The Orange Trees of Baghdad Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  The Orange Trees of Baghdad

  “A love song to Nadir’s Iraqi relatives . . . Nadir’s strength as a writer lies in her passionate descriptions of the smallest detail. There’s a real immediacy, even an urgency, about The Orange Trees of Baghdad . . . This is a powerful and important book.” — Vancouver Sun

  “Leilah Nadir’s The Orange Trees of Baghdad reminds us that Iraq is not just a war; it is a country. Lovingly woven together from inherited memory and family lore, her Iraq is infinitely more vivid, more textured, and more heartbreaking than what we see nightly on the news. In the debates about winning and losing the war, this is a book about what loss really means—the theft of history and of homeland.”

  — Naomi Klein, author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine

  “Nadir’s work is stunning in its brilliance and poignant in its elegance . . . The Orange Trees of Baghdad is a compelling memoir, worthy of every reader’s time, precisely because it eschews a simplistic understanding of all the issues it discusses.”

  — Canadian Literature

  “Skillfully told with extraordinary warmth, her story gives us an incredible and often surprising insight into a Middle-Eastern culture that is simultaneously exotic and familiar, comforting and terrifying . . . This is a compelling, touching and beautifully written book that thoughtfully challenges assumptions about a place and a people lost in the miasma of war.” — Brisbane Courier Mail

  “In The Orange Trees of Baghdad, Leilah Nadir writes about a place she has never been to . . . giving voice to so many émigrés who have been cut off from their past by war and insurrection.”

  — Elle Canada

  “The Orange Trees of Baghdad is unique in that it is not firsthand reportage. . . . But this remove is what gives Nadir’s book its terrible poignancy.” — Georgia Straight

  “. . . at once moving, disturbing, confusing, and wonderfully hopeful . . . With incredible intricacy and remarkable sensitivity she presents a portrait of the human struggles of war. . . . These are lasting images that . . . underscore the resilience of the human spirit.”

  — Dr. Ivan Townshend, head judge of George Ryga Award 2008

  “In a book that somehow manages to be both journalistic and intimate, the author eloquently reminds us that Iraq’s heart is a country, not a war. Her quest for her roots shows us the tragedy of this people whose land and history have been stolen from beneath them.” — France Culture

  “A very finely written, deftly crafted work about Iraq that translates this epic disaster into human terms and makes us understand the endless suffering of its people. Touching, insightful and poignant.”

  — Eric Margolis, author of War at the Top of the World

  “The book belongs as much to her father as it does to Nadir: she uncovers her own past through his experiences . . . her attempt to trace her family tree in an uncommon land makes this a compelling first book from a thoughtful writer.” — Quill and Quire

  “Leilah Nadir’s insightful, searching story about her Iraqi roots, family, exile, and survival, told in absorbing and moving language, reveals the great civilization now under assault.”

  — George Elliot Clarke, Poet Laureate of Toronto

  “The Orange Trees of Baghdad is a stunning book, the best I’ve read in the past year. Leilah Nadir takes us on her quest to meet the members of her family whose lives have been uprooted by war. In the process, we are drawn into the heart of the world’s most ancient civilization. In the haunting, dreamlike pages of this book, we discover that as Baghdad is destroyed, the roots of our own deepest past are being torn asunder. Hypnotically readable.”

  — James Laxer, author of The Border and The Acadians

  “To understand the suffering of Iraqis through the scattered leaves of exile, read Leilah Nadir’s beautiful memoir The Orange Trees of Baghdad. In it she tells in detail the history of her country through that of her family. A rich, generous autobiography that takes us to the heart of the Iraqi soul.”

  — Martine Gozlan, Marianne magazine

  “Masterfully constructed and profoundly moving, The Orange Trees of Baghdad is an intimate and unforgettable account of one woman’s quest to connect with her Iraqi heritage, and a stunning portrait of war’s ravages on a once-majestic country and its people. This soul-stirring journey of personal and political discovery is a must-read for anyone interested in the tragic reality of Iraq since the Gulf War.”

  — Carol Shaben, author of Into the Abyss, winner of the 2013 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction

  THE ORANGE TREES OF

  BAGHDAD

  In Search of My Lost Family

  Leilah Nadir

  Published in 2014 by Read Leaf

  www.readleaf.net

  Text copyright © 2007, 2014 by Leilah Nadir

  Photography copyright © 2007, 2014 by Farah Nosh

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  CIP Data available from Library and Archives Canada

  ISBN 978-1-77229-000-4 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-1-927018-35-4 (paperback)

  We gratefully acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the BC Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF).

  Printed in the USA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Text design and formatting: Marijke Friesen

  For my father and mother

  my aunties

  and my ancestors

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION: The Mother Tongue

  CHAPTER ONE: The Orange Orchard

  CHAPTER TWO: The Father Country

  CHAPTER THREE: The Motherland

  CHAPTER FOUR: “It Is Written”

  CHAPTER FIVE: The Three Graces

  CHAPTER SIX: Pieces of Civilization

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Porthole into Occupied Baghdad

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Occupation Limbo

  CHAPTER NINE: The Christians

  CHAPTER TEN: A Sugar Depression

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Snow in the Desert

  CHAPTER TWELVE: The Death of Lina

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The Flower of the Pomegranate

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Portraits of the Wounded

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Min Al’Sima, “From the Heavens”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: The Smell of a Car Bomb

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: New Baghdad in Damascus

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Iraq Comes to Me

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: A Letter from the City of Peace

  CHAPTER TWENTY: Christmas in Baghdad

  EPILOGUE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INDEX

  “Step by step, and you shall get to Baghdad.”

  —Turkish Proverb

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Due to the volatility of politics in Iraq, and because many people still fear reprisals for speaking publicly, I have changed most of the names in this book. The characters and events are real, although minor details may have been altered for the sake of security.

  To protect my family’s privacy, I display few of our photographs in this book.

  AN ORANGE TREE IN A BAGHDAD GARDEN

  PHOTO CREDIT: FARAH NOSH

  INTRODUCTION

  The Mother Tongue

  Old Salih the boatman . . . knew all the superstitions of the river: the Jinn, the Divs, the i
nvocations to Elias who hovers on its shores at sunset. He knew the names of the stars: the Children of the Coffin, who follow the North Star to its eternal funeral; and Sirius and Betelgeux, the lovers, who are Majnun and Leila and meet, said he, together in the heavens on one night in the year. —Freya Stark, Baghdad Sketches, 1938

  “I remember our garden in Baghdad. Rose bushes lined the walls and orange trees hung over the blossoms and dark leaves. A date palm stretched high over all the foliage, intermingled with a few fronds from the palms in the large garden that backed onto ours. We had a pomegranate tree that bore small fruit that my younger sister liked to eat. We grew mint and parsley for salads and my mother even nurtured a loofah plant that she harvested for household sponges. A grapevine crept over a trellis on the patio behind the house, giving us shade in the heat of summer. The grapevine reminded my father of his home village in Syria, but the vine didn’t produce grapes. The climate wasn’t right for them to ripen. But my mother wrapped fresh dolma in the leaves.”

  This is not my recollection. The picture is hidden inside my father’s memory. Like all our mythical origins, his beginnings are in a garden.

  I feel Iraq in my bones, though I have never been there. I have never lazed in the shade of the date palm on a stiflingly hot day or underneath the grape leaves hanging on the vine in the evening. I haven’t smelled jasmine or orange blossom scenting a Baghdad night. I’ve never tasted mango pickle with masgouf—the speciality fish dish of Baghdad—at an open-air restaurant on the banks of the Tigris. My father Ibrahim has done none of these things either since he left Iraq at age sixteen in 1960 to go to college in England. Around the world, there are approximately five million exiles from a country of twenty-five million; about one in five Iraqis does not live in Iraq. Most of them, like my father, are afraid to go back, even in peacetime. So we never have.

  Yet the garden still exists, my father’s childhood house still stands. The orange trees are still there. I sense the garden only through my family’s stories; words and pictures about its smells, the searing heat, the light, the butterflies, the storks, eating the Baghdadi delicacy of buffalo cream there. Baghdad is an outdoor city, and family meals were often eaten in the garden or as picnics on the lawn, or cooked on charcoal barbecues on the terrace. I imagine Iraq spreading and rippling out in circles with the house and garden in the halo at the centre. I see the last thirty years passing as the house stands, aging gracefully, then I see family members leaving it, emigrating, dying, and those that remain being slowly ground down by war and poverty.

  My paternal grandparents Victoria and Khalil, Iraqi Christians, built the house over fifty years ago. They’d been living at my great-grandmother Samira’s house since they got married and were still there despite having had three children: my father and his sisters, Siham and Ibtisam. Amal, the youngest, hadn’t been born yet. Victoria and Khalil designed and supervised the building of the family house themselves; people didn’t move frequently in the Middle East in those days so they planned to live in it for the rest of their lives and hand it on to their children one day.

  When my father was six, he, his parents, and his two sisters moved into their new home. From that day on it was always full of people. Victoria’s sister Lina and her mother, Samira, had moved to a street nearby, and their place backed on to Victoria’s aunt Madeline’s house; Lina, Samira and Madeline were always dropping by for coffee. Victoria and Khalil’s home was also the family hub that her unmarried brothers gravitated towards. Amal, the youngest of my father’s three sisters, was born in the house. Siham remembers the excitement when Amal first cried out, and how when Siham first saw her still naked, she felt sorry for her little sister because she didn’t have any clothes.

  I have only seen black-and-white photographs, but it is an elegant, flat-roofed house made of brick and stucco in a streamlined fifties style, with an iron gate entrance and a high wall surrounding the front and back gardens. The house has two levels of walled roofs designed for privacy and joined by a staircase, one for the parents and a lower one with a rounded wall for the children. Baghdadis sleep in cot beds on the roof on summer nights because it is uncomfortably hot inside. Summer lasts for a third of the year, so they need to slumber under the stars for months. The photographs show the house at every angle, complete with the empty lot next door, where a peasant family from the countryside looking for work in the city built their mud-and-straw huts and tended their buffalo. The woman baked bread in a special clay oven, a tanour (like a tandoori oven), and sold it. My father and his sisters watched from the roof while the neighbours made up their beds of reeds in the evening. My grandfather Khalil bought bread and fresh buffalo milk and cream directly from them each day.

  Once my father’s family moved in, they obtained their furniture and carpets over many years, slowly easing into the house. My father tells me that buying a carpet was like acquiring a work of art because you had to live with it for a very long time. The carpets were bought from Persians on pilgrimage to the Shia shrines in Kerbala and Najaf; they would come to Iraq by donkey every year, selling carpets in the streets to fund their pilgrimage from Iran and back. They’d bring one or two carpets each, likely handmade by their own relatives. A large carpet often took six months to weave. The carpet sellers weren’t just street hawkers. They sold intricate, fine-quality carpets, and one sale would suffice to fund their entire journey. My father remembers the neighbourhood women gathering to watch the bargaining spectacle, which was like street theatre. He stood by as his mother haggled for the first carpet for their new house. At first, after showing her the carpet with great fanfare, extolling its unique beauty and high quality, the seller named his price. My grandmother immediately retorted with a low sum, about thirty percent of what the seller asked, knowing she would be refused. Predictably, the seller clicked his tongue in disgust and started to roll up the carpet, while my grandmother strolled back towards the house. The seller shouted out another price, slightly lower than his original, just before she reached the door. She hesitated, turned around and asked to look at it again. The neighbourhood women got involved in the discussion, pointing out defects and merits, before my grandmother named a slightly better price than her original offer. This process took many hours until finally a deal was made. The haggling was a psychological drama, the seller needing the money to support his family for many months, Victoria wanting to get the best price she could for a carpet she’d have for years to come. The carpets were used every winter when the desert cooled, then cleaned and rolled up in the spring to leave the tiles bare for the heat of summer.

  I was born in Canada to a British mother and an Iraqi father. I am the oldest of four children, three girls and a boy, the youngest. My sister Brigette and I were born in Canada, in 1973 and 1971, respectively, but we spent our childhoods in England when we moved to London for my father’s work. My youngest sister Rose, and brother, Clayton, were born in England, in 1978 and 1982, respectively, but then our family moved back to Canada for good in 1982.

  My curiosity with Iraq began with my name, Leilah, which in Arabic means “night,” “dark as night,” or “dark-haired.” Nadir means “rare.” But Leilah has other more ancient and literary roots. The most famous Arab book in the Western world, One Thousand and One Nights, mentions my name twice in Arabic, “Alf Layla Wa Layla,” literally “One Night and a Thousand Nights.” And whenever I introduce myself to an Arab or an Iranian, the first thing they always say is, “Ahh, Layla and Qays, like Romeo and Juliet.”

  Layla and Qays is one of the earliest Arab legends and is said to be based on a true story. It began as an oral tale handed down among Bedouin tribes in the seventh century, and was later retold in countless adaptations, the most famous by the Persian poet Nizami, who brought many versions together in one epic poem. The details vary depending on who is telling them, but the essence remains the same. Qays (also known by his nickname, Majnun) became infatuated to the point of madness with a woman of the same Bedouin tribe named Layla, wh
o reciprocated his love but was obliged to marry another man to satisfy her father. Qays passed the rest of his days wandering half-naked among the hills and valleys of his native land, singing about the beauty of his beloved and yearning for a sight of her. Only when her name was mentioned would he return to his normal self.

  But when I asked my mother why she gave me this particular Arabic name, she told me that the first time she heard it was when she saw Leila Khaled on television in 1969. Leila was a young Palestinian refugee who hijacked a TWA plane from Rome to Athens to protest against the largest American airline flying to Israel. The flight was diverted to Damascus, but first it flew over Haifa, Leila’s birthplace, where her family had been driven from in 1948. The hijacking helped put the Palestinian issue into the international consciousness and made Leila Khaled the poster girl for Palestinian freedom fighters. I was shocked and asked my mother how she could have named me after such a notorious woman. She reminded me that she was only twenty-two at the time and Leila was only seventeen, and seemed so young, beautiful and brave. My mother was inspired by this woman’s fierce courage to stand up against injustice. These days it is hard to imagine an English mother naming her first-born after a hijacker.

  Despite my name, I was a typical English schoolgirl. I wore a uniform to school including a tie and a maroon felt hat in the winter or a straw boater in the summer. We lived on a quiet, tree-lined street full of large houses and wild, spacious gardens in a leafy suburb of Surrey. From my perspective as a young girl, Iraq was only an abstract world out of which emerged a travelling circus composed of my Iraqi grandparents, aunts, great-aunts and uncles. Once every few years they drove from Iraq through Turkey to Greece and across Europe to England.