Read Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village Online
Authors: Elizabeth Warnock Fernea
Tags: #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #General
has come a long way in this awful dust and is tired? Bring her
inside.” She emerged, smiling all over her wrinkled face, the
three blue tattoo dots still clear in the cleft of her chin. “Come,
my dear,” she said, taking me by the arm and leading me
through the court.
I sat down in Haji Hamid’s bedroom, the same pink satin
bedspread covering the gilt four-poster, the neatly folded
bedding piled to the ceiling, the oil painting of the mosque in
sunlight, photographs of Sheik Hamid and Sheik Abdul Emir,
and of King Feisal I on horseback, with the Iraqi flags crossed
above him. It seemed very pleasant and very familiar.
“She did come back,” repeated Laila.
“Well, we thought you’d
want
to come back,” Kulthum
said, “but we knew you couldn’t come unless Mr. Bob
brought you, so we couldn’t be sure.”
Selma bustled in out of breath and wrung my hand
violently. She was very pregnant and very fat; the seams of
her ordinarily loose dress appeared to be at bursting point.
“See how big Selma is! Her baby should be enormous!”
Medina had followed Selma into the room and rapped her
smartly on the behind. The company laughed delightedly and
Selma turned and tweaked Medina’s abayah.
“Have some respect for pregnant women,” she said lightly.
“You have some respect, my girl,” retorted Medina, “for
old age. I’m so old I can say anything I want. Ah me, but I’m
tired, I have to admit it.” She advanced into the room, erect
and graceful still, carrying herself so that her rusty black
garments billowed behind her like a court train. She sat down
and took my hand. Hers was bony and warm. “How are you,
Beeja?” she asked.
“Ya Selma,” she called, “ya wife of Sheik Hamid,”
inflecting her words in such a way that one could not help but
laugh, “do you think the house of your illustrious husband is
bounteous enough to offer me a cigarette?” Selma threw one
to her, took one herself and sat down with us.
“Where’s Sherifa?” I asked.
“She’ll be coming as soon as she’s milked the cow. She
knows you’re here.”
“Tea, Amina,” said Selma, “and then, Beeja, we’ll show
you where you’re to sleep.”
Amina brought a huge tray. The little glasses in their china
saucers clinked and tinkled as we stirred the sugar.
“I’m very glad to be back,” I said.
After tea the group escorted me to my quarters, the
storeroom just off Selma’s court which had once been
Bahiga’s bedroom, when she was still bearing children for
Haji. Clean mats covered the floor, and furniture had been
moved in, a bed and a cupboard, a washstand, a table and an
armchair. Samira walked around the room, touching each
piece of furniture and telling me where it came from, while
the company in admiration kept exclaiming “Al-lah!” Laila
pointed out that it was our old bed they had brought in for me.
“So you’ll be more comfortable,” explained Kulthum.
“Nour thought of the table, because he knows you write letters
and do things like that. Samira and I brought the minor, and
Selma said they should bring the armchair, too.” She turned to
me expectantly.
For a moment I did not know what to say. I was moved by
the women’s thoughtfulness and concern for my comfort. I
was also struck, for some reason, by the armchair. How I had
fought, long ago, to sit on the floor with the women rather
than in that lonely armchair in Haji’s room. My friends, in
trying to provide for my needs, had again pointed up the basic
dissimilarities in habits which would always exist between us.
But now it no longer mattered. I felt they had prepared the
room and made it comfortable for me out of mutual respect
and affection, and beside that reality, our differences seemed
unimportant.
My hesitation was misinterpreted. Selma said anxiously,
“What’s wrong? Is there something we’ve forgotten?”
“Oh no, it’s lovely, thank you all.” I paused, and decided to
blurt it out. “I didn’t say anything because I couldn’t.”
Blank faces greeted me.
Oh no, I thought, let us not have our communications break
down now. I rushed on, “I mean I’m so glad to be with you
again that I couldn’t speak for a moment.”
Still no comprehension. I began to feel quite desperate as I
searched the faces of my friends. It was Selma, as she had
done so many times before, who saved me. She had narrowed
her eyes suddenly and I saw that she had grasped the sense of
what I was trying to say. She spoke quickly to the women and
they turned back to me smiling.
“Ahlan wusahlan,”
they said.
“Ahlan. Ahlan.”
A sudden gust of wind whipped the door open and
distributed a swirl of sand about the room. The women rushed
to slam the door shut. “You’ll be much more comfortable than
Mr. Bob,” Laila pointed out. “The mudhif is full of dust.” She
settled herself with the other women beside me on the mat-
covered floor. Shut in from the storm, we felt safe and well
tended.
“Shlonich
, Beeja, how are you?” asked Alwiyah.
“Well, thanks be to God. And how are you?”
“Well, thanks be to God.”
“I’m afraid I cause trouble by my presence,” I offered.
“No, no, we are honored to have you visit us,” returned
Alwiyah.
“Shlonich
, Beeja?” asked Samira, and so we went,
reestablishing our relationship in the formal phrases of custom
and ceremony.
“Do you remember the bird that hit you in the head?” Laila
giggled.
I nodded.
“Has Mr. Bob seen any birds like that in Baghdad?”
Laila watched me, winking and nodding at the other
women.
“Not yet,” I smiled, “but maybe there are some there, who
knows? Have you seen any here, Laila?”
Laila was taken by surprise. “Who, me? I’m not even
married.” The women whooped. Laila looked at first
disconcerted, but gradually her expression changed to one of
pleasure, and she sat nodding happily, presumably, I thought,
in satisfaction at my good performance.
Nothing had changed. I might never have been away. We
talked, as we had talked before, of children and marriage, of
cooking, of things that had happened while I had been gone;
they were gradually easing me back into my old life here.
I was awakened by the sound of children laughing. At first I
couldn’t imagine where I was—gray mud walls high around
me, unfamiliar quilts and embroidered sheets, closed wooden
shutters admitting thin bars of daylight through the cracks.
Then I remembered and rose, a muddy taste in my mouth from
the dust that had sifted in during the night, under the door and
through cracks in the shutters and walls. The smell of it was
still thick in my closed room. Bob had probably had a
miserable night lying in the near-open in the mudhif.
It was the first day of the feast. When I opened my door, the
wind had died and the sun was shining weakly through the
dust that still drifted gently in the air. In the court all of the
children of the compound were frolicking, gay in their new
clothes. A crowd had gathered around a baby gazelle which
one of the boys was coaxing to drink from a bottle; Selma’s
son Feisal picked up the milk-white kid and brought it over.
He set it down on its gangly legs and the kid’s eyes, brown
and much too big for its small pointed face, focused
uncertainly on me.
“Abdulla found it in the bush,” Feisal said.
“Its mother was dead,” explained Abbas. “Abdulla heard
the baby crying when he was out hunting.”
Amina advanced with a tray. “Out of the way, out of the
way,” she hollered at the children. “Do you want me to slop
the Sitt’s breakfast tea?”
Grinning, she set the tray on the wooden table, wiped her
hands on her dusty abayah and held them out to me.
“Ayyamak sa’ida
, Beeja,” she said.
“Ayyamak sa’ida!”
More of my housemates were entering
the room, dropping their clogs on the doorstep as they came
forward to shake hands for the feast.
Selma said,
“Enshallah walad
, Beeja [God willing, you will
have a boy].”
“Do, Beeja,” urged Laila. “After all, you’ve been married
two years now. You don’t want Mr. Bob to divorce you, do
you?”
“When she gets back to America and is with her mother,
then she’ll have a boy,
enshallah,”
pronounced Kulthum. She
patted my knee.
To turn the attention away from myself, I said, “Selma, it is
you we’re thinking about.
Enshallah
you will have a boy.”
“It’ll be another girl,” put in Selma quickly. “Just because
Haji especially wants a boy this time.”
“No, no Selma, don’t talk like that,” the women shouted.
Selma raised her heavy bulk from the floor with some
difficulty. “Time to get back to work,” she reminded the
group.
Soon the women were busy with preparations for the
gigantic noon meal to be served in the mudhif. The butcher
had come and gone while I slept. Kulthum sat in her old place,
cutting up the slippery meat while the younger daughters
pared vegetables and the children ran errands between the
compound and the mudhif. Laila and I went up on the roof
again to watch the gathering of the tribesmen. I could see Bob,
looking a bit rumpled from his night in the mudhif, standing
with Sheik Hamid and Nour. The men of the El Eshadda
circled in the figures of the hosa, paused to chant their poems
of praise to the sheik and to the tribe and raised their rifles for
a salute. The shots rang out in the hot, dusty air. In a few
minutes we were called down to help load the trays, and then
we returned to the roof to watch the procession to the mudhif,
men balancing on their heads the heavy trays of rice, meat,
stew—enough food for two hundred people.
The next day I lunched at Moussa’s house and here I felt
even more at home, slipping along the dark passageway into
the open court where the sisters had assembled to greet me. I
turned toward the sewing room, where we had sat so many
times together, but the girls ushered me into their mother’s
sitting room where Um Fatima herself waited to lead me to a
pillow.
After lunch, Um Fatima conveyed the momentous news that
Basima would enter the girls’ secondary school in Diwaniya
the following autumn. She would live with a cousin of her
father’s and come home weekends.
“That’s wonderful,” I said sincerely. “In a few years she’ll
be a teacher like Sitt Aziza, maybe even a principal.”
“Enshallah,”
said Basima modestly, but I could tell by the
look in her eyes that she agreed with me.
“Our father says that Rajat will go too, when she finishes
primary school here,” added Fatima. The shy Rajat dropped
her head in embarrassment.
“Sitt Aziza said Rajat is doing very well in her studies,” put
in Sanaa. Rajat dropped her head even lower.
We discussed Basima’s fall wardrobe. Laila was making
her three dresses.
“That won’t be nearly enough,” said Basima. “I’ve heard
that the girls in Diwaniya wear a different dress every day. I
can’t buy that many, but I must have at least five, and a
jacket.” She was quite self-important about it, and her mother
spoke sharply.
“You are lucky to go to school at all, Basima,” she said,
“and you’ll be lucky to have one dress, let alone three.”
This seemed a good moment to bring out the small presents
I had bought in Baghdad—perfume, cloth, sweets—something
expected from anyone coming home from a trip.
After tea I professed weariness, but Laila would not listen.
“You can sleep in America,” she said. “Let’s not waste these
days. This afternoon we are going to see Salima. The teachers
are in Diwaniya for the feast, but I promised Salima we’d
come.”
So went the feast. Next day we visited Sherifa and Medina
and Fadhila, Mohammed sitting with us and smiling
constantly while we drank lemon tea. “Send me a charm from
America so I can have a child, Beeja,” said Fadhila, “and so
Sherifa can marry again.” From Mohammed’s house we went
on to Ali’s and that afternoon Hussein took me down the canal
to his clan settlement. Sajjida was pregnant again.
“Enshallah
walad,”
I offered.
“Enshallah,”
she rejoined. The little girls
looked on solemnly. In the evenings the women came to my
room in Haji’s compound, and I spent all the money in my
purse on cigarettes and pumpkin seeds. Amina brewed tea
with cloves. One morning a very old woman I had never seen
before entered the room.
“Ayyamak sa’ida,”
she said in a
cracked voice. I rose to greet her in return and added, almost
without thinking,
“Enshallah hejjiya
[God willing you will
make the pilgrimage].”
The old lady settled herself, groaning and grunting with the
effort, on the floor, and then peered at me. “How long have