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

by Annia Ciezadlo

  Despite her fanatical devotion to beauty, hardly anyone ever saw Layla: she rarely left the Sumer Land. She reminded me of a British colonial official, dressing for dinner every night so as not to let civilization go to the dogs. She seemed to pass most of her days sitting alone in the cramped living room, drinking coffee with perfectly manicured hands, watching Rachel and Ross and the gang prance around their fairy-tale apartments in sinful coed luxury and dreaming of herself among them.

  A beautiful woman yearning for David Schwimmer and Saddam Hussein. It surprised me at first. But it made sense: to her, they both meant freedom.

  Chapter 10

  The Flavor of Freedom

  If you go into any town, eat of its vegetables and onions, for they drive away the sickness special to that town.

  —The Medicine of the Prophet, Mahmud bin Mohamed al-Chaghhayni

  AFTER A FEW weeks in Baghdad, Mohamad hired a driver named Abu Zeinab, a cheerful giant who drove the tiniest red car in Baghdad. (Abu Zeinab is a kunyah, a nickname derived from the name of the firstborn—in this case, “father of Zeinab,” his four-year-old daughter. In much of the Arab world, parents usually name themselves after firstborn sons, but among Iraqi Shiites it is not uncommon to take the name of a firstborn daughter.)

  One day Abu Zeinab was driving us along the Tigris when we passed a grove of date palms the size of a football field. Tall, graceful trunks marched off in stately rows. The tops wove together into a green canopy. Grass grew underneath them so Granny Smith green I thought at first it was Astro Turf. Looking out over this oasis from Abu Zeinab’s hot little car, wedged in acres of diesel-fumed traffic, I realized it had been months since I had touched grass. And just like that, the homesickness got me.

  Back in Chicago, my mother wrote me e-mails describing fall in the Midwest: the magnolia tree was shedding its leaves. The crab apples glowed like bright red cherries. The deer invaded the backyard every evening and looked up, startled, when they heard the screen door slam. The air smelled like wood smoke and cinnamon.

  Homesickness was exactly that—a sickness. A misalignment of the limbs. A chemical imbalance in the blood. Body and soul out of balance from trying to straddle two different places at once. My skin remembered the precise level of moisture in the air; it rebelled against the heat, the dust. My feet recalled the exact surface tension of New York City pavement, northern Illinois soil, hardwood floors. My eyes needed green.

  If you couldn’t bring the body back to the place it remembered, you did the next best thing: you brought a bit of the place to where the body was. You could fool your metabolism, at least temporarily, with music. You could numb it with drink. But the best way to trick homesickness, as every traveler knows, is with food.

  After that first, disastrous meal at the Hamra, I asked every Iraqi I met about food. Even then, people were growing tired of politics. But everyone loves to talk about food. And food was one of the few things I could talk about in Arabic.

  In the beginning, I simply wandered around Baghdad, speaking to people in the little Levantine dialect I knew. Pickles in Beirut are kabees, “pressed.” In Baghdad they’re mkhallal, “the vinegared,” or turshi, a Farsi word for pickle. In Lebanon zucchini was kusa or courgette; in Iraq, it was shajar, which in Lebanon meant “tree.”

  But even when I knew the words, I couldn’t understand the guttural Iraqi accent. Their words were heavier; they clanked with consonants the Lebanese would simply swallow or spit out. If Iraqis didn’t understand me, it might be because I’d gotten a word wrong; it might also be that I was using a Levantine word they’d never heard before. The times I actually communicated seemed like small miracles, and I would whisper the words to myself like a blissful incantation: Dajaj: chicken. Mai: water. Rumman: pomegranate. Masquf: masquf.

  I started asking everyone to recommend a favorite dish. Everybody said the same thing: masquf. You have to try masquf. The best place for masquf used to be on Abu Nuwas, along the Tigris . . .

  Here they would sigh, and a montage of expressions—pleasure, pride, and regret—would pass across their faces.

  Nowadays, they would resume, the best place to get masquf is a restaurant in Karada, next to the leather factory. Here, I’ll write it down for you . . .

  The search for food led me to the places where Baghdad was at its best. Karada was my favorite neighborhood, especially the long and bustling market street of Inner Karada. American magazines described Iraqi women as cowering in their homes, kidnapped and raped if they set foot outdoors. The streets of Baghdad, according to these accounts, were empty of the fairer sex. But Karada swarmed with women: working-class Iraqi women didn’t have servants to do their shopping. They had to work, get groceries, and pick up their kids. They wore short-sleeved T-shirts, long black abayas, and everything in between. The women wearing abayas billowed along the sidewalks like black jellyfish. Every so often, a hand shot out to snare small children, point out tomatoes, or clutch the surging black cloth underneath a rounded chin.

  At Mahar masquf shop, the man led me to a bathtub where fat gray carp circled sluggishly. He asked me to choose my victim. I pointed to the liveliest one. The cook reached in and grabbed the fish, laid it on a worn wooden plank, and smashed its head with a mallet. The fish lay stunned, but not quite dead—I had chosen that one, after all, for its fierce attachment to life.

  Starting at the back of the fish’s head, he slit it down the spine with a knife, then grabbed each side of the incision and turned the fish inside out. The two halves of its own face gazed inward at each other in a macabre kiss. Pressing it open with quick, strong hands, he flattened the fish, now thoroughly deconstructed, into a large round O. He folded it between the metal jaws of a hinged barbecue rack (later, I visited more traditional places that propped their fish up on little wooden sticks). He splayed it out over a large open vat of smoldering wood.

  “Come back in one hour,” he told me, “and your masquf will be ready to eat.”

  There was a phrase Iraqis were always using: the flavor of freedom. For a lot of Baghdadis, that flavor was masquf. It was more than just a fish, or a way of preparing it; the ritual of masquf embodied a vanished place and time and way of life.

  Masquf can be made anywhere—they make it in Basra, or even, these days, in Beirut. But it is meant to be savored in the open-air restaurants on Abu Nuwas, the corniche along the Tigris where Iraqis used to stroll at sunset.

  Traditionally, the best masquf was made from barbel, a carp-like fish that Iraqis have been eating since the ancient Mesopotamian days. But masquf’s flavor also came from the hour of anticipation while you waited for your fish. During that hour, people would eat, drink, gamble, and talk. Girls and boys would stroll up and down the corniche laughing and making eyes at one another. Mothers and fathers would rent boats and float up and down the moonlit river, drinking in the sound of music and laughter over water, the flickering fires, the smell of roasting fish from the riverbank. “The important thing on Abu Nuwas was drinking arak,” explained Salaam, the young Communist I had met at Maggy’s journalism class, who had become a good friend, “and eating meze like jajik while you waited for your fish to be done.”

  Abu Nuwas had its heyday in the 1950s and ’60s, when the city rented out small plots along the riverfront every summer. Families would take them for the season and set up temporary wooden ramadas with roofs woven out of river reeds. On hot summer nights, everybody would head for the riverfront to talk, play the oud, take boat rides, and eat masquf.

  Some people said masquf was imported by the Ottomans. Others maintained it was a Babylonian tradition, thousands of years old. Muslims claimed it was a Christian dish (the Christian taste for fish being well known). Christians whispered that it was a specialty from the old Jewish quarter along the river (the Jewish affinity for fish being well known). Some believed it had come from the Mandeans (the Mandean love for the river and its waters being well known).

  I found this frustrating. I wanted facts, dates, scholar
ly references, not a vague mash of exoticized nostalgia. Everybody talked about masquf, but nobody knew where it came from. Etymology was no help: as with many Arabic dishes, its name describes the form of the dish more than its contents. Masquf means “the ceilinged,” from saqf, “ceiling”—a poet’s description of the fish spread out over the fire like the roof of a little open ramada.

  Ancient Sumerian tablets mention fish “touched by fire,” an ambiguous phrase. Herodotus wrote that three Babylonian tribes lived on fish alone, but according to his detailed description, they dried their catch in the sun, pounded it in mortars, and made it into cakes or “a kind of bread.” (An Iraqi from the marshland tribes told me they still make fish this way.) Pedro Teixeira, a Portuguese merchant-adventurer who traveled through Baghdad in 1604, noted that “Fish are plentiful and good, and the Moors use them.” But the usually thorough Teixeira does not say how the Moors used the fish. And so it was with all the sources I could find: the more I read, the more people I asked, the more masquf and its origins receded into mystery.

  In Iraq, as everywhere, food was an instant geographic indicator. There was the famous black pickle of Najaf, made with date syrup; the tiny, delicate okra of Hillah; the tender and juicy kebabs of Fallujah. There was a kind of oven-roasted lamb that is a specialty not just of Basra but of one particular family in Basra. This culinary GPS system often overlapped with sect. “I can enter an Iraqi house, and from the food I can tell if they are Sunni or Shiite,” an Iraqi man once boasted to me. “I’m not saying that Sunnis don’t make Shiite dishes, or vice versa. But you do have certain foods that are associated with certain places.”

  Masquf was one such dish. It might be made in other cities, but its soul was still in Baghdad. It got its flavor from the Tigris, even when the fish never touched its waters, and from Abu Nuwas Street.

  Abu Nuwas Street was named after an eighth-century poet. He was a companion of the Caliph al-Amin, son of Haroun al-Rashid, the storied caliph of the Arabian Nights. Nicknamed the “Father of Locks” for his luxuriant hair, Abu Nuwas was a bisexual bon vivant famous for his khamriyaat, “wine songs”—hymns in praise of wine and the nights he spent drinking it with beautiful girls and boys. He was the patron poet of bars and drinking and unrepentant freedom. “Accumulate as many sins as you can,” he wrote once, because when Judgment Day arrives, and you see how forgiving and gracious God is, you’ll gnaw your fingers with regret at all the fun you didn’t have. “[So] drink the wine, though forbidden / For God forgives even grave sins.”

  The nomadic bards of pre-Islamic Arabia padded their poems with grandiose invocations like the famous qifa nabki, “halt, and let us weep.” They wept over the abandoned campsite, the spot in the desert where the caravan of their lovers had once stopped, and the romance of endless travel. The formula persisted long after poetry moved to the cities; in medieval Baghdad, citified poets who wouldn’t know a camel if it bit them in the behind were still invoking the cold campfire, the traces in the sand, the lost ladylove. Abu Nuwas mastered the old nomadic form first. And then he updated it with a parody more suited to modern urban life: “This loser stopped to talk to an abandoned campsite,” he wrote (the paraphrase is mine), “while I paused to ask what happened to the neighborhood bar.”

  In the 1960s and ’70s, a generation of Iraqi intellectuals discovered a world of ideas, debate, and friendship on Abu Nuwas Street. The Iraqi journalist and memoirist Zuhair al-Jezairy described how Baghdad’s relationship to the river changed as the street and its restaurants had evolved: “The river became a kind of lung by which the city breathed—a boon for the eye and the spirit.”

  Faleh Jabar grew up in Baghdad during the golden age of Abu Nuwas Street. Today he is a well-known sociologist and author. But back then he was a penniless young student, eking out a living with occasional writing and translation work, “producing horrible sentences” out of his precious Webster’s Collegiate dictionary. Every evening, Jabar and his circle of friends would gather at Abu Nuwas and spend long summer nights drinking, talking, exchanging books and arguments and ideas.

  One night, a friend of Jabar’s brought his wife to the café. Some of the masquf restaurants had introduced “family sections,” where families could eat together. But for young men and women who weren’t blood relatives to mingle at cafés and bars—to sit and drink together in places where alcohol was served—was still shocking. Nobody had seen anything like it. The place was in an uproar.

  The owner came to their table. “We don’t have a private section for families,” he said, meaning no women allowed.

  “It’s none of your business,” replied the lady, her green eyes flashing. “I’m drinking tea. Is there anything in the Quran, in the shariah, or in the law, that forbids drinking tea in a café with my husband? With my cousins, with all my brothers?”

  Such a thing could happen only on Abu Nuwas, Jabar told me—lowering his voice and looking back over his shoulder as if, thirty years later, the café owner might still hear him.

  After the Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632, the leadership of Islam passed to a succession of caliphs. The caliph was the “commander of the faithful,” the political and military leader of the worldwide community of Muslims, and the city where he lived was the caliphate—the capital of the Muslim world. In 762, the Caliph al-Mansur moved the caliphate from Syria to Iraq. He built the round city of Baghdad in a small but strategic site on the banks of the Tigris. He christened his new capital Medinat al-Salam, the City of Peace, and immediately set about constructing an enormous palace.

  Then as now, Baghdad was a city of souqs. Every profession had its market: the silversmiths, the booksellers, the perfumers. And right in the middle of the bustling marketplace, surrounded by soap makers, butchers, and cooks, stood the caliph’s new palace. Just as the palace was finished, an ambassador from the Byzantine Empire came to visit.

  Scribes and scholars tell different versions of what happened next—kan ya ma kan, as the storytellers say; literally, “it was and it was not,” or “once upon a time.” But here’s more or less what took place:

  “How do you like my city?” the caliph asked his Byzantine visitor, expecting lavish praise.

  “Indeed, you have built a palace like no one before you,” said the ambassador. “Yet it has one flaw: the markets. Because they are open to all, your enemy can enter, and the merchants can pass on information about you. The leader who lives close to his subjects can have no secrets.”

  The caliph frowned, went stiff, and considered flying into a rage.

  “I have no secrets from my subjects,” he said coldly.

  But as soon as the Byzantine ambassador left, the caliph ordered his servants to bring a wide garment. He unfurled it across the table and drafted a new plan for the city on its fabric. He banished all markets from the city center, leaving only a few baqqals, greengrocers whom he barred from selling anything but vinegar and greens. He moved the markets across the river, putting each merchant in a specific place, with the butchers at the very end because “their knives are sharp and their wits are dull.” With a stroke of his pen, he rewrote the city.

  Saddam Hussein fancied himself among the great caliphs. He too built a palace along the Tigris; he too rearranged the city. In 1968, after its second coup, the Baath Party had banned the renting of small plots along the river. In the mid-1980s, Saddam began his assault upon Abu Nuwas Street and its culture of cosmopolitan freedom. He diverted water from the river to feed his palace’s fountains and swimming pools. He fenced off its banks with barbed wire. He posted guards along Abu Nuwas who watched pedestrians with hard eyes. He tore down blocks of old Baghdadi houses, with their graceful cantilevered balconies, and replaced them with a row of identical brown brick townhouses. Ugly as they were, these brownish barracks were prime real estate, rewards for loyal party henchmen; Saddam filled them with his Republican Guards, “and with that,” wrote Jezairy, “the river became their prize.” The street of the drunken bisexual poet, of masquf and bee
r and summer nights, turned into a district of drugs and prostitutes and wild dogs. Some restaurants still sold masquf along the river. But with the eyes and ears of the regime all around, it had a different flavor.

  During sanctions, the sewage pouring into the Tigris made it too polluted for fishing, and the masquf trade shifted to Karada. Now the fish were farmed in giant hatcheries, trucked into the city, and sold out of bathtubs on Karada’s sidewalks or at restaurants like White Palace. The fishermen who had once made their living catching shabout and bunni from the Tigris went elsewhere or died out.

  In June of 2003, Jabar returned to Baghdad for the first time in almost twenty-five years. He headed straight for Abu Nuwas. Near the Jumhuriyah Bridge, he looked down at the Tigris; once a silver ribbon, it had become a poisonous chemical green. A metal fence blocked off the water from anyone foolish enough to approach. Whorls of concertina wire grew along the riverbank like a mutant metallic weed. Qifa Nabki—halt, and let us weep.

  But then, looking closer, Jabar saw a gap in the fence. Somebody had cut a ragged hole with wire clippers. A toothless, wrinkled face peered up at him from the riverbank: an ancient fisherman, a remnant of the old Abu Nuwas.

  “What’s this fence, who put up the fence?” Jabar asked him.

  “It’s been there for twenty years,” said the old man.

  “And who cut this hole?”

  “We did it,” he said, triumphant. “We took back our river for the first time in twenty years.”