[The following is an excerpt from Jadaliyya Co-Editor Sinan Antoon's latest novel, Of Loss and Lavender (Other Press, March 17, 2026).]
He was sitting on the patio after having finished pruning the long row of boxwood between the garage and the garden. The gardener tended to everything. But the boxwood and grapevines were off limits. No one could touch them, except for Ma’arib if she needed grape leaves to make dolma. She was in the kitchen preparing the tray of tea and baqsam. Sami liked to dip one in tea and milk before nibbling on it.
Ma’arib came out of the kitchen and put the tray on the table. A car stopped outside the gate. Sami heard its doors and they both caught sight of a man who stood outside the iron gate. They heard the bell ringing from inside through the open window. Ma’arib walked to the gate and Sami followed her. “Just a minute. Let me go.” But she kept going.
“Who is it?”
“Assalamu `alaykum. We wanted to have a word with the doctor.”
Sami replied, “Wa `alaykum.”
Ma’arib was going to open the gate, but Sami got there first and did it himself. A man in his mid-thirties wearing a gray suit and white shirt, sans tie. He was holding a cell phone in his right hand. Sami noticed a ring with a big green stone on his right pinkie. Another man stayed in the passenger seat.
“Doctor, I am Habib Khdhayyir from the Council.”
“Pleasure.”
“We heard your house was for sale.”
“Who told you?” Ma’arib asked.
“One of our guys heard about it in the neighborhood.”
“No, it’s not for sale,” said Sami.
“Ah. Really?” Sami stayed silent.
“Alright. We apologize for bothering you, Doctor. Just let us know if you change your mind.”
“It won’t change!”
“Fimallah.”
“Take care.”
Sami closed the gate, and they walked back to the patio. Ma’arib scowled as she poured the tea.
“Who is spreading this rumor?”
“Maybe they’re mixed up and someone else in the neighborhood is selling?”
They drank the tea in silence and later the conversation drifted to other matters. Sami had a feeling it was not a mistake. They were probably testing the waters. What happened in the months that followed confirmed his suspicion. He would tell Ma’arib, “We’re under a double occupation. The Americans occupied Baghdad, and these people occupied the neighborhood.”
Other cars parked in front of their house on various occasions. It let them know that this wasn’t their place anymore. Insisting on staying would come at a high cost. A month and a half after the occupation, to regain a sense of normalcy, Sami invited his brother’s family and some of his in-laws to dinner. The guards at the checkpoint didn’t allow any cars to go through. They called Sami, and he had to go there himself to assure them these were his relatives. The guards ordered them to leave their IDs and said they would get them back after leaving the neighborhood.
At another time, an armed man rang the bell and barked: “Move these cars from the street right now.” Then came that day when a trailer truck parked in front of the gate to prevent them from leaving. His calls and attempts to get through to some higher-ups failed. The truck didn’t move until later that night. After that, there were calls and text messages saying, “You’d better leave.” And then someone spray-painted “Ba`thist” on their front gate and on the wall.
That was the onslaught they had called “De-Ba`thification.” They even came up with laws for it.
When Sami told Sa`ad on the phone about it, he asked his father, “Why don’t you leave?” “Where would we go? What about the house and everything we have here?” “Go to Amman until things calm down. I can arrange for immigration, and you can come here and live with me.”
It was not the first time he’d suggested that in recent years. And just as he would every time, Sami promised to discuss it with Ma’arib. But every time the subject came up, they decided to wait until things “calm down.” But this time, they weren’t going to.
***
Sami was surfing the channels and saw “Baghdad” in big letters on the screen. He paused, moving his finger away the volume to hear what was being said. The letters were minimized and the city’s name moved to the lower right corner of the screen, which was now occupied by the city’s map. In her balmy voice, the presenter said, “Maps narrate history succinctly and eloquently. The colors in this interactive map show the enormous demographic changes in Baghdad following sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing. You can see the shrinking of mixed areas marked in blue, which used to make up large areas in the capital before 2003, compared to areas of Sunni or Shi`a majority, which are in green and yellow. As you can see, the areas in green and yellow expanded with time, leaving only tiny islands of blue areas.” She then moved to another example of ethnic cleansing, in Darfur. Another map displaced Baghdad’s. But Sami kept thinking of the map that had just disappeared. He’d noticed that al-Jadriyya appeared all in green, when yellow was the color of the flags and the insignia of those who occupied it and kicked him out of it. It was so strange for his home and his entire life to become just a blue dot. A dot that disappeared from the map and can no longer be seen with the naked eye. A dot of ink that has dried now. No! it was erased. Just a tale to be told in passing. A minor detail in a passing news item. In the past tense.
***
During Sami’s first few weeks in New York, they took him every weekend to see one of the city’s landmarks. They went up to the top of Empire State to see the city. The excursion list included the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and the Museum of Immigration, MoMA, and the Metropolitan Museum. In the latter, he spent two hours in the Mesopotamia section. Reading every word on each plaque, he nodded with pride but melancholy, too. He lingered before Gudea’s statue and the winged bulls. The twins were bored and wanted to drink soda, so Sa`ad and Heather took them to the cafeteria and sat waiting for him. When he was done, he joined them. As he waited for the tea he’d ordered, he said to Sa`ad, “Half of our stuff is here. The bastards allowed our museum to be looted right before their eyes.”
“OK, but why do people loot relics to start with? Maybe it’s better for them to stay in museums abroad than to be looted by riffraff.”
That last word bothered Sami, who shot back:
“You’ve become too American. There are smuggling net-works, and people from abroad specify the items they want looted. Why did they protect the Ministry of Oil from the riffraff, but didn’t protect the Iraqi Museum?”
Sa`ad didn’t argue. He’d noticed that their arguments were becoming more heated, and his father was unwilling to listen to any other opinion or reconsider his own.
[Click here to order Of Loss and Lavender by Sinan Antoon.]