LITTLE BAGHDADON THE BANKS OF THE NILE: Five years ago yesterday US armoured vehicles rolled into central Baghdad and helped supposedly jubilant Iraqis to topple a huge statue of Saddam Hussein. The scene remained the ultimate camera moment for months, capturing the fall of a dictator who had promised his people that the Battle of Baghdad would be a 21st-century reenactment of the Battle of Stalingrad. Al-Ahram Weekly commemorates the occasion through testimonies from inhabitants of the Iraqi capital Of bridges and birds By Sinan Antoon It is agonisingly difficult to write about one's hometown as it drowns in flames and suffocates with smoke. After tons of bombs and thousands of liberating missiles, now many of Baghdad's own inhabitants are pillaging the city under the encouraging and voyeuristic eyes of its latest invaders. This is by no means the first time that Baghdad has fallen so violently, but in the past its fall had always happened "before" or "back then". One needed to plough through the many volumes of the city's history and poetry, or listen to its elders, in order to learn more about those past falls. This time, however, it is in the painfully present tense. A soft click on the remote control is all you need to get variations on one theme: the fall and destruction of Baghdad is live! As if trying to enter through one of its remaining gates, I start to approach Baghdad, or rather one of the many Baghdads I have carried about with me for years, by measuring the extent to which its present reality betrays the enchanting and idealised signifiers that have taken it in turns to represent it. Or those which have tried to capture some of its magic. For now it betrays, or is forced to betray, like never before all of the accolades bestowed upon it by its numerous rulers, chroniclers and lovers. It is no longer now the "Abode of Peace, Mother of the World, Abode of Beauty, Gift of the Gods, Triumph of the Gods, Round City", etc. Whichever way I choose to approach the city, I must tread warily, for its streets are still littered with bodies, books and blood. Even the safe, labyrinthine streets of my own memory are not free from the ghosts of wars, but at least they cannot be destroyed, or looted and pillaged, except by amnesia. I grew up in the Baghdad of the 1970s and 1980s. At that time the city's many faces, like its history, were already being appropriated and changed by Saddam and his regime to make it his Baghdad. His desire to inscribe his name and face onto the city's history and streets was insatiable. He fancied himself the descendent and natural heir to the likes of Abu-Ja'far Al-Mansur, the city's founder, and Haroun Al-Rasheed, its most illustrious ruler. And so I witnessed his murals, monuments, statues and sayings invading the city's space like rampant scars. By the time I left Baghdad in 1991, it had almost become a permanent exhibition of his likenesses. But, for those who knew it well and looked hard enough, there were always spaces to which one could escape and converse with the city, stealing a few kisses away from his watchful eyes. Having a fascination with birds, I liked to go to Suq Al-Ghazl where birds and animals of all kinds were sold on Fridays. I also liked to sit on our roof and watch as the pigeons kept by our neighbour's son would take their usual flight in the afternoon Baghdad sky. At times, these birds would dodge, and compete with, the kites flown by kids. Sometimes I could spot a flock of birds flying high above, en route to their breeding grounds in the north. Perhaps I remember this now because of something I read a few days before the US-led invasion. Reuters reported that these annual migration routes could be disrupted when the war erupts. In the period between mid-March and mid-April, one finds the greatest number of birds in Iraq. Since many of these birds cannot make it to their breeding grounds in one flight, they stop and "refuel" on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates and in the southern marshes drained by Saddam. Every year around this time I would look for the one or two white storks that used to nest on the dome of the old church in Bab Al-Mu'azzam. I wonder if they have made it to Baghdad this year? [...] I felt pangs of pain a week ago as I watched an American tank crawling across Al-Jumhuriyya Bridge in the heart of Baghdad. I have crossed that bridge hundreds of times, and I used to linger a bit half way along, especially when walking alone, and look down at the river. The Tigris splits Baghdad into two sections: Al-Karkh, on the western bank, and Al-Rusafah on the eastern. I used to recite Ali Ibn Al-Jahm's famous line about the enchanting, almond-shaped eyes of the Baghdadi women who used to cross from one bank to the other in the nineth century. On a lucky day, I would encounter a descendent or two of those women. [...] Now, tanks spit their fire towards a row of houses on the eastern bank of the Tigris, and blazes go up. A correspondent announces that Apaches are hovering over Baghdad for the first time, but, alas, this is a familiar species in our part of the world. They have come to make sure that Baghdad's residents join the Palestinians as the fortunate recipients of the latest form of lethal "liberation". Rivers of blood are flowing along the Tigris as America tattoos its imperial insignia into the bodies of Iraqi children, stamping their futures with its corporate logos in order to "safeguard" it. There is an abyss in and around Iraq, and it is widening by the moment. But one must look for, and cling to, a bridge. And so I try. A few bridges north of Al-Jumhuriyya Bridge lies Jisr Al-Shuhada' (Martyrs' Bridge). Throngs of Iraqis burst onto the streets in January 1948 to express their rejection of the Portsmouth Treaty signed between the despicable Iraqi government of the time and Great Britain. Some of them were killed by the regime's bullets on that bridge, and Al-Jawahiri commemorated the uprising with one of his powerful poems. It was an elegy for his brother, Ja'far, who was one of those killed and had died in Al-Jawahiri's arms. Many Iraqis know the poem's opening lines by heart. Like many of Al-Jawahiri's poems, this one has prophetic lines: "I see a horizon lit with blood/And many a starless night./A generation comes and another goes/And the fire keeps burning." Baghdadis and Iraqis have indeed lost their way, but they have not lost their collective memory. The US tanks will have to go soon, and so will the generals, the soldiers and their Iraqi informants. I can already hear the chants of the demonstrators and read the signs. The clock is ticking, and the message is simple enough for even Bush to understand: Leave Iraq. Extracted from a longer text published in the Weekly's supplement "Mourning becomes Baghdad" issued on 17 April, 2003. Sinan Antoon is an assistant professor at New York University.
