the walrus

eeing the Iraq Museum stripped is to be an Iraqi artist today, caught bare,” says Iraqi painter ­Hana between a battle for survival and the “ Mal Allah, one of the few artists struggle to overcome the image of toS continue working in Baghdad dur- Iraq — the cradle of civilization — as ing the occupation, “was like having my an empty landscape of terror. heart ripped out.” While life under Saddam and sanc- Television viewers in the West may tions was harsh, artists, writers, and recall the horrific images of looting in performers found ways to survive. De- April 2003, the early days of the inva- spite hardships created by the embar- sion of Iraq, dismissed casually by Don- go and the excesses of a police state, ald Rumsfeld with his infamous­ “Stuff the theatre scene thrived in the 1990s, happens” remark. But for Iraqis such pushing the envelope politically with as Mal Allah, whose beautiful, scorched layered language and double meanings canvases seem literally imprinted by in ways the state-run press could not. the ongoing war, the destruction and Dozens of private art galleries opened, looting of the Iraq Mu­seum was not and the stoic Iraqi National Symphony

art

a culture in exile Baghdad’s artistic exodus

by Hadani Ditmars

Al-Shahbender, Mutanabi Street’s literary café, was destroyed by a car bomb in March 2007. Photograph by Hadani Ditmars

just a national catastrophe; it was a Orchestra played on, albeit with frayed grim foreshadowing of the cultural de- violin strings and cracked oboe reeds. struction to follow. Now, thanks to the fatal combina- “I am going to light a fire in para- tion of Islamist militias, criminal an- dise and to pour water on to Hell,” the archy, and violent occupation, the eighth-century Iraqi woman poet, sing- culture that sustained Iraqis through er, and Sufi saint Rabia wrote, “so that hard times has broken down, perhaps both veils may vanish altogether.” As ir­revoc­ably. The theatres and galleries the fires of conflict engulf Iraq, I am -re that once helped make Baghdad a cul- minded of this verse by Rabia. But the tural and intellectual capital of the ­Arab words of poets are cheap now, as trad- world have closed. The book market on itional music is drowned out by the Mutanabi Street — once the centre of clamour of automatic weapons, bombs, Iraq’s literary scene and animated dis- and the divisive rhetoric of those who cussions on everyone from Mahfouz believe God is on their side. Rabia’s to Whitman — has been bombed, and words capture the essence of what it a de facto ban on live music has meant

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that even al maqam al Iraqi (tradition- victims of the new terror are labelled as al Iraqi sung love poetry) is no longer its perpetrators. heard, not even at weddings. The na- tional orchestra, which attempted a ven before the 2003 invasion, there few furtive post-invasion concerts Ewere disturbing signs. Due to the ­under armed guard, has been silenced, twin terrors of sanctions and Saddam, and many of Iraq’s artists have joined fundamentalism, poverty, and violent the roughly 2 million other Iraqis who crime were on the rise, and Iraq’s pub- have fled death threats and ­chaos for a lic education system — once the best life in exile. in the Arab world — was in a sham- bles. A whole generation of angry, un- rtists in Iraq have always been a lit- employed youths who could not afford Amus test by which to measure the to get married was seduced by Holly- state of things. Even as oil companies wood action movies and the promise and black marketeers prospered dur- of Islam. Women, who had only a dec­ ing the embargo years and artists were ade earlier constituted half of the civil reduced to a stark choice between food service and 40 percent of doctors, saw and canvas, medicine and violin strings, their role in public life eroding, a fore- they managed to hang on. Culture was shadowing of their post-invasion real- a form of resistance — to bombings, ity that saw the constitution rewritten Saddam, and sanctions, and to the along sectarian lines and Iraq’s secular harsh circumstances of life for the 95 and relatively liberal civil code substan- percent of Iraqi society that was not tially replaced by sha­ria law. part of the Baathist elite or the presi- In the fall of 2003, I met up with dent’s inner circle. Physical infrastruc- many of my artist friends to see how ture can always be rebuilt, but how they were faring. I found playwright do you rebuild a culture and society Omram Tamimi drinking chai at the trauma­tized by decades of war, sanc- National Theatre — newly manned by tions, oppression, and occupation? grim-faced armed guards — and de- Indeed, what hope remains for a re- spairing of the new self-censorship surgence of Iraqi culture from the ­ashes that has followed the invasion. When of war and despair when its creative I asked him why no one was writing and intellectual resources have van- new plays about the invasion or the oc- ished? Sadly, the siege mentality that cupation, he replied, “Before, we had inspired Baghdadi artists in the 1990s one Saddam, and we knew who to be has been replaced by fear and chaos afraid of. Now we have dozens, and that inspire only profit making in the we’re afraid of whom we might offend.” booming “secur­ity” market. When I Six months later, the National Theatre think of the state of culture in Iraq to- was closed and Tamimi was living in day, I think of a once-promising young ­exile in ­Cairo, working as a stagehand cellist friend who used to dream of an on an Egyptian soap opera. international performing career. Now “It has never been easy for artists he is working as a mercenary. in Iraq,” confirms Saadi Youssef, an And, most poignantly, with the ­elder statesman of Iraqi culture, man ­voices of poets and players silenced, of letters, and nomadic exile in his ­early there is no one left to document the seventies whose calling card lists his very death of culture in Iraq. Those Uxbridge, London, address and says who have not been killed or exiled are simply, “poet.” Youssef knows where- doomed to have their fates articulat- of he speaks: he was persecuted and ed by sound bites of televised horror. imprisoned for his Communist ­Party The caricatured reduction of 27 million membership in the 1960s and 1970s, people to mini-Saddams that once typ- when the cia was supplying Baathists ified mainstream media portrayals of with names of Iraqi Communists, as Iraqis before the invasion has been re- well as for his outspoken poetry. placed by a terrible new cartoon: ­Iraqis As Youssef points out, there was as mad suicide bombers, magically a brief golden age for the arts in Iraq, transformed from secular to sectarian which roughly coincided with the within a few years of occupation. The reign of Saddam’s predecessor, Ahmed

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Art

Tamimi despairs of the new self-censorship that has followed the invasion. “Before, we had one Saddam, and we knew who to be afraid of. Now we have dozens, and we’re afraid of whom we might offend.”

Hassan al-Bakr. Until his demise, in than not get lost in the translation to a self, I understand the situation. It’s just 1979, newly nationalized oil reven­ues new life far from home. chaos now.” were funnelled into public art, literary “I have an old friend,” recounts al- magazines, thea­tres, and galleries, as Sayegh, “a dir­ector of a magazine in hen an old theatre contact of mine well as a successful campaign to elim­ Iraq — his name is not for publish- Win Baghdad put me in touch with in­ate ­illiteracy. ing, please — he sent me an email last Muqdad Madlom, a sixty-year-old writ- Things began to change as Sad­dam year saying now finally that Saddam er, photographer, director, and ­actor, rose to ­power. Hundreds of thousands is gone, please send me your poems I was glad to discover that some ­Iraqis of young men were sacrificed on the to publish. We were friends for twenty have not lost their famous sense of battlefield­ with Iran, and cultural re- years. He was against Sad­dam as well, humour. sources were drained for the war chest. so my fath­er sent him the poems, and a Madlom sent me a series of screen- The thirteen years of draconian sanc- few days later he said, ‘If I publish these plays he had been working on that cen- tions that followed Saddam’s invasion poems, my magazine will be burned to tre on tragic tales of soldiers forced to of Kuwait made life miserable for Iraqi the ground within forty-eight hours.’ fight in a war they don’t want, and leav- civilians while entrenching the regime’s “We were waiting all this time for ing behind beautiful love interests, the power, and posed new challenges for freedom,” continues al-Sayegh, the central theme of every maqam ever Iraq’s artists. “But now,” sighs Youssef tension rising in his voice, “and these written. One of his screenplays, The with melancholic resignation, decry- ­people, these extremists, take it away Bomb’s Nipple, is about a soldier pull- ing the lack of security and the end of from us before we can taste it. I’m afraid ing the clip from a grenade and ­flashing the once-secular state, “this is the worst for the life of my friend now. When my back to his lover’s breasts. it’s ever been.” friend sent this email, I was confused Before the invasion, Madlom was an Adnan al-Sayegh, another Iraqi and didn’t understand why he couldn’t actor at the National Theatre, and early ­poet exiled in London, concurs. ­After publish my poems. But after I went to in the occupation he was the manager fleeing Iraq under threat of death Iraq in April and was threatened my- of a new television station. “Now,” he when one of his poems offended Sad­ dam’s regime, al-Sayegh decided to re- turn to his homeland in the spring of 2006. At a public reading in Basra, an armed Shia militiaman walked in and threatened to cut out his tongue, calling his poem “Slightly Mischievous Ver­ ses” sacrilegious. Terrified, al-Sayegh fled back to London. “After Saddam, we thought there would be freedom,” he explains from his central London flat, “but it’s still dangerous to publish even now.” A friend of al-Sayegh’s, a poet and journalist, wrote an article about al- Sayegh’s spring reading in ­Basra and the incident with the militiaman but was too afraid to put his name on the article. “We are afraid now,” says al- Sayegh of artists in Iraq, momentar­ ily forgetting his own recent exile, “of including any religious element in our work. Artists cannot depict a mosque in their paintings; writers can’t write any- thing about Islam. We are all afraid of offending the extremists.” Yet the price of exile is particularly dear for writers, he suggests. While music and visual arts can transcend words, the specifi­ city of language and place more often

75 the walrus

“I’m the head of the drama department at Iraqi state television, but I’m going to leave because the drama on the streets is greater.”

wrote, “I’m the head of the drama de- ondon-based Iraqi cultural activist partment at Iraqi state television, but Land artist Rashad Selim, who helps I’m going to leave because the drama on run the International Network for Con- the streets is greater than that on TV.” temporary Iraqi Artists, points out that He also said that he “can’t work with re- it is not merely Islamic extremism that ligious fanatics . . . it’s impos­sible. There is threatening Iraqi culture and society, is nothing I can write about.” Even for but a larger political strategy, the “Salva- a brave new broadcaster, it seems, it is dor option,” adopted by the Americans year zero in Iraq. after John Negroponte­ took over from One morning I eagerly opened an- Paul Bremer. other email from Madlom. He apolo- “This was a deliberate policy,” says gized for his late response to my last Selim, “by which paramilitary death missive, stating matter of factly, “my squads were formed to destabilize Iraq son got shot in his arm today, he is a and to foment sectarianism. Anyone camera man. sorry, muqdad” who was politically outspoken — be In his last email to me, he promised they academics, journalists, poets, or to write “within 4 days . . . i have to man- artists — became a target of these death age few things with my son . . . ” I’m still squads. The end result was to create a waiting. Baghdadi playwright and director Hamid al-Maleky, who was harassed under Saddam’s regime for having a “friend in the opposition” and later forced to write the screenplay of Sad­ dam’s life for Iraqi state television, was recently threatened by thugs he be- lieves were from al Qaeda. He fled to Syria for his own safety, and because a creative life had become impossible in Iraq. “The invasion brought about the rise of radical Islam,” he tells me, rail- ing against the new tyranny of ­people he calls “bowers” — in reference to state of total chaos and terror, and the the Muslim prostrations — “and these de facto destruction of any public in- people are against art.” Of course he tellectual life.” equally blames the appalling lack of se- More than 340 academics have been curity and stability for the demise of murdered in post-invasion Iraq, and Iraqi culture. But the censorship of the what is ­truly frightening about the new radical Islamists, he says, “is more as­sas­sins, often hooded or masked terrible than that of Saddam . . . At least in balaclavas, is that “we don’t know we knew what Saddam wanted, but we who’s doing this and why,” says Selim. can’t understand what these religious What’s going on, he says, “isn’t just types are after.” about the death of Iraqi culture — it’s Now, from the relative safety of ­Syria, about a larger struggle between the he continues to write screenplays for forces of civilization and barbarism.” a Cairo-based, Iraqi-run station called “Life is hell now in Iraq,” confirms Al Baghdadia. A current project is about Hana Mal Allah, as if the horror scenes an Egyptian who goes to Iraq to fight on the news needed any embellishment. US troops — something al-Maleky says Nevertheless, it is intriguing to hear this he’d never be able to write from Bagh- from a ­forty-nine-year-old painter who dad. As for the arts in Iraq, they are on chose to continue living there. permanent vacation. For now, he says, Although almost all of the galleries the culture of death holds sway. in Iraq are now closed and Mal Allah

76 balint zsako Art

exhibits mainly in Jordan and Europe, purchased by the British Museum. symphonic poem called “Heartbeat of until recently she created most of her In fact, London has developed a Baghdad.” The piece paid homage to work from her home studio in Bagh- lively Iraqi culture in exile, with such the spirit of Baghdad and its people, a dad. She holds a Ph.D. from the Bagh- recent productions as Hassan Abdul- place that had survived centuries of in- dad College of Fine Arts, where she razzak’s play Baghdad Wedding. The vasions, occupations, coups, civil wars, has lectured for years. For Mal Allah, story of three young Iraqis caught up and sieges. When I met him after the her artwork is an affirmation of Iraqi in a tragic post-invasion love triangle, it 2003 invasion, he was not in the mood culture and of her own identity, in the chronicles the demise of a culture and for music. “The situation is too grave midst of destruction. “Everything we society by proxy. now,” he confided, “for me to think of have built has collapsed . . . public life How long will it be before the ­exiles anything but survival.” The last I heard, is completely broken, and most of my can return, and with them the spirit of he was driving a taxi in Amman. friends have emigrated,” she says. “But an ancient nation? Will they ­ever re- Perhaps the only hope for the fu- there is one way to say to the new bar- turn? And if not, what real hope is ture of Iraq is that somewhere out barian, ‘We will survive.’ That way is: there for reconstruction? there he is still writing, composing, we must create and produce mean­ I think of a young composer friend playing — imagining a new sym­phony ingful work.” who, amid the deprivation and isolation for his homeland. That somewhere out The new series she is working on of the economic and cultural embargo there he is keeping the flame of his consists of distressed tableaux of green, in the late 1990s, produced a beautiful ­culture alive. S black, and red that suggest a scorched Iraqi flag, bloodied and battered but still defiant. “Now I am painting with the tools of destruction,” she says. Her work uses old bullet casings, burned and blackened canvases, and surfa­ces slashed by knives in a way that is at once visceral and vio­lent yet subtle and sensitive. Mal Allah ­also creates large works on wire-framed tissue that can be collapsed into a ­seven-centimetre cube — suitable for hasty smuggling out of war zones. “So far, my most suc- cessful work was from my exhibition in Amman in 2005,” she says. “That is the fate of the Iraqi artist — to create under the very worst circumstances.”

al Allah contends that, unlike the Msiege of Sarajevo, which inspired a virtual cultural renaissance, the cur- rent situation in Iraq is a fear-fuelled creative black hole. But ironically, the war has spawned an interest in Iraqi art and culture in the West — especially in the US and the UK, the two countries that led the invasion. Just as the best pieces looted from the Iraq Museum often ended up in private collections in the West, so are the jewels of Iraq’s living culture arriving in European and American capitals. When I last spoke to Mal Allah, she had given up her Baghdad studio for permanent residence in the UK. Her most successful show to date, Sophis- ticated Ways: Destruction of an Ancient City, was a collaboration with Rashad Selim at the Ayagallery in London this past summer. Three of her pieces were

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