by Roy Scranton
But Blasim had escaped. He lived in Finland now. There were artists, writers, and poets who hadn’t, still living in Baghdad, still writing and working. Indeed, while I was there, the Iraqi novelist Ahmed Saadawi won the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction for his gothic novel of wartime life, Frankenstein in Baghdad. The novel’s plot is a metaphor for artistic life in Iraq today: a scavenger named Hadi begins to collect pieces from the unidentified corpses of bomb victims, stitching them together into one body so that they could be properly buried. Before he has a chance to bury the monstrosity, however, it comes to life, and begins a rampage of vengeance, hunting down the killers who had murdered the various people its body was now composed of.
Another artist I met, a playwright and sculptor named Sarem Dakhel Ahmad, who had spent seven long years in the Iraqi Army during the Iran-Iraq War and the Persian Gulf War, thought of his art not as cruelty but as catharsis. “The curse of war has polluted my life . . . but after getting out of the army, I started making art as a way to purge the pollution. I think of my art as a practice of purification.” Under Saddam’s regime, he had been investigated for staging Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and had had a play of his own, The Night of Murder, banned. After the fall of the regime, he was threatened by religious extremists. One day he received an envelope with a note and a bullet. The note read: “Stop making sculpture.” He kept on making art, though he did take advantage of a fellowship offered by a Russian art institute to spend some time outside the country. The fellowship had been awarded because of a series of sculptures he’d made using American shell brass. After the invasion (in which the Americans had accidentally bombed his house), Ahmad began collecting spent American brass wherever he could find it. He melted the brass down and shaped it into several stark, Giacometti-like sculptures: a man and a woman on a boat, a three-headed minotaur figure, two women lifting a body overhead.
For all the stories of individual artists struggling to show an affirming flame, like Saadawi or Ahmad, there were as many stories of flames being choked out and smothered by religious fundamentalism. Haider Hashim, owner of the Akkad Art Gallery in the Karrada, told me how the art scene in Baghdad had been all but obliterated by the war, and that now, neglected by a government focused only on weapons and oil and under attack from religious zealots, it was breathing its last gasp. In 2002, Haider told me, there had been more than fifty art galleries in Baghdad. Today, his was one of two.
Ahmed Farouk Lafta, who under the name J-Fire was one of the most celebrated contemporary musicians on the Baghdad scene, used to perform rap and nü-metal, inspired by bands such as Linkin Park, P.O.D., Limp Bizkit, and Korn. When Islamic extremists threatened to kill him if he kept on using Western styles, he switched over to more anodyne Middle Eastern pop. The Baghdad music scene itself now existed almost entirely online: people were afraid concerts and dance clubs would attract bombs, and xenophobic religious conservatives opposed any youth culture that swerved from traditional lines—which meant anything that’s not Islamic, Arab, and segregated by sex.
Meanwhile, in Baghdad’s universities, departments were rife with sectarianism and corruption was eating away at educational and scholarly standards. I talked to professors and students at Baghdad University, Mustansiriya University, and the Academy of Fine Arts, and the system was failing everywhere. Students bought their way into college, then bought their way through it. Religious and sectarian pressures were forcing academic committees to limit what professors could teach and sometimes even intervene directly in professor’s courses. Nadia Faydh, a professor of English language and literature who quoted Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” to me to describe the current situation in Iraq (“And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night”), was banned from including Marxist literary criticism on her syllabus, and chastised by her department chair for “causing trouble” by teaching Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “A Defense of Poetry,” a canonical text of English Romanticism. Students had been offended by Shelley’s equation of love and poetry with religion, as when he writes:
“Love became a religion, the idols of whose worship were ever present. It was as if the statues of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed with life and motion, and had walked forth among their worshippers; so that Earth became peopled with the inhabitants of a diviner world. The familiar appearance and proceedings of life became wonderful and heavenly, and a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of Eden.”
The dream I’d had of Mutanabbi Street wasn’t just about cultural tourism, escaping the spartan constraints of military life, or even connecting with Iraqis. The dream I’d had was about finding common ground in a cosmopolitan humanist vision of intellectual freedom, self-development, learning, and collective cultural exchange. But such exchange depends on a free and open culture, and on engagement that goes deeper than military occupation and political manipulation.
I had visited Mutanabbi Street, as I had dreamed of doing for so many years. I talked to poets, artists, musicians, teachers, students, and philosophers. I walked among the people as they voted. I searched for every hopeful flame I could. But the spirit I found in Baghdad was broken, corrupted, or threatened where it wasn’t already dead—and we had caused the damage. We had let loose a grisly pandemonium in Iraq, then walked away and tried to wash our hands of the whole affair.
5.
We blasted along the Tigris, Nicki Minaj ripping out of the speakers over a furious woofer bump, Duraid’s Dodge Charger slipping through the traffic on Abu Nuwas Street like a hammerhead through a school of clownfish. The Karkh blazed and streaked across the gleaming black water, streetlights turning the faces of drinkers on the Jadriya Bridge a dull, efflorescent bronze. Duraid slowed to pass an Iraqi police Humvee, then gunned it down a side street, as kids and wary fathers watched us roar through the night. The city slowed around us, blurring into abstractions, statues, swaths of color.
It was my last night in Baghdad. Earlier in the evening, I’d met up with two freelancers working on a story about Baghdad EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) for Vice magazine, Ayman Oghanna and Andrea Bernardi, and Borzou Daragahi, a Pulitzer Prize finalist on staff at the Financial Times, and we’d walked over to Pizza House to get some dinner to take back to their crash pad at the Internews House, a cheap rental for journalists in Baghdad. I had some beers to finish off before I left in the morning, and Borzou had some vodka and Campari to dispose of before he flew to Cairo, so the four of us made a party of it. Borzou and Ayman dissected the election and Andrea showed us combat footage he’d taken during the Libyan revolution. Meanwhile, firecrackers went off behind the house, setting us all slightly on edge. It seemed like a good omen, though—they were the only explosions I’d heard the entire time I was in Baghdad.
I told them about the brief visit I’d convinced Aziz to make with me to a nearby nightclub, where Iraqi fat cats puffing nargilehs watched glammy young women dance in hip-tight, shimmering dresses. The audience was all men, clustered around tables laden with whiskey bottles and mezze plates, except, oddly enough, two families tucked away in the corners eating dinner. The nightclub had a rocking band belting out Middle Eastern pop too loud to talk over, and during the break the singer came out into the crowd and sat with one of the customers, asking him how he was doing that evening, complimenting him, thanking him for coming. In response, the man at the table tossed a fistful of dinars into the air. This seemed to be some kind of ritual: the singer moved to another table and the same thing happened again. Hundred-thousand-dinar bills fluttered out over the stage like ash after an explosion. Between songs, the girls came out and sat with the men, chatting them up, leaning in. I wanted to stay longer, but the management wasn’t encouraging our stay, and Aziz was growing increasingly uncomfortable. “I can’t even look at those women,” he hissed over the music. “They’re diseased.”
Borzou whipped out his phone and s
howed us a story he’d written about a similar club, back in 2010. He’d worked a deal with the management to hang out all night, and even claimed to have sneakily snapped a couple photos with his phone. Borzou had been in and out of Baghdad since 2003, and if there was a story in the city he hadn’t heard, covered, or written himself, it probably wasn’t worth talking about. And it wasn’t just Borzou: for eight years, the city had swarmed with Western journalists scrambling and hustling to scoop each other. You name it, somebody had written it. Baghdad nightclubs? Check. Iraqi rappers? Check. The looting of the national museum? Check. Corruption? Check. Children orphaned by war? Check. The rise of sectarian militias? Check. After the Americans left in 2011, though, the press corps scattered, back to New York and Washington, London, Paris, or settling into regional offices in Cairo, Beirut, or Istanbul—accessible cities with lower insurance premiums. Without any boots on the ground, American interest faded.
A handful of salty journos had ambled back for the elections, and I wandered into the party like a goof. Any story I might scare up had already been hunted, and when it came to finding real news, I was out of my league, poorly equipped, and totally inexperienced. The best journalists had at least some Arabic, could pass for a Middle Easterner on the street, and knew how to work through the sometimes paralyzing Iraqi inertia, the constant “Inshallah” that could stall out even the most motivated investigator. I had none of that, but I had one thing that none of them could put a claim on: an exclusive account of what it was like coming back to Iraq as a veteran, ten years later. As Matt Bradley from the Wall Street Journal had observed at a party at the Swedish Consulate, my story was all about putting my fucked-up self into the story.
Now my fucked-up self was leaning back as Duraid fishtailed around a corner, tires squealing. The last time I’d been in a Dodge Charger had been almost exactly a year before, the sun rising slowly behind us as we drove over the misty blue hills of central Texas, headed for the Austin airport after having driven all night from New Orleans. Austin had been the final stop on the Fire and Forget book tour, and the five of us behind the project—me, Jake, Phil, Matt, and Perry—all flew down for it, scheduling a quick visit to New Orleans as a kind of last hurrah. The car rental place at the airport had upgraded our rental on account of our being veterans, and so we found ourselves tooling around in a muscle car Jake dubbed Black Betty.
In New Orleans, we stayed at the Café Brasil, a Marigny landmark shuttered by its owner, Adgenor “Adé” Salgado, after Hurricane Katrina, for reasons that remained known only to him. But he was a friend of Jake’s, and so he let us stay upstairs. Adé was an enigmatic, hard-edged Brazilian mystic, a curved blade in a silk shirt, and he’d put Jake up for a few months after Jake had come back from Iraq. He welcomed us into the empty upper rooms of the Café and offered us beer, weed, and whatever else we might want. The rooms were musty and haunted, full of old books, clothes, Adé’s thickly daubed abstract paintings, sculptural junk, and, for Jake, memories of a strange time.
The next day, before we left, while Jake was catching up with Adé and the other guys were napping, I found a worn copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost on the mantel of a bricked-up fireplace. I opened the book at random and came to a passage in one of Satan’s monologues, a passage that resounded like the striking of a clock. It echoed through my ears all that day, all night as we drove back from New Orleans, all through the soft blue Texas morning, and onto the plane coming up out of Austin:
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;
And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.
The lines came back to me again in the close darkness of Duraid’s Charger, Nicki Minaj singing “I beez in the trap,” Baghdad a blur around me. Which part was the story, I wondered, and which part my fucked-up self? Who was a terrorist? Who was a victim? Who was trapped in hell, and who could fly away?
Almost everyone I talked to wanted to leave. The Americans wanted to leave. The ambassador wanted to leave. My translator, Aziz, wanted to leave. My driver, Ahmed, wanted to leave. The English literature students I talked to at Mustansiriya University wanted to leave, and who could blame them? Rania Tawfeeq, a Western-dressed woman with a direct gaze and free-flowing black hair who was finally finishing her bachelor’s degree at twenty-five, had spent much of her life in exile in Jordan, Sweden, and Syria. She was “home” now, but felt trapped and dreamed of nothing but escaping with her daughter. “Baghdad streets can’t compare to anywhere else,” she said, shaking her head. Huda Kadhim, a fresh-faced twenty-two-year-old in hijab, hadn’t seen her father since he’d been kidnapped in 2006. One of her cousins had also been kidnapped, and another murdered. The state paid her family a pension from her father’s salary for six months after his disappearance, then someone in the ministry started stealing it. Osama Kadhim, twenty-three, moved back to Iraq with his family from Yemen in 2003, then saw most of his family killed over the next few years. He was an affable, gentle-looking young man, but everything he said spoke of a soul clarified and hardened by violence. “Politics here is just lies and more lies,” he said. “I’m afraid to leave my house, afraid to die or be kidnapped.” Maysoun, looking even younger than her twenty years with her shy smile and bashful glance, had been forced to move from Saydiya to Abu Ghraib, now on the front lines of the fight against ISIS. Her brother had been kidnapped in 2006, and she hadn’t seen him since. She was phlegmatic about the dangers of living in an area being fought over by Daesh and the Iraqi Army, and of having to travel every day into the city for school. “I believe if I’m going to die, I will die,” she said, shrugging.
“You’re not going to die,” Professor Faydh told her, laughing. “They will use you for some other purpose.”
“There are worse things than death,” one of her fellow female students said, giggling.
Maysoun hoped to leave Iraq, but didn’t think she’d be able to, because of the difficulties involved, but also because she didn’t think her parents would let her. “I have dreams,” she said. “I just can’t achieve them because I’m a girl.”
Professor Faydh herself, who studied and taught American literature, said that her greatest wish was to come to the United States but she probably never would because she was unmarried and her parents wouldn’t let her travel. Professor Ghadah Abdul-Sattar, who taught philosophy of science at Baghdad University, told me she was obliged to wear hijab at the university or risk harassment from fellow teachers and even students. Isma Najm, an idealistic young woman with a degree in chemical engineering and a specialization in oil refining, was unemployed and pouring her energies into Facebook activism, because her parents wouldn’t let her move to the south of Iraq where she could get work with an oil company. Wasan Faghel, one of Professor Faydh’s most forceful and articulate students, left college in 2004 after getting married, and when she decided to go back to school in 2011, her husband told her she couldn’t. Only her mother-in-law’s influence convinced him to let her go. Wasan expressed her admiration for Professor Faydh and her desire to be a professor herself but didn’t think she’d ever be able to. “When I came back here, I had a dream to be something. I was influenced by a great teacher. She was a great model for me, she has a good character, she is an educated woman, and she is sitting right in front of me. She presents the woman I dream to be. But actually, I don’t believe I will be.” The other girls laughed. “I dream to be just like her but I don’t believe that I can do this, because I’m so tied to my family and my husband.”
Many wanted to leave, but few could. The SIV program and the IOM had tight filters and narrow pipelines for getting people out, and the process often took years—and this was for people who had worked with the US and were eligible for special consideration. For most Iraqis, not only was leaving impossible, but even traveling outside Iraq had become incredibly difficult. “The Iraqi passport means nothin
g now,” one of Professor Faydh’s students told me. “Nobody recognizes us. You can’t go anywhere.” Meanwhile, refugees from Fallujah came back to the neighborhoods in Baghdad they’d been forced out of in 2006, where they were threatened by the same militias as before. Refugees who had moved to Syria had become refugees again. Part of the misery of Iraq was the pervasive feeling that the walls were closing in: it was getting harder and harder for foreigners to come in and harder and harder for Iraqis to leave.
For me, leaving the first time was easy. I got on a C-130 at Baghdad Airport and I was gone. When people asked me if I’d ever go back, I’d laugh: “What for?”
My tour in Iraq had been extended past its original end date, after the Jaish al-Mahdi uprising in April 2004, and during our last months there, my anger, fear, and frustration grew into an unbounded hate: I hated the constant threat of violence, the smell of oil, the despicable role I was forced to play as an occupier, and the resentment we drew in performing that role. I hated my commander, who was an idiot. I hated military logic, with its redundancy and regulations, and I hated military culture, with its puffed-up machismo and dumb aggression. I hated the explosions and the gunfire and the mortars. I hated the feel of the air. I hated the sand, the heat, the tents, the streets, the camouflage, the Iraqis, the Americans, the sky, the sun, the wind, and the hands of the clock marking time.