Return to the Marshes

by Gavin Young

  One of these headmen, a sturdy, friendly Marshman, called Sahain, which means ‘little dish’, became a particular friend and has remained my friend to this day. His ragged village of reed houses ‘in the belly of the Marsh’, as the Madan expression goes, became a kind of home from home for Thesiger and myself. His younger brother, Hafadh, often travelled with me through the Marshes and once or twice stayed with me in Basra to shop or be taken to the doctor.

  People like Sahain and Hafadh knew little first-hand of the usual relations between sheikh and tribesmen – the mutual respect and sense of interdependence that in the great tradition of Arabia exists between even the strongest sheikhs and their people. Endless stories circulated amongst the Marsh Arabs of injustices by sheikhs and their representatives, of extortion by outlying bailiffs, of floggings and fines. I recall being told one such story at Sahain’s, how a neighbouring sheikh of brutal reputation was addicted to popping people who annoyed him into a coffin-shaped box full of nails; he ordered his servants to throw the box around until the victim emerged battered and bleeding. This sadist may have been the same infamous sheikh of whom the Madan, who love music and dancing, sometimes sang, mocking the evil memory, round their evening fires.

  ‘The Arabs told me of him,

  A try ant from an early age….’

  When I returned in the sheikh-less 1970s, I began one day to murmur these almost forgotten words at Sahain’s crowded house and at once people laughed, ‘Good God, he remembers that!’ – and they started up the song again, the older men explaining to the younger ones what it was all about. Naturally not all sheikhs behaved like little Jenghis Khans. Falih, for example, was a son of the awesome Majid, but his tribesmen regarded him quite differently. He was tough, all right, and proudly aware of his power and position. He expected immediate obedience and could be harsh if he didn’t get it. Most important, Falih was not pompous and stand-offish. He was hospitable; he was available; he listened. He bandied jokes with villagers and tribesmen; he dropped in on the Madan whom some people of his class despised. He was not afraid, as we might say, to get his hands dirty. He had a reputation as an excellent horseman, shot well and could even handle a Marshman’s wobbly canoe.

  There were other sheikhs more gentle and born to lead. One I know, Maziad bin Hamdan of the Al Isa, a shepherd tribe on the northern edge of the Marshes, lost a small fortune out of his own pocket trying to improve his tribe’s crop production. A sign of the times: he now spends half the year running a small hotel in Basra. Another sheikh, an almost saintly old figure, Jasim bin Faris of the Fartus tribe deep in the Marshes, was a gossamer scrap of a man always puffing at a cigarette-holder, who worked and guided and led his people with a voice not much more emphatic than a whisper. He survived the purges of the revolution and was still sheikh of the Fartus up to his death in 1976 – at heaven knows what age – to the satisfaction of all concerned.

  But an era died when the monarchy perished. As the post raj British disappeared so did the sheikhly landlords of the Marsh world. From the abortive upheaval of 1920 and the subsequent imposition of the monarchy by the British to the late 1950s, nationalism had proliferated in the Kingdom like a strong creeper grappling a wall. By 1958 the wall was ready to fall, and did so. The collapse buried not only the royal family and those close to the palace, but merchants, too, and politicians and land-owners. Pompous sheikhs were banished from their lands to easy exile in Baghdad where they live comfortably but without power.

  So the fiefdom that Majid feared for in the hour of his son’s death passed into other hands – the hands in fact of Majid’s own tribesmen, now at last landowners in their own right. Perhaps Falih died in good time, before his familiar world disintegrated. The great mudhif with, its eleven reed arches and 60 feet of length is no more. Not a stone remains of the house that stood just behind it where Falih, the family that survived him (living quietly in Baghdad now) and his servants and guards (dispersed to city jobs, or jobs in the police or the army) once lived. The ridged land, once Falih’s own, stretches up to Wadiya waterway uninterrupted these days by any human habitation until where old Sayyid Sarwat holds majestic, but entirely spiritual court, like some wise old man of another time. And so, the place where I first set foot thirty years ago on the threshold of the Marshes, is now green, silent and empty.

  8 The Word of the Marshes

  ‘Hadha el hor!,’ Hafadh cried from the tarada’s stern. ‘This is the Marsh.’ He leaned across his paddle and squeezed my shoulder as if to add, ‘This is our world, you understand. You are in our hands now!’ Thesiger, fitting cartridges into a shotgun, looked up – ‘Yes, this is it.’ The breeze was light and cool. Soft white clouds moved across the blue sky. It was a fine winter’s day in the Marshes like countless others I was to see in the years to come. The difference was that this was my first day. A moment ago the palisade of reeds had risen behind us, cutting us off with apparent finality from the outside world, even from Sheikh Falih’s mudhif and Sayyid Sarwat’s voice booming a welcome. In their element once more, our four canoe-boys settled back, chattering to each other, relaxed. Their paddles dipped and rose more languidly trailing tinkling liquid drops back into the water.

  These canoe-boys were typical Madan: Hafadh, Ajram, Hasan and Yasin. If I could draw I think I would be able to catch their likenesses accurately after more than twenty years. I jotted down a few notes on their appearances at the time:

  Ajram: angled, bony profile – prominent temples and cheekbones. Very wide mouth, fair skin. Big bony hands: light hairs, no moustache. Already deepening furrows of laughter bracket the corners of his mouth. No beauty, but good-hearted and never grumbles. Grins easily and means it.

  Hasan bin Muhaisin: square face, short straight nose. Deep-set, widely spaced eyes and black eyebrows. Very white, level teeth. Solemn expression. Tentative smile. Slow of speech. Dogged.

  Yasin: noticeably mongol face, high cheek-bones, up-tilted eyes; curving sensual lips; skin darker than usual; black hair, heavy hair on arms and legs and wisps of moustache. Surprisingly resonant, deep-chested voice too often raised in acrimony. Very strong and big-limbed.

  Hafadh: vivacious, full mouth and a satyr’s nose sweeping down to meet it. Brown hair, large, mischievous brown eyes, and good teeth and a tongue always darting between them. He looks like a wiry, brown, good-natured faun.

  They were all young, zestful and alert; full of humour, some of it ribald; full of mischief usually kept in check by their natural poise, the tribesman’s sense of what is fitting. They were poor – less poor than their fathers and grandfathers in Turkish times, but poorer than they are today. To wear, they owned little more than the shirts (of cotton, no longer the coarse sackcloth of Keppel’s visit), the headcloths (kafiyahs) and headropes (agals), and the belts and daggers they wore every day. Despite this, appearance was important to them. When we approached a village after the antics, songs, and sweat, possibly dangers, of a long day’s travelling, the boys laid down their paddles, scooped up water to wash their hands and faces, rolled down their sleeves and carefully straightened their kafiyahs and agals, peering into tiny, round mirrors to make sure they looked at their best. Sometimes one of them would thrust a comb into my hand and point to my untidy hair – a friendly hint that if one of us looked scruffy we all lost face. If our night’s lodging was simple, like well-brought-up boys in Europe or America, they would automatically jump up to help our short-handed host with dishes or the coffee. At the other end of the social scale, in a sheikh’s mudhif, those spritely Marsh yokels quietly took a humble seat in the throng with as much dignity as if they were themselves sons of sheikhs.

  At such times, I thought: Can they really be descendants of those tangled-haired marauders who frightened della Valle into shifting camps to avoid them? They could be, and were. And they were grandsons and great-great-grandsons of the fierce harriers of British and Indian regiments, of the giggling men and women who were so delighted when Mr Fraser sketched them in 1834, of those untamed pe
ople who had preyed on the sumptuous caravans of ancient Greeks, Persians and Turks. These boys were proud of that kinship and of their tribes and – though Iraqi townsmen scoffed at them – proud to be Madan.

  It was strange – unheard of, in fact – for outsiders like us to spend so much time, to live as the Madan did, in the heart of the Marshes. No one had ever done so before. Not surprisingly, the Madan tribesmen Thesiger first met took a very long, careful look at him before they were convinced he was harmless. Once they were satisfied, they bestowed upon him – and later, myself – the compliment of their affection.

  *

  We dawdled through the reed-lanes that first day; then struck across Dima, one of the larger lakes. In the middle of the lake, several bellams lay close together and a cluster of naked and half-naked men struggled half in and half out of the water with what looked like acres of netting.

  ‘Those people are called Berbera,’ said Ajram. ‘They spend their lives catching and selling fish. They use nets which is a thing we Madan never do. Shall we buy a fish off them?’

  ‘Why don’t you use nets? It would be easier.’

  ‘We use spears to catch fish, not nets,’ Hasan called out.

  ‘Yes, but why?’

  ‘Don’t know why. We just do. Shall we buy a fish?’

  Netting fish was indeed taboo to the tribesmen in those days – like trading, it was simply ‘not done’. So, the Madan fished laboriously with long bamboo spears; the spear-heads had five metal prongs with barbed tips. They also scattered bait impregnated with digitalis which paralysed the fish so that they floated unconscious to the surface and were effortlessly scooped up.

  Now, a man’s voice suddenly quavered up into the limitless sky.

  ‘Your skin white and fair, as white as buttercups (it sang), your eyes like the wide eyes of the gazelle, teeth shining like stars, how will you know that I am here fainting for love as a warrior faints when he is struck by a bullet?’

  Hafadh took the opportunity to blow his nose – he arched his left palm above the bridge of it and, extending the little finger like a maiden aunt holding a teacup, pinched his nostrils genteelly with thumb and forefinger and gave a sharp snort. He dipped his hand into the water to wash it, and resumed his paddling.

  Echoes of the song hung in the air. But our companions were not in a sentimental mood.

  ‘How will she know you’re there?’ Ajram shouted. ‘Who couldn’t know with that appalling racket you’re making?’

  And Yasin yelled, ‘Come here. I’ll give you something up the backside that’ll make you faint.’ A pause; and an embarrassed voice in the reeds said faintly, ‘Oh, go away.’

  At the end of the day we came to Mugheifat, Sahain’s small village. It was deep in the Marshes. Sahain was Hafadh’s big brother; he must have been older by seventeen or eighteen years. He was the hereditary headman, the qalit, of the Feraigat tribe in these parts. He was short and strong, calm and sensible. A good man, a Victorian writer would have said, ‘in a tight corner’. When I saw him laughing on the threshold of his island-house, it was my first sight of a man who has remained my friend to this day. Of course, he was delighted to see Hafadh back again. But whenever Hafadh left home, as he frequently did, to accompany me round the Marshes for weeks on end or to come to Basra, Sahain was pleased with that too. If Hafadh was happy, Sahain was content. We both knew Hafadh was very happy travelling.

  Hafadh was a good boatman, a fair shot, cheerful and reliable; he got on well with the others, too – an important point. Whenever we arrived at Sahain’s house, he and Hafadh made it seem like my home-coming. Sahain’s house was simple, the whole insignificant village was simple – a prototypical Marsh village. You ducked into the house through what was little more than a crack in the reed wall – nothing at all like Sheikh Falih’s great arched doorway. One’s bare feet brushed across green rushes and reed matting on the floor. A reed screen, coming half-way up the wall towards the far end, separated off the women’s quarters and the kitchen; smoke seeped up over it and hung like a fog in the curve of the ceiling. Sacks of rice and grain, paddles, fishing-spears, tattered bolsters, mattresses with the stuffing leaking out, a dilapidated dark wooden chest with a hinge missing; that, apart from the hens and cats darting among us, was all the visible content of the house, except for another much smaller box also made of wood.

  From this, as soon as we arrived, Hafadh took out narrow-waisted glasses about 2 inches high which he placed on a cheap metal tray. He dipped an old black kettle into the water from the buffalo-platform, not bothering to disperse the surface scum, and placed it on the fire of reeds and dung that Sahain had already prepared in the middle of the floor. Then he broke small lumps of sugar from a large solid cone and dropped one piece into each glass. The boiling water he poured onto a handful of tea already in the pot, and put the pot onto the fire to brew. When he was satisfied with the brewing he poured the tea into the glasses. A sheikh would have produced diminutive spoons. At Sahain’s you stirred your tea with short splinters of reed that you broke off the matting. Sometimes tea was replaced by pieces of dried limes which made a delicious sweet drink. In summer – in the terrible wet heat of summer – there were sometimes tall glasses of sherbert looking deliriously cool, but often luke-warm because, of course, there was no ice.

  In summer, too, there was swimming; a blessed relief from the furnace of the air. The side-flaps of the houses were raised to let the breeze in: but often there was no breeze. You just sat and let the sweat run down your chest and back, and did your best to breathe air like steam from a hot bath, while you beat off the flies and mosquitoes that attacked you from above and the fleas and other insects that crept up on you from below. If you could stay there then for more than a day it meant that you really loved the Marshes.

  Fortunately, the Marsh water stayed cool and deep. Doctors would have warned against bilharzia, the disease that hatches in snails which infect the standing waters. But it was sometimes too hot to worry about bilharzia. All Marsh Arabs swim like frogs from a very early age. Throwing off their ragged shirts they jumped into the water as though it was their true element. Watching them I remembered the First World War stories of Marsh Arabs; how they stripped and oiled their bodies to make capture more difficult, before slipping into the Tigris to raid a British army barge-train under the eyes of its Indian sepoy guards. I also remember the Hon. George Keppel’s description in 1824 of a boatman who would have made ‘an excellent model for an Hercules’.

  Infant mortality among the Madan in those days was high: only the strong survived. So these Feraigat tribesmen, though slim, were enormously powerful. How could they not be? Every day of their lives they laboured at a paddle or a punt-pole, plunged about in water after buffaloes or fish or wildfowl, wielding a sickle hour after hour to cut rushes for fodder and giant reeds for building or sale.

  I am not sure that I have ever met men with such power in their fingers and wrists. I think they could snap a man’s neck in a trice. Their hands are wide, large-pored and hard-palmed. Often these hands are strangely hairless and they are dark skinned from the sun, about the colour of dark treacle. Their arms and bodies are several shades lighter and the skin surprisingly soft. Early travellers used the word ‘shaggy’ to describe Marsh Arabs, as though they were coated all over with hair, like monkeys. On the contrary, their bodies, except for the forearms and calves, are remarkably hairless. Their feet are colossal: unusually broad and thick, like bedouin feet, but deeply scarred and fissured from the ceaseless contact with decks of mashhufs and the daily slashes and stabs of the undergrowth of the reed-beds – rushes with edges as sharp as razors, and jagged reed-stubble thrusting up like bayonets. The Marshmen, when I first saw them, wore their hair cropped short, as they do now. Then, as now, most of them eventually grew moustaches; and some, like Sahain, affected a stubbly chinbeard. The days of plaits and ringlets have gone. Blond hair is quite common in the Marshes, and you see startlingly green or blue eyes among the black and brown.


  On summer days, howling and hooting with animal glee, the younger males of the village plunged their flat-bellied circumcised bodies into the water and their sun-darkened arms and legs thrashed up the spray. It was like a carnival time. The shrieks and laughter excited the buffaloes into an orgy of groans and the dogs became hysterical and plunged in too. The women and girls, spruced up in bright dresses of scarlet, green and blue, giggling and feigning bashfulness, eagerly peered out of their doorways at all this high-spirited nakedness as if they had never seen such a thing before.

  The village sits in a clearing in the reeds. But the reed-walls hedge it round quite closely. Suppose your tribe was attacking the village; with strong oarsmen and complete surprise, you could storm the first house before its inhabitants had time to get off more than a hurried shot or two. But probably some small sound borne before you on the wind would have given an earlier warning.

  Between the houses, tiny boys pole themselves confidently about on tiny, home-made rafts or in small boats called chalabiyas. You see buffaloes grunting and munching at the house doors, swinging their great heavy horns to ward off the persistent swarms of flies; cattle egrets perched on the curving mat roofs, black and white kingfishers hovering to sight their prey and then dropping like stones in the water. You hear the chorus of frogs. You smell the delicate evening smell of fires and the rich smell of coffee-making that brings the saliva into your mouth. You tie up the canoe, step ashore, kick off your shoes and squeeze through the narrow entrance of the house. You take a place against one of the longest walls and when, one by one, everyone sitting there gives you the greeting ‘Good evening’ you murmur it back to each man in turn.