Memories of a Lost City: Baghdad and Babylon

Ten years ago  the world was in turmoil after the ill-advised invasion of Iraq by American-led forces.  Over the last two weeks there has been considerable comment on what happened--and didn't happen.  Sadly, it seems that the lot of Iraqis is perhaps even worse than it was before. 
   
 This kind of reflectioin always sends me looking to see what I've read in the past that might resonate with the future.  One of the most interesting is Naim Kattan' memoir Farewell, Babylon, first published in French in 1975 and in English in 1976 by McClelland and Stewart.  In 2005, Raincoast brought it out again: it seems to have disappeared from their list, but Amazon.ca insists it is available. Certainly, it is worth looking for. 

 Winner of Quebec’s top literary award the Prix Athanse David in 2004 as well as the French Légion d’Honneur, Kattan has published 32 books of poetry, essays and fiction in French since he came to Canada in 1954.  His first literary language was Arabic, however, and it still holds a part of his heart.  The nuances of Arabic dialect and vocabulary are center stage in the opening section of his memoir  and set the tone for a drama of the loss of one world and the discovery of another. Kattan’s observations also cast welcome light on Iraq: what we see today grew from the colonial, Muslim-dominated society Kattan grew up in and from which he escaped. 

Kattan begins by explaining that he and his friend Nessim are the only Jews in the group of young intellectuals who meet each evening in a Baghdad café not long after World War II.  They argue about the foreign literature they are reading and  the difficulty of  creating a unique Iraqi literature in the newly independent country. Kattan and Nessim had rejoice
d like everyone else when the British were forced to give up control, but nevertheless they feel themselves outsiders.  No matter that the Iraqi Jewish community dates back 2500  years to the times of Babylon and the Bible, or that  the best Arabic grammarians come from the Alliance Israélite school or that the best students on Arabic examinations are Jews:  Jews are different and the Jewish dialect is considered comic.  Needless to say, Kattan usually speaks classical Arabic when discussing with his friends.

One  night, however, Nessim makes a strong political statement by insisting on speaking it: “we were Jews and we weren’t ashamed of it.”  The others are surprised, but slowly the Muslims began to listen with “respect.” Indeed, Kattan says, “in the heat of discussion Janil and Said borrowed some of our familiar expressions.  They stammered over words they had heard so often but never allowed to cross their lips…Nessim's tenacity bore fruit.”

From that beginning, one might think that Iraq might be able to build a country for all its people, but the section which follows show how the book’s bittersweet ending could be nothing but the end of the Jewish community.. Kattan takes us back to the Farhoud, the vicious pogrom which began on a hot night in May, 1941.  British forces had beat back German-backed Iraqi insurgents, but before they could enter the city angry Bedouins swept in. “A wind of impunity was blowing…The Jews would bear the cost of this repressed hunger, this devouring thirst. Two days and a night.  We could hear shots in the distance…”

Luckily, the conflagration stops just short of Kattan’s house when the Iraqi regular forces take control of the city. Slowly things return to normal and young Naim is allowed to grow up precocious and loved.  His first story is accepted by an avant-garde literary magazine while he is still in short pants; he dreams of women in a society where all respectable females wear veils, he wanders the crowded streets of Baghdad, visits its many gardens, swims in the mighty Tigris.

As the book goes on, however, it becomes clear that there will be no place for Kattan in the modern Iraq, no matter how deep his roots in the region or how elegant his Arabic.  His family begins the long process of getting passports right after Farhoud.  He transfers to the Alliance Française school and starts to dream of studying in Paris.  His friends—Muslim and Christian as well as Jewish—begin their own lives.  Then he gets a scholarship to study at the Sorbonne.  The memoir ends as he leaves Baghdad on a bus headed for Beirut, and thereafter for France.  He will not see his family for five years, when he visits them in a settlement camp in Israel.

How many other Iraqi exiles are now looking for their families--or mourning them?

If anything, Farewell Babylon  is more important now than ever.  Translator Sheila Fischman has deftly captured the fluidity and charm of Kattan’s style, making it read as if had been conceived in English originally.

The illustration, by the way, is an imagined plan of the Hanging Garden of Babylon, as lost as Kattan's Baghdad is.