The Map of Poetry, Baghdad, 2003
“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die." — E.M. Forster, Howard’s End
Only connect. In the Middle East, whenever I could, I always looked for writers to speak to history. And by history, I meant what was happening right in front of me. This was true in 1991, when I discovered that my translator, Esho Y., whose name means Jesus in Aramaic, had translated The Satanic Verses for Saddam Hussein. Under threat of torture, for an entire week, along with a dozen other unfortunate souls at the Ministry of Information. Saddam threw the translated hodgepodge against a wall, but he later said, on national television, Let Salman Rushdie come here to me for protection. The Persians are scared of their shadows — these stories are cartoons for children.
The world was in uproar over those “cartoons,” the attacks against his literary allies — publishers, translators — were bloody, fatal and mounting, and Rushdie was in hiding.
And that made Saddam envious: he fancied himself a writer. A writer! The Ayatollah had terrified the world over a book. A book! While he, Saddam, published romance novels, in which “The King” always got the girl and defended the country and rode a white horse. The name of the author was “Anonymous,” and in this case, anonymous was not a woman.
And so Saddam fumed. Bring me writers. And, they were forced to come.
“My friend had to empty out his wooden leg,” one Iraqi novelist told me, as Saddam interviewed them. They wrote, and when Baghdad fell, most of them fled.
Books alone are not bridges. They needed bridge builders. Interpreters. Readers.
And as a radio reporter, I thought I might look for these book-builders and writers and readers, my bridges to my invisible NPR audience, to translate a place as impenetrable and unpredictable as the “Middle East,” itself a vague concept to many Americans. Books, I believed, were portals from one world to the next, one time to the next, one soul to the other. English literature was popular in Iraq, amongst the elites and the educated class of Iraqis, and there were many such people in Iraq then, a country with a high literacy rate and a solid middle class, which sent its students around the world. I don’t mean to sugar-coat Saddam’s evil. But the fact remains: the country needed an educated class, and the government made sure that it got one — even if it meant meritocracy and enlightenment.
In 2003, I took myself to the University of Baghdad (designed by none other than Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius) where my friend and translator Esho had been a graduate student in his youth. At the renowned library which served the College of Arts and Languages, smoke gave it an atmosphere of one very large ashtray. The marauders had come in April, five months earlier, torching and maiming, and stripping the library of its collections — especially Shakespeare and Jane Austen — as if they had been pirates on a shipwreck, and the books were gold doubloons. Those books were sold in the streets, perhaps even on Mutanabbi Street, the street of books.
“When they came I took my books and tried to outrun the thieves,” an English professor told me, insisting she’d hugged her books to her chest even as she heard the glass breaking. She ran. She said that she decided, in the end, that her books were less replaceable than her computer. But it was no use, the books were gone, and she was lucky to be alive.
In the ransacked library, which felt quiet and forlorn, wires uncurled from the ceiling like intestines dangling out of a body. Dust filtered in the windows. I wandered in, and there I met a woman who was trying to build a universe out of books, an order from disorder and enlightenment from chaos.
“I am the head librarian,” she told me, introducing herself as Suhair Suhadi, and that may have even been her name. Or, it wasn’t. She stood in a yellow cardigan sweater and smart red pencil skirt, wearing heels, as she sifted through the piles of the library. She asked me if I had a Hoover, to pick up the dust. It would have been useful, she said. It would have been useless, I thought. There were random books, opened to the spine and mooning each other’s backsides, or piled atop each other, corpse-like, in the beautiful stacks of the University of Baghdad’s College of Arts and Sciences. There were books that, when you lifted them, turned to soot, like dark magic in reverse. There were pages that seemed like the scripts of incantations, because their partial sentences floated in the air. Suhair stood amongst these books rather like Scarlett O’Hara stood amongst the wounded soldiers in Atlanta; she would tend them, and rescue them from the soft grey snow of ash and dust.
“I must do something useful or go mad,” she told me. “ Everything is out of order here, the world of the jungle. It is all lost, destroyed, ruined. The library is turned upside down. But I will rebuild this again. I am indexing it all again. And I will use the map of poetry to do it, “ she said. “Look.”
And she placed in my hands a copy of The Plays of George Chapman, the University of Urbana Press, 1970. It seemed intact. All I could think of was Keats: Much have I travelled in the realms of gold.
Slowly, as if building a wall of words, she was re-shelving thousands of burned and abused tomes, whatever had been saved from the thieves and the looting, with giant gaps where the old titles had been. On the day that I was there, Suhir al-Saadi was all alone in the library. Daylight fell on her in almost tragic abundance, coming as it did from windows without glass, and as if rendering this smokey, dusty scene visible simply mocked her task. It had been a beautiful library in its day. Walter Gropius had designed not only the library but the entire campus at the University of Baghdad, under a contract with King Faisal the First. When he was assassinated along with his family in 1958, the Iraqis kept the contract with Gropius. The books were wartime survivors, and needed immediate attention.
“Everything is out of order here,” Suhair told me. “It’s the world of the jungle. We’ve lost at least half the books. As you can see, the library has been turned upside down. Some of the books are stolen, destroyed, ruined, and burned. But I will rebuild this again. I am indexing it all again. When the thieves came, they knew exactly what they wanted. They took our computers. They stole the Encyclopedia Britannica — some of them in Arabic and English. But then they picked random books to burn, to prove that they could have burned the whole place, I think. And so, for this reason, they attacked these books. Most definitely. For example,” she said, “look at this.”
It was a burned, 60-volume survey of Shakespeare. Forty volumes were left.
“Huge anthologies of Shakespeare cost $500 here; if you want to buy them you can’t find them, and if you can find them they’re too expensive.”
“I used the map of poetry to rebuild this library. If you go to the other side of the shelf, in general poetry, I began with the pioneers of early poetry. You have from Beowulf then to Middle English and to Chaucer. Then things skip to English medieval poetry. Sir Thomas Wyatt, he’s in the wrong place, but I am trying to start where the Renaissance started so that I can lead to the first persons who created the sonnet.”
“So from Sir Thomas Wyatt to John Donne?” I asked. I was struggling to keep up — in fact, to breathe.
“Yes,” she said. “Then it goes to Elizabethan lyrics, because that comes after the period of Elizabeth. Of course, Sir Edmund Spenser and his epic The Faerie Queene. Then after that, Milton, Donne, and after that we go now to the Restoration period of Bonnie Prince Charlie. And after that I found it very difficult to put them in perfect order. Swift, we have him here. What goes after Swift? Then we have the 15th and 16th centuries. Then, after the Romantic period, which is more like small pieces on people who wrote on the Romantic period and the anthropology of Romanticism.”
“And here’s the Victorian period,” she said, leaping ahead. “18th Century, we start with Tennyson, Lord Alfred. I’m sorry it’s so dusty; we’ve been asking for that Hoover to pull out the dust. After Tennyson goes the modern period of verse and poetry. T. S. Elliot and Hardy.”
“Wow, that’s something of a jump,” I said, thinking there were, in fact, no romantic poets on offer, like Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Shelley. We moved ahead. I saw something that caught my eye.
“How many volumes of The Wasteland do you have in this library?” I asked. There were place makers indicating that several copies had been checked out.
“Everyone is chasing Eliot,” she said, laughing. “The American professor’s influence, perhaps, or maybe it makes the most sense to English readers here.” And sure enough, a literature professor from Berkeley, a Ph.D emeritus named Kathleen Nanphy, had the students reading it. And also, Mother Courage and Her Children, by Bertolt Brecht. I’d heard they were going to act it out.
“Oh, but let me take you back to the English novel,” Suhair said, turning a corner. I was getting a little dizzy, from both the choppy historical literary tour and the fumes of smoke in the place.
“I started the novel section with “The Life of Samuel Johnson,” she said.
“But that’s a biography by Boswell,” I said somewhat lamely and sneezed. “You know, his biographer.”
“No,” she said, “you see, I like realistic books. This is something about his life. I like the books that deal with the human condition. I like to think of the dilemma of being human in modern times. Like these times I am living in now, these times of destruction and loss in which the future is so vague. We don’t know what our future will be. It’s not like the other two wars we have been through. And many writers make great books about this uncertain human condition, like Hemingway, like Fitzgerald. They reflect on the human life and draw from it, reflecting on the experiences of people living in this world — this universe — and try to realize their dreams, to do something that they had always wished to do no matter what. If I did not think I could do something great, to restore this, I would contribute to forgetting who we are.”
Maybe that idea, I thought, is part of my pull to this place.
“This is what’s left of Jane Austen,” she went on. She pointed to half a sad shelf. “We used to have three full shelves of Austen, everything she’d done.” I imagined Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy in the Baghdad back streets in their Victorian garb, besmirched with soot and trying to get back to their shelves in the Baghdad library to join their neighbors at Northanger Abbey.
“But I still have Dickens to catalog and Sir Walter Scott, and Thackeray, and Melville.” She brightened.
“So Melville,” I said, my head clearing a little. “You’re coming back to the Americans?”
“We used to get all the new American books straight from the publishers before the sanctions of 1991,” she said. “And then we received American books no longer. So almost everything you see will be from before that.” The acrid carbon smell grew stronger as the morning wore on. She adjusted her bright clothing. She was obviously sad, so I tried to say something cheerful. She did look like such a phoenix in those ruins. I caught a whiff of her pungent perfume.
“You’re dressed very nicely,” I said, “for a woman who works in ashes and soot.”
She smiled wanly.
“I like color. It makes me think of old times here, Arabian Nights stuff. Richard Burton. Then again, color is all that someone like me has left.”
“You have your books,” I said. “You will have more.” She gave me a pained smile. I thought, again, of how confounding and ignorant the embargo of American books to
Baghdad had been. Twelve lost years.
“I don’t know the rules any more,” she said, “and I can’t stay home forever. I can tell you this about the country — only the powerful ones will survive, and I think the rest of us are doomed. I don’t know who I’m working with; no one from before. There are a bunch of people in here who don’t have the slightest idea what they’re doing. So I talk to these books, and they talk back to me. It was like a theatrical charade when I began, everything like it was in another world, and I’m trying to wrest something, some order, from this ancient, ruined culture. People came from all over the Arab world to this library. It took me weeks to face what had happened and to come in here. Sometimes I used to sit here whole days, just looking at the books and thinking about putting them back together. One day I started, just picked up a Shakespeare volume and started. Some day I will finish, but not too soon, I hope.”
I don’t know what happened to Suhair al-Saadi, the “head librarian.” She was not a librarian, she told me later. She was a reader, who came each day to volunteer and pretended to be a librarian, and claimed she was a graduate of the college. She’d lived for a long time in London, and her own father’s Ph.D. was lost in the flames when the university library was ransacked.
About the American books, though, I read a November of 2011 article from The New York Times about the “American Corner” at the University of Baghdad. The article said the library has a very contemporary section of American books, from Alexis de Tocqueville to John Updike. The selection was put together by the American embassy staff in Baghdad. The research librarian on duty at the University Library at the College of Arts and Sciences said he had a lonely job. “No one,” he told the Times reporter, “has ever come here to read any of these books.”
Jacki Lyden, author of the internationally best-selling memoir, regarded as a contemporary classic, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba, was for over three decades an award-winning host and correspondent on NPR. She has reported on wars and conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere.