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| PEACE TEAM REPORTS: report-2 from Baghdad-January 31, 2003 |
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Baghdad, 31 January 03. "God bless you!" shouted the man in the music hall.
We had just handed him a sheet describing the Iraq Peace Team in Arabic.
Minutes before he had been glowering disapproval, perhaps because of the
antics of the small shoeshine boy who had come with us from our hotel. Now
he was transformed, thanking us whole-heartedly for our solidarity.
The classical music event was the last event in a day of exploring the arts scene in Baghdad. We had started out in the morning visiting a cafe overflowing with the male intelligentsia of Baghdad. The cafe is a decades-old institution, a gathering point for artists, sculptors, and writers. We spent several enjoyable hours discussing mythology, Japanese martial arts, British literature, American films, Sumerian printing, techniques of wax painting - everything but politics and war. The sanctions emerged only tangentially in the conversation as the difficulty of obtaining canvas and the necessity of working on the streets as a bookseller during the first hard years of the blockade. Issam, a very talented painter working with themes of flight and mythology in swirling colours, was able to support himself by supplementing sales of paintings with translation. In response to my overview of antiwar activities in Canada - a last vain attempt to turn the conversation towards matters at hand - he replied only, "Nothing is so stupid as war!" A sculptor named Haydr had adopted the style of a British dandy, a movement which strove for meaning by isolating art from reality (art for arts' sake). His work also tended towards winged figures. Haydr is able to support himself by selling his striking bronze figures to UN personnel and other foreigners. Iraqis, he explained, weren't normally able to afford them. Later, we walked through booksellers' lane, a busy outdoor market in second-hand books. The books were old; the text books, notably medical journals, very outdated. Still, the variety of topics and languages attested to the learnedness of society and rich cultural life here. I considered buying a book on the roots of contemporary, abstract Iraqi art, but found it too expensive. Looking at books spread out on the street, we thought of the academics and intellectuals and book-lovers of all stripes who had been forced to sell their librairies to make ends meet. Many well educated people are also forced to take menial jobs. Although university education, including books, remains free, the economy has been deeply affected by the sanctions, and good jobs are scarce. 
I ran into a couple of young students, whose intensity and energy reminded
me of the hope-inspiring young people and students we have been working with
in the antiwar movement in Ottawa and Montreal. But these two expressed deep
frustration and despair of their future. "Yesterday, I told my friend that I
wanted to kill myself," said one, his smile thin and bitter. Many of their
class who had the opportunity have simply left. We were told in Amman that
many Iraqi poets, artists, musicians were living there, hoping to get visas
to the west. Before we had a chance to exchange names, the students had to
move on.
The liveliness of the music hall was able to dispel the grim threat which is the suffocating atmosphere of daily life here. Old men waved their prayer beads in the air, singing out the lyrics to favourite passages in the obviously beloved classical music. The atmosphere was delightful; a release of shared human emotions that brought us all together in uproarious laughter and song. This is another wonderful Friday tradition of Baghdad life, another tradition which will soon be disrupted by thousands of cruise missiles. Unless somehow, against all odds, we succeed in averting the war. |