Nabil Salih<\/span><\/h4>\n <\/p>\n
In our guest room hung a portrait of a man*. He was young, had a solemn look, elegant in his suit and tie. His gaze, however, was orphaned, unmet, and in-waiting. He was ever-present, yet seldom spoken of or remembered overtly.<\/span><\/p>\nMy late grandmother, forever in black, would sob in the evenings. We, children, neither received nor needed an explanation. From the same room where we huddled during American air raids, undulating lamentations would sway into the living room and the kitchen where we dined.<\/span><\/p>\nAs for him, sleepless as he was, he could no longer hear. A forbidden secret, his name was rarely articulated. As if effaced from the registry; no family story segued into a mention of his whereabouts. Only his photograph was there, mute, waiting in vain to speak. From this troubled quietude I could only grasp absence.<\/span><\/p>\nAll I later learned was that <\/span>ammu<\/span><\/i> Tariq, my late uncle, had been a communist executed or forcibly disappeared in the early 1980s with other comrades in the family. For when Saddam Hussein seized power in 1979, he\u2019d ushered in another episode of purges against the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP).<\/span><\/p>\nIn her book <\/span>Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia<\/span><\/i>, Zainab Saleh writes of her father\u2019s final years. \u201cA staunch supporter\u201d of the ICP, he passed away in 1982 while still burdened by what she believes was survivor\u2019s guilt:<\/span><\/p>\nHe mainly lamented the liquidation of the ICP in the late 1970s and the death and disappearance of some of his close friends. He sometimes banged his head against the wall as he talked about the fate of his friends. He often wished that he had died before witnessing these developments and talked about how the struggle of his generation was forestalled by the European- and U.S.-backed reign of Saddam Hussein.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nAmong so many Iraqis, the ICP was mythical, celebrated in song and poem. Decades of repression did little to diminish its relevance. Even when legendary comrade Yusuf Salman Yusuf was hanged after the <\/span>wathba<\/span><\/i> uprising in 1949, Hanna Batatu writes, the ICP became \u201csurrounded with the halo of martyrdom.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nTariq was quiet; he sipped <\/span>arak<\/span><\/i> with his comrades in the garden and, as my aunt once told me, wrote poems destined to be unread and lost. Against the family\u2019s advice, he would amble back from his work at a state-run dairy factory with the ICP newspaper spread before his face. Then one day he went to work and never came back.<\/span><\/p>\n(The telephone rings. My aunt picks up. Someone\u2019s voice says Tariq is never coming back. <\/span>His uncle, a medical doctor, was arrested on the same day).<\/span><\/p>\n
\nIn front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott\u2019s psychotic patient, <\/span>over a catastrophe which has already occurred<\/span><\/i>. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe. \u2014 Roland Barthes<\/strong>, <\/span>Camera Lucida<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
\n<\/blockquote>\nUntil the occupation of Baghdad in 2003, there was never a body to go along with his death. When the mass graves of the dictator were beginning to be exhumed, the family acquired archival documents that said Tariq was executed in 1984. My grandmother finally experienced a sense of closure: an empty grave on which to grieve.<\/span><\/p>\nIn the 1980s, Hussein\u2019s apparatchiks would come knocking on the door: \u201cWhere is he?\u201d they would ask. But they knew very well where he was; having sent him \u201cbehind the sun,\u201d they were only there to torment his family. My aunt faced pressure by Ba’athists at work to proselytize, and my father was denied a state job.<\/span><\/p>\nGrowing up in the 1990s, my family\u2019s fear was passed on to us children. We were warned not to let slip the little we knew of Tariq in school. There, our classrooms had broken windows, and we shuddered from the cold. Each class would start by us half-heartedly reciting an elongated \u201cLong Live the Leader Saddam Hussein!\u201d His watchful eyes sent ominous looks from portraits adorning the school walls and the pages of our worn textbooks.<\/span><\/p>\nHussein was also a family member. No space remained immune to the penetration of his voyeuristic gaze. The city\u2019s walls were a canvas of his likeness, tattooed with variations of his triumphant grin. In people\u2019s homes, his image decorated living rooms as a cacophony of his dull speeches played on television screens <\/span>ad infinitum<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"Man](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/Nabil-Saleh-Man-reads-a-newspaper-at-a-cafe-on-al-Rashid-Street.-Baghdad-November-2020.jpg\")
<\/a>Man reads a newspaper at a cafe on al-Rashid Street. Baghdad, November 2020 (all photos Nabil Salih).<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>
![\"Al-Shuhada](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/Nabil-Saleh-Al-Shuhada-Martyrs-Bridge-over-the-Tigris-seen-from-between-two-concrete-slabs-perched-on-al-Ahrar-The-Free-Bridge.-Baghdad-February-2021.jpg\")
<\/a>Al-Shuhada (Martyrs') Bridge over the Tigris, seen from between two concrete slabs perched on al-Ahrar (The Free) Bridge. Baghdad, February 2021.<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>
![\"Nabil](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/Nabil-Saleh-the-photographer-in-Baghdad.jpg\")
<\/a>Nabil Salih the photographer in Baghdad.<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>
![\"Nabil](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/Nabil-Saleh-Abdul-Qayoum-and-his-comrades-pose-for-the-camera-on-their-way-home.jpg\")
<\/a>Nabil Salih Abdul-Qayoum (left) and his comrades pose for the camera on their way home. They were selling chewing gum to the few drivers during a coronavirus lockdown in the western part of the capital. Baghdad, April 2020.<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/Nabil-Saleh-Man-reads-a-newspaper-at-a-cafe-on-al-Rashid-Street.-Baghdad-November-2020-150x150.jpg\")
<\/span>![\"Al-Shuhada](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/Nabil-Saleh-Al-Shuhada-Martyrs-Bridge-over-the-Tigris-seen-from-between-two-concrete-slabs-perched-on-al-Ahrar-The-Free-Bridge.-Baghdad-February-2021-150x150.jpg\")
<\/span>![\"the](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/Nabil-Saleh-the-photographer-in-Baghdad-150x150.jpg\")
<\/span>![\"Nabil](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/Nabil-Saleh-Abdul-Qayoum-and-his-comrades-pose-for-the-camera-on-their-way-home-150x150.jpg\")
<\/span><\/div><\/div>\n
\nIn our house, Tariq looked on as the guest room was slowly emptied of its furniture. After the Gulf War came the sanctions, economically strangling a population already on its knees. Families plied their house items on the streets, selling even their cameras for a song. Baghdad\u2019s nights became dark and long; the time for parties was over. Guests and hosts were now abroad, disappeared, or dead. The record player went silent, the sofas shipped away.<\/span><\/p>\nOur photo albums all contain gaps: the missing, unpictured decade of the 1990s.<\/span><\/p>\nThe weight of United Nations Security Council Resolution 661 was unbearable. Barring a few exceptions, export and import were forbidden. Iraq could not receive any funds from abroad and every UN member state was obligated to participate in enforcing this \u201chumane and humanitarian\u201d starvation.<\/span><\/p>\nIraq was grappling with an entire host of such Orwellian realities imposed on it from the outside. It was, after all, a nation that had just undergone <\/span>a surgical war<\/span><\/i> that, inter alia, devastated water purification plants and the power grid, sowed its soil with Depleted Uranium for future generations and, infamously, incinerated hundreds of civilians in the al-Amiriyah bomb shelter, including Tariq\u2019s aunt and cousins.<\/span><\/p>\nIn war\u2019s aftermath, madmen roamed the streets and anguished mothers the grim hospital wards. One million children suffered malnourishment; 70% of women were anemic. \u201cWhether the number of child deaths was 200,000 or 500,000,\u201d writes Joy Gordon in <\/span>Invisible War<\/span><\/i>, \u201cthe magnitude of the harm was enormous, and it was always known to be enormous\u201d \u2014 and now forgotten, too.<\/span><\/p>\nSanawat al-hisar<\/span><\/i>, the years of the embargo, were especially long on the women who had just parted with lovers, buried or hoped to give a dignified burial to brothers, fathers and sons whose bodies littered the desert of the south: a frontline of many wars now roamed by the lost ghosts of the soldiers who died thirsty and alone.<\/span><\/p>\nThese were long years on my own late mother too; like so many Iraqi women, she was a teacher whose pay was reduced to near nothingness. Many could not even afford to go to work and were pushed to eke out their domestic life instead. To make ends meet, my mother sewed and tutored at home, the rhythmic sound of her sewing machine bearing the family off to sleep every night.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nOne night not so long ago, reading <\/span>Charles Simic<\/span><\/a>, I heard my mother\u2019s sewing machine running again. The sound that echoed down the long-gone years compelled me to raise my head towards the nightstand where I keep a photograph of my mother in the folds of a pocket-size copy of the Quran.<\/span><\/p>\nMy Mother Hoped<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
To take her sewing machine<\/span><\/i>
\n<\/span><\/i>Down into her grave,<\/span><\/i>
\n<\/span><\/i>And I believe she did that,<\/span><\/i>
\n<\/span><\/i>\u2019Cause every now and then<\/span><\/i>
\n<\/span><\/i>It keeps me awake at night.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nI then buried my head in the pillow, pretending not to hear.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nThough my mother\u2019s picture has been sitting on my nightstand, just beside my bed for near three years, rarely do I dare pull it out to look at it. Unconsciously, it is as if a veil keeps the corner where the nightstand, with the Quran and the photograph it carries, out of my sightline. But while the picture is hidden, its authority is not.<\/span><\/p>\nNow my fingertips linger over this keyboard\u2019s surface. The photograph in hand is an impenetrable passage back to a day about which I almost know nothing. The stamp on the back reveals only the name of the studio (<\/span>al-Junayna<\/span>) and my neighborhood\u2019s address in western Baghdad. There is nothing about the date of the visit.<\/span><\/p>\nI assume it was taken in the early 1980s, while the Iran war raged on. Perhaps my father was on the frontline. In the late 1970s, his family moved from the riverine Karradat Maryam neighborhood (part of it would later be swallowed into the Green Zone) to the western suburb where I grew up. The newly wedded couple, as is the custom, moved in.<\/span><\/p>\nIn this photograph, my mother\u2019s face glows. Her eyes, captivating, are fixed on a point above the camera\u2019s. Not yet in her <\/span>hijab<\/span><\/i>, she wears a woolen blouse for what I assume was a chilly day. Her lips are closed (a habit I would inherit myself), and she \u2014 just as I knew her \u2014 is reservedly confident.<\/span><\/p>\nThe absence of <\/span>hijab<\/span> indicates that the photograph was taken during a time predating the Faith Campaign. After the Gulf War and the imposition of sanctions, Hussein feared for his dying hegemony as beleaguered Iraqis embraced religiosity for solace. He promoted a state-sponsored and controlled version of Islam, allowing its symbolism, monuments and discourse to suffuse the public and urban spheres. Thus Ba\u2019athism\u2019s secularist principles were reversed, instead returning to the embrace of the tribe and Islam.<\/span><\/p>\nThat aside, no single detail in her photograph arises, as Roland Barthes would say, from the scene to pierce me like an arrow.<\/span> Time is one of these elements that assail and wound, what he called <\/span>punctum<\/span><\/i>: my mother has long been dead. But it is also a living death, one that casts a vertiginous spell and disturbs.<\/span><\/p>\nInstead, I long for the totality of her, for the touch of her blouse\u2019s fabric, the sound of her footsteps walking in, her voice speaking, her thoughts posing for the camera, how she spent the remainder of her day. <\/span>But the photograph is an impassable passage in time.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nUnlike a portrait of a familiar strip of urban space I often walked and still roam through the haunted streets of memory, the impassability of my mother\u2019s claustrophobic photograph is also a consequence of an unlived time. I have never met my mother in her youth, and thus <\/span>a temporal abyss is opened between then and now.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nIn his essay <\/span>On Some Motifs In Baudelaire<\/span><\/i>, Walter Benjamin writes of the \u201cdecline of the aura\u201d in photography. Unlike photographs, when a fleeting scene of <\/span>m\u00e9moire involontaire<\/span><\/i>\u00a0flits by, a halo of <\/span>associations<\/span><\/i> gathers around an object of perception. To experience its aura, an object must return our gaze from a distance.<\/span><\/p>\nBut my mother is not seeing me, I cannot be with her. <\/span><\/i>It is her <\/span>living death<\/span><\/i>, then, and the unfulfilled promise of a rendezvous in the photograph that haunt and intimidate.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nWhen war revisited Iraq for a longer stay in 2003, cluster bombs rained over our house. Once a site of beautiful memories, the luscious garden where we would have lunch during sunny springtime days was withered by war. The rooftop where we\u2019d once slept our summer nights, watching the palm fronds dancing to the nocturnal flirtations of the wind was riddled with bullet holes and scarred with shrapnel. Even the trunk of our palm tree was wounded. Our house was repeatedly desecrated, along with our privacy. For, nestled near an international highway and an adjacent overpass, patrolling US troops often occupied our rooftop and turned it into a watchtower of their expanding empire. At times, they would come barging through the door, pounding up the stairs as my mother, startled, dashed into her room to fetch a scarf.<\/span><\/p>\nWhen I look at the elegant woman in the photograph I can\u2019t help but also see how the world surrounding her was destined to crumble. How her husband, my father, would be kidnapped, their friends and relatives murdered; the clashes that would erupt outside her door, the corpses dumped on sidewalks that she would encounter, and, in a time of sectarian cleansing, the letter she would find in an envelope left on our doorstep. We had three days to leave, it said, or else we would die.<\/span><\/p>\nOn one of these wartime days, she braved the ever-looming threat of clashes to visit one of the few grocery stores left open in the mayhem. Men always feared abduction, assassination or arrest, so sometimes it was wiser for women to be the ones to venture out of the house. As I stood by the front door waiting for her, an explosion plowed the soil around the corner and sent it skyward.<\/span><\/p>\n(Silence after the thundering of the blast. I run. The debris comes falling from the sky).<\/span><\/p>\nA roadside bomb had been detonated as a coalition convoy entered the neighborhood, shredding a Humvee with whomever it carried inside. As I waited to hear news of my mother, the moments lasted an eternity. Had she been on her way back with her bags, about to cross the street as the convoy brushed by her side?<\/span><\/p>\n
\nMy mother returned safely. At the site of the explosion, a gaping crater would silently scream for weeks. As punishment for each such incident, the bowels of Abu Ghraib prison needed to be fed with thousands. Unable to control Iraqi cities, people were scooped off the streets and thrown into \u201cGitmoized\u201d jails.<\/span><\/p>\nWomen, of course, were not spared. Not only were female reporters, academics and doctors murdered and exiled, but as Haifa Zangana narrates in <\/span>City of Widows<\/span><\/i>, American troops raped women and, in an abyss of Abu Ghraib\u2019s depth, even rode a seventy-year-old woman like a donkey:<\/span><\/p>\nIn addition to suffering the same hardships as male inmates, the women endure another plight: silence. First, the denial by occupation authorities that there are female detainees at all; and second, silence from the women’s own families because of the stigma surrounding the arrest and detention of a woman. For most Iraqis, the horrifying photos of Abu Ghraib signify not only the abuse and torture of the inmates but also the nightmarish reality of what has not been photographed or published: the torture and rape of their daughters, sisters, and mothers.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nSuch generational violence saturates the photographs of Iraqis. Even the happiest photographs are haunted by the implicit promise of <\/span>impending<\/span> doom, hovering around the smiling subject like an omen.<\/span><\/p>\nAfter 2003, however, the violent death of both humans and places surged to the foreground of every photograph, became the entirety of our lives. Images of torment and abuse replaced and erased those of laughter. Every serene park, market and street corner became a crime scene, smelling of gunpowder and ash \u2014 memories of happier days having been condemned to oblivion.<\/span><\/p>\nTo many, images of Abu Ghraib are synonymous with Iraq. Women clad in black and beating hard on their faces and chests at sites of carnage and hospital gates are the archetypal visualization of the Iraqi self: <\/span>defeated<\/span><\/i>. Like a prized booty from the wreckage of history, this framed defeat is dusted off by some guilt-ridden photojournalists every March 20<\/span>th<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\nFor, it seems, atonement and repair in the Global North require a re-violation of the nameless, muted Iraqi self whose curated suffering is a commodity lucrative even post death. To express their solidarity with us requires them to make a spectacle of our humiliation, to parade it mournfully across a screen to the pace of a white man\u2019s or woman\u2019s regretful voiceover<\/span>.<\/span><\/i> The life-size images of degraded Abu Ghraib inmates in Jean-Jacques Lebel\u2019s installation <\/span>Poison Soluble<\/span><\/i> at the 12<\/span>th<\/span> Berlin Biennale are but one example of regret-as-art, humiliation-as-atonement.<\/span><\/p>\nJean Baudrillard knew this breed all too well. This solidarity, he writes in <\/span>No Pity for Sarajevo<\/span><\/i><\/a>, implies condensation and belies a \u201cself-pity and a way of absolving one’s own powerlessness.\u201d<\/span> If <\/span>something needs to be done<\/span><\/i>, start at home, not where the \u201cblood flows.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nWriting in <\/span>Regarding the Torture of Others<\/span><\/i><\/a> on the images of Abu Ghraib as the scandal seeped from the \u201cunwinnable folly\u201d (never a crime, of course, but would <\/span>a winnable \u201cfolly\u201d<\/span><\/i> be less evil?) that was the Iraq war, Susan Sontag is worried that \u201cthe pictures will continue to \u2018assault\u2019 us.\u201d They will \u201cnot go away.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nSontag was writing for the readership of the New York Times Magazine<\/span>. To her credit, she admits the images were not an <\/span>aberration<\/span><\/i>, that \u201cthe photographs are us\u201d (Americans). But as Judith Butler says<\/a>, she was also a self-preoccupied liberal livid at disturbing images giving no direction towards political action.<\/span><\/p>\nThis self-preoccupation, she writes, prevents one from adequately responding to the suffering of others. But Sontag <\/span>was doing something<\/span><\/i>, Butler was right. She did so by writing about the photographs with both eloquence <\/span>and<\/span><\/i> American-centrism.<\/span><\/p>\nBut what of our own reckonings, our own photographs? Not from Abu Ghraib alone, but from our everyday lives, which continued to unfold beyond its infamous walls before, during and <\/span>
My late grandmother, forever in black, would sob in the evenings. We, children, neither received nor needed an explanation. From the same room where we huddled during American air raids, undulating lamentations would sway into the living room and the kitchen where we dined.<\/span><\/p>\n As for him, sleepless as he was, he could no longer hear. A forbidden secret, his name was rarely articulated. As if effaced from the registry; no family story segued into a mention of his whereabouts. Only his photograph was there, mute, waiting in vain to speak. From this troubled quietude I could only grasp absence.<\/span><\/p>\n All I later learned was that <\/span>ammu<\/span><\/i> Tariq, my late uncle, had been a communist executed or forcibly disappeared in the early 1980s with other comrades in the family. For when Saddam Hussein seized power in 1979, he\u2019d ushered in another episode of purges against the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP).<\/span><\/p>\n In her book <\/span>Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia<\/span><\/i>, Zainab Saleh writes of her father\u2019s final years. \u201cA staunch supporter\u201d of the ICP, he passed away in 1982 while still burdened by what she believes was survivor\u2019s guilt:<\/span><\/p>\n He mainly lamented the liquidation of the ICP in the late 1970s and the death and disappearance of some of his close friends. He sometimes banged his head against the wall as he talked about the fate of his friends. He often wished that he had died before witnessing these developments and talked about how the struggle of his generation was forestalled by the European- and U.S.-backed reign of Saddam Hussein.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n Among so many Iraqis, the ICP was mythical, celebrated in song and poem. Decades of repression did little to diminish its relevance. Even when legendary comrade Yusuf Salman Yusuf was hanged after the <\/span>wathba<\/span><\/i> uprising in 1949, Hanna Batatu writes, the ICP became \u201csurrounded with the halo of martyrdom.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Tariq was quiet; he sipped <\/span>arak<\/span><\/i> with his comrades in the garden and, as my aunt once told me, wrote poems destined to be unread and lost. Against the family\u2019s advice, he would amble back from his work at a state-run dairy factory with the ICP newspaper spread before his face. Then one day he went to work and never came back.<\/span><\/p>\n (The telephone rings. My aunt picks up. Someone\u2019s voice says Tariq is never coming back. <\/span>His uncle, a medical doctor, was arrested on the same day).<\/span><\/p>\n In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott\u2019s psychotic patient, <\/span>over a catastrophe which has already occurred<\/span><\/i>. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe. \u2014 Roland Barthes<\/strong>, <\/span>Camera Lucida<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n Until the occupation of Baghdad in 2003, there was never a body to go along with his death. When the mass graves of the dictator were beginning to be exhumed, the family acquired archival documents that said Tariq was executed in 1984. My grandmother finally experienced a sense of closure: an empty grave on which to grieve.<\/span><\/p>\n In the 1980s, Hussein\u2019s apparatchiks would come knocking on the door: \u201cWhere is he?\u201d they would ask. But they knew very well where he was; having sent him \u201cbehind the sun,\u201d they were only there to torment his family. My aunt faced pressure by Ba’athists at work to proselytize, and my father was denied a state job.<\/span><\/p>\n Growing up in the 1990s, my family\u2019s fear was passed on to us children. We were warned not to let slip the little we knew of Tariq in school. There, our classrooms had broken windows, and we shuddered from the cold. Each class would start by us half-heartedly reciting an elongated \u201cLong Live the Leader Saddam Hussein!\u201d His watchful eyes sent ominous looks from portraits adorning the school walls and the pages of our worn textbooks.<\/span><\/p>\n Hussein was also a family member. No space remained immune to the penetration of his voyeuristic gaze. The city\u2019s walls were a canvas of his likeness, tattooed with variations of his triumphant grin. In people\u2019s homes, his image decorated living rooms as a cacophony of his dull speeches played on television screens <\/span>ad infinitum<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n Man reads a newspaper at a cafe on al-Rashid Street. Baghdad, November 2020 (all photos Nabil Salih).<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div> Al-Shuhada (Martyrs') Bridge over the Tigris, seen from between two concrete slabs perched on al-Ahrar (The Free) Bridge. Baghdad, February 2021.<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div> Nabil Salih the photographer in Baghdad.<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div> Nabil Salih Abdul-Qayoum (left) and his comrades pose for the camera on their way home. They were selling chewing gum to the few drivers during a coronavirus lockdown in the western part of the capital. Baghdad, April 2020.<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div> In our house, Tariq looked on as the guest room was slowly emptied of its furniture. After the Gulf War came the sanctions, economically strangling a population already on its knees. Families plied their house items on the streets, selling even their cameras for a song. Baghdad\u2019s nights became dark and long; the time for parties was over. Guests and hosts were now abroad, disappeared, or dead. The record player went silent, the sofas shipped away.<\/span><\/p>\n Our photo albums all contain gaps: the missing, unpictured decade of the 1990s.<\/span><\/p>\n The weight of United Nations Security Council Resolution 661 was unbearable. Barring a few exceptions, export and import were forbidden. Iraq could not receive any funds from abroad and every UN member state was obligated to participate in enforcing this \u201chumane and humanitarian\u201d starvation.<\/span><\/p>\n Iraq was grappling with an entire host of such Orwellian realities imposed on it from the outside. It was, after all, a nation that had just undergone <\/span>a surgical war<\/span><\/i> that, inter alia, devastated water purification plants and the power grid, sowed its soil with Depleted Uranium for future generations and, infamously, incinerated hundreds of civilians in the al-Amiriyah bomb shelter, including Tariq\u2019s aunt and cousins.<\/span><\/p>\n In war\u2019s aftermath, madmen roamed the streets and anguished mothers the grim hospital wards. One million children suffered malnourishment; 70% of women were anemic. \u201cWhether the number of child deaths was 200,000 or 500,000,\u201d writes Joy Gordon in <\/span>Invisible War<\/span><\/i>, \u201cthe magnitude of the harm was enormous, and it was always known to be enormous\u201d \u2014 and now forgotten, too.<\/span><\/p>\n Sanawat al-hisar<\/span><\/i>, the years of the embargo, were especially long on the women who had just parted with lovers, buried or hoped to give a dignified burial to brothers, fathers and sons whose bodies littered the desert of the south: a frontline of many wars now roamed by the lost ghosts of the soldiers who died thirsty and alone.<\/span><\/p>\n These were long years on my own late mother too; like so many Iraqi women, she was a teacher whose pay was reduced to near nothingness. Many could not even afford to go to work and were pushed to eke out their domestic life instead. To make ends meet, my mother sewed and tutored at home, the rhythmic sound of her sewing machine bearing the family off to sleep every night.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n One night not so long ago, reading <\/span>Charles Simic<\/span><\/a>, I heard my mother\u2019s sewing machine running again. The sound that echoed down the long-gone years compelled me to raise my head towards the nightstand where I keep a photograph of my mother in the folds of a pocket-size copy of the Quran.<\/span><\/p>\n My Mother Hoped<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n To take her sewing machine<\/span><\/i> I then buried my head in the pillow, pretending not to hear.<\/span><\/p>\n Though my mother\u2019s picture has been sitting on my nightstand, just beside my bed for near three years, rarely do I dare pull it out to look at it. Unconsciously, it is as if a veil keeps the corner where the nightstand, with the Quran and the photograph it carries, out of my sightline. But while the picture is hidden, its authority is not.<\/span><\/p>\n Now my fingertips linger over this keyboard\u2019s surface. The photograph in hand is an impenetrable passage back to a day about which I almost know nothing. The stamp on the back reveals only the name of the studio (<\/span>al-Junayna<\/span>) and my neighborhood\u2019s address in western Baghdad. There is nothing about the date of the visit.<\/span><\/p>\n I assume it was taken in the early 1980s, while the Iran war raged on. Perhaps my father was on the frontline. In the late 1970s, his family moved from the riverine Karradat Maryam neighborhood (part of it would later be swallowed into the Green Zone) to the western suburb where I grew up. The newly wedded couple, as is the custom, moved in.<\/span><\/p>\n In this photograph, my mother\u2019s face glows. Her eyes, captivating, are fixed on a point above the camera\u2019s. Not yet in her <\/span>hijab<\/span><\/i>, she wears a woolen blouse for what I assume was a chilly day. Her lips are closed (a habit I would inherit myself), and she \u2014 just as I knew her \u2014 is reservedly confident.<\/span><\/p>\n The absence of <\/span>hijab<\/span> indicates that the photograph was taken during a time predating the Faith Campaign. After the Gulf War and the imposition of sanctions, Hussein feared for his dying hegemony as beleaguered Iraqis embraced religiosity for solace. He promoted a state-sponsored and controlled version of Islam, allowing its symbolism, monuments and discourse to suffuse the public and urban spheres. Thus Ba\u2019athism\u2019s secularist principles were reversed, instead returning to the embrace of the tribe and Islam.<\/span><\/p>\n That aside, no single detail in her photograph arises, as Roland Barthes would say, from the scene to pierce me like an arrow.<\/span> Time is one of these elements that assail and wound, what he called <\/span>punctum<\/span><\/i>: my mother has long been dead. But it is also a living death, one that casts a vertiginous spell and disturbs.<\/span><\/p>\n Instead, I long for the totality of her, for the touch of her blouse\u2019s fabric, the sound of her footsteps walking in, her voice speaking, her thoughts posing for the camera, how she spent the remainder of her day. <\/span>But the photograph is an impassable passage in time.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n Unlike a portrait of a familiar strip of urban space I often walked and still roam through the haunted streets of memory, the impassability of my mother\u2019s claustrophobic photograph is also a consequence of an unlived time. I have never met my mother in her youth, and thus <\/span>a temporal abyss is opened between then and now.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n In his essay <\/span>On Some Motifs In Baudelaire<\/span><\/i>, Walter Benjamin writes of the \u201cdecline of the aura\u201d in photography. Unlike photographs, when a fleeting scene of <\/span>m\u00e9moire involontaire<\/span><\/i>\u00a0flits by, a halo of <\/span>associations<\/span><\/i> gathers around an object of perception. To experience its aura, an object must return our gaze from a distance.<\/span><\/p>\n But my mother is not seeing me, I cannot be with her. <\/span><\/i>It is her <\/span>living death<\/span><\/i>, then, and the unfulfilled promise of a rendezvous in the photograph that haunt and intimidate.<\/span><\/p>\n When war revisited Iraq for a longer stay in 2003, cluster bombs rained over our house. Once a site of beautiful memories, the luscious garden where we would have lunch during sunny springtime days was withered by war. The rooftop where we\u2019d once slept our summer nights, watching the palm fronds dancing to the nocturnal flirtations of the wind was riddled with bullet holes and scarred with shrapnel. Even the trunk of our palm tree was wounded. Our house was repeatedly desecrated, along with our privacy. For, nestled near an international highway and an adjacent overpass, patrolling US troops often occupied our rooftop and turned it into a watchtower of their expanding empire. At times, they would come barging through the door, pounding up the stairs as my mother, startled, dashed into her room to fetch a scarf.<\/span><\/p>\n When I look at the elegant woman in the photograph I can\u2019t help but also see how the world surrounding her was destined to crumble. How her husband, my father, would be kidnapped, their friends and relatives murdered; the clashes that would erupt outside her door, the corpses dumped on sidewalks that she would encounter, and, in a time of sectarian cleansing, the letter she would find in an envelope left on our doorstep. We had three days to leave, it said, or else we would die.<\/span><\/p>\n On one of these wartime days, she braved the ever-looming threat of clashes to visit one of the few grocery stores left open in the mayhem. Men always feared abduction, assassination or arrest, so sometimes it was wiser for women to be the ones to venture out of the house. As I stood by the front door waiting for her, an explosion plowed the soil around the corner and sent it skyward.<\/span><\/p>\n (Silence after the thundering of the blast. I run. The debris comes falling from the sky).<\/span><\/p>\n A roadside bomb had been detonated as a coalition convoy entered the neighborhood, shredding a Humvee with whomever it carried inside. As I waited to hear news of my mother, the moments lasted an eternity. Had she been on her way back with her bags, about to cross the street as the convoy brushed by her side?<\/span><\/p>\n My mother returned safely. At the site of the explosion, a gaping crater would silently scream for weeks. As punishment for each such incident, the bowels of Abu Ghraib prison needed to be fed with thousands. Unable to control Iraqi cities, people were scooped off the streets and thrown into \u201cGitmoized\u201d jails.<\/span><\/p>\n Women, of course, were not spared. Not only were female reporters, academics and doctors murdered and exiled, but as Haifa Zangana narrates in <\/span>City of Widows<\/span><\/i>, American troops raped women and, in an abyss of Abu Ghraib\u2019s depth, even rode a seventy-year-old woman like a donkey:<\/span><\/p>\n In addition to suffering the same hardships as male inmates, the women endure another plight: silence. First, the denial by occupation authorities that there are female detainees at all; and second, silence from the women’s own families because of the stigma surrounding the arrest and detention of a woman. For most Iraqis, the horrifying photos of Abu Ghraib signify not only the abuse and torture of the inmates but also the nightmarish reality of what has not been photographed or published: the torture and rape of their daughters, sisters, and mothers.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n Such generational violence saturates the photographs of Iraqis. Even the happiest photographs are haunted by the implicit promise of <\/span>impending<\/span> doom, hovering around the smiling subject like an omen.<\/span><\/p>\n After 2003, however, the violent death of both humans and places surged to the foreground of every photograph, became the entirety of our lives. Images of torment and abuse replaced and erased those of laughter. Every serene park, market and street corner became a crime scene, smelling of gunpowder and ash \u2014 memories of happier days having been condemned to oblivion.<\/span><\/p>\n To many, images of Abu Ghraib are synonymous with Iraq. Women clad in black and beating hard on their faces and chests at sites of carnage and hospital gates are the archetypal visualization of the Iraqi self: <\/span>defeated<\/span><\/i>. Like a prized booty from the wreckage of history, this framed defeat is dusted off by some guilt-ridden photojournalists every March 20<\/span>th<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n For, it seems, atonement and repair in the Global North require a re-violation of the nameless, muted Iraqi self whose curated suffering is a commodity lucrative even post death. To express their solidarity with us requires them to make a spectacle of our humiliation, to parade it mournfully across a screen to the pace of a white man\u2019s or woman\u2019s regretful voiceover<\/span>.<\/span><\/i> The life-size images of degraded Abu Ghraib inmates in Jean-Jacques Lebel\u2019s installation <\/span>Poison Soluble<\/span><\/i> at the 12<\/span>th<\/span> Berlin Biennale are but one example of regret-as-art, humiliation-as-atonement.<\/span><\/p>\n Jean Baudrillard knew this breed all too well. This solidarity, he writes in <\/span>No Pity for Sarajevo<\/span><\/i><\/a>, implies condensation and belies a \u201cself-pity and a way of absolving one’s own powerlessness.\u201d<\/span> If <\/span>something needs to be done<\/span><\/i>, start at home, not where the \u201cblood flows.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Writing in <\/span>Regarding the Torture of Others<\/span><\/i><\/a> on the images of Abu Ghraib as the scandal seeped from the \u201cunwinnable folly\u201d (never a crime, of course, but would <\/span>a winnable \u201cfolly\u201d<\/span><\/i> be less evil?) that was the Iraq war, Susan Sontag is worried that \u201cthe pictures will continue to \u2018assault\u2019 us.\u201d They will \u201cnot go away.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Sontag was writing for the readership of the New York Times Magazine<\/span>. To her credit, she admits the images were not an <\/span>aberration<\/span><\/i>, that \u201cthe photographs are us\u201d (Americans). But as Judith Butler says<\/a>, she was also a self-preoccupied liberal livid at disturbing images giving no direction towards political action.<\/span><\/p>\n This self-preoccupation, she writes, prevents one from adequately responding to the suffering of others. But Sontag <\/span>was doing something<\/span><\/i>, Butler was right. She did so by writing about the photographs with both eloquence <\/span>and<\/span><\/i> American-centrism.<\/span><\/p>\n But what of our own reckonings, our own photographs? Not from Abu Ghraib alone, but from our everyday lives, which continued to unfold beyond its infamous walls before, during and <\/span>
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\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div><\/div>\n
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\n<\/span><\/i>Down into her grave,<\/span><\/i>
\n<\/span><\/i>And I believe she did that,<\/span><\/i>
\n<\/span><\/i>\u2019Cause every now and then<\/span><\/i>
\n<\/span><\/i>It keeps me awake at night.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
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