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

by Annia Ciezadlo

  In vain I protested that I had already ordered and drunk an ocean of tea. I was speaking to the air. He was already gone.

  He bustled back in with a glass of pale tea. “This,” he said, presenting it to me with a flourish: “this—believe me!—is the real tea of Iraq!”

  It looked oily, dense and yellow, like a glass of melted topaz. It tasted musty and bittersweet—an antique taste, like drinking old history books. It was called hamudh, which means sour, and it was made from noomi Basra, little sun-dried key limes historically imported from Persia through the southern Iraqi port of Basra.

  Abu Rifaat had spent most of his life as a radar operator in the Iraqi army. Once he retired, he became a full-time scholar of the word. Medieval Iraqi poets went to the Basra souq to learn the desert Arabic of the Bedouin; twelve centuries later, Abu Rifaat haunted the cafes and streets of Baghdad, compiling massive, heavily annotated guides to the strongly flavored expressions of Iraqi speech—the proverbs, idioms, jokes, graffiti, and slang. “All of them are alive,” he told me, as we sat in Shahbandar, waving his hand around the café, “because they are circulating in places like this.”

  I never saw Abu Rifaat without a stack of books. He would pile them on one of Shahbandar’s little linoleum tea tables: a rusty old copy of Cricket magazine with the cover torn off; a ragged 1950s-era primer on Business English; and Chicken Soup for the Soul. This he considered second only to Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, a compendium of trivia, stories, and odd little facts that he often held up as proof of the beauty of American literature.

  “They write things that are so beautiful, you cannot find anything like this in any other country!” he told me. “For example, the Bathroom Reader. It is so beautiful. It is not a book—it is a university! It contains everything beautiful.”

  In the Middle East, folk stories chronicle the misadventures of a wise fool, a trickster named Juha or Nasir id-Deen, or, in Lebanon, Abu Abed. In America, the storytelling tradition lived on in compilations of urban legends and little self-help fables, like Chicken Soup for the Soul.

  Abu Rifaat loved America and everything it produced. His father started it: if an American movie aired at night on television, he would wake up the children, shaking their shoulders gently: “Look, watch—James Cagney! Jimmy Stewart!” Later, Abu Rifaat discovered something even better than Hollywood: American literature—Jacqueline Susann, Harold Robbins, Sidney Sheldon, and Barbara Taylor Bradford. Books were his key to America, the dream world that kept him going through the long, lonely years in the army.

  “We need the artists, because they make life so beautiful,” he sighed to me once, in Shahbandar. “I don’t know why the journalists laugh at me when I tell them I love Sidney Sheldon. His writing, it is so beautiful. You know, one of his books, I read it twenty-two times before I was satisfied!”

  I never made fun of Abu Rifaat’s taste in books. In Baghdad you read whatever you could find. I scored an old paperback of Moby-Dick in Mutanabbi Street, and John Dos Passos’s entire USA trilogy in one volume. But I was equally excited to find a flaking old copy of Budd Schulberg’s boxing novel The Harder They Fall, with a pulpy cover that growled, “Rough and Tough, Smelling of Blood and Lust.” That was America too, and we all need to escape sometimes.

  Late fall in Baghdad felt like spring in the Midwest. It was warm instead of hot, and after it rained the fragrance of orange and lemon trees would temper the stench of burning garbage and generator fuel. I started driving around with Abu Zeinab, and sometimes Roaa, and exploring different parts of the city: Hurriya, Kadhimiya, Bab al-Muadham, Baitaween; Mustansiriya University; the art gallery Hewar (“Dialogue”), with its green sculpture garden and outdoor café. But there was one place I had been avoiding. Aside from a late-night trip to the American military hospital when I was sick, I had never been to the Green Zone.

  The Green Zone was surrounded by concrete barriers, concertina wire, armed guards, sandbags, and checkpoints where you had to stand in line for hours, every minute of which you were a sitting duck for suicide bombers; all to attend press conferences where U.S. occupation officials would read prepared statements about how well everything was going in Iraq. By mid-November, I felt safer drinking tea at Shahbandar than approaching the citadel of American power. Mutanabbi Street felt less alien.

  But shortly before Thanksgiving, a friend told me to look up an American colonel she knew named Alan King. She introduced us over e-mail and suggested we get together. I invited him to lunch—thinking, naively, that I would take him to Karada for masquf.

  He e-mailed me back right away. Lunch was great; as for location, he wrote, “since I have a price on my head I try not to go to too many public places.” He asked me to meet him in the Green Zone.

  Alan King was thick as an oil drum, solid, and so blond his hair looked white. He had a round, red, sun-seared face that he screwed up in a perpetual squint, as if blinded by his own blondness. He looked like he was designed for colder climates. But he was from northern Virginia, and he had spent the 1980s and ’90s in places like Egypt, Bosnia, Honduras, and Panama. He seemed to feel right at home in the brick-oven heat of Baghdad.

  “Betsy said you were a good journalist,” he said, and gripped my hand with what felt like a cinder block. “I’m real pleased to meet you.”

  Alan headed a civil affairs battalion that was responsible for building relationships between the U.S. military and the local population. As the military marched through the south and up into Baghdad during the invasion, Alan realized that the tribes had a lot of influence, especially outside Baghdad. He built a Rolodex of Iraq’s tribal sheikhs, and made it his mission to build alliances with these leaders and their far-flung networks. He studied all the tribal divisions in Iraq, from the overarching confederations to the smallest unit of five generations in one family. He got a copy of Arab Tribes of the Baghdad Wilayat, a guide published in 1918 by British colonial authorities, and began learning the history of the major tribes. He held weekly meetings with an Iraqi historian, and they amassed a list of all of the tribes in Iraq. He punched them into his Palm Pilot, indexed into tribe, sub-tribe, clan, sub-clan, branch, and family. He memorized every line and verse of the Quran, especially those that had anything to do with relations between Muslims and “People of the Book”—Christians, Sabaeans, and Jews. In conversation he would rattle off verses of the Muslim holy book and follow them up with biblical scripture.

  All this homework paid off when he met Hussein Ali al-Shaalan, a Shiite from the southern town of Diwaniya. Sheikh Shaalan led a branch of the Khazail, a historically rebellious confederation with branches across the Middle East. Sheikh Shaalan fled Iraq after the 1991 uprising, when Shiites in the south rebelled against Saddam at President Bush’s urging. After a year in Saudi Arabia, he was granted political asylum in London and studied law at the American University there. He returned to Iraq after the 2003 invasion.

  In a show of respect, Alan invited Sheikh Shaalan to meet with him three times. Shaalan waited for the third invitation before he granted the American officer an audience. When they finally met, Alan related a centuries-old Iraqi tale about Shaalan’s tribal confederation crossing a river. That was an even greater compliment than the three invitations. “This knowledge that he had, he either knew it or he found it out,” Shaalan said, nodding gravely, when I met him. “In both cases, this shows that he is doing his duty.”

  Learning the tribes, knowing their history—those gestures showed the kind of mutual respect one warrior caste expects from another. But one of the most important acts of diplomacy an American soldier could perform, as Alan soon discovered, was simply to eat. Eat the sheep a tribal sheikh has slaughtered. Eat mountains of rice scooped up with three fingers. Eat gobbets of fat with relish, and not a moment’s hesitation, because your host would normally save this delicacy for himself and he is offering it to you min eedu, from his hand. Eat sitting at tables in gilded overstuffed dining room chairs, reclining on cushions in a diwan, or kneeling o
n a concrete floor around a sheet of plastic weighed down with bowls of kubba. The path to hearts and minds led through the stomach. You have to eat the meal.

  This was proving just as true for me. Food and drink were like truth serum. People would say one thing when you first met them. After a cup of tea or coffee, a plate of pastries—gradually, bite by bite, they would reveal what they really thought.

  “We are outraged by the despicable events in Abu Ghraib!” they might rail at first, politely supplying the bluster they believed I was after.

  After a cup of coffee, the outrage over Abu Ghraib would turn into “Well, we are not surprised.” By the end of a meal, it might be an incredulous shrug: “Do you think we care if the Americans torture these people? Those Baathists tortured us for years. Forget Abu Ghraib. What I really want to know is: when are we going to get electricity?”

  Every place in the world has a shibboleth, a question for sussing out who you are and where your loyalties lie. Classical Greeks would ask strangers which city-state they were citizens of: the Cynic Diogenes hated this question so much he came up with the famous retort “Kosmopolites eimi”—“I am a citizen of the world.”

  Like all questions, these also contain an answer. When you move to a new place, you do well to learn its question right away, because the question tells you what its people value (or fear) above all else. During my two years in Clayton, Missouri, I got used to the question: “What parish are you from?”—because being Catholic was apparently, in some circles, a given. In New York, it was “What do you do?”—because in New York everyone must do something.

  In Iraq, the question is “Min aya aamam?” “Which tribe are you from?” Literally, aamam means “paternal uncles”: the tribe—called banu, the plural of ibn, which means “son”—is a very extended family that serves as the guarantor of lineage and honor.

  The tribes of the Middle East emerged long before Islam or Christianity. Tribal identity cuts across sectarian lines and supersedes national boundaries; a tribe might be Shiite in some places, Sunni in others. A tribesman from western Iraq might feel more loyalty to kinsmen across the border in Syria than he did to an Iraqi from Basra. Some of the larger tribal confederations, made up of numerous tribes aligned for purposes of war, spanned the entire Arabian Peninsula.

  Historically, one of the tribal leader’s most trusted attendants was his coffeemaker, the man in charge of hospitality. Tribal sheikhs often formed alliances over a massive dinner feast. They would eat and talk for hours in courtly monologues that eventually corkscrewed into concrete demands. More often than not, they would seal their agreement with another ceremonial meal: roasted lamb, chickens, tanoor bread, stews of lamb and tomatoes and eggplant and zucchini for pouring over the obligatory galaxies of rice. The meal and the business being conducted were both essential parts of the same ritual.

  Alan met with sheikhs in desert tents or cement mansions. Complicated negotiations around irrigation rights, oil pipelines, and security agreements would unfurl over the course of the meal. Once, as he met with a sheikh inside his house, Alan’s team leader ran in from outside in a panic. “Sir, they’re slaughtering a sheep out there!” he whispered. “What do we do?” Laughing, he told the soldier to stand down. “I knew then,” he said later, “we were going to have to stay for lunch.”

  He was learning one of the first, most basic lessons about Iraq: never, ever turn down a meal. So when Alan invited Mohamad and me to a dinner hosted by Sheikh Shaalan, I figured saying no would be an act of unforgivable cultural insensitivity. And if we were obliged to eat a Brobdingnagian feast in the interests of cross-cultural understanding, then I was prepared to make that sacrifice.

  That is how Mohamad and I ended up in the back of a four-by-four with Alan and a Philadelphia judge named Daniel L. Rubini, roaring down the middle of Palestine Street in a two-car convoy that was painfully, conspicuously, deafeningly American.

  Alan was edgy. Leaving the Green Zone was as dangerous and stressful for him as entering it was for us. He had to get permission to venture out into the Red Zone, and he had to take a security detail wherever he went: in this case, two men he introduced vaguely as “friends,” but who had the quiet watchfulness of spies. He stopped to make several urgent, whispered phone calls (Iraq still had no cell phone service, but military and occupation officials had a special telephone network). Finally he told us what the problem was: he had thought the dinner would be at Sheikh Shaalan’s villa, but somehow signals had crossed, plans had mutated, and apparently we were on our way somewhere else—a Lebanese restaurant called Nabil.

  For the military, restaurants were dangerous. Like checkpoints, they were an intimate point of contact among occupiers, occupied, and everybody in between. Food and the public spaces where you bought or consumed it—hotels, restaurants, cafes, and markets—were theaters for all the ambiguities and frustrations between Iraqis and foreigners, which is why these places were among the first to be attacked.

  As we walked inside, I could see Alan and his security detail dissecting the dining room with their eyes, measuring the line of sight from the tables to the windows and the quickest path from the front to the back. Several hushed consultations later, the waiters ushered us into a windowless back room.

  Sheikh Shaalan was tall and moved very slowly. His face was tanned, with heavy-lidded eyes that often carried a weary expression, as if he was going through motions he knew would be useless but nevertheless felt obligated to pursue. He had the bearing of a man born into a position of command, a way of speaking and watching as if everyone were waiting for him. He wore bespoke wool suits, occasionally pinstriped, cut by skilled tailors into flowing Middle Eastern designs. He talked in long, ornate sentences that would have made Henry James proud.

  The sheikh sat down in the middle of a long banquet table, with Alan’s translator Faisal next to him, then Alan, and one of his bodyguards. I sat across the table with Judge Rubini, Mohamad, and the other bodyguard. Waiters rotated in and out, depositing plate after plate of hummus, tabbouleh, baba ghanouj. Great oval platters of grilled lamb, chicken, and kafta, all blanketed tenderly with bread soaked in tomato juice. Mountains of fresh cucumbers, radishes, and green onions, whole heads of romaine, and delicate, opalescent peeled white onions. In keeping with the rules of hospitality, they brought more than one plate of each kind of food so that no one would have to reach across the table.

  We hadn’t eaten before going to meet Alan. The hours of waiting in traffic, then standing in line at the Green Zone, topped by the adrenaline-fueled ride through Arasat—all of it had left my blood screaming for sugar. The restaurant had grilled the dish of meat with onions and tomatoes, and the smoky smell of charred tomato skins wrapped around their melting red insides, the iron smell of grilled meat, still bloody inside, impaled on long metal skewers, was shooting urgent animal commands—seize, kill, eat—across the already raw fight-or-flight circuits of my brain.

  But as soon we arranged ourselves around the various delicacies, Sheikh Shaalan looked around, nodded, and started to speak. “Saddam,” he began, waving his wool-draped arm with an ominous air of enumeration, “did many wrong things.”

  I got out my notebook. This was going to be epic. To lunge across the table and grab a mouthful of food while the sheikh was speaking—even to surreptitiously tear off a tiny scrap of the bread so close to my hand—would be unthinkable disrespect to our host. Only the ugliest of Americans would commit such an insult. And so we settled in to listen to the sheikh. For the time being at least, we would eat history.

  The Ottoman Empire, which ruled Iraq off and on for centuries, left its tribal leaders more or less alone until the nineteenth century, when it imposed land reform and a penal code that eroded their power. But when the British Empire occupied the country, after World War I, the colonial administrators decided to promote the rural sheikhs. British officials believed the sheikhs could be more easily controlled than the educated urban Iraqi upper class, whose members were beginning t
o mutter that Iraqis might want to rule their own country. Britain’s needs in Mesopotamia (read: oil) would be better achieved by “a veiled rule” through the sheikhs, wrote the colonial political officer Bertram Thomas, than by a “premature experiment” in native government.

  In 1918, British administrators gave tribal sheikhs the power to settle disputes and collect taxes. Iraqis might have desired a more modern, egalitarian system, but tribal law, said Thomas piously, had “the sanction of immemorial custom.” Over the following decades, the empire expanded the sheikhs’ control so much that Iraq’s peasants became virtual slaves. By the time the Tribal Disputes Regulations were finally repealed, in 1958, many sheikhs had amassed unprecedented wealth and power.

  At first Saddam saw the sheikhs as a potential threat to his hegemony. But then he realized they could be useful. During the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War, soldiers began to desert the army and return to hide among their tribes. Saddam enlisted sheikhs to turn in deserters. Just as the British had before him, he replaced those who did not cooperate with pretenders. People called them “fake sheikhs,” or “Swiss sheikhs” for the cars, gold, and currency that Saddam lavished on them. The regime kept a detailed list of all the sheikhs, fake or genuine; at one point they numbered 7,380.

  The tribes of Iraq, as the historian Hanna Batatu points out, have always thrived as its cities have suffered. When the country’s civil institutions began to crumble under the Baath dictatorship, the sheikhs regained much of the influence they had lost. As the rule of law grew weaker, tribal law gained strength: when Iraqis had a dispute, they turned to their sheikhs instead of the corrupt judges or policemen.

  “You have a conflict—land theft, irrigation rights, car accident,” Adnan al-Janabi, a tribal sheikh who trained as an economist and was an OPEC official in the 1970s, told me. “The tribes of both parties try to meet, and to make an agreement. If not, you go to the courts: the policemen will blackmail you, the judge will take the rest, and in the end somebody from the government will have the judgment overturned. Even if you get a judgment in the court, you can’t enforce it. In some cases, it will go into this cycle for years—if vendetta doesn’t break out, which is very likely.”