Poisoned fruit

>> Leilah Nadir traces her roots and ours
in The Orange Trees of Baghdad

by Juliet Waters

Ibrahim Nadir describes his childhood home in Baghdad: “Rose bushes lined the walls and orange trees hung over the blossoms and dark leaves. A date palm stretched high over all the foliage, intermingled with a few fronds from the palms in the large garden that backed onto ours. We had a pomegranate tree that bore small fruit that my younger sister liked to eat. We grew mint and parsley for salads and my mother even nurtured a loofah plant that she harvested for household sponges. A grapevine crept over a trellis on the patio behind the house, giving us shade in the heat of summer.”

Baghdad today, the Baghdad his daughter Leilah Nadir does her best to describe in her family memoir, The Orange Trees of Baghdad: In Search of My Lost Family, does not evoke this picture. Images of Blackwater mercenaries shooting up innocent Iraqis come to mind more easily. Nadir’s uncle Karim describes his aunt Lina’s house soon after her death from dehydration and a heart attack in 2005. It was a house on the same street as a government ministry building protected by both Iraqi and American troops.

“Everything was gone…It was like a plague of locusts had eaten the house clean…the kitchen counter, the kitchen and bathroom sinks had vanished too [along with all personal effects]. There was no telephone and no appliances, and all the kitchen cabinets had been stripped away. Even the copper wire from the electricity cables had been stolen. The house was completely empty.”

But if Baghdad was ever the Garden of Eden, it’s been a while. (Biblical scholars believe the myth-inspiring garden would have been somewhere in Iraq.) Ibrahim left in 1960 at age 16 on a scholarship to London and never returned. With good reason. Teenagers in Baghdad in the early ’60s were already starting to patrol the streets with guns, on behalf of the Baath party, intimidating neighbours they had known all their lives.

After becoming a petroleum engineer, Ibrahim married a British girl and moved to Calgary, about the only place he could find a job. Apart from some family visits from Iraqi relatives during the first 10 years of her life—when Leilah’s parents moved back to London before relocating permanently to Canada—Nadir never knew her father’s family very well. This makes the project of a family memoir extremely challenging. At the same time, it creates a far greater sense of urgency and suspense than the average genealogical quest. It’s now or never for Nadir, who was 30 when the project began. There’s a good chance that her relatives and any evidence of their lives will be destroyed at any time.

And so she sets about—through e-mails, cell phone conversations, a visit to Lebanon, a short family reunion in London, and through reports on her family by a close friend, Iraqi/Canadian photo-journalist Farah Nosh—to get to know people who stand a good chance of being killed any day.

The picture Nadir provides is of a continuum of suffering in Iraq that certainly pre-dates the current war. The orange trees in the house that her great-aunt Lina guarded, until her death, had started dying during the Gulf War, producing deformed, inedible fruit. Yet, even when the suffering is beyond anything Canadians could imagine enduring, the despair her relatives feel at the prospect of leaving Baghdad is palpable.

They aren’t welcome here, or in the countries that “liberated” them. Iraq is now considered a democracy, so refugee applications are usually rejected. And even if they were accepted, what awaits them? Cultural alienation, poor job prospects, wasted, unrecognized educations from a place where reading, writing and mathematics were invented.

It’s hard to avoid the reality, as one reads this poignant memoir, that Nadir’s roots are the roots of our own civilization, the roots that seem to be rotting with every page we turn.

The Orange Trees of Baghdad:
In Search of My Lost Family
by Leilah Nadir, Key Porter,
HC. 326pp, $32.95