A Culture in Exile

“It has never been easy for artists in Iraq,” confirms Saadi Youssef, an elder statesman of Iraqi culture, man of letters, and nomadic exile in his early seventies whose calling card lists his Uxbridge, London, address and says simply, “poet.” Youssef knows whereof he speaks: he was persecuted and imprisoned for his Communist Party membership in the 1960s and 1970s, when the cia was supplying Baathists with names of Iraqi Communists, as well as for his outspoken poetry.

As Youssef points out, there was a brief golden age for the arts in Iraq, which roughly coincided with the reign of Saddam’s predecessor, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr. Until his demise, in 1979, newly nationalized oil revenues were funnelled into public art, literary magazines, theatres, and galleries, as well as a successful campaign to eliminate illiteracy.

Things began to change as Saddam rose to power. Hundreds of thousands of young men were sacrificed on the battlefield with Iran, and cultural resources were drained for the war chest. The thirteen years of draconian sanctions that followed Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait made life miserable for Iraqi civilians while entrenching the regime’s power, and posed new challenges for Iraq’s artists. “But now,” sighs Youssef with melancholic resignation, decrying the lack of security and the end of the once-secular state, “this is the worst it’s ever been.”

Adnan al-Sayegh, another Iraqi poet exiled in London, concurs. After fleeing Iraq under threat of death when one of his poems offended Saddam’s regime, al-Sayegh decided to return to his homeland in the spring of 2006. At a public reading in Basra, an armed Shia militiaman walked in and threatened to cut out his tongue, calling his poem “Slightly Mischievous Verses” sacrilegious. Terrified, al-Sayegh fled back to London. “After Saddam, we thought there would be freedom,” he explains from his central London flat, “but it’s still dangerous to publish even now.”

A friend of al-Sayegh’s, a poet and journalist, wrote an article about al-Sayegh’s spring reading in Basra and the incident with the militiaman but was too afraid to put his name on the article. “We are afraid now,” says al-Sayegh of artists in Iraq, momentarily forgetting his own recent exile, “of including any religious element in our work. Artists cannot depict a mosque in their paintings; writers can’t write anything about Islam. We are all afraid of offending the extremists.” Yet the price of exile is particularly dear for writers, he suggests. While music and visual arts can transcend words, the specificity of language and place more often than not get lost in the translation to a new life far from home.

“I have an old friend,” recounts al-Sayegh, “a director of a magazine in Iraq — his name is not for publishing, please — he sent me an email last year saying now finally that Saddam is gone, please send me your poems to publish. We were friends for twenty years. He was against Saddam as well, so my father sent him the poems, and a few days later he said, ‘If I publish these poems, my magazine will be burned to the ground within forty-eight hours.’

“We were waiting all this time for freedom,” continues al-Sayegh, the tension rising in his voice, “and these people, these extremists, take it away from us before we can taste it. I’m afraid for the life of my friend now. When my friend sent this email, I was confused and didn’t understand why he couldn’t publish my poems. But after I went to Iraq in April and was threatened myself, I understand the situation. It’s just chaos now.”

When an old theatre contact of mine in Baghdad put me in touch with Muqdad Madlom, a sixty-year-old writer, photographer, director, and actor, I was glad to discover that some Iraqis have not lost their famous sense of humour.

Madlom sent me a series of screenplays he had been working on that centre on tragic tales of soldiers forced to fight in a war they don’t want, and leaving behind beautiful love interests, the central theme of every maqam ever written. One of his screenplays, The Bomb’s Nipple, is about a soldier pulling the clip from a grenade and flashing back to his lover’s breasts.

Before the invasion, Madlom was an actor at the National Theatre, and early in the occupation he was the manager of a new television station. “Now,” he Art wrote, “I’m the head of the drama department at Iraqi state television, but I’m going to leave because the drama on the streets is greater than that on TV.” He also said that he “can’t work with religious fanatics . . . it’s impossible. There is nothing I can write about.” Even for a brave new broadcaster, it seems, it is year zero in Iraq.