Review: Yasmine El Rashidi on Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
You never forget the first dead body you see shot on the streets of the place you call home. You never forget the wounded, or those with bullets to their eyes. The sight of the dead heaped on the corner of your city’s central square haunts your mind’s eye, and your dreams, for years following. I write this from my experience of the Egyptian revolution, which was a short-lived, mild, and relatively nonviolent political rupture in comparison with the neighboring uprisings and wars of Syria, Gaza, Iraq.
How then do you survive having witnessed tens, even hundreds, of disfigured, dismembered, flattened, burned, shot, bodies; those of your neighbors, your countrymen, people close to you? What does it mean to be expelled from your home overnight as your city is bombed to destruction, perhaps never to be rebuilt? How do you document and create a record of the turmoil as you grapple with the unique contradictions of journalistic instinct and survivor’s guilt?
Inasmuch as the harrow of these experiences and trauma can be put to paper, the Iraqi journalist and photographer Ghaith Abdul-Ahad provides a vivid, heart-wrenching, stunningly written account of human resilience amid such horror in his memoir, A Stranger in Your Own City. It spans over two decades from the January day the American Air Force, after the US’s ultimatum to Iraq that it withdraw from Kuwait, began aerial bombings of Baghdad in 1991, past the fall of Saddam Hussein 2003, to the eventual sweep of people-led revolutions that took over Iraq in 2011.
When a series of explosions hit the Iraqi city of Karbala in 2004 during the holy Ashura festival, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad writes:
I ran into the street and saw hundreds of people weeping and screaming as they fled. I stood in the midst, unable to focus. I heard another explosion—it was close, near the shrine of Imam Abbas. I ran there and stopped at the edge of a pool of blood. Body parts were strewn across the street, and the injured were wailing … I told myself I had to start taking pictures. But I couldn’t, I was paralysed by a sickening feeling that I was intruding on people in their most intimate moment, when they were injured, hurt and dying. I went through the motions of taking pictures, of a man pushing a cart with an injured woman lying on it. Another man, angry, shouted at me to stop. I obeyed, relieved, and just observed. I am paralysed by fear and shame even as I write these lines fifteen years later.
Trained as an architect, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad was thrust into the role of reporter and photojournalist by chance as his country imploded into war. His memoir began as a journal, largely written for friends who had left the country, but his dispatches over the years for The Guardian and other publications found their way with his more personal reminiscences into a book, to narrate one of the richest, most nuanced, and wide-angled views of war from the ground we have, told through series of profiles, encounters, journal entries, and vignettes, alongside his drawings from the time.
There is the psychiatrist’s clinic where families bring their traumatized relatives for electroshock therapy as the only means of forgetting, and survival; there is the Sunni family that swaps houses with a Shia when their neighborhood fell on the wrong side of a sectarian battle-line; the woman who has lost four sons and scrapes together funds to release her fifth and last son from imprisonment; the unlikely woman doctor working under the Islamic State; the neighborhood where kidnappers and murderers bring their victims to face death. And amidst these glimpses into the suffering of strangers come the circumstances of his lifelong friends.
These stories and many more breathe with Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s descriptions: “Tankers emptied their sewage into a vast lake where a handful of local kids splashed and swam, seemingly oblivious to the ghosts of men lying so near.”
I walked across the uneven earth, studded with hundreds of bits of debris and scrap metal. The carcass of an air cooler, the bumper of an old car, a bucket of paint, metal of all shapes and sizes, plastic bottles, broken pipes, a fork missing a prong. They all sprouted from the dark soil, and each marked the grave of someone killed in the civil war.
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad also documents the history, the corruption, the fraught encounters with officials, and his own terrifying experiences of being held hostage at gunpoint.
There could be no better guide to the upheaval of Iraq than a local who is as ambivalent about his role as witness and chronicler as he is committed to it. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad weaves his own fundamental moral and political quandaries into his record, giving a deeply insightful account of what it means to be from a place as it is torn apart by war and the forces of occupation; what it feels and looks like to witness your country being dismantled and blown apart (“no amount of planning could have turned an illegal occupation into a liberation”). By 2006, Abdul-Ahad writes, “Baghdad was no longer my city.”
Yasmine El Rashidi is the author of Chronicle of a Last Summer, A Novel of Egypt, and an editor of the Middle East arts journal Bidoun. She lives in Cairo.
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