Tracy Fuad • Iraq
Peaches, apricots, apples, grapes, cucumbers, zucchini, squash, tomatoes, beans, eggplants, okra, honeydew, watermelon, strawberries—this is what’s grown on my grandfather’s farm, among some other things. Thyme grows in thick bushes along the stone footpath to veranda. There is a brood of turkeys and two chickens that all hatched at the same time and roam freely along with the cats like they are all one species.
The days at the farm pass naturally and wholesomely like I imagine they are supposed to. I read and sleep and when I want a snack I walk to a tree and pick it. When I ask questions about Kurdistan or my family tree, I receive rich and detailed answers.
Unlike the narrow alleyways of Istanbul or the unplanned tangle of streets in Sulaimaniya, the few roads here are unpaved and digestible. After teaching English for a month in the village down the hill, this is a place I can claim some ownership to by sheer right of familiarity.
This morning, I hiked up the orange gravel road according to my grandfather’s unneeded directions: go straight and don’t turn. My destination was four large “hoop houses,” a greenhouse of sorts that extend the growing season into spring and fall and stretch the growing space vertically upwards on rough strings, like ladders for viney vegetables. The plastic covering protects the plants from the harsh summer sun, and prevents fast evaporation of precious water, nourishing the crops through a drip line. To enter is to change climates, from an arid oven to a humid jungle of narrow corridors with walls of sticky vines that grab your shirt as you pass by.
Everyday a few women from the village wake up at dawn to come and harvest the kilos of tomatoes and cucumbers that ripen daily. Sometimes hundreds of kilos. But a cucumber only sells for a penny a pop and the profit is little, hardly more than what the harvesters are paid.
By the time I’d woken up, had breakfast, borrowed a pair of my grandpa’s socks and tugged on a pair of old Vans in defense against rattlesnakes and scorpions and finally arrived at the hoop houses, the dozen plastic cartons on the ground were already heavy with tomatoes, and the women were eating shuti in the shade. Shuti means watermelon, and it’s the first word I ever learned in Kurdish so I sometimes forget its a foreign word at all.
Outside the hoop houses sat a dozen cartons of heavy ripe tomatoes warm to the touch.
The women smiled and spoke rapidly; I shrugged my shoulders, making a cartoon face with wide eyes to show I didn’t understand. They laughed and laughed and I pointed to the tomatoes. Finished? I rubbed my palms across each other twice like I was washing my hands.
Tawa, they said, repeating my gesture. Imro tawa. Today, finished.
Imro tawa, I repeated.
They shook their heads. Tawow, they repeated.
Tawow. Like Jwow from Jersey Shore. Well, that’s one word I won’t forget—and if you don’t get the reference, consider yourself lucky. Imro, tawow, Tomorrow? A new day.
The first day in Kurdistan I watched Inception; the second, I drove to Kirkuk. I went to Kirkuk last summer for the same reason, to visit family-of-family, so I didn’t really think anything of going again until my great aunt assured me not to worry; we’d be staying outside the city.
Kirkuk is like Sulaimaniya but hotter, more desolate, more desperate. It’s stranded between badlands and a string of oil fires that light the horizon at night with false sunrise. I don’t know if I’d ever get use to the scenery. Despite nearly burning my house down twice in the past year, the instinct to flee from fire is innate, and I think that will forever be my image of Kirkuk: the gobs of flame undulating on the horizon, smudging the blue-brown sky with a black tassel. They say there is so much oil in Kirkuk that if the fires went out, the earth itself would swell up and burst open with the black crudeness that drives the energy and ambitions of so many alive now.
No mountains scallop the horizons of Kirkuk. No dazzling new skyscrapers pierce the heat-blurred line where desert meets sky, like they do in Suly and Erbil. The city is rimmed by checkpoints more tense than the ones surrounding other cities. The soldiers are in navy blue camo, meaning they are with the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, commanded by coalition forces. These aren’t the Kurdish pesh merga. These soldiers have bigger guns, heavier armor, deeper scars on their faces. They’re reinforced with tanks that rove around beside the street like giant insects.
In Kirkuk you recall the war. You think back to where you were when the bombs went off in Baghdad that one March years ago, exploding in night-vision green all over the TV. You force the knowledge that car bombs and IEDs still rip up these brown and ripped up streets. You wonder about the purpose of more rubble and dust in a city that already drowning in both, but I guess there’s an infinite capacity for more rubble.
Of course these thoughts are only thought while looking out the window of a car spluttering down the pockmarked street lined with pallid palm trees all askew.
Inside a home, the walls and floors a bare blue gray cement that holds a cold and serene comfort in the buzzing heat. You wouldn’t know you were in a highly contested city, the fate of which, some say, the entire country is resting on. You don’t believe all the earlier thoughts about Iraq that filled your skull a few moments ago; your brain never really let them sink in anyways.
You are thankful for the rice and bread and cucumber and tomato and chicken you eat cross legged on the floor with a cold glass of Coca Cola in your hand. You drink tea and laugh across language barriers and you aren’t thinking about guns or disputed territory.
Until the news is on and it shows Kirkuk, a riot in the streets, a neighborhood far from the one you’re in. Until you’re back in the air conditioned safety of the family compound and you log on to your favorite photography site, Boston Globe’s Big Picture, and you see the body of a little girl shattered by a bomb in Kirkuk. That’s how you’re reminded.
Before they evaporate into the heat of the Kurdistan desert, I want to capture the characters I met at the Chillout Hostel and Café in Beyoğlu, Istanbul. The Hostel actually lacks a café or any place to “chill out” at all, except for the narrow lobby wide enough for only one guest to pass at a time. Missing as well are fans, clean bathrooms, and breakfast, something every other hostel I’ve stayed at has provided. Despite these apparent detractors, the place was fully booked and turning away more guests every night. I can only credit this to its location, half a block off Istiklal street, a wide and lively pedestrian street in the heart of the city. Also it’s cheap. Dirt cheap. Rock-bottom cheap. The next cheapest place to spend a night in Istanbul is the park.
So I got what I paid for and gained a lesson in what I could (temporarily) live without. Privacy, breakfast, internet elevators, clean clothes, clean bathrooms— clean anything, for that matter. I could tell you I was thankful for the seven-story climb to my room after a month of inactivity in Diyarbakir’s heat, but in Istanbul’s humidity, even that was mostly untrue.
Yet I would stay there again, not only because I’ve become a bit of a cheapskate while riding on summer grant money, but because of who else was staying there. If the hostel itself taught me the inessentials, my fellow guests reminded me what I can’t do without. New people, new places, and a steady replenishment of that good old thirst for adventure.
Here’s a sampling of the most vivid characters:
Two 20-year-old students from Serbia who bicker like siblings, and despite never having moved in their lives, have lived in five different countries through the course of the Balkan Wars. From them I gleaned not only a detailed history of this conflict, but in addition several salacious Serbian insults as well as the phrase “bübreg yok yok yok,” or “kidney no no no,” fueled by their mothers’ sincere fear of stolen kidneys.
Three men from Paris who, when asked how they came to know each other, will tell the story of their parents (from Iran, Uruguay, and Italy) and 5 other couples leaving Paris years ago to lead their lives on a small boat, a commune of sorts. For a decade they lived there, raising their children together aboard until the arrangement fell apart in disagreements. They have a proclivity for wearing hats and baggy linen pants and act like brothers in such a convincing way that I wasn’t at all surprised when they told me they relearned together at the age of eight how to walk on steady land rather than pitching deck of a boat.
A dissimilar pair of British students, fresh out of prep school and off to prestigious universities in the fall. The first is Afghan, poor, zealous and loquacious. He fled Afghanistan at age 8 and has an extensive reading habit that has informed his knowledge of Istanbul that’s superior to any tour guide or guidebook. For example, all elongated vegetables were forbidden by law to enter the Topkapi palace harem before a thorough chopping. The second is South Korean, wealthy, humble, and quiet. He left South Korea alone at age 15 to pursue an education in the UK, living on his own and cooking his own meals before I even got a driver’s license.
My cousins and I stumbled out of the theater like we were lost. In a sense, I was.
Rauschaba, the black wind, filled the half-empty parking lot, sweeping hot air against our arms and whistling through tall, bare trees that framed the full moon. The neon sign of the theater blinked on and off and the half-empty lot on the outskirts of the city, and the whole scene was painted with the glow of neon and moon and headlights of passing cars. I was getting a bad case of jamais-vu, trying to recall the exact sequence of life events that had dropped me off in this foreign country and trying to make sense of the global history that set into place the construction of a 1960s-era American cinema in Iraqi Kurdistan, year 2010.
I’m not a film critic, and describing the dreams within dreams of Inception would not do justice to the movie. But when the film ended I felt a bit like I felt after finishing Camus’ The Stranger. Detached, displaced, and a shade removed from reality. There’s nothing like being in Northern Iraq to fuel the feeling of being in a dream. Storefronts advertising Happytime Pizza! next to fire-gutted hotels with punched out windows. Hollow silhouettes of half-finished sky scrapers rising above the mountains around the city. The Fuad Family compound, empty and dark except for an orange ember in the shadows, revealed as your eyes adjust to be a cigarette in the hand of a pesh merga crouching in a corner and holding an AK-47.
In 10 hours, I’ll board a plane from Istanbul to Sulaimaniya, Iraq. It’ll be the sixth flight in as many weeks (counting all the layovers). Chicago to Detroit to Amsterdam to Istanbul to Diyarbakir to Istanbul to Sulaimaniya. I’ve been in Istanbul for 10 days and Turkey for 40, but still I feel a little scattered across provinces and countries. There’s a downside of slicing up a short few months across several cities, and it’s the pervasive sense of up-and-go that’s followed me this summer. It’s the feeling I could spend many more days in every place I’ve left, more time than allotted by my carefully planned calendar.
Tonight I had dinner with a close friend from home who’s also studying in Istanbul for the summer. We dined in a narrow, cobblestone alley that grew slick and reflective in a sudden, unseasonal thunderstorm which sent the waiters scrambling to keep food dry, using umbrellas to navigate the downpour between the awnings.
Over a meal of roasted eggplant with yogurt, we picked apart the particular kind of sadness, the sadness of leaving, that catches up with me every time I start to pack my things.
What will I miss? It’s not the worldly feeling of bustling streets and unidentifiable languages. I’ve had my fill, and I’ll be back to this city. I’ll see my friends again. I made good use of my time here. It’s not as if I’ve put down roots here in Istanbul, this sorrow city of empires, but when you’re always on the move, even a sweaty hostel is quick to feel like home.
At 21, the idea itself of home has been blurred. My childhood house sees only snippets of me, short visits on weekends and holidays. I haven’t lived in one place for more than 9 months in three years. I remember the first time the idea of home was modified, when I called my Northwestern dormitory “home” on the phone with my mom freshman year. It felt a bit like betrayal, but it was just the beginning.
These days, home is anywhere I can sleep for a few nights in a row. Six bunk beds crammed into a dirty room the size of my bedroom at school? Qualifies. As did a bed in the house of a family I’d just met living in Diyarbakir; so did the couch I slept on for three weeks in the apartment of a Turkish women who didn’t speak much English. When I get to Kurdistan tomorrow I’ll settle down for four weeks straight. This will be great. And when September comes I’m off again, to the original home for a day or two, and then to a new house in Evanston. After that, who knows. What I’m really homesick for is a concept of home that for me no longer exists.
The 5th floor hostel room was sweaty, pressed full of musk and stagnant air. The paint was peeling and bed sheets dull. But on one bed was a book. Gabrijel Garsija Markes, it read. Sto Godina Samoce.
It matched the book on my bed: Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 100 Years of Solitude.
I flipped through the doppleganger book and found an unfamiliar language. The script was Roman but I could not identify a single noun or preposition. It wasn’t French or Spanish or German or anything remotely in the family. It was wholly foreign, and I was overjoyed. But the names gave it away as the same book I was reading.
In the bustle of Beyoglu, a neighborhood of Istanbul that bustles with a cacophony of foreign faces my eyes linger on, appreciating the variety, where pedestrian streets are packed with street musicians and vendors selling corn and ice cream outside of sleek glass storefronts and hidden night clubs, this same-different book was a comfort. A reminder that behind the facade of our different languages we are more fundamentally alike than different.
The next morning I awoke to my two new roommates, Tijana and Stevan, who joyfully identified the mystery language as romanized Serbian. How strange, I thought, to be in a foreign city, where a dozen Northwestern students happen to be studying and living down the street, and to find myself reading the same book as a Serbian girl on holiday.
The Serbs (or Serbistanians, as they jokingly call themselves) are constantly light-heartedly bickering, telling a story, or making fun of their own cultural stereotype. “In Serbia…” begins many of their sentences. They are instantly lovable, and I’ve spent the last two days with them, wandering the streets of Istanbul, soaking up an impassioned history lesson of the Balkans along with some traditional Serbian insults.
My favorite: “May your mother recognize you in a kebab.” It sounds better in Serbian, though.
While I miss the students, city walls, home cooked food, and blistering countryside of Diyarbakir, Istanbul is an unpredictable and ever-more-colorful story of winding streets and surprising characters, and it’s good to be here.
The streets here are thick not only with heat, but a palette of scents.
Fresh bread peaks in the early hours of the morning, the flat loaves baked in huge ovens throughout the night for the morning crowd. It wafts up on warm drafts of wind through the open windows of my 7th story flat, conjuring thoughts of breakfast as I’m falling asleep.
In the late afternoon, as shops close and bags of garbage pile up in alleys, the sidewalks are scented with overwarmed produce mixed with unidentifiable scraps of uneaten food and other things that were never edible in the first place, all fetid in the heat.
If you wander off the streets with tall buildings, past the government buildings and through the stone city walls to the winding narrow alleys of old houses on a hill, you’ll surely catch the unmistakable drift of burning garbage. The exact contents of what’s being burned seems unimportant because it always smells the same. Acrid like melting plastic. Fecund like manure.
Yesterday I smelled something new, just inside the Urfa Gate of the city walls, on the edge of a large park filled with old men slouched on pieces of ripped cardboard, and further on, wrinkled women and their grown daughters crowded onto blankets, the younger generation in constant motion around them.
Chickens. In Turkish, tavuk. In Kurdish, mreeshk.
Still alive, their legs bound, they jerked their necks sporadically, jiggling their waddles. They wobbled in two lines on the kind of cart pushed all about the streets here, though usually stacked with stone fruits, not birds.
The scent was putrid, like old meat and fresh feces and too many animals living too closely together. The chickens clucked softly and their dirty white feathers ruffled in the breeze. An old man came, and left with two handfuls of bird, two per hand, flopping limply upside down like empty burlap sacks. For one family, it must have been a feast.
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Today we drove through the captivating landscape of Eastern Turkey to a town called Mardin, an ancient city on a hill overlooking an endless desert plain that turns into Syria somewhere on the horizon.
It’s famous for its Arabic architecture and its rich history of many different civilizations. Today it’s a city where Kurds, Turks, Sourians, and Arabs live alongside one another. Our friend Alişan who took us there said it’s an example of coexistence that proves a diverse mix of ethnic and religious groups can live amongst each other in peace.
The city’s ancient history is still very alive: roads so narrow that donkeys collect garbage rather than cars; houses hundreds of years old with stone walls so thick the rooms keep cool even in 120 heat; Arabic script engraved into stone and illegible with wear.
It was nice to see a city other than Diyarbakir in the region, and it was grounding to feel the expansiveness of humanity right here on the same bit of earth I’m living on these days. My favorite part was examining the large coin collection in the museum, marveling at the ancientness of the dates and the ornate designs pressed into rough circles of gold. I imagined what hands they’d passed through and took comfort in how many lives had been lived out on the same dirt beneath my feet.
At the end of the day, we settled down in a sprawling outdoor cafe complete with bean bags and a large projector screen and joined 700,000,000 other people or so across the globe and watched the World Cup final.
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The old city of Diyarbakir is surrounded by a thick stone wall, crumbling where it hasn’t been restored and studded with collapsed beehive domes.
Everyone in the city is quick to inform us they are the largest walls in the world after the Great Wall of China. That happens to be the one fact I knew about the walls before I arrived here, and unfortunately it remains the only thing I know for certain.
No one has offered any other facts, and online sources have wildly convergent answers. Were the walls really built in 3000 BC? All I know for certain is that they are very, very old, and have stood under more than a dozen civilizations.
Last night I took a long walk around the walls in the evening when the heat is a little more bearable.
Almost immediately, my camera drew the attention of some children, who drew the attention of other children, until I was suddenly surrounded by kids, asking for their picture, stroking my hair, pulling me in different directions.
One particularly persistent little boy succeeded in bringing me to his family’s picnic set up, where I was offered tea and encouraged to take more photos. As I got up to continue on my walk the child mob had somehow doubled in size and I actually started to be a little concerned for the safety of the kids who were pulling each other down to get closer to my camera, so I made a speedy escape with only a few followers behind me.
One follower was named Yusuf, a 10-year-old boy on a bike who became my unofficial tour guide/body guard for the next hour. He watched as I climbed steep stone stairs to the top of the walls, biking 20 feet below me and waving occasionally as I marveled at the view.
On the other side of the wall was the Kurdistan I remember from Iraq. Stacks of small plaster houses, some painted in bright pastels, with ladders between levels on the roofs and whole families sitting atop their house in the evening, eating watermelon. I befriended a man and his son who were also taking pictures on the wall, then finally made my way back down and found a small door to the outside of the walls.
In the doorway I encountered the three smallest, dirtiest, happiest children. They seemed to be miniature sized, and were covered in crusted snot, food, and dirt. No one was watching as they bounced in front of my lens and ran after me, giggling (except trusty Yusuf, who seemed rather concerned that I was in the village side and kept pointing towards the door I’d entered from).
I kept trudging along the dirt-and-garbage path until I encountered another family, who were as bewildered as Yusuf about what I was doing there. I stuck around and practiced some Kurdish with them, to their delight, and finally followed their urging and left the way I came.
Even as the sun set, I felt exceedingly safe, even though my bodyguard was a scrawny 10-year-old who didn’t speak any English. His utter concern for my safety– insisting on walking me back home, giving me the phone number for the Polis– was endearing and as I walked away from the walls and Yusuf I felt like I’d learned more about the city walls I could have from the still-mysterious facts.
A white-mustached man and his old wife, wrapped in white, sitting silently. A boy maybe my age with a rough face and a cigarette. A man with his arms on the rail, crowded into a corner by faded laundry left out to dry. A purple tricycle and potted plant and two kids visible through the window, plopped in front of a TV screen. Cherry sheets blowing precariously upwards on a draft, hanging from a clothesline strung below the balcony rail. Three children and their mother each on a tiny child sized chair.
On the horizon, the sun sets, and a giant flag waves, red with a white crescent. The streets below suddenly fill, as they frequently do, with dozens of cars holding their horns, blaring Kurdish music and waving colorful pieces of cloth out their windows. Two men sit in the back of a pickup truck, banging on two giant drums. Summer is a popular time for weddings here, and there are several every night. The noise draws more families, couples, and old men out to this sliver of the city, an intersection where four apartment buildings meet. As it gets darker the balcony dwellers return to their flats. TVs flicker on through half-sheer curtains. More laundry is hung out to dry. Another wedding party passes, a smaller one that doesn’t draw many onlookers, and another night begins in Diyarbakir.
