discuss your sex life with strangers.

  “What do you think?” I said finally.

  She laughed, and then smiled sleepily. We were friends now, or at least accomplices. She reached out and rubbed the fuzzy golden hairs on my forearm. “This!” she scolded. “Why you don’t take care of this? Your husband will like you better.”

  “Oh, I don’t think he really cares about that kind of stuff,” I said.

  “Ha,” she barked. With satisfaction she added, “He will leave you.”

  The first time I visited Layla’s room, she was sitting in a chair crammed close to the television. There was barely enough room for the sofa and a couple of armchairs in the claustrophobic living room of her suite. Grubby handprints greased the walls. Her two daughters, six and seven years old, both as beautiful as their mother, were playing video games on a computer. The screensaver was a picture of Saddam after one of his famous swims across the Tigris, a reenactment of his watery escape after failing to assassinate Iraq’s prime minister in 1959. The dictator was dripping wet and wearing nothing above the waist but a dazzling white smile. Layla was watching Friends.

  “I love Ross,” she sighed, closing her eyes dreamily and draping an exquisitely manicured hand over her heart.

  I visited Layla often over the next year. We would sit in her living room and share coffee, tea, cigarettes, and Arabic sweets. Layla was around my age, in her early thirties. She had studied art and classical poetry at Baghdad University, but quit her studies when she got married at twenty-three. She had divorced her philandering husband a few years before the war. “He was very tender, very romantic,” she said. “But he didn’t really care about me and our girls. He just wanted my money.”

  When Layla found out Mohamad and I were on our honeymoon, she was appalled: a newlywed, and I was already letting myself go—no pedicures, no waxing, and hair that had never known chemicals. “Eastern women, we like to look beautiful for our husbands,” she said.

  She looked at me accusingly, as if I were part of some American impe
rialist uglification campaign.

  “They like us to be beautiful,” explained her niece, Shirin, who was visiting her that day. “Soft.”

  “Also, they like us to have big breasts,” said Layla. Lifting her T-shirt, she exhibited a shiny padded beige bra. “Iraqi women, we have bigger breasts than American women,” she said, and tucked her T-shirt back in.

  After we’d known each other for a few months, Layla decided to save my marriage by giving me a full Iraqi makeover: legs, arms, eyebrows, manicure, and pedicure. “I will call a woman, a friend, and she will come to the hotel,” she said, looking happy to have a project. “She can do everything except hair. For coloring you must go to the salon.” I didn’t tell her that the only time I’d had my hair done at a salon was the day I married Mohamad, or that I hated it so much I ran home before the wedding and scrubbed off the hairspray encrusted to my scalp.

  Before the war, Layla went to mixed-sex parties where she could wear the fashionable clothes she liked, and “talk, dance, laugh—things that girls do.” She went to concerts by Lebanese pop stars at the Alwiya Club, where Uday Hussein was said to have held his birthday party. Tickets were $50—a fortune for most people in Iraq, especially after sanctions. She didn’t miss a single show. She traveled abroad without a mahram, the male chaperone required when women left the country. The rules did not apply to people like her.

  “I did everything I wanted,” she said. “That’s why I’m not happy now. Because before the fall of the regime, I had more freedom.”

  Layla was a Baathist in spirit, if not a party member. Ethnically, she was Kurdish; but above a certain tree line of wealth and privilege, ethnicity or sect didn’t matter as much as it did for others down below. There were plenty of Shiite and Kurdish Baathists. Her friends were Christians, Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis; it didn’t matter. What mattered was money, and she had plenty. Layla owned a mansion along the Tigris. But after the invasion, she couldn’t live in it; she was too kidnappable. Fortunately, the owner of the Sumer Land was a family friend, so she moved into the hotel with her daughters.