Read Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village Online
Authors: Elizabeth Warnock Fernea
Tags: #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #General
shift.
“See how lovely and fat she is,” the older women said
proudly, and picked her up so I could see her better. I nodded
politely.
Fatima and her sister, who had indeed become more lively
since the tea and cigarettes, were chattering volubly with
Abdul Razzak. As the child was being exhibited, they looked
at me in an almost friendly fashion and spoke to Abdul
Razzak.
“The girls asked if you have any children and I said no, and
they said they think there aren’t many children as fat and
healthy as this one. They are all very proud of the baby, so
you must praise her.” I did as I was told and Abdul Razzak
translated my remarks.
All the women looked pleased, and the one who was
holding the baby at the moment got up and brought the child
over to me, trying to get her to sit on my lap. The child did not
realize what was required of her, but obediently held out her
arms. I took her and everyone murmured with delight.
I looked at the child in my lap, the deceptive fat hanging in
gray rolls about her neck, wrists, and ankles. She smiled, but
through the layers of filth, the unhealthy flab, the scabs and
the oozing of the open sores on her face, it was a grotesque
gesture, hardly human. I was suddenly violently revolted and
found myself, to my horror, utterly unable to lean down and
kiss the small face turned up to me. The women pushed her at
me; I simply could not. I smiled wanly, patted the child’s
matted head, and handed her back.
Apparently the women had not noticed my distaste, for the
child tottered off, and they laughed at its uncertainty on the
flabby legs. I tried to think of a pleasantry to offer in the
conversation, but none came. Our host had lapsed into silence,
but Fatima was sitting on the box beside Abdul Razzak,
talking to him in a low, urgent voice. Her sister smoked,
resting her elbows on her bent knees and staring straight ahead
at nothing. Some of the women had gone off, and Jabbar said
he thought we should leave.
He nudged Abdul Razzak, who was nodding absent-
mindedly to Fatima as he rose. She continued her plea,
whatever it was. The host rose with us, but the women stayed
where they were and the girls huddled together, lighting still
another cigarette in the dying embers of the charcoal fire. The
child had disappeared.
At the tent flap the man bade us goodbye, and we walked in
silence to the car, followed by a hound sniffing hungrily at our
heels. I looked back at the tents, which were almost the same
shade as the dun-colored earth, at the shivering man wrapped
in his aba, his hand raised in a gesture of farewell as the dust
swirled around him. And I remembered the proud, gay
procession we had seen along the road, the drums, the pipes,
the flashing eyes of the women as they jingled their bracelets
and swished their bright-colored petticoats. I was glad Khadija
had not come with us.
6
Housekeeping in El Nahra
In a few weeks our life in El Nahra settled into a working
routine. After breakfast, Bob and I would listen to the BBC
news and drill on Arabic, adding to each other’s vocabulary
new phrases and words we had heard for the first time the day
before. By nine-thirty he had gone off for his morning
interviewing and I began the household chores. My
afternoons, like his, were given over to regular visits, he with
the men, I with the women of the tribal settlement. The
evenings we spent together, reviewing the events of the day,
writing in our journals, reading or playing chess.
Most of the problems posed by everyday living in the
village had been solved fairly easily. Our stove, refrigerator,
new cupboard and the aluminum work table and folding chairs
filled the bare kitchen. The dirt floors were covered with new
reed mats, and we had screens made for the windows. Bob and
Mohammed dug a garbage pit for tin cans and we burned
refuse in the cylindrical oven. After many days of delicate
negotiations, Bob finally found a man who was willing, once a
month, to clean out our mud-brick toilet. We arranged to have
our heavy laundry done in Diwaniya, as no one in El Nahra
wanted to do a Christian’s laundry, even at a price; the rest of
the clothes I did by hand. We even became accustomed to
taking baths out of two pails of water, one for washing, one
for rinsing.
The preparation of food, however, was a major occupation.
Shopping had to be done each day, for we were out of reach,
literally as well as financially, of the luxuries of canned and
frozen foods. Bob bought jam, dried yeast and coffee in
Diwaniya, and otherwise we ate what was available locally:
the vegetables and fruits currently in season, rice, eggs,
yogurt, and, since we were rich by village standards, meat
every day.
Mohammed did the marketing, and with his help I soon
learned what every merchant had to offer, although in all the
months in El Nahra I never visited them in person. Only
women of very low status ever appeared in the public bazaar;
rather than go personally, a woman sent her children, her
servants, even her husband to buy groceries, pick up mail, or
carry urgent messages to friends.
The village butcher slaughtered a goat or a sheep daily, and
if Mohammed got to the market early, we had lamb kidneys
for lunch, or liver, or the tenderloin which lies along the
backbone. But if he was late we got a kilo chunk of
unidentifiable meat, which might take one or four hours to
cook, depending on the age of the animal. With Mohammed’s
help, I learned to strip off the tough membranes, and then he
would either grind the meat or cut it into minute pieces
suitable for stews of various kinds, which we ate with rice.
Onions and garlic to give flavor to the stringy meat were
cheap and plentiful, and Mohammed brought me a fine supply
of spices, cinnamon bark, whole nutmegs, turtneric root,
peppercorns, saffron, dried celery leaves and mint. Whenever
I needed spices for cooking, he would pound them fine with
an old brass mortar and pestle which belonged to his mother.
Homemade tomato paste was the other ingredient essential
to local cuisine. In the summer, when tomatoes glutted the
market, every good housewife bought a supply, spread the
tomatoes on flat tin trays and carried them up to the roof of
her house. There, in the summer sun, the raw tomatoes dried
and thickened, and salt was added every other day for about
two weeks. The resulting tomato paste was then ready to be
packed into earthenware jars to be kept throughout the winter.
This paste had a delicious and distinctive flavor—the women
asserted it was the combination of salt and summer sun.
We used locally made
ghee
, or clarified butter, for cooking,
and after experimenting with a few tins of tasteless imported
margarine (specially treated to maintain, its texture in tropical
climates!) we turned to local butter for all uses. One or two
women in the tribal settlement specialized in making butter
and selling it to the market to be clarified into ghee. If we
ordered in advance and paid slightly more than the market
price, we could usually get part of the supply. Many months
after I arrived, I was visiting the butter-and-egg woman one
day and asked the purpose of a shapeless leathery mass which
lay near us on the ground. The woman demonstrated that it
was her butter churn, a young lambskin which had been
cleaned and dried in the sun, then greased for easy handling.
The cream was poured in, both ends of the skin were securely
tied, and then my neighbor simply shook the “churn” back and
forth till the butter came. Occasionally the butter we bought
was topped with a film of dirt, undoubtedly from the inside of
that old and fragrant “churn.” When this happened,
Mohammed would simply scrape off the dirt and return it to
the woman, explaining that we only paid for clean butter.
I made yogurt from water-buffalo milk, which was richer
than the thin milk yielded by the settlement’s undernourished
cows. The
jamoosa
, or water buffalo, huge black slow-moving
animals, were much better adapted to the local climate than
were cows. They seldom contracted tuberculosis. Their milk
was in demand and even the meat could be eaten, but, though
the buffalo herders were prosperous by local standards, they
did not enjoy a comparable social status. A cow was an animal
conferring prestige, but a water buffalo was not. Still, several
tribesmen owned buffalo, and from one of our neighbors
Mohammed would buy a quart of milk each evening. Still
foaming, the milk was put on to boil. It cooled during the
night. In the morning we skimmed off the cream, a rich, thick
butterlike substance
(gaymar)
which was delicious with jam
on toast. To the rest I added a spoonful of yogurt starter,
wrapped the pan in a towel to keep it at a constant
temperature, and by late afternoon we had yogurt, for cooking,
for eating, or for drinking if we diluted it with water.
We always got good rice, rice grown in Iraq, or the famous
long-grain “amber” rice which supposedly came from Iran.
When potatoes were available, we often buried them in our
charcoal brazier and baked them. Other vegetables were
seasonal; for weeks we might eat marrow squash, then spinach
would come onto the market, followed by broad beans and
okra. In the fall there were eggplant and carrots. The winter
fruits, oranges and bananas, were excellent and in summer we
ate watermelon and grapes.
For special occasions we could buy a chicken, which was,
predictably, very skinny and outrageously expensive, but had
a good flavor if parboiled or marinated before roasting. On
some nights we returned home to find by our doorstep a brace
of small partridges which had been shot by one of Bob’s
friends. Plucked and cleaned and sautéed, they made a fine
change of diet.
The local bread, flat round cakes made of barley or wheat
flour, salt and water, was healthful and good when hot, but
usually it was dry and often tasteless. Finally I tried baking
my own bread in our portable oven and soon I was baking
four fairly presentable loaves a week.
So we ate well, if monotonously, slept a reasonable amount
and were seldom sick. We were finding people generally
pleasant and helpful, and our painfully meager Arabic showed
signs of improvement. Gradually we began to feel more or
less at home in El Nahra, although new problems kept arising,
some more serious than others.
First there were the birds, which absolutely refused to leave.
We shooed them out of the house several times a day, and
tried to keep the windows and doors shut lest they swoop back
in. Bob had screen doors made with tight latches, and we crept
in and out of the house, shutting the doors quickly against the
flocks of swallows that filled the yard, perched on the roof or
in the lemon trees, waiting for the door to be opened the
smallest crack.
One night I awakened, coughing, for a feather had fluttered
down into my face. What would come next? “This must stop,”
Bob said, and in the morning he and Mohammed set out to
“do something definite about the birds,” I was not sure just
what. Mohammed returned with a long bamboo pole, and
every night thereafter before we retired. Bob would probe in
and around each of the beams, routing out the sly swallows
who had hidden there during the day, waiting for the peace of
the night to recommence their mating and nest building! After
a month of nightly probing, most of the swallows retired in
defeat, but the next spring they came again, small groups
which camped in the lemon tree, twittering sadly and
obviously unable to understand what had happened to their
haven.
Bob was also in some perplexity about horses. Much of the
visiting of tribal clan settlements in the back country had to be
done on horseback, as there were no roads. Bob enjoyed this,
for he had always liked to ride, and he found it another area of
common interest with the men of the tribe. For these occasions
the sheik insisted on lending Bob one of his good Arab
stallions. They were valuable and beautiful horses, worth at
least 500 pounds, and Bob lived in fear that, while he was
riding the borrowed animal, it might trip and break its leg, and
then what would we do? It was not only that we could not
afford to replace the horse, but that the sheik would probably
not allow us to do so (after all, we were his guests) and this
would have been even worse.
One morning the gate opened and Bob and Mohammed led
a horse into our garden. He was small and light brown and
slightly sway-backed.
“I’ve bought him,” Bob announced.
“Bought him?”
“Yes, what do you think of him?”