Nadia Yaqub, Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (New Texts Out Now)

Nadia Yaqub, Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (New Texts Out Now)

Nadia Yaqub, Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (New Texts Out Now)

By : Nadia Yaqub

Nadia Yaqub, Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Nadia Yaqub (NY): I actually did not intend to write a book about Palestinian cinema from this period. I was researching the ways that Palestinian filmmakers have addressed the problem of the violent and victimizing image. I began to research the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) cinema in order to gain a historical perspective on the question. As I learned more about it, however, I realized that there was a story about this early work that needed to be told. It was evident that there was tremendous interest in this early cinema and other cultural work of the PLO from filmmakers and scholars, but the information that was available was scattered and incomplete.

From its inception, an important strand of PLO cinema practice consisted of the archiving of its films along with footage, photographs, and other materials as a basis for Palestinian filmmaking of the future.

J:  What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

NY: The book begins with a chapter focusing on the decades immediately preceding the PLO period, tracing representations of Palestinians between 1948, when more than eighty percent of the Palestinian population of what became the state of Israel were expelled from their homes, and the late 1960s, when a consensus emerged among Palestinians in support of a movement for national liberation through armed struggle. I describe the representational context in which PLO filmmaking first emerged. On the one hand, film and photography about Palestinians, primarily in the hands of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and other relief organizations, represented the image of Palestinian abjection that the PLO in general and filmmakers in particular sought to undo. On the other hand, Palestinian representations emerging in art and literature during the 1950s and 1960s informed the agential perspective with which filmmakers began their work. Later filmmakers engaged directly with both types of representations from this earlier period.

I then examine the filmmaking of the PLO period through three different lenses. The chapter entitled “Towards a Palestinian Third Cinema” discusses the founding and early development of the Palestine Film Unit as an example of third cinema theory put into practice. These early films evince both the ideology of national liberation that underpinned the Fatah’s operations at that time, but also expressed personal engagements with violence and loss. Palestinian filmmaking was shaped by contradiction, contingency, precarity, and compromise from the start, but also succeeded in producing some innovative and highly expressive texts that worked valiantly to process the traumatic events that Palestinians experienced throughout this period.

In “Palestine and the Rise of Alternative Arab Cinema,” I focus on the filmmaking in Syria during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Palestine was a major theme in Syrian public sector cinema during this period. In fact, the most innovative feature-length works about Palestine during this time were made with Syrian support. “From Third to Third World Cinema: Film Circuits and the Institutionalization of Palestinian Cinema” examines the filmmaking of the Palestinian organizations from the mid-1970s to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. During this period, a growing circuit of film festivals and distribution networks in Eastern Europe as well as co-production arrangements and the creation of a film infrastructure on the ground in Lebanon contributed to higher production values, but also greater ideological and formal constraints. Filmmaking from this period was shaped by both Third Worldism and the culture of the Cold War.

From its inception, an important strand of PLO cinema practice consisted of the archiving of its films along with footage, photographs, and other materials as a basis for Palestinian filmmaking of the future.  The archive disappeared during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, but beginning in the early 2000s, artists, filmmakers, and curators have begun to locate and restore scattered copies of films, footage, and documentation from this period. While the process of recovery is ongoing, the material gathered so far has sparked creative engagement from a number of young Palestinian filmmakers and played an important role in the processing and passing on of traumatic memories. The final sections of the book focus on these afterlives of the material of the PLO period. “Steadfast Images: The Afterlives of Film and Photographs of Tall al-Za`tar” examines the role that the films and photographs about the 1976 siege and fall of Tal al-Za`tar refugee camp in Beirut have played on social media for communities of Palestinians in Lebanon and Europe. “Cinematic Legacies: The Palestinian Revolution in Twenty-First Century Cinema” focuses on the engagement of a new generation of Palestinian filmmakers with the PLO material and its themes during the past decade. More information about the book and a link to the Introduction are available at Film Quarterly.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

NY: I have been writing about Palestinian cinema for more than ten years now, but this is my first foray into film history. This is also the first research project in which I engage extensively with the material conditions of filmmaking.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

NY: Like most authors, I hope that the book will attract a wide audience. It is an academic work, with the scholarly apparatus that that implies. However, I strove to write it in accessible prose. I hope that filmmakers, programmers, and activists interested in Palestine, in addition to students and researchers, will read the book. This year organizations and institutions around the world are marking the fiftieth anniversary of the momentous events of 1968. Last year was the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. These landmarks remind us to look back at the cultural and political legacies of these historical moments and to plumb them for insights into our what is happening today. Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution offers all scholars working on this period a glimpse into one such legacy from the Arab world.

Finally, as I note in the introduction of the book, The Palestinian films of the 1970s are important as an archive of a particular Palestinian experience that derives significance not only from its content, but also from the fact that these, and other Palestinian archives are continually being erased. Resisting that erasure has always been a key component of Palestinian activism. This book is, to some extent, a contribution to that work.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

NY: I am beginning a new research project on alternative Arab cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. While this period has been covered in various studies of various national cinemas in the Arab world, no one has examined filmmaking from this period from a regional perspective. My study will focus on the interrelationships between different sectors of filmmaking and how some filmmakers moved between them. I hope to illuminate the complexity of these filmmakers’ engagements, how they incorporated politics into personal works, and personal visions for filmmaking into their nationalist and militant projects.

J: What struck you in revisiting films of the Palestinian revolution today, against the backdrop of recent developments in the Middle East?

NY: Definitely the most striking quality of the earlier material is its optimism. One still encounters expressions of hope in relation to Palestinian activism—a belief in the ultimate triumph of justice, for instance—but there is no organized political project today like the Palestinian revolution of the 1970s. Individuals and groups are conducting important work for Palestinian rights, but there exists no unifying vision for how to arrive at a better future or what that future should constitute—whether the goal is an amelioration of conditions on the ground, an end to occupation, one, two, or no states, and so forth. Already in the 1970s Arab states were using the Palestinian cause for their own political ends that had little or nothing to do with the Palestinians and their needs. Today, Palestinians must contend with the residue of five decades of that instrumentalization and the cynicism it has engendered. The Palestinian cause has also been affected in complex ways by various Islamic political movements in recent decades.

Contemporary Palestinian activism has been shaped by neoliberalism and its effects on concepts of selfhood and one’s relationship to community. All of this is reflected in one way or another in the films Palestinians are making today, and in particular in the various ways in which they engage with the Palestinian revolution, with nostalgia, anger, and resignation. However, my book should not be read as an elegy. This is a bleak time politically and economically not just for Palestinians but for the Arab world as a whole, and it is difficult to imagine how conditions in the region might improve anytime soon. Nonetheless, there is a tremendous degree of cultural and political dynamism in the Arab world. People are very active at the local level, and a wealth of innovative art, film, literature, and music is emerging from the region. We must not lose sight of that work and the promise it contains.

 

Excerpt from the Book:

Kassem Hawal made several attempts to direct a fictional film. His first proposals were not successful, but in 1981, he succeeded in getting funding and the green light to adapt Ghassan Kanafani’s Return to Haifa to the screen. Hawal’s film was destined to be the first and last fictional feature film made under the auspices of the PLO in Lebanon.

Hawal was eager to render Return to Haifa not just a success as the first Palestinian fictional feature film, but also as a model for alternative cinema in the Arab world. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he chose not to address limited resources and expertise through small films, but rather to create something of a film epic by mobilizing a commitment to the Palestinian cause via enthusiastic volunteerism. The film includes a variety of indoor and outdoor scenes ranging from Poland in the 1940s and Haifa during the 1948 war to Ramallah in the late 1960s and a fida’i training camp in Jordan. Most significantly, Hawal recreated the Palestinian exodus from Haifa in April 1948 in an epic crowd scene shot at the harbor in Tripoli. The scene included thousands of extras, dozens of boats, and aerial shots of the action. A lush score, composed by Ziad Rahbani; action scenes, including a desperate driving scene, battle scenes from the 1948 war, and a successful fida’i operation at an Israeli checkpoint; and the use of color film all contribute to the film’s (relatively) spectacular aesthetics.

Hawal spent six months writing the script and planning the production. With the help of PFLP offices in northern Lebanon where the film was shot, he recruited thousands of volunteers from among residents of Tripoli, the Nahr al-Barid and Badawi refugee camps, and the villages of Ihdin and Zgharta. PFLP members went door to door, explaining the importance of the project and recruiting volunteers. Hanan al-Hajj, the Lebanese stage actress who plays Safiyah in the film, the lead female role, held information sessions with women in the camps. Hawal at one point addressed an audience at one of the local mosques after Friday prayers. He recalled the experience in a 1984 interview:

It was a difficult and unique experience. We had to make do with very modest material and artistic resources, and when we began filming the first scene in August 1981, conditions around us were difficult, amid the battles taking place in North Lebanon. We relied on the capabilities of our people and enlisted them with the help of the Palestinian resistance. We chose as the site of our work the refugee camps of al-Nahr al-Barid and Badawi in North Lebanon. We undertook what resembled a giant sewing workshop in Badawi camp in which young women of the camp took over sewing clothes for the film. We set up a storehouse for clothes and weapons in the camp. We needed about 4000 men, women and children to film the mass exodus from Haifa in period costumes, and Palestinians in the camp provided them. Lebanese fisherman also contributed their boats and divers for the exodus scene with the help of the Association of Fisherman of Tripoli and the Lebanese National Movement who also provided us with a helicopter for filming. Also, the people of Ihdin and Zgharta in North Lebanon offered us old cars. We filmed some scenes there.

Almost everyone, including Hawal himself, donated their labor.

According to the PFLP’s own news reports, participating in the film was a meaningful experience for the Palestinians and Lebanese of North Lebanon. A number reported feeling a sense of accomplishment at the opportunity to contribute directly to a Palestinian national initiative, and for many, the experience of re-enacting the exodus from Haifa (a lived experience for some of the older participants) strengthened ties to the Palestinian narrative by offering an embodied experience with recreating the Nakba. One volunteer named Umm Mazin reported that “during shooting I was really sick, but I ran. I ran with all the strength that I had. I took my small grandchildren with me so that we could run together. We were all shaking with emotion, remembering our homeland and dreaming of returning to it.” Some reported feeling so lost in the moment that they imagined the houses of Ihdin or Tripoli were their own lost homes in Palestine.

The film follows the major outline of Kanafani’s novel.  Sa`id and Safiyah have been living in Ramallah since leaving Haifa in 1948. In the wake of the 1967 war, they take advantage of the newly opened border to return to Haifa to see their old home. In Haifa, they meet Mariam, a Polish woman who has been living in the house they were forced to leave, and her adopted son, Dov. The child the Palestinian couple was forced to leave behind in 1948, Dov has been raised as an Israeli Jew and now serves in the Israeli army reserves. The novel is constructed around the protagonists’ conversation as they drive from Ramallah to Haifa, and the lengthy conversation Sa`id has with Mariam and Dov.

Hawal fleshes out the story with scenes that contextualize the Palestinian narrative internationally. He includes footage of fascist rallies, the ransacking of Mariam’s home in Poland and the murder of her child by the Nazis, as well as the murder in Palestine of a Jewish immigrant who questions the motives of those organizing the transportation of Jewish refugees from Europe to Palestine. This attention to Jewish persecution in Europe is significant, perhaps representing the first time this subject is treated in Arab cinema. Hawal also highlights the efficacy of the fida’iyin by including a scene, not found in the novel, in which they successfully blow up an Israeli checkpoint and ending the film in a fida’i camp where Safiyah and Sa`id’s son Khalid participates in military training. Kanafani’s novel is already didactic, including meditations on the meaning of political commitment, peoplehood, and the homeland; on truth, ethics, and political convenience, and on the reasons for armed struggle. Hawal added dialog that renders the film more pointedly so. The result is a work that consciously instrumentalizes the pleasures of spectacle and narrative for ideological education.

Return to Haifa is a significant text not just because it is the first feature-length Palestinian fictional film, but also because it is the first extended visual representation of the Palestinian experience of leaving Palestine in 1948. `Azzam’s and Kanafani’s fiction had offered a few early narratives, and Shammout’s early paintings had focused on the feelings of loss in the immediate aftermath of the war. In The Dupes, Saleh depicts a 1948 battlefield followed by scenes of newly displaced Palestinians in a refugee camp. But no film had as yet narrated the exodus itself--the effects of the violence and chaos of the war on ordinary Palestinians and their desperate responses to those effects. At the climax of his film, Hawal inserted a flashback that extends more than eight and one-half minutes in which both Safiyah and Sa`id’s experiences in the chaos of fighting and the forced exodus from Haifa are depicted. Their personal stories from the past are then connected to their psychological state in the present as they confront the occupation of their home and the loss of their first-born child to Israel. The exodus is also contextualized within contemporary Palestinian politics.

Hawal was unfortunate, however, in the timing of the film’s release. Its screening was postponed by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and the film was largely marginalized by subsequent violent events, including the Sabra and Shatila massacre in late 1982, renewed fighting in the Tripoli area, and the fratricidal camps war in southern Beirut that occupied Palestinians in Lebanon for much of the mid-1980s. Return to Haifa premiered in Damascus, subsequently screened at the Carthage and Moscow film festivals, and aired on Algerian and Libyan television in late 1982. In the early 1980s, it also screened once at a British university, but Hawal was not able to show it to the Palestinians and Lebanese in northern Lebanon who had worked to create it. Moreover, in the drastically altered circumstances in which Palestinians found themselves after 1982, the work did not enjoy the attention one would expect from the first Palestinian feature film. `Adnan Madanat recalls that in the wake of the invasion and massacre, Arab audiences were in no mood for a film centered on a conversation between Palestinian refugees and an Israeli who had settled in their home. It was one thing to read the polemical conversation among Sa`id, Dov, and Mariam on the pages of Kanafani’s novel, but quite another to see rounded Israeli characters engage in such a conversation with a Palestinian refugee on screen. The film languished until Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir selected it for the Dreams of a Nation Film Festival in Jerusalem in 2003.

Sinan Antoon, The Baghdad Eucharist (New Texts Out Now)

Sinan Antoon, The Baghdad Eucharist. Maia Tabet, trans. (Hoopoe Fiction, 2017).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? 

Sinan Antoon (SA): I’d wanted to explore the relationship to home/homeland. The context I had in mind was my own hometown, Baghdad. I was interested in the ways in which history disfigures and devastates selves and material and imaginary spaces. And how one resists, copes, and survives (if and when one does). I was haunted by a story I’d heard about an Iraqi man, from Baghdad, who refused to leave the city despite the death and destruction caused by the sectarian civil war that followed, and was unleashed by the Anglo-American invasion. His entire family had left the country and he insisted on staying alone in his house in Baghdad. This was the seed around which I started writing the novel. Yusif, the main character in the novel, is a retired septuagenarian who refuses to leave the house he himself built. His entire family is in the vast Iraqi diaspora and he lives alone. He is unfazed by the violence of sectarianism and holds on to his identity as a secular Christian Iraqi. He refuses to internalize political sectarianism or to abandon his homeland.

As I was writing, an event took place and complicated the trajectory of the narrative. On 31 October 2010, The Islamic State of Iraq attacked the Our Lady of Salvation church in Baghdad, held the congregants attending Sunday mass hostage for a few hours, and killed fifty-eight of them. That was not the first attack on a church in the post-invasion chaos, but it was the most devastating and shocking. I knew that church very well and had attended it many times for funerals and weddings of relatives back in the 1970s and 1980s. Both the attack itself and the reactions by Christian Iraqis, especially in the diaspora, compelled me to add another character/narrator (and layer) to the novel. Maha is a young woman who grew up in the 1990s, during the terrible years of the genocidal embargo (1990-2003). The sectarian violence forces her family to leave Baghdad to `Ainkawa in Iraqi Kurdistan. She stays behind to finish her studies and moves in with Yusif, who is her distant cousin. Like many of her generation, her lived experience and memories of Iraq are at odds with Yusif’s, whom she deems to be a hostage to nostalgia and living in the past. She is hell-bent on leaving an Iraq that is no longer a homeland.

Was there a time when Christian Iraqis felt at home in Iraq and had no qualms or doubts about their status and belonging? Or did they always live as second-class citizens and destined to be hunted and chased out of Iraq?

J: What particular topics, issues, and ideas does it address?

SA: The primary subject of the novel is sectarianism and the formation of sectarian identities in Iraq in the last few decades. Although the main events of the novel take place over one day, the lives and memories of two generations of a Christian Iraq family are enveloped within that single day. Through them we get competing memories and narratives about Iraq’s recent history, from the monarchy until today, and the status and fate of its Christian citizens. Individual and collective memories intersect and suggest conflicting interpretations. Was there a time when Christian Iraqis felt at home in Iraq and had no qualms or doubts about their status and belonging? Or did they always live as second-class citizens and destined to be hunted and chased out of Iraq? Yusif and Maha live under one roof, but don’t see eye to eye. How and why did Iraq’s social fabric disintegrate?

J: How does this work connect to and/or depart from your previous work? 

SA: The thread connecting all of my novels is that they deal with the visceral reality of life in Iraq. The first one, I`jam: An Iraqi Rhapsody, was about a college student who ends up in prison for ridiculing the Ba`th regime’s discourse. It portrayed daily life under a totalitarian regime during the Iraq-Iran war (1980-1988) and then in one of its prisons. The narrator resists insanity and psychological breakdown by writing, parodying the regime’s discourse, and reconstructing his shattered memory. My second novel, The Corpse Washer, centers on a young man who is born to a family of corpse washers. He refuses to inherit his father’s profession and studies art to become a sculptor. But economic hardships in the 1990s derail his plans. After the 2003 invasion, his only means for making ends meet is to take on his deceased father’s profession. The occupation and the sectarian civil war deliver plenty of corpses and a handsome income on a daily basis. But Jawad’s extensive exposure to death takes a toll on his psyche. His lack of faith and non-sectarianism in an increasingly sectarian society compound his alienation.

While The Corpse Washer focused on a Shi`ite family, the world of The Baghdad Eucharist (Ya Maryam is the original Arabic title) is that of a middle class Christian family. The latter book is also different structurally. I used three narrative voices and had an entire section in the novel devoted to family photographs. Also, unlike with the previous novels, I did not translate this novel myself.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

SA: Ideally, everyone! But I live in the real world. I want its readers to be moved and challenged. In its Arabic version, the novel has had a very life and is still widely read in the Arab world (it’s in its seventh edition now). It received critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. It was translated into Spanish by Mari Luz Comendador and published by Turner Kitab in 2016. Philippe Vigreax is almost done translating it to French and it is forthcoming from Actes Sud this summer. A Persian translation is also in progress.

Quite often, translated literature from the global south has to go through invisible checkpoints and gates before arriving in Anglophone reading spaces. It arrives bearing “marks” and “labels” that over determine the way it is read. It might even be forced by publishers to surrender its original title for a more marketable one. I hope it is read as a novel, first and foremost, and not a “document.” One can never control such matters of course, but I hope that Islamphobes and voyeurs stay away from it.           

J: What other projects are you working on now?

SA: I am putting the final touches on a collection of the poems (in Arabic, entitled كما في السماء) I have written in the past seven years. Dar al-Jamal will publish it in Beirut later this year. My own translation of these poems to English is currently under consideration. In terms of research, I have been working on a book about the late Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus (1944-2007), which I hope to finish by the end of the year. I have also started writing my fifth novel.

 

Excerpt from The Baghdad Eucharist    

On my way back, I passed by a house whose owners were obviously neglecting the date palm in their courtyard, neither pollinating it nor pruning it. I was reminded of Brisam, the saa'ud who'd pruned and pollinated our trees for more than thirty years. He would have been hopping mad at the sight. Brisam would wander along the streets of residential neighborhoods and ring the doorbell whenever he came across a date palm that looked neglected. He'd ring until someone answered the door and would then give them a piece of his mind, berating them for being heartless and mean. In his last years, when he was almost deaf, he went around declaiming at the top of his lungs: “All I have are God and the date palms … only God and the date palms!” Sometimes, you'd hear him shouting, “This one is a Barhi.” God loved him for sure: he took Brisam to his eternal rest one day around noon after the saa'ud had shimmied up a tree to pollinate it. Brisam's arms were wrapped around the tree trunk and his body was held aloft in a brace when his heart simply came to a stop. 

He died caring for a tree to which he spoke as if it were a human being. According to Jasim, who looked after our two trees after Brisam died, he had become a legend among the sawaeed, the date palm climbers. Jasim wasn't much of a talker. Whenever I asked how the trees were doing, he gave me a vague and terse reply. “Thanks be to God, sir! Everything is going as it should.” The only time he ever let loose was three years ago when he rang the bell and told me that he'd decided not to work as a saa'ud that season because he was going back to his village. I asked him why.

“I’m going back home, mister,” he said. “These days, when I knock, people I’ve never seen before in my life come to the door. Some of them say they’re relatives of the owners, that they’re looking out for the house, but that’s baloney. When I ask them where the owners have gone, they don't have an answer. Anyhow, it’s none of my business. Did you know that twelve of us sawaeed have been killed? Better for me to go home and work in the orchards down south. It’s safer over there.”

People had stopped giving him keys to let himself into their courtyards and tend to the trees while they slept, or when no one was home. Now, when the women and girls of the household were there alone, he couldn’t come in, and they would tell him to come back when one of the men was home.   

“Honestly, I was better off before the Americans came... I could go and come as I pleased. I could sleep under a tree or in a corner anywhere and no one bothered me. Now I have to get a room in a hostel or else get killed. And the massive concrete blast walls are suffocating us. I swear to God, mister, even the date palms are Sunni and Shiite now. I have to leave my bicycle at the checkpoint and I can’t take it in with me — and on top of it all, my bike was stolen.  The dates are wilted and dying of thirst. Do you know how many trees have been cut and burned so that the Americans can see the snipers and the snipers can see them? That is what it has come to. Ya haram!”  

I was pained by his words, but not surprised—I'd always maintained that the date palm was the weathervane for human affairs. The fortunes of the two were inextricably linked. What befell humans was a reflection of the tree's condition, and war didn't differentiate between the heads of men and the crowns of the tree: it decapitated them both. Had the owners of the house I had just passed fled? Were the current occupants indifferent to the trees? Was there such a thing as an Iraqi who didn’t love the date palm? I was certain that those who had no love for the date palm had no love for life or their fellow men. 

In that they are created male and female, humans resemble palm trees. Only after it is pollinated by her male counterpart does the female tree become fertile and hang heavy with fruit that is clustered in large and heavy bunches. Like an infant, a palm sapling must be protected from the cold and the rain in order for it to grow strong.

From a distance, the fronds of the two date palms towering above the garden seemed to me to be protecting the house — and I, too, was guarding it along with all the memories it contained. The house was more than a mere shelter, it was like a palm tree, which isn't a mere tree but a living being unto itself, joined with the earth beneath it, the sky above it, and the air around it which it breathed. So too the house, which wasn't merely a combination of bricks, mortar, and paint, but the assemblage of an entire lifetime. 

“It would be best to sell the house and leave,” Amal had said through her tears, when she called after Hinnah died. “Things are going to go from bad to worse. Why remain alone? You can come here or go and live with Salima in Sweden. Please Yusif, I beg you, leave.”

I responded the way I always had. 

“I'm not leaving,” I told her. “I'm not going anywhere at my age—I'm too old for such humiliation.” 

Many a real estate broker had been knocking on my door lately, to ask if I was thinking of selling. And my answer was always no. Our neighborhood was considered one of the safer and calmer areas in the city and prices were going up. A few upscale restaurants had opened and the nouveaux riches had begun buying up old houses that they tore down and replaced with ostentatious mansions. 

One evening, as we were watching TV, Lu'ayy asked me if I'd ever considered leaving.  

“At my age? Better suffer here than experience the humiliations of being a refugee. If I were young, I would consider it. It's different for you and Maha—your lives are ahead of you, you can go and start over in a new place. I'm not going anywhere. I built this house, and I've lived in it for more than half a century. How could I leave it and go?”

“Have you ever had the opportunity or the desire to leave?”

“I did once or twice. I got an offer from Abu Dhabi in the late '70s, and another one from Dubai in 1989. I turned them both down.”           

“Do you ever regret it?”           

“No. D'you know what al-Gubbanchi says?”          

“No. What?”             

Do not think that in leaving there is comfort

I see nothing in it but grief and weariness, 

All sleep was robbed from my eyes.

I never thought and no one knew

That it would be like this.

. . .

After translating the book, which the agency then published, I got a promotion and received a hefty raise. I dedicated myself completely to work and within three years, I had saved enough money to buy a good piece of land near Karrada where I wanted to build a new home for the family. Habiba had returned from Suleimaniyya to work in Baghdad and was betrothed to her first cousin on our mother's side. She moved in with him at his parents' in al-Sinnaq, and then they got a place of their own. She offered to contribute to the costs of building the new house as a gift to our father—she wanted him to be comfortable in his old age and to be surrounded by his sons and daughters, and any grandchildren that were on the way. Although we both agreed that his name should be on the deed, he objected vehemently, and so we registered the house in Hinnah's name.

Just as I recall the day I planted the palm saplings at opposite ends of the backyard, I also remember that there was nothing but the foundations back in 1955. I would come by every week to check on the progress of the work and Khalaf, the foreman in charge, would brief me. On one of my visits some months into the work, I was surprised to see that they had used palm fronds to build the arch that the architect had designed for the reception room. When Khalaf assured me that it was an old and time-tested technique, I remembered seeing pictures in the book about date palms that the inhabitants of the marshes built similar structures in their guest quarters and their houses.    

The house was on a lovely quiet street near the Opera Gardens that was later named after Jaafar Ali Tayyar, a prominent man who lived in the very first house to be built on the street. The main thoroughfare it branched onto became known as Street 42. This was because people called the next street over from the main thoroughfare Street 52, after the bus which plied that route, and that is the roundabout way in which the streets in the vicinity were numbered. 

I entrusted the design of the house to a friend from Baghdad College who'd gone abroad to study architecture and had come back and started his own firm. My main instruction was that the house had to be spacious enough to accommodate the entire family. Thus, we had six bedrooms, three on each of the two floors, a large reception lounge for entertaining guests and an everyday living room. The architect suggested having a fireplace in the reception room and I agreed enthusiastically. There was a small yard at the front of the house, and a very large one at the back.   

The blooms on the bougainvillea whose branches scaled the façade of the house came into view. Besides its heat hardiness and its ability to bloom year-round, I had chosen the bougainvillea for the beauty of its flowers, which looked like so many vermilion tongues licking at a fire. From the distance, I could also see the crowns of the three Seville orange trees that I had planted in the garden at the front. How I love the smell of those oranges! There's really nothing like it! Whenever the harvest season came around, I'd pick and juice the oranges in the kitchen, and Hinnah would freeze the juice to use in her cooking. I did this every year, even after she was gone. I would offer a container of frozen bitter orange juice to any visitors that dropped by. Nothing else flavors food like the juice of bitter oranges, I'd tell them, and I had no use for it.  

I looked up toward the upstairs bedroom windows. The curtains were drawn which meant Maha wasn't home. I noticed that the metal plaque hanging on the pillar to the right of the gate that had my name on it was so dusty that the Y was hardly visible. I wiped my finger across the plaque—it really needed polishing. I opened the gate and bent down to turn on the water spigot close by. I took out a pack of tissues from my pocket, pulled three out, wetted them with a few drops of water and stepped back out to clean the plaque. Although my lower back hurt, I was pleased that I had cleaned my name, and I cursed at the proliferation of dust and soot in recent years. I remembered that the myrtle tree between the garage and the garden needed pruning. I would ask Lu'ayy to do it when he could. Once inside the house, I realized how tired I felt and that I needed to make up for the previous night's broken sleep. I got undressed and went to bed.

[Excerpted from The Baghdad Eucharist (c) 2017. Translated from the Arabic by Maia Tabet.]