Return to the Marshes

by Gavin Young

  ‘Behold Al Qabab!’ shouted Farhan, and the rowers put on a new turn of speed to enter another tribe’s village in style.

  Al Qabab. In the old days it had always been a home from home for me. It has grown – today it has well over a 100 houses. Bu Mugheifat, where Sahain used to live, was abandoned years ago and the people, all of the Feraigat, concentrated round Sahain, like a swarm round the queen-bee, in Al Qabab.

  Sahain was standing at his door with a paddle in his hand. There was no mistaking him. His face was more deeply lined and his hair was grey, that was all – the same strong, short body, eyes wrinkled with laughter and the glare of sun on the water. There was no doubt about his welcome either. The effect of our arrival in Al Qabab was more tumultuous even than at Rufaiya. Ajram soon arrived jubilant and grinning – unchanged as far as I could see but with a canoe-load of sons and brothers. Sahain’s sons, Bani, Mohammed and Warid, the eldest, just back from military service, darted about preparing a sumptuous meal: sherbert, wheat bread, dishes of green beans, apricots, chicken, thick and spicy soups, yoghurt, a plate of lamb stew, grilled fish. Others piled onto Sahain’s buffalo-platform which began to sink and seep water so that people ran to fetch bundles of rushes to raise the floor-level.

  Middle-aged men demanded to be recognized, and I realized that these weather-beaten, lined faces belonged to the smooth-skinned, naked young swimmers of those scorching summers years ago. Among them was Chethir, no longer the delicate, slender figure of the 1950s, but a furrow-faced man of about thirty-six with dark, thick forearms and chin-stubble that scraped my cheek when he greeted me, and a hand that squeezed mine painfully. His hands were like paddle-heads and the pores on their backs were enormous. I knew him instantly, as I had Amara, by the deep eyes that the years had left unchanged. ‘How’s your throat, Chethir?’ I said: I could see in my mind’s eye those ugly, white spots that I had had treated by the doctor in Basra. ‘Do you remember that?’ he said. ‘Oh, it’s fine. Not a day’s trouble with it for years.’

  Sahain said: ‘You know Hafadh’s dead. He was your friend, wasn’t he? There was nothing we could do. He had some pain in his stomach and chest. The doctor was baffled. And without warning one day, he just collapsed and died.’ Sahain’s eyes glistened. ‘I already miss him,’ I said. ‘So do we,’ said Sahain. ‘Did you know he blew off half his hand with that gun you gave him? Yes. Some idiot got a bullet jammed in the barrel and Hafadh, not knowing, loaded and fired another bullet and a piece blew out of the chamber taking his thumb away. Look.’ He went behind the mat partition in his house and came back with the Mannlicher I had left with Hafadh in 1956. Sure enough the chamber had been breached and repaired. I had never heard of an accident like that before. I was glad it was not the gun that had killed Hafadh.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Sahain smiling and taking my arm. ‘Sit here and tell us what you have been doing.’ He shouted, ‘Hurry up with the tea, Ajram, make some coffee will you. Warid, my son, throw over more cushions. You two sons of Yasin, come over here and let Gavin look at you. You remember Yasin?’

  ‘Very well,’ I said. And to the boys, who quickly squatted close to me with folded legs and wide brown expectant eyes – about ten or twelve years old and with the Mongol cheek-bones of Yasin – I said, ‘I have some photographs of your father in my bag. I’ll show you later. He was very strong, and brave with pigs, and very dear to us all. Ajram will tell you I speak the truth.’

  Ajram grunted, ‘Yes, that’s God’s truth.’

  The pattern of the old days began to re-form. We went shooting coot and duck for food. Then I deserted the tarada for a tiny 4-foot skiff – a chalabiya – which was essential in the narrow, overgrown reed-paths, half-lost except to Marsh Arab eyes and Marsh Arab memories.

  I preferred an elderly man called Safair as my guide: an expert hunter even by Marsh standards; a skinny, undemonstrative man with a long nose like a snipe’s; a brilliant tracker despite the extraordinary old-fashioned, round-framed glasses he perched on his nose. Safair shot skilfully with an ancient, single-barrelled shot-gun, sometimes concealing his lanky frame for hours in a reed-clump to wait for duck, like an old and bespectacled heron watching for frogs.

  In the deep grey-green womb of the reeds I felt the old comfort. It pleased me to think that we might emerge from the Marshes to find Ancient Sumer around us; that in Basra there might be a Wali and Janissaries lounging in the bazaar, and Portuguese galleons in the Shatt al Arab; or that the Caliph Ali sat plump and white-bearded in his capital at Kufa with its new clay and reed mosque, and that Baghdad was still an insignificant village on the Tigris waiting for Harun al Rashid to build his city there.

  *

  There was a school at Al Qabab now. A large ishan covered with reeds and rushes, and three reed schoolrooms, and a small reed house for the two schoolmasters, cheerful young men on a nine-month secondment from a town near Baghdad. All the village boys went to school each morning. I saw them paddling themselves there or being paddled by their mothers. They sat at tiny desks in their dishdashas – all the sons of people I had known since they were the size and age of these children, when the idea of a school would have amazed them. In the summer, mosquitoes permitting, lessons are in the open air. ‘Look now,’ says the teacher at the blackboard. ‘This is a three. What is it?’

  ‘Three, three!’ the class yells in unison and a couple of cattle egrets on the roof flap away in alarm.

  ‘One, two, three,’ says the teacher.

  ‘One, two, three!’

  I see Ajram weighing some fish on the platform of a house next door. He waves. His sons, Battel and Khanjar (which means Dagger), are in the class. In the evening Khanjar sits beside me at Sahan’s to practise his English on me: ‘How old are you? What is my name? One, two, three!’

  At a larger village some hours away, I saw a school prize-giving ceremony, and a handball game in which the star was an enormously tall black boy, a sort of Harlem Globetrotter of the Marshes. He told me he was twelve years old, and he must have been at least 6 feet tall.

  The village was visibly more prosperous without having changed too drastically. People’s clothes looked much less ragged. Launch-owners, like the man who had taken me to reach Rufaiya, ran a more or less regular shuttle service to the markets. The launches move at a sedate pace and their roofs give one a grandstand view of the passing scene. The engines of some may smoke and splutter. But generally their quiet chugging hardly ruffles the peace of the Marshes, and their size confines them to the deepest channels, so you do not meet them head-on every bend in the reeds.

  One early trip I made in the tarada was to Jasim bin Faris’s far out at Awaidiya. I had heard that the wonderful old man was still miraculously alive. Jasim was one example of a sheikh who had been so beloved by his people that they had voted for him to remain over them. I looked forward to seeing his stooped, deceptively languid figure with the cigarette-holder, and see his little smile and hear him encouraging the festivities, as he had at his son Nasaif’s wedding, with ‘Fog hum! Onto them!’ the old battlecry. But Jasim was away in Shatra, not at all well, said Nasaif, who welcomed us. Jasim’s younger son, Falih, who soon arrived from Shatra, confirmed it. The old lopsided mudhif had gone and with it the two holes I had shot into the roof a few minutes after Nasaif’s consummation of his marriage. A bigger, grander structure stood in its place. In fact, prosperity had come to the Fartus. Nasaif was now head of a new cooperative organization, set up within the tribe, for marketing fish. Bellams brought ice – I had scarcely seen ice in the Marshes before – and the fish were shipped in it to Basra or Amara. Tribesmen came as I watched and emptied fish from their skiffs onto an already impressive pile. Nasaif would pack the fish presently into a bellam full of ice for the market and later divide the sale-money to all concerned. ‘Hard work,’ Nasaif said, ‘with the crops and buffaloes, too. But worth it.’ Certainly: Marsh tribesmen now earn two or three thousand dinars a year. An enormous sum in Iraq. His and Falih’s hospitality was as la
vish as ever. Falih took me out to the places where at that winter-time of year the geese came in to graze.

  Only the Berbera had netted and sold fish in the old days. Now everyone in the Marshes is doing it, including Ajram.

  ‘You’ve all become Berbera now,’ I told him.

  ‘With a family like mine, I have to earn money somehow,’ Ajram grinned. Then added: ‘Do you remember my first son’s birthday party?’

  ‘I remember Mister Kharaibat very well.’

  ‘Well, there’s Kharaibat the second now. And Battel, and Alwan, and Khanjar and Ali!’

  ‘Isn’t it time to stop?’ I said.

  A grin and a shrug!

  On one shooting afternoon, a party of us went to Bu Mugheifat – or where Bu Mugheifat had once been. The water completely covered it. I looked into the water and saw the ishans deep down and drowned for ever. ‘That’s our house!’ Sahain said, pointing. And other people shouted, laughing, ‘That’s mine’ … ‘And that’s mine!’ But it was disturbing to see the past imprisoned down there.

  Sahain’s house today is a good deal larger than his old one. It is snugly built of reed columns and reed mats, with an earth strip for a coffee hearth near the low, Alice in Wonderland door. I thanked God that the evening’s entertainment did not centre round the deafening, idiot sound of a transistor radio. There is the familiar sprightly hubbub of humans talking to humans, and jokes, and songs. On the warm evenings rugs are spread outside. We sit watching the swallows dipping down to drink in flight and listen to the frogs’ chorus and the groaning of the buffaloes and the noise of the birds in the reeds – the sunset air is always full of little voices. Now and again you hear in the distance – sounds carry in the reeds – the long stutter of a modern sub-machine gun; and another stutter, or perhaps several, replying. Sahain and the others will prick up their ears and say, ‘That must be a Such-and-Such a place.’ It means a blood feud is being fought out. And, indeed, Sahain’s people themselves were in blood feud because a ne’er-do-well of the Feraigat had eloped with someone’s daughter in another district. Sahain had a good deal of trouble before a truce could be arranged and guaranteed by Sayyid Sarwat. The girl’s relatives were furiously demanding fasl – compensation. Otherwise, they snapped and barked – ‘Your people, Sahain, should henceforth guard their lives well, whether cutting reeds or hunting or merely travelling to market, they should be careful!’ – that was the warning. The compensation they were demanding was two girls of marriageable age, plus about £700 in Iraq money – a lot of money in the Marshes. When Sahain had asked for a period of truce in which to find the kidnapper and return the girl, he had been rudely rebuffed. So he sought help from Sayyid Sarwat. With that incomparable assistance and the backing of the local police-chief (who is wisely content to leave tribal problems to the tribes unless things really get out of hand), a truce was arranged for six months. It had later been renewed for a further period. But Al Qabab had some uneasy nights and days before the truce. I noticed people were quicker to call out ‘Yahu hai? at some suspicious night-sound. And the response ‘Sadiq! Friend!’ came quicker, too.

  The British administrators after 1915 found that a harsh code of honour governed the Marsh tribes. Haji Rikkan told Hedgcock of a young man who, on hearing of his sister’s adultery with a neighbour, went straight home and stabbed her to death, saying, ‘Sister, the price of adultery is death’. Surely he acted a shade too brusquely? No; it was agreed by all that the brother had been right. No one would have risked making a false accusation of adultery for which the punishment is dire. So the taleteller had not been lying; and the brother was obliged to kill.

  The lore of the Marshes is very old and it is not simple. The varying compensations (fasl) that can cancel blood feuds have to be learned like a more complex multiplication table. Women or buffaloes can make up the price, as well as money. But how many of one and how much of the other depends on who has killed whom; what relationship, if any, existed between them; what tribes are involved, and so on. The passions and vengefulness of a volatile and heavily armed people to whom honour is paramount and who live far from the constraints of government must be effectively curbed or channelled somehow.

  In the old days everyone had a bolt-action rifle and was proud of it. Now smuggled automatic weapons are the thing. Ammunition is hard to get and expensive, but this does not stop people loosing off hundreds of rounds for a wedding or funeral as tribal custom demands.

  When Haji Yunis, the grand old man of Al Aggar, a good friend of Thesiger and myself, died in 1976 at a great age, it was said that three or four thousand rounds were banged off into the blue in his honour – although perhaps nobody really counted. One of the Haji’s last acts had been to present Al Aggar – a big, sprawling village, almost three villages in one – with a winnowing machine. It was a great, old-fashioned thing of enormous, clanking wheels and snapping belts and had been built some years ago by a firm called Ruston of Lincoln in England. It snorted like twenty dragons, and took several men tugging on a rope to get it going. Haji Yunis encouraged them with shouts of ‘For the Love of God, heave!’ as they strained at the rope that turned the great driving-wheel. ‘Heave! Heave! God give you strength.’ Several score villagers danced and clapped encouragement and at last a heavy metallic cough shook the machine; a dense cloud of oily smoke enveloped all concerned; then it was away and grinding. It was old and noisy but, thanks to God, it worked. Haji Yunis was much blessed for the innovation.

  At the village of Saigal there are now two or three communal mills like Haji Yunis’s at Al Aggar. Saigal stands on the lip of the marsh and is the most populated place in the west-central Marshes. There must be a thousand families living there, some on dry land and some on islands.

  There is a police fort, too, that turns orange-red when the setting sun strikes its old bricks. What is more, there is a small concrete clinic with a young Iraqi doctor called Fuad and a nurse or two. The doctor’s clinic was always full when I visited it, with a queue of patients squatting outside the door, fanning the flies away from sores and cuts. I had never seen a doctor in the Marshes before. People came to Fuad from a long way around. He has a small white launch as well as his clinic and he chugs about the neighbouring villages two or three times a week, bandaging and inoculating, rather as we used to, but I suppose with a more comprehensive knowledge of surgery. In the last few years I have come across him in several villages, once near Jasim bin Faris’s at Awaidiya. A cheerful man, he told me that bilharzia is much reduced – though it is a vigorous disease that stubbornly resists elimination: all those hostsnails must be annihilated with their lurking parasites. But TB is the main trouble now, and trachoma and dysentery and bronchitis. Malnutrition? No, says Doctor Fuad; and I did not see or hear of any. There are other doctors at, I believe, Sahain (a biggish place north of Saigal), Shatanya (even further north), Shatra, Chubaish (a major township on the Euphrates) and Mejar el Kebir, and people with some degree of medical training at several other places on the northern edge of the Marshes, like Negara and Humus.

  Of course, the extra cultivable land given to the Madan after 1968 had improved their diet and I saw many fewer infant stomachs swollen by vitamin deficiency. Each peasant fellah has received from the Government five donums (a donum is an area a little less than an acre) and some Marsh tribesmen something like seven or eight donums of good land supposing there was enough in the reasonably close vicinity.

  ‘Only in the belly of the Marsh’, Amara told me, ‘are there people who still rely on nothing but fish, buffaloes and reeds for their livelihood.’ As for the Feraigat, they received more like three to five donums each. To reach the Feraigat barley and rice fields takes about three hours by canoe from Sahain’s house; but that is nothing to a Marsh Arab. At the necessary season of the year they go out at dawn and back at sunset, or after, bawling out songs at the top of their voices and thinking nothing of it. It is revealing – how strong and proud tribal feeling is – that the Marsh Arabs are not deserting thei
r Marshes for the already overstuffed cities as many fellahin are. The slower-minded fellahin began their pursuit of gold in the streets of Baghdad and Basra in the mid-1950s. They are in hot and usually futile pursuit of it still, having apparently learned nothing all these years. Not the Madan. Why? Chethir’s answer was short and simple: ‘In the water, the reeds and the air, is where we live and where we like to live.’ And that, for him, was that.

  *

  ‘Sayyid Sarwat says take the tarada as long as you like. But on one condition. You must visit him as soon as you can.’ Amara had told me that first morning of my return. It was no hardship to visit that saintly man of stormy good-nature. The crew of the tarada always enjoyed staying with him. They, like people from the farthest extremity of the Marshes and beyond, hastened to consult him on topics ranging from unlawful arrest or adultery to sheep-rustling.

  ‘Well, well, well!’ he rumbled when we tied up alongside the mudhif, the new concrete guest-room, and the tiny outside lavatory on the water’s edge. ‘How was the tarada? Watertight? Not a bad one, is it? Wouldn’t give you something that was falling apart! Now then, how long is it since I saw you last? Was it with Thesiger? – Yes, that’s right, just before the sheikhs went away. How are you, Amara? Look after my friend here, eh? Mind you do, and God help you!’ He threw out his arms, looking enormous in his wide black robes. ‘Do we have to stand all day in this heat? Have all the rugs been stolen? Has someone sold them all? Why don’t you bring some so our friends can sit down? Jabbar, how are you – family well? I heard they cut out your mother’s gall-stones. Well, God preserve her anyway. Come now, Gavin, sit by me. I see my family has left me one rug unsold, thank God….’ This is the ebullient, unstoppable way the Sayyid addresses his guests and those around him. He is eighty-something by now, he tells me, though even approximate ages in the Marsh region are elusive.