by Sinan Antoon
In March 2004 I read a story in the New York Times about the process of washing the dead in Iraq. The journalist spoke to Raad Abboud, a thirty-three-year-old man who had been washing corpses since he was thirteen. He remembered the bodies that used to come in the 1980s, when the regime was executing its victims. Raad thought the situation would improve after 2003, but what happened was quite the opposite. He started work at seven o’clock in the morning and didn’t finish until five in the afternoon. He felt a responsibility toward the dead, but the news always made him depressed because he knew that the bodies would soon be piling up in front of him. He was traumatized and had recently decided that he would be the last corpse washer in his family. “I won’t let my son inherit this profession. It has destroyed me,” he said.
I wiped away a tear and reread it right away. I was struck by the details and rituals of washing the bodies, and I kept thinking about Raad and the horrors he faced every morning. When I got to the office I cut out the article and put it in a new folder. I researched the subject on the Internet. I thought of writing a novel about Raad Abboud and people like him. Then I felt guilty, as if I were betraying Wadood and the novel I’d been dreaming of writing about him. I went to the university library and took out several books on Islamic law that described the intricate procedures for washing the dead. I copied out the relevant parts and added them to the folder, in addition to an interview with a corpse washer I found online. I imagined the narrator in the novel as coming from a family that had practiced this trade for generations. He would be from the al-Kazimiyya district of Baghdad, not from Najaf like Raad. But he would have had artistic inclinations since he was a child and would refuse to become a corpse washer. This would cause conflict with his father. Many of the details began to take shape, and I thought about it so often that everything about it seemed real to me. I began to see the washhouse and hear the characters speaking. But I had to put all this on paper. And I didn’t write anything. I often tried but I didn’t succeed, so the folder stayed as it was.
I’m surrounded and under surveillance, like a bird in a prison cell. I don’t have a sky. What to do now? No family and no homeland. In prison. And my crime is that I know and I want to know. You might think I’m raving mad and I wouldn’t blame you for thinking so, because no one else believes me. Most of the people I’ve revealed my secret to, by telling them about my ordeal, and they are very few, have thought I’m demented. Instead of trying to understand my ordeal, they offered me their pity, which I hate. They can’t see what I see and they haven’t lived what I’ve lived. They can’t imagine the torment I’ve been through. They may not realize that there are cameras everywhere, and the patrols are on the lookout too. They don’t realize that we’re in a gigantic prison and all our movements and thoughts are monitored and carefully recorded. Even this message that I’m writing to you now, I’m sure they’ll read every word of it. They’ll examine what it might mean and submit a report on it even before it reaches you. They tell me I’m no longer in prison and that I’m ranting. There are no bars and no guards. But they can’t see and they don’t understand that I’m suffocating. I suffocate, but never die. There’s no way out of all this. The only way out is death. But I know that there’s nothing after death, no “after” other than nothingness. Otherwise I would have killed myself years ago in order to move on to another existence that is less tormented than this. Nothing but nothingness. Yes. There’s no hell other than the hell we’re living now. I believe what Calvino says about hell. Besides, to die would be to proclaim that they have triumphed over me. I may never triumph over them, but I will not declare defeat. I will never admit defeat whatever the price. I’ll die standing by my ideas. You’ll no doubt wonder why I’m writing to you. I don’t know. I have no hope that you’ll understand or that you’ll fully accept my view of things as they really are. What’s it to you in the first place? Was it your mistake that you met me? Maybe you’re just, forgive me for using the word, a pretext. A pretext to converse. I may be addressing myself through you. I could have been you and you could have been me, but for the absurdity of history and of fates. But I go back to Calvino and what he wrote in “Invisible Cities.” I’ve memorized the passage: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” And I, sir, bet once again, and maybe for the last time, that you are not part of the inferno.
“Winter will be very harsh and it’s impossible to go around on foot in this town. I advise you to buy a car,” the department chair said. I liked the design of the Honda Element, so I bought a black one. The salesman gave me a temporary registration certificate, and to switch it to my name I had to obtain a New Hampshire driver’s license. Since I already had a Massachusetts driver’s license, I thought this would be easy. But the bureaucrat in the DMV, a woman in her early fifties with thick glasses and gray hair tied up in a style way out of fashion, told me that the new law required me to provide them with a copy of my birth certificate. I laughed and said, “I don’t have a copy of my birth certificate.”
“Why not? Where is it?”
“In Baghdad.”
“Why?”
“Because I was born there.”
“Can’t you call them up and ask them to send it to you?”
“Madam, have you read the news recently or watched television?” I said. “There are manuscripts hundreds of years old that have been burned and lost, as well as antiquities and archives. Who’s going to look for my birth certificate after all that?”
“I’m sorry but that’s the law. I can’t complete the process without a birth certificate.”
“What’s the point of this? I was living in Massachusetts and I was issued a driver’s license there without any problem at all.”
“Well, sir, an Arab like you tried to slip across the border from Canada two years ago so that he could go and blow up the Los Angeles airport.”
“And do you think the terrorists would keep repeating the same plan even after it failed?”
“I don’t know, sir. That’s not my job.”
I called the legal office at the college to help me with the problem and the person there promised to try. But he later told me that the authorities were very strict about this. “I know it’s nonsense, but it’s out of my hands,” he said. A month later, the temporary registration expired and the police started to stop me whenever they noticed that the expiry date had passed. Although I explained the problem, and although they were sometimes sympathetic, they would still give me a ticket and I had to pay a fine every time. The unpaid fines piled up until they amounted to more than six hundred dollars. One day I went out to find that the police had put a massive metal clamp on the front wheel on the right-hand side. I found a pink warning slip under the windshield wiper, telling me to pay all the fines or appear in court within a month of receiving the warning.
I went to court to explain the complications in the case. The cases that came up before mine were theft and serious assault cases. My turn followed that of a young man accused of stabbing his colleague at work after an argument. When I explained my problem to the judge, he rebuked the prosecutor and told him, “Do I have to waste my time on things like this?” Then he turned to me and said, “You’re a university professor. Solve the problem. Sell the car.” He ordered me to pay half of the fines.
In the end I sold the car at a loss to the same dealer who had sold it to me. I bought some heavy snow boots instead. On days when it was snowing heavily, I would wade through the snow on my way to the office, cursing Osama bin Laden, George Bush, and the Algerian who had tried to slip across the border.
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“We must convince the living that the dead cannot sing.”
I can hear the goldfinch singing. I open my eyes and I see myself under a tree laden with fruit that I cannot name. The goldfinch has landed on one of the branches. It stops singing. It turns its head and looks at me as if it knows me. When I reach out to touch it, it flies away and the branch shakes. I notice the green fruit. They look like lemons but they’re not lemons. When I take hold of them they dissolve and turn into drops of water. My hand gets wet and the tree disappears.
My apartment in Hanover remained without a television. Watching the news on American channels made me both depressed and angry. It seemed like a waste of the valuable time that I needed to finish my dissertation. I couldn’t get Arabic satellite channels because for aesthetic reasons the college didn’t allow satellite dishes on the roofs of the buildings it owned. Without a satellite dish one couldn’t get the Arabic package. After reading so many criticisms by Iraqis of the coverage by the Arabic channels, I realized it was probably better for my sanity. But I would cheat nevertheless and break my promises to myself. After buying dinner in the students’ cafeteria, I would go on some evenings to the classroom where I taught in the morning, which was close to my office and which was equipped with a large screen for showing educational films during lectures. I watched television there on the big screen. I put out the light and watched the American news in the dark. After that I watched Dave Chappelle. At 11:30 p.m. every night the janitor would come on his daily round to lock up the rooms. The first time he saw me he was rough: “What are you doing here? The building’s closed. You have to leave.” “I’m a professor and I teach in this room and I have a key,” I said. He asked me to show him my ID card and I did. He kept opening the door every night and was about to say something, but then he would say, “Ah, you of course” and would go away.
At the beginning of fall I received a letter from Kate, one of the students in the first-year Arabic class that I taught, saying she was setting up a group called “Students Against the War” and asking me if I would be willing to be the advisory faculty and help the group if and when needed. I was surprised she hadn’t spoken to me face to face, and then I realized that she was quite shy. I agreed and asked her for more information. She replied that they were planning to arrange some events to raise awareness of the negative effects of the war, and they would also try to organize a series of lectures. I wrote back encouraging her and expressing my enthusiasm for the idea. I said it would help to stimulate dialogue about the war on campus and among the students. In the two weeks after our email exchange I saw an advertisement in big letters posted on the walls, on the notice boards in the university buildings, and in the library, saying, “Are you angry about the war? Let’s do something then.” In smaller letters it invited students to attend the first organizational meeting. I wasn’t able to attend it personally because the time conflicted with the monthly department meeting. The next day I was returning homework to students at the end of class and I asked Kate about the meeting. She smiled awkwardly and said, “Unfortunately not many people came, only seven, but they were enthusiastic. I’m hoping the movement will get more members in the future.” I tried not to show my disappointment. “The important thing is it’s a start,” I said. “Please let me know if I can be of help.”
Seven students out of six thousand. Really pathetic. But why am I surprised? Most of these students were from rich families, and many of them were right-wing conservatives. The war and its costs were far from their worlds and concerns. Even if it had mattered to them, they believed in the logic of the war.
I liked the idea of the group’s first event: they were going to plant white roses symbolizing the victims of the war in the main square, stand in front of them in silence early in the morning, and then leave them there for a whole day. That way the students would see them from the half hour before they went to the first class at eight o’clock in the morning till sunset. I woke up earlier than usual and went to the place where they were going to stage the event, according to the email they had sent me. I found the members of the group, including Kate, standing in silence in front of the roses that had been planted close to one of the giant elm trees. They were carrying placards saying, “Stop the War Now,” “No to War,” and “Yes to Peace.” Some of the other students slowed their pace to take a look at the strange spectacle. But the overwhelming majority kept on walking to their classes and just threw a quick, indifferent glance, while others laughed. I counted the flowers and there were thirty-seven. I tried to think why this number in particular, but I couldn’t think of a logical explanation. At ten to eight, one of Kate’s colleagues gathered the placards and thanked the participants, who broke up to go off to their various classes. I went up to her and asked her about the number of roses. “They represent the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq so far: three hundred and seventy, one rose for every ten.” Before I could ask her about the Iraqis, she added spontaneously, “Unfortunately, we don’t know exactly how many Iraqis have died. And in the group we decided it would be better politically to focus at first on our own troop casualties and bring up the civilians later.”
I’m in a train station but it doesn’t look like Baghdad Central Station or any other station anywhere else. I’m standing alone on the platform and there’s a train about to leave. A booming voice announces the last call for the train, but it doesn’t say which direction the train is headed in or what the final destination is. I don’t understand what’s happening. I look at the train windows and I can see my family and friends waving to me from the windows and gesturing at me to hurry up. I walk to the nearest door to board the train. A man standing by the door in a blue suit and a hat says, “This train is going to the future. Where’s your ticket?” I look for a ticket in my pockets but I can’t find one. He says he can’t let me board and I can’t buy a ticket on the train. I have to go to the ticket office on the ground floor. I look around to find the ticket office and I see another train on the other side. I can see my family and friends waving from the windows and gesturing to me to hurry up. I head toward them and see the same man. “This train is going to the past,” he says. “Where’s your ticket?” He repeats what he said a few seconds earlier: “You can’t board the train without a ticket.”
At the beginning of 2005 a journalist working with the Valley News contacted me and said she was writing a feature story on what Iraqis resident in the area thought about the parliamentary elections taking place in Iraq. I was hesitant at first. I asked her whether there were enough Iraqis in the area. I knew about the eccentric Iraqi academic who had left Iraq in 1983 and had been teaching in the history department for years. I had met him only once since my arrival, and my attempts to approach him had failed. I had written him an email suggesting we have coffee together. We agreed on a time and place, but later he sent me an apology saying he was ill. After that I heard that he was a loner and didn’t really have any friends. He lived far from campus and came in to teach only two days a week. “Yes, there are three of you,” the journalist said. “There’s a student from Iraq who came on a Fulbright scholarship this semester. Don’t you know him?”
“No, I don’t,” I said.
I agreed and I answered her questions, which were naïve as usual. She was surprised when I told her that I wasn’t going to take part in the elections. “Why not? There are polling stations in New York and Washington. Don’t you want to exercise a democratic right that people have died for?” she said.
“I don’t believe in the legitimacy of elections held under military occupation. I also can’t take part in elections when I’m living on another continent and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are denied the right to vote,” I said.