The Tigris: Nationalism of River and Place: A Suicidal Nation

ʿAli Bader

Baghdad is the creation of a river, in fact of two rivers. One may call it Mesopotamia, for instance, at least according to history, as it was thus called by Herodotus. But the second river—I call it ‘second’—in Baghdad, which is the Euphrates, meant absolutely nothing to me at all, neither in my memory nor in my childhood in Baghdad. As for its name, which rings in my ears loudly and strongly, it is nothing but morning mist that fades away on the river’s surface with the first rays of sunshine. Then it dissipates, shining softly until it flickers and melts away little by little. In fact, it fades slowly from my consciousness and my memory.

This is nothing strange for me at all. The river Tigris likewise means nothing at all to many of my acquaintances when compared to the importance of the Euphrates or the Nile for some, or the place the Danube occupies, for instance, in the heart of a writer such as Claudio Magris, whose Danube had a great impact on me. I say ‘great impact’ in the sense that I replaced the word ‘Danube’ with ‘Tigris’ each time it appeared, and I traveled with the author as if he were an influential historian of the river Tigris rather than the Danube. I am not concerned with the fact that this Italian author, born in Rome in 1939, was a celebrated professor of German rather than Iraqi literature, and a renowned correspondent of the newspaper Corriere della Sera rather than a paper in Baghdad or elsewhere in Iraq. Instead, what I find interesting and significant is that the English translator of his famous book, first published in Italian in 1986, added an explanatory sentence to it, which sums up the substance of the book: “A sentimental journey from the source to the Black Sea.”

In my opinion, this book is the greatest work ever written on the flow of a river: it is a journey which in its entirety develops into a richly intricate and colorfully woven fabric that tells the story of European history and multiculturalism, and not just that of a waterway connecting Europe and Asia. According to Magris, the Danube is the symbol that nourishes the distant Germanic, Hungarian, Slavic, and Jewish regions. Thus the author traces the river from the hills of Bavaria to the Black Sea and follows its flow through villages, forts, Viennese coffeehouses, historical sites, and cemeteries. Throughout the book, he constantly contemplates the violent tensions between Teutonic philhellenism and Roman civilization.

Today when I look at the course of the Tigris River, I instantly recall what Magris did when he precisely traced the intellectual and philosophical roots that produced the raw form of all the fascist ideologies on the banks of the Danube.

But why do I remember this? Perhaps because during the 1930s and ‘40s the banks of the Tigris witnessed the development of the roots of Iraqi national thought as it passed through the Nazism of the Four Colonels in 1941 to the end of a whole phase of nationalist thought, brimming with the Address to the German Nation by Fichte and the emerging chauvinism in the Arab world.

This is how I read Magris in light of Iraqi history—with the names echoing in my memory. ʿAbd al-Karim Qasim was the embodiment of the ultranationalism centered on the river. I recall here one of the brilliant ideas conceived by Magris, who had dealt with the enigmas of the House of Habsburg. I also remember a picture of ʿAbd al-Karim Qasim with the river in the background: his eyes gleamed happily and his red lips, despite his tiredness, were tightly pressed together and protruded in a careless smile.

Like Magris, who without ambiguity emphasized the rise of Nazism along the river, I observed the rise of inflammatory nationalist thoughts along the banks of the Tigris in Baghdad. The river is a constant reality in the emergence of a nation-state because it not only binds the state together by providing connections, but also holds it together through ideas and myths. Similarly, the search for the Self led to the self-destruction the Iraqi nation witnessed along the river. This act of self-destruction is the same as the suicide of the German nation in its constant search for Self. So I explored the chain of splendid tableaux along the Tigris—images infused with both culture and history—just as Magris explored the river scenes described by Kafka, and those by Kepler, Hayden (through his music), Heidegger, Elias Canetti, and Vasko Popa. I searched for the image of the river in other literature. Badr Shakir al-Sayyab is the first of those who expressed the idea of the river by describing it as a collective revolution. Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri bestowed upon the Tigris a declaration that resembled armed disobedience. Saʿdi Yusuf clad the Tigris in leaden shoes. And the splendid Fuʾad al-Tikarli penetrated the other aspect that let the events of his novels unfold within a few meters of the Tigris River.

But why is it that when I read this book and sink into its lively, pulsating sentences I feel as if the expanse of the two rivers were but one? I remember my whole childhood by the river because my grandfather’s house was there on the shore. From the window of this big house I gazed for a long time at the calm and shining surface of the river: it was glitteringly white in the glaring light of the morning, and dissipated in the distance as a translucent spark. I listened to it from my window, how it faded into the sand with a soft murmuring.

This murmuring is known by anyone who has lived close to the river. Marguerite Duras filled her novel The Lover (L’Amant) with this sound that rumbles throughout her book, and about which so brilliant a critic as Roland Barthes commented that it was the sound of time passing in the river and coinciding with the stream of consciousness that explodes throughout the work. The same happened in books by the two most important Iraqi novelists, Ghaʾib Tumʿa Farman and Fuʾad al-Tikarli: none of them was free of this murmuring that runs through life, through the novel, through time.

I looked at the river in this way when I was a boy, living in the house of my grandfather. There, the rays of the morning sun would traverse their golden stage, then descend, little by little, across the muslin curtains, and settle down on the furniture in the living room. This image will never leave me, nor will the family life there ever leave me. It is as if the river with its murmuring and the passing moments of time brought us together: the image of grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, the uncles, and the aunt who was a young woman in her twenties. I see her in the morning moving with the dark locks of her hair, with her smile that still had the signs of childhood in it. She moves close to the mirror with soft elegance, the mirror that always slept in the living room, reflecting the faces of the girls of the family as they place a piece of myrtle wood in the front of their hair.

At first light, the door of our big house witnesses the awe-inspiring spectacle of the daily work: dozens of villagers in the gardens overlooking the river collect palm leaves; the stores of chaff are opened as the cattle moo, asking for the women to milk them; from among the pillars of the bridge the sea gulls circle over the courtyards and terraces; and the young peasants lead their cattle to the nearby pastures in the gardens of the river. When I see my grandfather preparing himself for his morning promenade, I rush to my mother so she will change my clothes, and I go down quickly to accompany him on his walk. There we watch the pigeons as they pick seeds on the pavement, and dark bees on the rows of damask roses standing loftily among the palm and citrus trees. This awesome pastoral idyll passes in front of our eyes as if it were a theater play.

This is the Tigris. But why did I feel while reading Magris’s book about the Danube that both rivers share the same story?

The Tigris was the gift of the flood, Noah’s flood without doubt. The Europeans think that it has been for many years, and still remains, the river of gentle moisture under the seafarers’ feet, whilst its soaked air has been on their faces since ancient times. Yet in the popular narrative of Baghdad, this Tigris is the gift of the flood, just as Baghdad is the gift of the Tigris, or the gift of the Two Rivers.

The Tigris was the gift of the waves’ desire, when Mount Judi stretched along the coast with open arms, and the water gushed endlessly from north to south. When the flood receded to the middle of the large sea, the river rose high as the first Babylonian legend. It was naturally a Babylonian legend in the first instance, and only then a Semitic one. I myself felt that I was in the midst of two legends, belonging to two rivers, to two geographies, to two cultures, although they are one. I felt the air of the river in the distance as one: how the wet air gushed onto my face, carrying the sweet-smelling scent of water.

The myth of the Danube shed light on the pillars of the Jewish temples, as Claudio Magris says. The Tigris, which repeats the myth of the deluge, reflects the same brilliance through its dark blue color. Saʿdi Yusuf says about the river that it wears leaden shoes, and he describes it as it stretches along with the burning sunset on its shore.

The Torah is obviously the creation of the Hebrews, and Hebrew is a sacred language created by the Tigris, as the Semitic people speaking it gradually gained power, and its flickering flame passed silently and swiftly through history. In this way the Tigris and the Danube meet at the turning point of the path that leads to God, exhausted after a lifelong journey, spreading out and receding, continuously rising and receding, then spreading out again.

After many years, the river witnessed Iraq’s historical change: Saddam Hussein rose to power, and the family was destroyed. Hot political topics destroyed it, as they destroyed the whole of Iraq. The safety of one’s home was gone forever, and the family ended up as dead, imprisoned, and exiled. The river turned into an instrument in the hand of the authority that disciplined and punished, and Iraq became a lunatic asylum, a hospital, a prison, and a military institution. The tranquility provided by the river ended, and the riverbank that was close to us stopped being like a theater, for the other bank of the river was the palace of the oppressive power.

The palace is not only validated by the river itself, but is also a symbol of the river’s tyranny. The power of the state does not rely solely on mastering the river; rather, the river becomes a symbol for the power and authority of the state. Through it, the state symbolically communicates its policies. The river is no longer a theater, but its image disappears like the meaning of romantic and erotic dreams with which the Arabian Nights enthralled generations of intellectuals in Baghdad. It becomes the property of the oppressive power in a noticeable way. Throughout Iraq’s long history, the palace of the ruler is erected on the west bank of the Tigris. From the time I was a boy, I looked at the other side, conceiving of it as a field for domination. There is the palace of Nuri al-Saʿid, who ruled Iraq in the 1950s; the Siʿsuʿ palace where King Faysal dwelled when he first arrived in Baghdad; the Rihab palace; and the Flower Palace (qaṣr al-zuhūr) that later became the Presidential Palace. But the ruling government fortified it in the 1980s with palm groves and weapons, and widened its precinct to include the whole river.

I stood before the Danube when I was over 30 years old. Cold and lonely breaths blew at me and I felt forlorn, for the darkness of the sunset on the Tigris has a sad and constant grieving echo dissipating in the palm grove. I used to smell the warmth of palm trunks, scorched all day long by the sun. Fluttering birds chirped on the fences of farms and stables which were everywhere. Those birds twittered all at once, and set off in a flurry toward their nests.

The night in northern Europe is different; it is hardly a night at all, but rather a prolonged late evening. It begins to darken little by little, slowly and softly as the evening lingers. The beginning of the evening is characterized by an exquisitely subtle bluish-violet color that then ascends with a soft rhythm, little by little, until it reaches its darkest hue. Thus I read the description of the night in Europe, after many years, in one of the novels by Mihály Babits—in fact one of the most beautiful novels by a European author. If you doubt my word, then suspend judgment until you have read the novel Virgil Timár’s Son (Timár Virgil fia), namely the novel that the press of the time called Autumn Orchestra.

Of course, my exile was not a sort of intensive tourism, despite the fact that traveling became my career. But what could I do when my emotional and political roots were somewhere else? A powerful moment starts with the river, as I found out for myself by the Nile in Cairo, for instance, when I paid it a visit in 2007. I thought that exile does not return to find itself a home, but perhaps it finds a river. I am referring here to exile as constant roaming from place to place, even if this is difficult. This is the roaming of which György Lukács speaks and which leads to a certain cultural elevation. I, however, did not experience this rise at all. At that moment, I instead tried to bring back history—in the emphatic sense of the word “history,” to bring back the Gramscian concept, that is, a concept that has a geographic and climatic nature linked to the earth. It is history made by a few elevations that interconnect and interpenetrate each other, insofar as society is described as an earth, across which a number of images and metaphors pass. In this way, the river—not only through its political but also through its cultural metaphor—achieves a state of inimitability. This does not depend on possessing the water, the bank, and the gardens, and chasing the people from them by surrounding, seizing, and binding them and all the implied ideas that are connected to the river.

Thus I found myself almost without a place, being rejected most severely, removed—a stranger. At that moment, I felt not only the dearth, but also the deceit.

For the first time in my life, I felt not only that I lost the summer by the river, but also my memory of it. As the first step toward exile, I lost the summer by the river forever. And I felt that the reproach would not compensate for the lost river. It was lost like my childhood, which was almost entirely spent inhaling the scent of the houses and chambers built on the beaches. This memory will never be erased; it will always torment me like a monotonous piece of music playing constantly, endlessly. It will stay in my consciousness stubbornly and persistently. This memory has a certain resonance to it, recalling every evening like a sparrow that flies higher and higher in the evening and keeps ascending cheerfully at sunset, until it reaches ecstasy and elation. In the meantime I stand silently, confused and sad, having a slight feeling of dearth, deception, and squandered dignity.