Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers (25 page)

But I was willing to risk a bad, even exploitative, film in defense of the principle that Joffe has as much right to make a film about India as I have to set my next novel in America. And — just as Candice Bergen's presence helped get Gandhi's message to a vast new audience — I know that Joffe's film can do far more to make the West's rich aware of the East's poor than the more authentic films of Third
World directors, which won't garner any Academy Awards or reach a fraction of the audience that
City of Joy
will.

Those are two good reasons why, when I went to Calcutta during the filming, I refused to join my friends on the picket line.

I
TRAVELED TO BAGHDAD IN MID-FEBRUARY
1998 not as an Indian writer but in the course of my “other life” as a United Nations official. The world was largely focused on two dramas at the time, both involving issues of “internal affairs” and “access to presidential sites” — the crisis over United Nations weapons inspections in Iraq, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal in Washington. It was the former that took me, at very short notice, to Baghdad with an “advance team” to prepare the sudden visit of the secretary-general of the United Nations. The necessary groundwork laid, there was just enough time to catch a few glimpses of the Iraqi capital, away from UN business, before the political negotiations began.

Where does a non-Arabic speaker go in quest of literary pleasures in Baghdad? The answer, I was told by a senior UN colleague resident there, was to what visitors call the “book souk.” This is actually a longish street, Al Mutanabi, rather than, as the word “souk” implies, an enclosed bazaar.
Appropriately enough, the street is named for a legendary tenth-century poet, Tayyeb Mutanabi, author of the immortal lines I would later come across cited by the
Washington Post
’s Nora Boustany: “Not everything a man longs for is within his reach / For gusts of wind can blow against a ship's desires.”

The booksellers of Al Mutanabi were for the most part people whose desires had been buffeted by strong gusts of wind from abroad — international sanctions that had paralyzed their country's normal trade and sent their economy and currency into free fall. On both sides of Al Mutanabi, old (and some new) publications were laid out for sale on the sidewalks; magazines and volumes were arrayed on sheets, racks, and cartons the length of the street, from a busy intersection at one end to a cul-de-sac at the other. This was not, for an Indian visitor, extraordinary in itself, reminiscent as it was of the pavement bookstores of Calcutta's College Street. But what was different was the added pathos that many of the books and journals on sale were from the personal libraries of families devastated by life under sanctions, who now had to sell their volumes to survive.

And what a cornucopia was laid out for the indiscriminate reader! Books and periodicals overflowed the dusty sidewalks. Some were leather-bound, some tattered; first editions of rare books rubbed spines with dusty paperbacks from forgotten best-seller lists; technical textbooks sat alongside primly covered Arabic girlie magazines from a more modest era. The volumes were mainly in Arabic, but the makeshift stalls also featured a multiplicity of foreign publications, especially in English (though German, French,
and — according to a Scandinavian colleague — even Swedish popped up too). Here I spotted a lovingly thumbed reference book, there a brittle 1950s set of
Time
magazines; 1970s Lebanese reprints of nineteenth-century British classics sat side by side with out-of-date almanacs and even, bizarrely, an old telephone directory. Many of the English titles seemed incongruous on an Arab street — a paperback of Leon Uris's
Exodus,
for instance, or even more startling, Grace Metalious's
Peyton Place.
Though Iraq had long enjoyed a reputation as among the most secular and cosmopolitan of Arab societies, adversity had noticeably begun to breed piety: many of the newer volumes were Korans, some handsomely bound, and they were selling more briskly than the pulp fiction — or the men's magazines.

I had heard from foreigners of the bargains to be had at the book souk: stories, perhaps apocryphal, were told at the UN cafeteria of opportunist colleagues like the one who had picked up a first edition of T. E. Lawrence's
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
for the equivalent of seven cents in Iraq's dramatically depreciated currency (at a penny a pillar, the buyer clearly had acquired his wisdom on the cheap). What I had not heard about, however, was the avid interest of the local population in the offerings of the book souk. Even at an early hour on a weekend (I was there on a Friday, the Islamic Sunday), there was a crowd of Iraqis on the pavement, browsing, chatting, laying out more books in remarkably orderly fashion, eager to share their wares with a visitor. Iraqis are a famously literate people; an old saw about the Middle East has it that “the Egyptians write, the Lebanese publish, and the Iraqis read.” Here was proof of this, in these often-perused,
carefully preserved books bought decades ago, many with ownership proudly inscribed on the flyleaf, some lovingly annotated in the margins. It was easy to imagine them on the shelves of middle-class living rooms in educated homes, now brought out by their owners to help fill stomachs where they had only, in the past, salved souls.

The threat of bombs had been in the air for weeks, and Baghdad was full of journalists looking for news that would be obsolete in minutes. But here in the souk of Al Mutanabi there was a sense that there is a world beyond the immediate, that the wisdom of antiquity could prevail over the news flash of the moment, that poetry could still trump poverty, that books might buffer you from bombs. Amid the lingering remnants of remembered reading from an age when leisure was a choice rather than an imposition, the avid Iraqi buyers appeared to affirm a life beyond the headlines, a life sustained by the timeless pleasure that the printed page — read, reread, passed on from hand to hand — would continue to provide.

“I forgive time its sins,” Tayyeb Mutanabi had written, “if it maintains friendships and safeguards books.” The reverence for reading resonates in his thousand-year-old dictum: “A home without a library is an arid desert.” Each book for sale on that sidewalk souk named for him seemed to me to be one more paving stone in a journey that was transforming home after Iraqi home into a trackless desert.

Perhaps I was being unduly romantic. On my rough calculation, the literary works and the potboilers were both outnumbered by the textbooks, many dauntingly technical
and in European languages, some seemingly too old to be authoritative sources of the scientific knowledge they sought to impart. One vendor assured me that they sold well, no doubt because new books were either unavailable or unaffordable or both. And in disciplines where the opportunities for experiment, for practical work, and for international exchange were dwindling or have disappeared altogether, textbooks, however old, are all that a student can fall back upon.

Many in the street were, however, just looking. I spotted a young man, I guessed in his early twenties, picking up a book at which he had been gazing intently for some time. He held it, opened the cover, put it down again, then stood there looking at it, unable to walk away. Racked by hesitation, he picked it up once more, studying its contents as if weighing them against alternatives in his mind. Then he asked the vendor the price. When he heard the answer he had a hand in his pocket, perhaps fingering banknotes within; but I saw him shake his head sadly, put the book gently down and walk slowly away. I asked an Arabic-speaking colleague what the book cost. “Five hundred dinars,” was the answer. Thirty-three U.S. cents at the prevailing black market rate of exchange, but a week's rations, perhaps, in a country where the typical middle-class wage was four thousand dinars a month.

“For every student like that, you'll also find a fat cat buying books by the armload to cash in on the bargains,” a diplomat who knows Iraq well later told me. “The book souk isn't kept alive by foreigners. There aren't enough of
us here to do that. Iraqis are still doing most of the buying. But what's sad is that those who love books are mainly doing the selling.”

With the book souk at Al Mutanabi still on my mind, I took a trip to see the riverside statue of Scheherazade, the storyteller of the
Arabian Nights.
Only in Baghdad, said friends who know the Arab world, would there be such a statue at all — of a woman, and a woman, at that, renowned for decidedly un-Islamic reasons.

Scheherazade stood twenty feet high in black stone, hands extended, weaving her storytelling spell to an equally immense sculpture of Sultan Shahryar, reclining entranced at a safe distance. Her eyes were large, her gown flowing, her expression modest; but there was no doubt that she dominated the scene, a woman harnessing the power of fiction to her own salvation.

I walked slowly around the plinth on which the pair had been erected and failed to find a plaque or even a date. Nor was there any other visitor or attendant to ask. The site was deserted, and the park in which the statuary stood was overgrown and ill-tended. The city of the fabled Caliph Haroun al-Rasheed, patron of the arts, was now neglecting its own stories — as if, with harsh reality pressing down upon it, even literary Baghdad could no longer seek solace in the magic of myth.

(Speech delivered at the International Festival of Literature, Berlin, September 10, 2003)

W
HEN THE ORGANIZERS
of the International Festival of Literature first invited me to deliver this lecture, they suggested something that might reconcile my two worlds — the UN and literature. In conceiving my topic for today, I thought about the issues that have dominated my UN life of late: the forces of globalization, transforming the world irresistibly; the nature of the international mass media, which I try to influence as a UN official; and the changes that the age of terrorism, or “9/11,” as it is known in America, has wrought in us, once its shadow has fallen across all our minds and seized our imaginations. Globalization, the media, our imagination — one could well ask: In the world after 9/11, is there such a thing as a global imagination?

In other words, I wondered: Has globalization, which has brought McDonald's and Microsoft to every land, brought Mickey Mouse and Nintendo, and for that matter Osama bin Laden and “Chemical Ali,” to every mind? With the speed of satellite and cable TV, this is a serious question. The media bring to our breakfast tables and our living rooms, and increasingly to our computers and our mobile phones, glimpses of events from every corner of the globe. Any doubt I might have had about the reach and influence of global mass communications was dispelled when I happened to be in St. Petersburg, Russia, for a conference and was approached by a Tibetan Buddhist monk in his robes, thumping a cymbal and chanting his mantras, who paused in his chanting to say: “I've seen you on BBC!” New communications technology has shrunk the world, and in a real sense made it all one.

And at the risk of being facetious, our major news stories reek of globalization. Take, for instance, an item circulating on the Internet about the death of Princess Diana. An English princess with a Welsh title leaves a French hotel with her Egyptian companion, who has supplanted a Pakistani; she is driven in a German car with a Dutch engine by a Belgian chauffeur full of Scottish whisky; they are chased by Italian paparazzi on Japanese motorcycles into a Swiss-built tunnel and crash; a rescue is attempted by an American doctor using Brazilian medicines; and the story is being told to you now by an Indian visiting Berlin. There's globalization.

But on September 11, 2001, a different challenge arose to the notion of a global imagination. On 9/11, as the Americans have taught us to call it, the twenty-first century was
born. If, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm has suggested, the twentieth century really began with the assassination in Sarajevo that sparked World War I, it is fair to suggest that, in the impact it has already had on the shape of our era, the twenty-first century began with the demolition of the World Trade Center just one day short of two years ago.

What do I mean by that? The destruction of the World Trade Center struck a blow not only at the institutions of American and global capitalism but at the self-confidence that undergirded them, the self-confidence of a social and political system that, without needing to think about it too much, believed it had found the answer to life's challenges and could conquer them all. And of course the outrage of September 11 and the anthrax scare that followed it brought the stark consciousness of physical vulnerability to a land that, despite fighting a dozen major wars in its history, has not been directly attacked in living memory. This was the country in which a scholar could complacently propound “the end of history”; now history, like Mark Twain, has proclaimed that reports of its demise were exaggerated. In today's ever-smaller world, geography too offers no protection. If only by bringing home to Americans the end of their insulation from the passions that bedevil the rest of the globe, September 11 changed the world forever.

But the horrifying events of that one day are emblematic of our new century in another crucial way. The defining features of today's world are the relentless forces of globalization, the ease of communications and travel, the shrinking of boundaries, the flow of people of all nationalities and colors across the world, the swift pulsing of financial transactions
with the press of a button. The plane, the cell phone, the computer, are the tools of our time. These very forces, which in a more benign moment might have been seen as helping drive the world toward progress and prosperity, were the forces used by the terrorists in their macabre dance of death and destruction. They crossed frontiers easily, coordinated their efforts with technological precision, hijacked jets and crashed them into their targets as their doomed victims made last-minute calls on their cell phones to their loved ones. This was a twenty-first-century crime, and it has defined the dangers and the potential of our time as nothing else can.