A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War - Hardcover

Abdul-Ahad, Ghaith

 
9780593536889: A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593536886 ISBN 13: 9780593536889
Verlag: Knopf, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

From award-winning journalist and Baghdad-native Ghaith Abdul-Ahad comes a powerful portrait of his city and the Iraqi people told through twenty years of war


The history of reportage has depended on outsiders—Ryzard Kapuscinski witnessing the fall of the shah in Iran, Frances Fitzgerald observing the aftermath of the American war in Vietnam. What would happen if a native son was so estranged from his city by war that he could, in essence, view it as an outsider? What kind of portrait of a war-wracked place and people might he present?

A Stranger in Your Own City is award-winning writer Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s beautiful, shattering answer. This is not a book about Iraq’s history, nor an inventory of the many Middle Eastern wars that have consumed the nation over the past several decades, though both wars and history are part of its narrative, including the 2003 American invasion, the Arab Spring, and the rise of ISIS. This is the tale of a people who once lived under the rule of a megalomaniac leader who shaped the state in his own image; who watched a foreign army invade, topple that leader, demolish the state, and then invent a new country; who experienced the horror of having their home fragmented into a hundred different cities.

When “Shock and Awe” began in March of 2003, Abdul-Ahad was an architect. Within months he would become a translator, then a fixer, then a full-time reporter for The Guardian and elsewhere, chronicling the unbuilding of his centuries-old cosmopolitan city. Beginning at that moment and spanning twenty years, Abdul-Ahad’s book offers a remarkable decentering of the West, and in its place emerges space for everyday people, soldiers, mercenaries, people blown sideways through life by the war. What comes to the fore is the effect on the ground: the human cost, the shifting allegiances, the generational change.

A Stranger in Your Own City is a rare work of beauty and tragedy whose power and relevance lies in its attempt to return the land to the people it belongs to. 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD is an Iraqi journalist. Born in Baghdad in 1975, he trained as an architect before he was conscripted into Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army, which he deserted. Soon after U.S.-led coalition forces took control of Baghdad in April 2003, he began writing for The Guardian and The Washington Post. He has won numerous awards, including the British Press Awards’ Foreign Reporter of the Year and two News & Documentary Emmy Awards. He currently lives in Istanbul.
 

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1

My First War

War came to our house on a sunny and cold September morning. I stood on my parents’ bed trying to peer out of the window. My mother had her head in the blankets, and my father was propped on one elbow, looking out at the empty patch of land behind our house. What did we expect to see? Tanks and soldiers fighting there? There must have been air-raid sirens, anti-aircraft guns that woke me up and sent me scuttling down to their room, but I don’t remember. It was 1980, I was five years old, and the Eight Years War with Iran had just begun.

Later, on the roof of our squat brick house in eastern Baghdad, my father, with honey-coloured eyes, black moustache and thick pomaded hair, carried me with one arm and stretched the other to point at a thin white trail that arced in the pale blue sky. With a big smile, he declared “Phantoms, F-4” with the confidence of a hunter who could spot a partridge at a distance in hazy dawn light. From my vantage point resting on his chest, I looked down at my dear uncle standing next to us, his face furrowed with concern and bewilderment. Downstairs, confusion—and people cowering under a white Formica-topped iron table that had been placed under the stairs. Someone was trying to get an old radio to work. For a while they remained there, squeezed into the safety and comfort of that cramped place, then one after the other—grandmother, mother, aunts and cousins—seeing the silliness of their shelter, left and headed to the kitchen, turning the day into a festive family gathering. Only one aunt remained under the table, whimpering.

Eight years of war cluttered my memory with images, mixed in with scenes from Russian war films, creating a news reel where reality and fiction seemed equally absurd. There must have been tender memories of childhood, images of uncles and aunts, of feasts with colourful dishes cooked by grandmothers who’d brought their recipes from far distant places . . . All these images were swept away, drowned out by the wails of sirens and the explosions of the Scud missiles that shook the houses.

Spring in those years was marked by major infantry offensives, in which human waves of tens of thousands of soldiers crashed against each other. On TV they ran endless loops of a programme called Images from the Battlefront. They showed footage of trenches piled with the mangled and burned corpses. We were told that these were the bodies of Iranian soldiers; mowed down, electrocuted or gassed. The screen filled, the images multiplying: blackened limbs hung from barbed wire, mouths stuffed with dirt, bloated khaki uniforms and helmets scattered along a large field. The pictures were always accompanied by the hoarse voice of the narrator assuring us of imminent victory.

After each of these battles, we watched the Leader Necessity on TV, gathering his generals in the gilded hall of one of his many opulent palaces. He took the “Medals of Courage” from a tray carried by his tall bodyguard, who followed respectfully two steps behind. As he pinned them to the generals’ chests, you could see them suck in the well-fed bellies that bulged through crisp military uniforms. The medals collected on the bosoms of the generals, and thousands of black banners blossomed throughout the city. They were hung on walls, tied between trees and lamp posts, each announcing—by the name of Allah the most compassionate and most merciful—the martyrdom of an Iraqi man. Collective grief hung over Baghdad during these days. Men raised their hands in a final farewell gesture to wooden coffins draped in Iraqi flags and strapped to the tops of white-and-orange taxis making their way to the cemeteries outside the city, followed usually by a minibus or a van packed with women dressed in black, weeping and smacking their faces in mourning.

At night, my father crouched next to the old chrome-coloured radio, straining his ear through the jamming static, trying to listen to foreign stations—an act punishable by seven years in prison—to find out what was going on. “Come to the flavour, come to Marlboros . . . fighting in Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut . . . Iran rejects a peace offer . . .” The snippets of conversation we heard from returning soldiers told us more—artillery shelling in Basra, trenches, and families displaced in the fighting. The dead in that war, all conscript soldiers forced to march to the front, were divided into “martyrs” and “deserters.” One set died “gloriously,” and were exalted; the other hunted, summarily executed and despised even in death. We saw the deserters transferred into buses with metal grilles on the windows, hands cuffed to the bars of the seats in front of them, scared eyes in their shaven heads. There was the story of the man who killed his own son, for desertion, and was rewarded with a Medal of Courage by the Leader himself.

On TV and in school, we were told that this war was a continuation of the first battle of Qadisiyyah, when the Muslim Arabs defeated the Sassanid Empire in 636. Thirteen and a half centuries later, and under the wise command of the Leader Necessity, we the inheritors of the legacy of the Muslim conquerors were defeating the wicked Persians in the Second Qadisiyyah, or the Qadisiyyah of Saddam. The Iranians/Persians were the mortal enemies, the regime declared; they were the thread that ran through all our Babylonian, Assyrian and Arab Muslim metamorphoses.

Not only the war but our whole history was explained in the same straightforward linear narrative of phantasmagoria. It ran like this: first God created Adam and Eve in Eden, which was in the south of Iraq, then after a period of confused early humans, the Sumerians emerged, again in the south of Iraq. The Sumerians begat the Babylonians, who begat the mighty Assyrians and eventually metamorphosed into Arabs in a swift natural progression of history. The Arabs became Muslims and went on to conquer the world, defeating the wicked Sassanid Empire in the aforementioned battle of Qadisiyyah, which brought Islam and civilisation to the backward lands of the Persians. After many glorious centuries of unity, evil invaders—Mongols, Turks, more wicked Persians and British imperialists—conspired against us. We had to endure centuries of darkness and oppression, until the Glorious Revolution, led by the Leader Necessity, Saddam Hussein, liberated us and showed us the path to emancipation, progress and victory. Murals decorating official buildings illustrated that history, with the austere bearded profile of an Assyrian king at one end, and the portrait of Saddam at the other, and in between there was a collage of Saladin, Arab warriors and tribal rebels, with a couple of workers and farmers thrown in as a nod to the socialist myth of the Baath Party.

The Leader was the embodiment of our national narrative, tall, moustached; eating watermelons with farmers. Wearing dark sunglasses, smoking cigars and with a pistol tucked in his waistband, he struck the quintessential pose of a Third World dictator channelling Che Guevara and Yasser Arafat. The Leader Necessity title was first mentioned in the writings of Michel Aflaq, a Syrian writer and paramount Arab nationalist, who co-founded the Baath Party. Aflaq, inspired by the writings of German ideologues of the nineteenth century, wrote about the historical emergence of a long-awaited Leader Necessity who shall unify the nation and march on the path of victory and glory. Some say Saddam’s press secretary was the first to bestow the title on the Leader, others say the Leader himself chose it; in any case, the Leader, a Historic Necessity, was born.

At school, we stood to attention as the Iraqi flag was raised. I looked with envy at those whose fathers had been...

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Verlag
Knopf
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593536886
ISBN 13 
9780593536889
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchbär
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