A Culture in Exile

One morning I eagerly opened another email from Madlom. He apologized for his late response to my last missive, stating matter of factly, “my son got shot in his arm today, he is a camera man. sorry, muqdad”

In his last email to me, he promised to write “within 4 days . . . i have to manage few things with my son . . . ” I’m still waiting.

Baghdadi playwright and director Hamid al-Maleky, who was harassed under Saddam’s regime for having a “friend in the opposition” and later forced to write the screenplay of Saddam’s life for Iraqi state television, was recently threatened by thugs he believes were from al Qaeda. He fled to Syria for his own safety, and because a creative life had become impossible in Iraq.

“The invasion brought about the rise of radical Islam,” he tells me, railing against the new tyranny of people he calls “bowers” — in reference to the Muslim prostrations — “and these people are against art.” Of course he equally blames the appalling lack of security and stability for the demise of Iraqi culture. But the censorship of the new radical Islamists, he says, “is more terrible than that of Saddam . . . At least we knew what Saddam wanted, but we can’t understand what these religious types are after.

“Now, from the relative safety of Syria, he continues to write screenplays for a Cairo-based, Iraqi-run station called Al Baghdadia. A current project is about an Egyptian who goes to Iraq to fight US troops — something al-Maleky says he’d never be able to write from Baghdad. As for the arts in Iraq, they are on permanent vacation. For now, he says, the culture of death holds sway.

London-based Iraqi cultural activist and artist Rashad Selim, who helps run the International Network for Contemporary Iraqi Artists, points out that it is not merely Islamic extremism that is threatening Iraqi culture and society, but a larger political strategy, the “Salvador option,” adopted by the Americans after John Negroponte took over from Paul Bremer.

“This was a deliberate policy,” says Selim, “by which paramilitary death squads were formed to destabilize Iraq and to foment sectarianism. Anyone who was politically outspoken — be they academics, journalists, poets, or artists — became a target of these death squads. The end result was to create a state of total chaos and terror, and the de facto destruction of any public intellectual life.”

More than 340 academics have been murdered in post-invasion Iraq, and what is truly frightening about the assassins, often hooded or masked in balaclavas, is that “we don’t know who’s doing this and why,” says Selim. What’s going on, he says, “isn’t just about the death of Iraqi culture — it’s about a larger struggle between the forces of civilization and barbarism.”

“Life is hell now in Iraq,” confirms Hana Mal Allah, as if the horror scenes on the news needed any embellishment. Nevertheless, it is intriguing to hear this from a forty-nine-year-old painter who chose to continue living there.

Although almost all of the galleries in Iraq are now closed and Mal Allah until recently she created most of her work from her home studio in Baghdad. She holds a Ph.D. from the Baghdad College of Fine Arts, where she has lectured for years. For Mal Allah, her artwork is an affirmation of Iraqi culture and of her own identity, in the midst of destruction. “Everything we have built has collapsed . . . public life is completely broken, and most of my friends have emigrated,” she says. “But there is one way to say to the new barbarian, ‘We will survive.’ That way is: we must create and produce meaningful work.”