Kanan Makiya: ‘Wrought By Neglect, Not War’
[Kanan Makiya is Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University]
I returned to Baghdad the week after Saddam’s monument in Firdos Square fell. The last time I had seen the city in which I was born and raised was 1968, the year the Baath Party came to power. That fateful summer I studied sculpture with Muhammad Ghani. There in his Baghdad studio he had sat so patiently with me, showing me how a piece of wood could be made to respond to different tools. Twenty-three years later I would write a book, under a pseudonym, about his “Victory Arch” monument in Celebration Square.
Ghani’s teacher and mentor had been the great Jawad Salim—the artist who had been to 20th-century Iraqi art what Diego Rivera had been to 20th-century Mexican art. Perhaps I was hoping that through Ghani some of Salim’s aura might rub off on me. I had grown up in the Mansour suburb of Baghdad alongside Salim’s children. Conversations in our house about art and architecture repeatedly rang in my ears. In those years I did not have a single political thought. We lived in a glass house, literally, in which Saddam did not exist....
All over the city that summer, posters, monuments, and signs that signified or made even the slightest reference to the Baath era were being torn down, just as propaganda had been trashed in Eastern Europe in 1989 and Baghdad itself in 1958, the year the monarchy was overthrown. Artifacts like these speak to memories, memories that constitute the very marrow of a community’s identity, bestowing personality and character just as they do upon an individual. It does not matter whether those memories are good or bad. But it does matter how they relate to their city, and which survive to represent them. Iraqis in 2003 were hoping that it was easy to excise bad memories....
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I returned to Baghdad the week after Saddam’s monument in Firdos Square fell. The last time I had seen the city in which I was born and raised was 1968, the year the Baath Party came to power. That fateful summer I studied sculpture with Muhammad Ghani. There in his Baghdad studio he had sat so patiently with me, showing me how a piece of wood could be made to respond to different tools. Twenty-three years later I would write a book, under a pseudonym, about his “Victory Arch” monument in Celebration Square.
Ghani’s teacher and mentor had been the great Jawad Salim—the artist who had been to 20th-century Iraqi art what Diego Rivera had been to 20th-century Mexican art. Perhaps I was hoping that through Ghani some of Salim’s aura might rub off on me. I had grown up in the Mansour suburb of Baghdad alongside Salim’s children. Conversations in our house about art and architecture repeatedly rang in my ears. In those years I did not have a single political thought. We lived in a glass house, literally, in which Saddam did not exist....
All over the city that summer, posters, monuments, and signs that signified or made even the slightest reference to the Baath era were being torn down, just as propaganda had been trashed in Eastern Europe in 1989 and Baghdad itself in 1958, the year the monarchy was overthrown. Artifacts like these speak to memories, memories that constitute the very marrow of a community’s identity, bestowing personality and character just as they do upon an individual. It does not matter whether those memories are good or bad. But it does matter how they relate to their city, and which survive to represent them. Iraqis in 2003 were hoping that it was easy to excise bad memories....