A Bright Light for the Arabs Goes Dim

Sajeda Mousawi describes herself as a mother and a lover, someone who yearns through her poetry to celebrate the sublime and beautiful miracle of everyday life. She abhors sadness and suffering and tries to banish it from her mind.

Yet when she sat down to write her contribution for this year’s Arab poetry festival in Baghdad, her pen couldn’t do that.

Mousawi found herself dwelling instead on a tragedy--common enough in the seventh year of the world economic embargo against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. In her poem “It Rained on the Books,” a lover of literature is reduced to selling his library on the street in order to live.

For a country that had long been considered one of the most literate and cultured in the Middle East, the brief poem was a poignant emblem of the failed hopes and broken dreams of a generation of educated Iraqis.

“I am a woman who has sold much of my gold, my earrings, my furniture for medicine and food,” said Mousawi, who has five daughters and whose monthly salary as secretary of a cultural club connected to a state-run newspaper translates to $10. “This embargo is destroying whole classes of our society.”

Much has been written about the hospitals without medicine and the children perishing of hunger here, but something else also is dying between the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers: a cosmopolitan world of culture, art and intellect that had been one of the brightest lights of Arab society.

There were doctors and scientists, poets and painters, teachers and students, who once traveled and entertained, shared witty conversation in Baghdad cafes, enjoyed good food and middle-class comforts similar to those of Europe or the United States; they felt safely part of the larger world of intellectual discourse.

Today they are trapped between a totalitarian government and the world’s indignation, pauperized by more than six years of economic embargo, feeling shunned and abandoned by counterparts abroad and humiliated by having to join the hordes in the marketplaces, where they shed a lifetime of accumulated possessions and despair of what will happen when there is nothing left to pawn.

They exist under the shadow of their leader, “his excellency, the victorious, the glorious President Saddam Hussein,” who is rarely seen but is an omniscient, dominating presence. He appears every night on television; his face graces the front of every newspaper; he smiles or glowers from portraits in front of every important building.

When Hussein took power in 1979, their country, with the world’s second-largest oil reserves, was flush with money from the boom ‘70s to spend on arts and culture. Universities were built, world-class teaching hospitals were established, and Iraq became a magnet for painters, poets and other artists from across the Arab world.

Now Iraq is a gray, sullen, isolated place of imposing monuments and vainglorious palaces, where a doctor’s monthly salary is equal to the price of 30 eggs, where medical research has all but stopped and where photographers and painters cannot afford even the film or paint to pursue their art.

But if Iraqis question the wisdom of their leadership, they do not do so in their literature or their art. They especially do not mock or criticize Hussein.

Intellectuals as Targets

In a report Wednesday, the New York-based organization Human Rights Watch said that U.N. monitors started 1996 with 16,100 unresolved cases of Iraqi “disappearances,” more than for any U.N. member state. Intellectuals have been the pride of the regime, but they are also among the chief targets of purges.

So pervasive is the secret police, so common is informing even on one’s relatives and so closely are Western visitors monitored, that in more than a dozen interviews with Iraqis from the world of the intelligentsia, only one person took the risky step of revealing the slightest unhappiness with the government.

The others did not stint in expressing despair at the country’s decay but always were careful to voice it in anger at the West--particularly the United States--for maintaining the embargo that is ruining their country.

“I don’t want to indulge in politics. . . . I only wonder, why does America kill my people?” journalist-poet Abdel Moneim Hamandi said, with evident sincerity, in a typical refrain. On Monday, U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali eased the sanctions slightly, giving the go-ahead for Iraq to resume oil exports to buy food and medicine for its people.

Rather than try to work in the crumbling shells of their institutes or test the limits of their artistic license, many of Iraq’s most respected thinkers have fled, swelling the ranks of refugees in Jordan and elsewhere, free to work but pining for their old Baghdad haunts.

“Some people found out that they don’t have enough freedom to write and talk and express themselves, and I am one of those,” said Saad Bazzaz, former editor in chief of the state newspaper Al Jumhuriyah. He fled Oct. 2, 1992, when he became convinced that he had been marked for death for having written a book critical of Iraq’s military conduct in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Speaking of fellow intellectuals still inside Iraq, Bazzaz said they are forced to develop “double personalities”--a public persona that agrees with and praises the government and a private one that dissents but is almost never shown, and then only to the most trusted.

But he rejected the notion that lack of freedom is their only problem. The sanctions are a “comprehensive crime,” he said. And Iraqi thinkers endure slights from people throughout the world who, he says, have turned against Iraqi culture out of disdain for its government.

Inside the country, some artists have chosen to act as tribunes for the regime, receiving honors, houses and exalted titles such as “Poet of the Mother of All Battles” in return for producing works that serve the state.

“The Umayyad and Abbassids and Saladin were lucky, because [President] Clinton and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu were born only in the 20th century,” was the closing line of one poem read out at the poetry festival, which was sponsored by the government.

The Iraqi Caldron

Because of shared language and history, Arabic culture is like an ocean in which books, music and ideas flow little hindered by political boundaries. That huge caldron that is Iraq, with its premier cities of Baghdad and Basra, has been for at least 1,000 years one of the most important centers, says Egyptian literary editor Gamal Ghitani.

Iraqi poets Mohammed Mehdi Jowahari and Abdul Wahab Bayati--both now in exile in neighboring countries--are considered throughout the Arab world the greatest contemporary poets of the language. Architect Zuha Wadid, now in London, regularly wins prestigious international awards. Each succeeding generation produces a new crop of important writers such as Ali Gafazar Alak, now living in Yemen, or avant-garde dramatists like Jowaas Asadi, living in Damascus, Syria, and Beirut.

Those, like the poet Mousawi, who remain in Iraq keep their heads down and doggedly pursue their art.

“Sometimes we lack even the paper to write a poem. This creates a sort of reaction,” she said. “The embargo doesn’t want me to write, so I will write, even on the skins of animals or leaves of palm trees, as our forefathers did.”

The government works hard at keeping up a pretense of normal intellectual life by sponsoring gatherings such as the seven-day Al Mirbed poetry festival and bragging about how many countries attend. Although the literati wore the turtlenecks and berets that might be expected among participants at such an event, Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz wore his black beret atop a military uniform with gold epaulets when he opened the festival--which, like every other public gathering in Iraq, was used as a forum to denounce “the siege.”

“We are not exterminated,” Aziz declared, standing in front of a sepia-toned picture of a young Hussein. “Those who wanted us dead find us alive. Those who wanted us silent find us free to speak. . . . Your attendance in Baghdad proves that the nation’s pulse beats on.”

It is true that poets have not stopped writing, but the subjects have changed.

“I turned away from poetry about love and started to write about hunger,” said journalist-poet Hamandi, a 42-year-old admirer of Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot. “We write about the lack of medicine and the spreading of collective death. How else can a poet feel, when faced with such suffering?”

A magazine columnist, Hassan Anni, wrote about how weariness and depression had sapped his creativity. “My fingers have stiffened, and my language becomes weak.”

In addition to his writing, he explained, “I am obliged to take time out of my sleeping hours to be part of the queue of sellers on the side of the street selling cigarettes.”

Archeologists have virtually stopped working, in part because the Department of Antiquities has no more working vehicles and lacks the chemicals it needs for restoration of ancient artworks.

Medical laboratories perform only the most basic tests on patients. And don’t even ask about research, said Dr. Alhan Rashid. “We don’t even have the pen and paper to write results with,” she scoffed.

Before the Gulf War, the state publishing house would issue 1,200 books a year; now the number is 40. Daily newspaper circulation used to be 850,000; now it is 90,000. There used to be 65 periodicals; now there are fewer than a dozen, according to Information Minister Hamid Youssef Hammadi.

No medical journals are coming in, and Health Minister Umid Midhat Mubarak said he has but one computer with a CD-ROM drive with which to print out reference information for doctors around the country. It is his treasure, he said. “I am treating it as a bride.”

Serious theatrical productions are a fading memory; only a certain amount of diversionary schlock is still put on by theatrical companies and state-controlled television. (The National Theater’s current production: “The World in One Night,” a musical review starring an Asian dancer as a genie, complete with sight gags like a huge banana.)

“A shortage of film” has curtailed the cinema, said actress Fatima Rubai, who in 1993 appeared in the first and only feature movie made in Iraq since the Gulf War. “I feel upset and angry because the years keep going by, and if you don’t produce anything, life and your future stop.”

No Dreams of Revolt

The country, meanwhile, is down to two TV channels. The government recently switched off an educational channel, citing high costs. The buzz in Baghdad was that it was axed because it competed for resources with the “private” station run by Hussein’s son Uday.

Nevertheless, Iraq’s intellectuals, unlike those of Communist-era Poland or Czechoslovakia or those in France in the late 1960s, do not seem to dream of leading their people in revolt, the unstated but widely understood intent of the West’s squeeze on living conditions.

“Even you [Americans] could not do it,” said the one academic who would speak about such things, referring to widely reported attempts by the CIA to fund an anti-Hussein coup. “How are we supposed to get rid of him?”

Instead, they hawk their belongings and struggle to survive. El Saray Street, once a thriving district of booksellers and stationers, has become a symbol of the cultural decline.

Each Friday, professors, writers, engineers and students can be found selling off their libraries on its sidewalk, raising the inflation-depleted dinars necessary to supplement meager state salaries. A cornucopia of knowledge is shabbily arrayed on pallets or cloths lying on the sidewalk--hundreds of books, many in French and English, ranging from old textbooks and encyclopedias to plays by Shakespeare, novels of Dickens and treatises on Western philosophy. The buyers are scarce.

“People here consider their books just like their children. But what can they do?” said Kadhun Talal, 51, a trader on his way to evaluate a library being sold from an elderly couple’s home.

Samir Abu Ziad, a government worker, went one day to sell a favorite book of poems.

“I almost began to cry,” he said. “I took my book and ran away.”

Daniszewski was recently on assignment in Baghdad.

It Rained on the Books

I found him

On the sidewalk of El Saray Street,

Selling whatever books he had . . .

His eyes looking far away.

Wonder who will buy them?

I asked, How much for the Bahtory?

He did not answer.

Wonder who?

He crushed the money, with worries and tears. . . .

And the tears fell

From forests of candles in his eyes, the sky weighing down.

And the tears gushed. . . .

The sidewalk was wet, and the books. . . .

The shirt was wet, and the edges.

On Friday in El Saray Street

It rained . . .

On the books.

Sajeda Mousawi