A Wedding of Shanasheel

When I last visited Baghdad, I made my way to Rasheed Street to visit one of the city’s many historic sites that, in recent years, have been transformed through private investment into cafés and restaurants. The former General Directorate of Endowments (Idarat al-Awqaf al-Amma), established in 1929, served for a time as student accommodation and then stood empty for several years, before it was given a new life as Café Gubbanchi. With its traditional interior and its setting amid the renovated streets around Mutanabbi Street, the café draws visitors throughout the year, many of whom sip their tea unaware that the walls around them once held the history of Iraq’s Islamic endowments, mosques, and pilgrimage sites.

The street leading to the café, too, has largely cast off the visible traces of history. Nothing there today would suggest that, nineteen years ago, this part of Baghdad was struck by an attack that left thirty people dead, emptied the streets, and forced shops to close. Today, freshly paved, pale stone walkways, lush palm trees, street musicians in muted orange light, and houses with colored glass windows and carved wooden details offer visitors a glimpse of what much of Baghdad could look like with comprehensive urban planning and large-scale investment. Yet the polished, almost sterile character of these streets—which at times calls to mind the “historic” markets of the Gulf states more than a city over a thousand years old—also leaves the impression that those behind the renovations were less concerned with a historically sensitive reconstruction, that might give residents a sense of their country’s history and identity, than with the tourist development and commercialization of the city’s cultural space. In this way, the area has come to stand for those parts of Baghdad where years of neglect have recently been turned into capital, giving rise to the vast multi-storey restaurants, kitschy cafés, and shopping malls that now shape the city’s more affluent urban districts. 

Café Gubbanchi lies in the historic part of the city, surrounded by many small alleyways that have so far seen little of the splendor bestowed upon their larger neighbor. If one ventures through these unlit and deserted passages, where abandoned building materials and electrical cables hanging down from the rooftops form a kind of man-made thicket, one begins to sense what this part of Baghdad must once have looked like: small houses pressed closely against one another, with wooden windows and doors, ornamented brick walls, and finely carved balconies that still rise proudly over the street, reveal—even in their decaying remains—something of their former majesty.

These balconies, known in Iraqi Arabic as shanasheel, are among Baghdad’s architectural emblems, even though they have now almost entirely vanished from the cityscape. It is therefore no coincidence that they occupy an important place in the following poem by the Iraqi poet Muzaffar al-Nawwab (1931/4–2022), who most likely wrote it with the image of that Baghdad he was forced to leave in the late 1960s still alive in his memory. The poem also draws on other distinctly Iraqi motifs: Barhi dates, date clusters (ithig), date pastries (kleyche), and the floor-length men’s garment (dishdasha), which, when gathered in front of the legs, can form a small pouch for carrying all manner of things (shleel). 

All these motifs are brought together in the poem to form the image of an encounter with a beloved. Like the ornaments of the shanasheel, the “you” and the “I” are interwoven, withholding from the observer any direct view of what lies behind. For the lyrical speaker, beauty seems to draw its allure precisely from this withdrawal, from a longing that cannot be fulfilled, or at least not at once, like the moon behind clouds or a flame in a mirror. And just as the lyrical speaker feels his way through the dark, the reader, too, must search for the meaning of the poem’s bold metaphors, behind which the outlines of an erotic encounter begin to emerge: round date-breasts that set the date cluster aflame, two praying cranes, a bustard chick with a lost river touching the date cluster, and a horse vanishing in flight. As the ecstatic images of this union gradually fade toward the end of the poem, the fullness of the present gives way to quiet contemplation, and the poem recedes softly, almost melancholically, into silence.

Four years ago today, Muzaffar al-Nawwab died in a hospital in Sharjah from Parkinson’s disease. To this day, almost all his poems remain unedited and scarcely studied. Like the shanasheel in Baghdad’s dark alleyways, they too await their future fate. What will it be: neglect, or commercialization? One hopes for neither.