Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family

’Atshan hafn issnin, warwi ’ala shufak …

Wu as’al ’anil mahbub, minhu ili shafah …

Wi shlon anam il layl, winta ’ala bali

Hatta il simach bil may, yibtchi ’ala hali

I have no business in the market, I just came to see you.

I’ve been thirsty for years, only the sight of you will quench it …

I want to ask about the beloved, who saw him? …

How can I sleep the night, when you are on my mind?

Even the fish in the water cry for me.

Something deep inside me is moved as I hear the familiar words about a lover pining for his sweetheart, sung by Madfa’i with such longing and weariness. Images from the song bring to life a childhood memory of Bibi singing it to me as a taste of her country. I am overcome by floods of tears, which puzzles my friends, and myself as well. My ‘foreignness’ has come to the fore – the other half of my identity which is usually well concealed beneath my comfortable outward Lebanese appearance.

I can’t explain, let alone understand, this deep homesickness that I feel. What am I homesick for?

BOOK TWO

Replanting Eden

SEPTEMBER 2005

My aunt Raifa invites me to lunch at her house in Putney, south of the river in London. She knows I am going to ask questions about her life in Iraq. My other aunt, Thamina, is also invited, as well as two cousins of mine, Raifa’s daughter Zina, and my uncle Rushdi’s daughter, Nadia. Both my aunts are in their eighties. Although, like me, Zina and Nadia are Bibi’s grandchildren, they belong to my mother’s generation, since my grandparents had my father relatively late.

I’m the first to arrive. As my aunt sets the table in the kitchen while we wait for the others, I sit in her reception room. I see many valuable pieces, antique objets d’art, silver and precious glass – a museum curator’s fantasy. Many of these inherited pieces have made a long journey, often from London or Paris (where they were purchased) to Baghdad, and back again to London via Beirut. Each has a story, like the silver tray table engraved with my grandfather’s initials which was bought decades ago from Mappin & Webb. My aunt likes to tell their tales. I think they reassure her.

A sadness comes over me as I think of how the emotional charge of these objects has changed over time. Here in my aunt’s flat, I feel almost as if they have been reduced to something grotesque. It is as if they have been dragged across history and then forced to fit into more cramped circumstances than they were once accustomed to.

Later we sit in the kitchen, three generations of women discussing Bibi over dishes such as timan za’faran, saffron-flavoured rice, and sabzi, green herb stew. It seems amazing that Bibi’s influence is so pervasive that nearly twenty years after her death she has managed to bring us together.

Culturally and psychologically, my aunts are very different to my cousins and myself. They seem stuck in a time warp, preoccupied with private and public decorum, their values inherited from the world of their parents. This is less the case with my two cousins, but there is also a gap between them and me. I think we are outwardly less governed by the tribal mores and allegiances that dictated my aunts’ identities. This is perhaps most vividly manifested in the old-fashioned way they dress, in silk gowns and pearl necklaces with diamond clasps.

Thamina is describing her idyllic childhood in Baghdad. She recalls life then as a constant round of activity. She keeps repeating how ‘beautiful, beautiful it was’. She has barely started her reverie when Raifa interrupts her: ‘Let me tell them about my mother, God rest her soul.’ She launches into a soliloquy about how Bibi loved life, how she charged towards it with her arms wide open so as to embrace as much as she could. She then says that Bibi loved to gamble, but warns me not to mention this, and that she loved to indulge herself with material possessions: jewellery, furs, clothes. Bibi loved herself, Raifa declares, quickly adding that she was also magnanimous with those less fortunate than herself; she was very generous, forever giving alms to the poor. When she got older she started to feel guilty about her indulgences, and worried that God would punish her in the afterlife. She asked forgiveness from him, and died a pious woman.

Raifa stops, and Thamina, not to be outdone by her sister, reaffirms that her mother was never hands-on when it came to rearing her children. She was famous for delegating. Yet Bibi had an outrageous story that she loved to tell her tailors: that one of her shoulders was lower than the other from all the children she had had to carry.

‘How preposterous – I don’t think I ever saw her carry anyone!’ Thamina exclaims.

I ask why Bibi would say that, and Raifa replies that it was because she was fat in later life, and wanted an excuse for it, so she blamed the number of her children. Quietly, I think that Bibi was probably right, having given birth on nine occasions.

Nadia embellishes Thamina’s story by saying that she thought Bibi looked like ‘a walking onion’. We quickly discover that it is one thing for her daughters to say certain things about their mother, but quite another for the grandchildren to do so; Raifa snaps back at Nadia that she clearly never liked her grandmother.

‘Yes, I did,’ answers Nadia defensively.

‘Well, I loved Bibi,’ I interject.

‘She loved you too,’ says Thamina.

‘Ooze away, why don’t you,’ growls Nadia.

I carry on: ‘She had lovely soft skin.’

‘I remember she always used rose water,’ Zina says.

We continue to share our memories, but after a while Nadia has to leave. However, she still wants to learn a little bit more from her aunts before she goes, so she asks them about Baghdad’s markets. They list several, including Soug al-Saray, where they sold books.

‘Really? What did the book market look like?’ asks Nadia with childlike enthusiasm.

‘They were all covered. Like the ones in Istanbul or Damascus. Have you not seen them?’ replies Thamina. She explains that Soug al-Saray was a big market, but it was burned to the ground during the war in 2003. They said at the time that civilization had been destroyed yet again in Baghdad, with all those burned books.

Zina remembers how there used to be men with typewriters sitting on the pavements outside Soug al-Saray. They would type letters and requests for people who were illiterate.

‘Yes, they were called ardahaltchi; it’s a Turkish word. “Arda Haltchi”,’ Raifa confirms.

‘Ah, and what’s the English word?’ wonders Nadia.

‘Can’t you see there’s no English word? I don’t think they even existed here. Use your imagination!’ I snap at her, irritated by her repeated cultural mistranslations. Of all of us, she remains the most nostalgic for her pre-exile childhood, yet she is also the most removed culturally from anything Iraqi, or non-Western for that matter.

‘The market was near the courts, so the ardahaltchis wrote complaints for people,’ says Raifa.

My aunts continue to reminisce about the markets. ‘The textile market had the best range of cloth. Your grandmother loved it. There were lots of different silks, devoré and taffeta, brought from everywhere, from Italy, France, India, everywhere.’ Raifa concludes sadly: ‘There was everything in Baghdad.’

6

Café Chantant

The British in Baghdad

(1918)

WITH EACH WEEK that passed, it became increasingly obvious to Abdul Hussein and Hadi that whatever was going to replace the Sultan’s Empire would be markedly different. For some time Abdul Hussein and many other men of his generation had felt out of place in their own land; now they were experiencing profound pangs of nostalgia for what they had lost as they watched the British set about establishing their new administration. Everything the British brought with them was thoroughly alien: their soldiers, their police, their mannerisms and their language. The only flag the people had ever known, with its familiar crescents and stars, had been replaced by the Union Jack. Ottoman Baghdad appeared to have retreated into the shadows, leaving few traces of its existence behind other than old buildings and street names. Yet its soul lingered on in the people and the language.

The pillars of the British administration were erected swiftly. The political vacuum could not be filled at once, but the pressing issue of security had to be addressed without delay. Each day administrators poured into the area from the four corners of the British Empire, these new figures of authority including (amongst others) Egyptian policemen and Indian civil servants. Before long the Baghdadis began to resent these newcomers for what they seemed to represent: colonized peoples – the foot soldiers and lackeys of the British. Baghdadis feared that they themselves would be next in line to be subsumed into the British Empire.

Despite this suspicion and distrust, Abdul Hussein was saddened by the dishevelled state in which Baghdad was found by the British when they took occupancy of the city. While he hadn’t exactly welcomed their arrival, he would have much preferred Baghdad to be looking its best when any stranger set foot in it, whatever that stranger’s business happened to be.

Certainly from afar the city remained a compelling sight, with its thick palm groves and its minarets glittering with bright mosaics, answering the glow of the golden domes of Kazimiya across the Tigris. To have marched proudly into Baghdad only to be confronted by the sight of looting and filth everywhere must have been a huge let-down for the British troops.

The former pachalik or territory of Mesopotamia, which included the provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra, was now under British control. Familiar with India, and the extent to which its various faiths had to be accommodated in order to ensure the smooth running of the Raj, the British sought to impose a similar policy in their newly acquired territory. They made concerted efforts to appeal to the different communities in the provinces, to the Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Sunnis, Shi’a, Jews, Christians and Madeans, among others. Order was reinstated throughout the region, with each community allowed to follow its own rites under the umbrella of the new administration.

This was not lost on Abdul Hussein, as a prominent member of the Shi’a community. The annual Ashura processions to commemorate the death of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet, had at best been ignored by the Turks in the past. Ashura was of great importance to the Shi’a, as in Hussein’s final speech before his death he had uttered the words that would become the central tenets of their faith, emphasizing the duty to fight tyranny and oppression, and the importance of seeking truth and justice. In 1918, the last day of Ashura in Muharram in Baghdad was finally given the public prominence that such an important event deserved, and Hadi and his brother Abdul Rasul rode out among hundreds of young men to celebrate it as the crowds cheered them on the street. They felt very proud to be a part of the proceedings. Besides the young men on horseback, the processions were formed of men from the different guilds and neighbourhoods who chanted and beat themselves with metal chains and swords as they marched with others waving flags and striking drums. At the centre of the activities was a passion play performed by a troupe of amateur actors. The ceremonies were concluded with an elaborate expression of thanks and gratitude in the local press by Baghdadi Shi’a notables.

In contrast, the predominantly Sunni Baghdadi politicians were cautious of British overtures towards them. They were very conscious of the fact that with the defeat of the Ottoman state they had lost their official status, from whence they had derived their power. Moreover, while some Baghdadis were delighted with the possibility of progress and modernity, others were fearful of change, and didn’t trust the Christian ingliz, attributing the recent flowering of the city’s nightlife to British corruption and decadence. Baghdad’s street cafés were the best places in which to gauge the strength of these feelings, amidst the smoke and the slurping of over-sugared tea, and the rhythmic sound of dominos being slapped on tables.