On a recent afternoon in Baghdad, I drove across the Republic Bridge to an emporium on the eastern bank of the Tigris. A new Iraqi film that recently screened at Festival de Cannes is finally at the theater, and I, not without a moment of trepidation, decided to go see it. The bridge was a casualty of a bombing campaign that, in the words of former US secretary of state James Baker, sent Iraq back to the preindustrial age in 1991. Bridges collapsed, as Beat poet Sargon Boulus once wrote, “like the ribs of a murdered God over the Tigris and the Euphrates.” Zayouna Mall bears the name of a bourgeois neighborhood near Ismaʿil Fattah’s Monument to the Martyr, a turquoise split-dome commissioned in the 1980s by the Baʿathist regime in honor of the soldiers perished in the senseless war with Iran. It loomed under a polluted sky to my left.
Twenty-two years after the Saddam Hussein regime was toppled in 2003, Baghdad remains a fallen city. Palestine Street, the highway leading to the mall, resembled a forsaken film set, with abandoned security barriers, skeletal watchtowers, haggard beggars, and illegible outlines of slogans gone obsolete dotting the landscape.
The mall is an imposing, heinous edifice, jutting from the main street among modernist villas mutilated and spoliated by the new occupants in town. Eastern Baghdad is a militia playground that, as Derek Gregory once wrote, emptied its middle class and adorned itself in a Shia garment by sectarian cleansing. Inside, the shopping center was empty and claustrophobic. I took a stained capsule elevator and ordered a ticket from a smiling Rita — a human relic from the Christian communities driven, like so many Iraqis, by violence to, again as Boulus would say, Australia, Sweden, heaven, or hell.
I asked a young usher if he knew where the emergency exit was. A few weeks earlier, a similar venue was engulfed in infernal flames. Dozens died in the limboed town of al-Kut. There were none,…
Auteur: Nabil Salih
