A Reed Shaken by the Wind (12 page)

Inside a marshman’s own home his woman may exert a profound and lively influence, and there is very much more comradeship between them and their husband or father than their total segregation outside the family circle would suggest. The men and women of a household habitually eat together when no outsider is present, and the women will sit and drink tea with guests whom they know very well, but they may never eat with strangers. They have a strict position in the family, a role not absolutely menial but outside which they may not step. If a Ma’dan community were transferred without conditioning to a European city it is, for example, the women who would rise to offer their seats in public transport to their menfolk, who must always be honoured both in word and in deed. Travelling in a canoe with his family a man will take the place of honour and squat smoking in idleness while the women paddle or pole, for it would be unseemly for him to work as one of them.

In the same way tradition relegates to the women all tasks that are considered unmanly; no man will ever draw water if a woman is present, and no man will in any circumstances gather buffalo dung or pound grain. This last is so individual a task, and its performance partakes so much of ritual, that it is difficult to imagine it done by men, or indeed in any other way than became so familiar to me after even a short time in the marshlands. Two women place the grain that is
to be pounded in a container that is always the same, a two-foot length of hollowed-out palm trunk that stands upright like a narrow tub. Each takes the haft end of a mallet used for pounding reeds before mat-making, and strikes downward into the tub in alternative rhythm with the other; at the same moment as the thud of impact she gives vent to a grunting cry in a different key to her companion. The sounds are like those made by a tennis ball struck hard with a racquet; when the grain pounders are out of sight it would be easy to believe that one was listening to a new ball game played with two racquets of steel strings, one with a high twang and the other with a low. They would be inconvenient sounds for a man to have to make.

Whether it be from hard work or from frequent childbearing or from the prevalence of disease, the women of the marsh Arabs become old very quickly. They are in their flower in their early teens, and ten or fifteen years later they seem already middle-aged. One must presume the infant mortality to be enormous, for neither sex employs any method of contraception, yet families even of southern Mediterranean size are rare. By reason of her early age, every girl has nearly the whole of her childbearing life before her when she marries, and even allowing for the phenomenon of adolescent sterility one would expect that a man with two wives would in his old age have at least fifteen or twenty children, but something well under ten would probably be nearer to the truth. For many centuries the balance of nature has been but little disturbed, and the diseases that erase new life amid a storm of wailing from the women have been surer safeguards against overpopulation than the contraceptives of the western world.

W
HEN
we left Hadam we were still going northwards, and away from the marshlands. We moved at first through partially flooded rice fields, and the only navigable parts of them were the narrow irrigation channels, high-banked with loose clay, and so twisting that it was often impossible for the great length of the
tarada
to negotiate their acute bends. We walked balanced on these banks; to me it felt a strange unpractised gait, as if an uncertainly toddling baby were to attempt a tight-rope. Like the alleys of a dream town, the water paths led always obliquely away from the direction of our destination, so that again and again we had to manhandle and lift the loaded
tarada
over mud dams into channels at right angles to our former course. Waist-deep in the brown water the canoe boys would heave and strain until the whole length of the
tarada
stood poised upon the centre point of a mud ridge; she would sway there like a see-saw until a final effort set the great scimitar prow dipping to the new channel with a smooth rush like a ship launched down a slipway.

Presently the banks of the winding waterways became lower, and the floods beyond them more and more continuous, until at last they died away altogether, submerged beneath a vast pallid sheet of water that lay before us. An horizon line of a hair’s breadth separated the sky from the still water, so that every solid thing inside this great shimmering bubble appeared lapidary, sharply out of key, harder and blacker than ever a black line on white paper could be. Far away on the sunward side, where the sky met the water, a scattered fleet of high-prowed canoes formed etched silhouettes of infinite delicacy. Overhead, long strands of silver cobwebs floated everywhere on the empty blue air;
many carrying a fragment of bulrush fluff that lit them, white-tufted, as they travelled in stately procession high over the still water; one long gleaming thread that hung almost stationary far above us seemed to trail from the crescent moon of the same whitened silver.

For more than an hour we paddled over the enamel surface of the great lake. We passed parties of naked
Berbera,
who fish with nets, strange people of whom Thesiger could tell me little or nothing. Like weavers, gardeners, and, to a lesser extent, pedlars, the
Berbera
are, by reason of their occupation, looked down upon as of lower caste, and a Ma’dan will not eat with them nor intermarry with them. This is strange, in that the inferiority of the
Berbera
would appear to lie specifically in their method of fishing; and as this is the only efficient way of taking fish, the superstition has a curious lack of survival value. The ingenuity that the early Ma’dan displayed in the elaborate exploitation of the natural reed growth of the marshes, together with the introduction of water-loving livestock, suggests that the settlers would have been quick, also, to exploit the great possibilities of the fish that throng the marsh waters. No one seems to know how the prejudice arose against catching them in the obvious way; but it seems to have withstood the blandishments of comparative wealth, for the
Berbera
make a much better living than do the Ma’dan.

Under admittedly unusual circumstances they have at least once made sums that are a fortune by any standards. Some six years ago Thesiger saw a group of
Berbera
who, working where the fish were lying in dense shoals due to freak water conditions, had for at least a week been taking in more than
£
1,000 daily. The
Berbera
were hiring the Ma’dan to pole the vast boatloads, totalling some forty tons every day, to the nearest point from which lorries could drive the catch to Baghdad.

There are some settled
Berbera
communities, but more often the families or groups are semi-nomadic, moving where
generations of experience have taught them that the rise or fall in water level will congregate the fish.

At the far side of the great sheet of flood water the earth dykes began to appear again above the surface, and soon we were once more among the patchy water and irrigation ditches of the rice fields, and once more heaving and hoisting at the unrelenting length of the
tarada.
But as we progressed from channel to channel they became steadily wider and more orderly, and one of them led abruptly into a broad river flowing southwards from the Tigris. Here the dense reed village of Suq ed Tuel clustered both palm-fringed banks; a village of a different type from any that I had seen, for there were busy
suqs
right along the banks, and throngs of people about their everyday affairs. The whole place was as active as an ant-hill, and the narrow path between the shops and the flowing water was like the street of a county town on market day. On the river big trading boats with carved and painted prows towered above the packed canoes, and among the crowds on the bank were sprinkled here and there clothes as diverse as those in Basra or Baghdad. A schoolmaster strolled in the European suit that is the official dress of all civil servants, talking earnestly with a tribesman whose beard was dyed auburn with henna, a not uncommon device among elderly dandies; a policeman in khaki stood before his reed-built police station, and stepped back from the footpath to give passage to a stately white-turbaned priest. The path was intersected by deep ditches leading to back-waters among the palms, each spanned only by a single palm trunk across which the people streamed without a falter or a downward glance.

We landed at a section of the village devoted to boat-building, threading our way with difficulty through the mass of craft huddled against the bank. We negotiated the stern of a huge dhow of a hundred or more feet, to which two
men were fitting a new rudder; one of them was using a big drill operated not by a handle but by an instrument shaped and used like a violin bow. On the bank above, an old man, white-bearded and dressed only in a loin cloth, squatted beside a bubbling mud-trough of black bitumen, below which, tunnelled into the bank, glowed a furnace of reeds. From time to time he would stir the seething surface beside him, thoughtfully and ruminatively, and a big blister would rise and burst with a belch of air. Close by, men were coating upturned canoes with the hot bitumen; but to him, I felt, his cauldron was an end in itself.

In the Sayid’s
mudhif
where we slept that night we were guarded from thieves not by the usual armed Africans of the sheikhs, but by a simple booby-trap. After we had lain down to sleep our host propped a bamboo canoe-pole across the entrance about a foot above the ground, and, on the floor where a man who tripped over this obstacle might be expected to fall, placed coffee pots and aluminium saucepans. The only victim of this ruse was Sabeti, who went out in the night to relieve himself. I woke as he got up; he remembered to step over the pole as he left, but was too fuddled with sleep to remember it when he returned. He came down squarely on the ironmongery, and woke nobody.

The sounds to which one woke in the morning in a reed house were usually of dogs barking or fighting close to the thin walls, or of the exuberant quacking of domestic ducks a foot from one’s head, or the harsh challenge of a cock to the coming day. That morning it was the chirping of a hundred clamorous sparrows that flitted about the reed arches overhead, their voices seeming magnified to the volume of clashing cymbals. I turned over to face the wall and pulled a blanket over my head to try and shut out their din; as I did so I became aware of a snuffling at the reed matting that separated me from the compound outside. It was no more than inches from my face, and the matting was ragged enough to let in a dapple of daylight. Through this golden
lace I saw the head of a gazelle, its great liquid eye peering wonderingly into the darkness of the
mudhif,
one delicate hoof scratching daintily at the lattice. I realised that the simile of gazelle’s eyes, so well worn by Persian and Indian poets, was in fact a very exact one, for this eye so close to my own was, in its gentleness, timidity, and lustre, startlingly like those of the young Arab girls.

When we left Suq ed Tuel we went downstream, southward toward the permanent marshes, and I found myself looking forward with a curious intensity to a return to that strange world of lagoons and giant reeds and island houses.

From the main channel of the river we turned into a lesser and then a lesser, and for a time we were among the difficult waterways of the rice fields, but always far off on the southern and eastern horizons lay the long pale wall of the reed-beds. After two hours we came out on to a sheet of water as wide and still as that we had crossed the day before, and at its farther side their ranks stood stately and golden. As we neared them there came to us the voices of the frogs, a confused murmur at first, swelling gradually into the remembered chorus that enclosed us like the walls of a room.

The appearance of the marshes had changed during the short time that we had been away from them, for the growth at this time of the year is rapid, especially in the perimeter of seasonal marsh that depends upon the thaw of mountain snows. Everywhere the green spears of the new growth had thrust up through the brittle gold of the old reeds, and at their feet were aquatic plants that had not been there before. As the eye travelled upward there was first the blue sky-reflecting water, on which lay flat purple leaves like those of a water-lily, then the
terre verte
green of water sorrel, and above these the bright green and gold of the giant reeds themselves, their high tops feathered and plumed like roosters’ tails.

Because of the new growth, the marshes seemed more than ever a wilderness without paths. I was amazed anew that throughout all these seasonal changes the Ma’dan can recognise through-way from cul-de-sac, can use a vocabulary that lists by name a score or more different types of waterway, and can even tell by the evidence of a few broken or crushed reeds what build of canoe has passed this way before them, a
tarada
or a
bellam,
or the little flat hunting canoe of a wildfowler.

Among primitive people living always in one landscape and with few belongings, there is, I think, a degree of recognition, a photographic memory, that is quite impossible to civilised man. I saw many examples of this. Once, crossing an open lagoon, Hassan called out that he saw concealed in the reeds not less than a quarter of a mile away a canoe that had been stolen some weeks back from a friend of his. At that range I could just, but only just, make out that it was a canoe; I could not even have told to what type it belonged, but when we reached it Hassan proved to be right. On another occasion we were poling in the dark through a broad mud-banked waterway in the land of seasonal marsh. There was a moon, but it was obscured by heavy cloud, and the banks were only just perceptibly darker than the sky. We had on board with us a passenger, returning from a wedding in another village. Suddenly he gave an exclamation and pointed to some dim hulks that to me were just recognisable, by probability rather than by any visual certainty, as buffaloes. He, on the other hand, had recognised them as his own buffaloes, strayed from his village. We put him ashore to round them up and drive them home, and they were, as he had said, his own. Every man, in fact, claims that he would be able instantly to pick out his own buffaloes among a thousand others of these remarkably anonymous animals; by one inch of the tip of a horn, by a fleeting glimpse of some apparently amorphous part of the body, or by their voices, however distant. I
expressed disbelief about this to Thesiger, who relayed what I said to the canoe boys. They were indignant; they said that if they were shown, even casually, one service rifle, they would be able a year later to select it from among ten thousand others of the same make. This, it must be remembered, could not be by memorising in the ordinary way the number stamped upon it, for they cannot read. Whether or not that claim is exaggerated, it is certain that they know every seemingly indistinguishable canoe one from another, and this not only in their own villages but in every community within a wide radius of it.

The sun had set by the time we reached Kidi, a satin sunset of oyster and duck-egg blue, against which trailed long skeins of flighting ibis. In the fading light the water reflected the same colours; in the distance only the reed houses and the crescent shapes of the canoes were dark, and in the foreground the clubhead silhouettes of bulrushes stippled against the sky. Across the water came the sound of high-pitched drums beating the rhythm of the
hausa,
or war dance, that announces not only wars but weddings.

We could scarcely avoid following the progress of that wedding in some detail, though we were not among the guests. Soon after we had landed at one of the first houses of the village, houses that again reminded me vividly of ships at anchor, we heard the sound of shots as the bride was removed from her home. The bridegroom’s house was a short way across the water from us, and from the time the bride arrived there the drumming and chanting became ever wilder and more fevered as hour followed hour. Presently some professional dancers who had been entertaining the wedding party came across to dance for us. Their mood seemed fired by the occasion, for the movements were more than ever erotic, and after the dancing came two “variety turns” each of which had as its climax a complete and
unstylised representation of sexual intercourse. It is curious that these turns are almost always of satire against
haji
(priests or holy men) or against the customs of the religion that the Ma’dan profess as a matter of course. The first of these two was yet another variation upon the well-worn theme of the rump-in-air position of prayer, which drew as much applause from the audience as if it were a brand-new joke; the second concerned a
haji
who called repeatedly for milk, in order to seduce the girl who should bring it. He was, of course, successful. The part of the girl was played by a youth who had become engaged that evening, and the part of the
haji
,
very realistically, by one of the professional entertainers.