The T-Walls of Baghdad

A T-wall is a concrete block over three meters high, in the shape of an inverted ‘T’. It serves as a protection against explosions, indirect fire, and it’s used for regulation of movement.  

A large part of Iraq is constructed and padded now with T-walls. A mobile wall, made for the games of the masters of fire. They lord over the concrete, and the concrete lords over the flesh.

The bars at the top of a T-wall block enable it to be lifted and moved around like a Lego-cube. Whole cities can be made in this way in the middle of a desert; smaller cities can be piled up within larger ones. А grave cam be made of T-walls, or a shelter. Concrete. Unfortunate matter for both life and death. Baghdad is a labyrinth of T-walls constructed by the masters of murders and the masters of survival.

The Mansoor Compound, a relatively quiet place, is such a city within the city of Baghdad, outside the Green Zone. Ten months of Mansoor life by now are marked by T-walls. The gaze shipwrecks onto the concrete barriers, these ugly and towering monuments of the trouble we brought, we found, we kindled and unleashed.

To open the eyes wide one has to raise the gaze above the concrete edges, where the blazing sky is seamed with green, rustling embroidery of palm leaves. The sun batters the skin with heavy mauls. The heat is a murder and the dreamy people move slowly, as if crushed by an invisible, heavy veil. They are persistently kind, nevertheless.

I love heat. We laugh with the Iraqi friends when I seek the sun on the terrace in front of the offices, while they seek shade, their women longing for paler tan. Friends. We share the same sense of black humor and shameless political incorrectness.

While we lightly chat and they fill me in on the newest office gossip, the view from the terrace is barricaded by T-walls. A fierce accusation of the human passion to murder each other. Is there anything else in nature that has plagued humanity more than the people themselves? People with faces, like you and me, like the neighbor and the foreigner.

I know. I am human too. A part of this collective suicide and rebirth. Like a T-wall, I observe without a blink. Horrendous, speechless witnessing. And then the hand moves and I start to exist again as part of the human urge opposing destruction. The fragile and suspicious care for the other, the instinct to be close to those who suffer, perhaps to help somehow, in any manner, any way, it doesn’t matter, just to be there, with them, somehow.

To see the other from inside. To see myself from inside. To see and participate in the great and downcast human drama.

The Irony of Iraq

The irony lies in the fact that we are so alike, so kindred. This could have happened to any of us.

Each one of us, in different circumstances, or in an alternative life, could accept to be self-interested and raving tyrant, a privileged power-maniac, a cruel instrument of devastation, to be thirsting or fighting, a widow or a killer, a beggar or a fanatic, a cunning robber or a silent soldier, a prisoner or a headman, swerving or accepting, a powerless witness or an indifferent eloper, a hidden politician or a vulnerable spokesman, a rebel or a defender, brave or reasonable, excelling or indecisive, proud or invisible, dead or alive.

These are all interchangeable roles that the shackles of circumstances bring forth from within us. Both mortal and lethal roles which, once brought forth, look like the only possible choice in the given circumstances. From the actor’s perspective, the chosen role seems to be a fruit of necessity and choicelessness.... The ancient illusions of necessity, freedom and choice.

Some say that everyone opens their life to these possibilities, and that the role we choose to play, no matter how naked, sad, painful, or proud, is a decision…. and that this decision can change.

But how many of us can choose to be other than one's self?

In the end, is survival an overrated achievement?

The bottom line is that the bullet puts an end to all such questions, follies and illusions.

 Our Irony

It’s ironic that we are hirelings of the left hand, while the right hand wracked chaos. Both, foreigners and locals equally. Now the Iraqis destroy and build, build and destroy. Sunni and Shia, Arabs and Kurds, murder each other massively. Nevertheless, there is an end to all evil. This people, so similar to other peoples, made of beauties and thugs, cowards and heroes, victims and abusers. Often, it’s hard to tell the difference between them.

We live under the shade of the T-walls, and it’s not clear who the fortress protects from whom: those inside or those outside. It is far from clear. One meets all kinds of people here, foreign and Iraqi.

The T-walls and the guards’ arms lined up along them are a sign of both danger and security. I walk among them every day. Every time with a shiver and in wonder. After a few months of walking and wondering, the T-walls inhabit me.

What the eyes see long enough becomes part of the eyes. It shapes the mind. I become a person with a focused prison inside, because of convictions, adventure and salary.

As every prison and every fort, the walls become a home. A narrowed vision of the world, a small and regulated space where one’s existence is justified by the ID-cards of the mass mechanism of survival in conflict zones.

Blessed are the ones marked with ID cards around their necks. The irony is killing. The sense of humor saves the day. Before going on leave, we banter: What would we do outside without T-walls? Would we be able to fall asleep? Shouldn’t we take a t-wall along, a tiny-winy t-wall, to keep it in the pocket, to hide it under the pillow, to sleep comforted and safe?

Some smartheads in the Green Zone had already outsmarted us: they are selling little plastic t-walls as souvenirs. The perversity of the idea outdoes all expectations. The T-walls have become a symptom of a collective illness.

Probably, to anyone who hasn’t been there this isn’t funny but is rather morbid. I can’t help it. I can’t help it.

The Walls Home and Inside

There are invisible T-walls home, deployed along the streets of Skopje. They limit the insanity, they rise tall in people’s eyes, the fear of full being, the home limited by sight, the restraint in the bodies, the prohibitions and the shame. The terror of being alone and totally open to the other.

Fear of solitude builds walls. Infinite space makes us feel so small and alone.

Fear of the others builds walls. The others can harm us or see us for what we are really inside.

And yet we cannot breathe without open space, we cannot love without another.

This insanity can be survived only by falling in love with one’s own prison. Or, by the grand madness of total and final facing and exposing oneself.

Home. If we are lucky, we learn to love what we have to see every day, what we have to live with. The habits, the comfort, the safe, the familiar – out of hundreds of Skopje streets I know only a few and there I walk. In the gloomy days, even the familiar seems hostile. In the mild days, it looks like love, like recognition and belonging. It looks like freedom and right to exist. Home.

When I found myself growing to love the T-walls of Mansoor, when I started calling them “home” with suspicious tenderness, I knew that something began to go wrong inside me. But I stayed a long while and then I returned. To unweave this insanity knot by knot now. It wasn’t a heroic feat.

And still, the seed hides into the soil, the embryo in the womb, for something unknown to be born. The core is sheltered so that the following day it can live what the heart has dreamt of in the secret darkness.

Scarlet Clouds

A cloud of sand dust invades the air. At sunset, the world becomes bloodlike somber to suffocation. The wind dies down, the palm leaves lie drained. Everything is wrapped up in a mysterious purple cloak. The sounds nestle in the dust. No one dares raise a voice. The tension beats from the air and we all quietly, focused, listen to that pulse inside. Our secret thoughts shy away from looking into each other’s eyes.

Everything is waiting for something grand to happen. It never arrives. The wind comes and blows away the dust cloud. Golden sky, green palm trees, we may laugh again now, although somewhat half-heartedly, as if we carry a new hidden sin on our soul.

Who knows what revelation or death passed us by?

October 17, The Great Speed

Nearly two months in Baghdad, but they seem like two million seconds each one in its own sphere of possibilities, choices and worlds. A string of decisions and changes – out of the arrow of time they make a heavy tree, pregnant with boughs, laden with leaves and fruits. Which one of the branches becomes the single line we call ‘our life’ later, meaning ‘remembrance,’ meaning only one out of all possible worlds?

Abundance in the ocean of temporality. A miracle of events. Real, undeniable. Stretched to explosion. Life here is eventfulness to exhaustion.

Here we do not stand aside and choose what from the world will touch us: here events overcome us, rip us apart and break us down to the core. They plunder the being and we mould ourselves against the world, while trying so hard to mould the world in our shape.

The heart draws itself out of a human shape and lets itself go into complex confluences. Freedom of openness rented apart, terrifying and grand.

Blasts: they reshape, they merge. Laughing together, the thin lines of connectedness. A day made of beings flowing into each other through common experiences. A night of mending the tears on the being.

The great speed of the day, of the spirit, but there is no space for sorrow or balm.

Stop, Ana. Calm down. This too shall pass. It’ll melt away and vanish into colorful memory. A vitrage hurled into the stormy shaft of the past. I too will vanish in other people’s memories, a glass painting, unknown outside the nailed time, in different colour and shape for each and everyone. Calm down, Ana. This is not reality.
…
How can I stop? How can I look into my feet and see that I stand still in the shallows of some river in a cloudless and moonless night? How my heart is howling of exhaustion, seeking the moon to throw a veil over its head and whisper secretly under it, ‘I am tired.’

This body of strained sinews, always worn out, always ready to leap forward.

This mountain of thoughts full of real bodies, this thunder-like nightly pondering.

December 19, Shootouts in Baghdad

Shots in the night: a weeding or a murder? Will it ever be quiet? Will I ever be quiet?

December 26, Walk Away

When a story has ended, walk away. Even though the heart still yearns to say one more remorseful word, to pick up the warm yarn once more for the sake of a heart that remembers for ever. It’s time to wave off the crusted heart’s remains, turn your back to its canyons and peaks, and walk away.

Even though this ancient world seems yarn-less and cold, learn to walk away.

Do not say what you’ve said again, do not seek a new answer in the old eyes, fell away the burden, fell away. We must learn to walk away.

The wholesome silence will bless the ones left behind. Walk away.

Were they real or imaginary, those trapped in our story? They were glorious, nevertheless.

February, Walled-in

The walls shape us. They etch their way into the senses and the thoughts.

The walls demarcate the end of freedom and the beginning of survival. A friendship with the concrete with which we exchange a piece of the soul:

“Good morning, wall!” and “Good night, friend….”

I return home unprepared. Restless without the walls. I touch them inside me. The safety of the corridor leading from nightmare to daymare. They measure the discord between what awaits in front and behind me, and this being walking in between.

Weariness lies heavy in my feet, my fingers, my forehead. Where did I go wrong? Which earthly road has taken me prisoner?

What has become of me? This overstrained wall, this nervous ruin, this unkindly, lonely guide to nowhere…

April 21, Home Again

Finally home. My love is in the room next door; asleep, fair haired, lean and kind. This home is quiet, it’s quiet inside from hours of sleep. Everything is silenced, both inside and out, in the fingertips, in the tip of the nose, at the edge of the eyelashes, under the glassed clouds, in the faceless windows.

A bit of the sun will scatter holy ember over this soft comfort and everything will spring to its feet for a dance.

The fingertips will clumsily roll, the nose will open the nostrils, the hair will leap into the wide, the eyes will twinkle under the eyelashes. We shall love each other all, and who’s not dancing is not with us.

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