Indigenous Screenings: Piecing the Ahwari Narrative

screenings
Celine Aljamil
Culture and way of life

How can the earth ever forget those who took care of it; those who inhabited it, those who know it deeper than any authority that has taken and taken and taken, barely giving anything back, if at all…

The earth doesn’t forget, but the Iraqi regime believed in 1985 that it could suck the Ahwari marshes dry and burn a film to force its people to forget. 

 

The Marshes by Kassem Hawal

The Marshes, directed and produced by Kassem Hawal in 1976, is a 45-minute short documentary entering the lives of the Ahwari indigenous group in southern Iraq. Ahwaris inhabit the Wetlands, the largest ecosystem of its kind in this region, constituting two-thirds of the area. 

Straight from the archives, the documentary shows the cultural extension of the Sumerian civilization, by more than seven thousand years. The Marshes film is one copy that got away from the hands of tyranny, while the actual lands stand arid now, subjected to desertification, with its people uprooted and its species extinct. The Iraqi government is to blame: this film, once a piece of propaganda, is now a testimony to cultural genocide and erasure.

 

Labor in the Marshlands, Labor in the Factories

You enter through a boat to the calm waters, reed framing the pathway, leading you to pieces of floating land where mudhifs compile (traditional reed houses). The people are wearing dresses, some colorful others black, with cloth framing their faces and trailing their backs. They pour tea, cut reed, surround their children. They carry boats, fix them, trade with them and fish. Clothes hang to dry, hands row boats, and palms toss dough to bake. 

The film unfolds through chapters, as if from a Sumerian storybook, transitioning with excerpts that lead you through diverse aspects of Ahwari life: from the roles and experiences of women and social relationships to modes of production and construction, healthcare, and education.1

As if juxtaposed, the farmers’ day to day is interjected with colonial attempts of modernization. A fisherman sitting on his boat is asked about his family members, the shot cuts to his son, who’s been working for 6 years at the sugar factory. Shots go back and forth between the father and the son, the latter answering for his salary, while the man of the house blanks out, giving half baked answers about income. This could be read as a generational divide over means of income and modes of labor.

Away from the marshlands, we are invited into a university campus in Al Basra, a city in Iraq, through the recollections of a mother, who, standing next to her reed house shares that “we are peasants, my sons are in the army as soldiers, and they pay for their brother’s education.” While the marshlands, away from the cities, display a level of autonomy and independence, the regime favors their portrayal as an area where savages inhabit, as if they need social integration. Through the younger generation, the regime disseminates its propaganda, inviting them to leave the marshlands for a city life, where modernity lures. This is to justify the actions of the Iraqi regime in draining the swamps’ resources and the dislocation of its people. 2

Ahwari people are referred to as Madan, a derogatory term that loosely translates to “dweller in the fields.” Their agricultural practices are considered uncivil, with western notions of civilization becoming synonymous with morality, and wilderness considered as barbaric. 

The truth is that Ahwari people were thriving through self sufficiency, their practices a testament to the greatness and the attuning of Sumerian civilization to nature.  

 

Erasure and Cinema

In 1991, following the uprising against Saddam’s Ba’ath party, the Iraqi minister of foreign affairs Tariq Aziz ordered every copy—both positive and negative—of “The Marshes” to be burned.

This is how The Marshes documentary transformed from a propaganda piece to a testimony and an archive. At the time when the documentary was filmed, it juxtaposed “modern” forms of labor (industrialization) with “outdated” agricultural practices, feeding into the Iraqi regime’s favored image. However, over time, with the threat of erasure, and the desertification of the marshes, it is rich to see the Ahwari people back in the wetlands. 

The Marshes is a documentary about several betrayals: about national development, colonialism, sociocultural transformation, and forced displacement. Though, Ahwari youth know of the documentary through the spread of dancing snippets on their mobile phones, celebrating cultural joy; the documentary ends with a wedding scene and a rhythmic “he will not die once he announces his wedding.” Culture lives on when passed through and embodied. 

At the beginning of the documentary, a confused bibi (old woman) addresses the camera: “you come everyday to photograph us, as if our lives are like the movies. We are the marsh people; we live miserable lives. You receive large salaries because of our tragedy.”

It’s as if Kassem Hawal leaves this disclaimer at the start so that us viewers can deconstruct this tragedy, so that we can see more life than stagnant wetlands; the Ahwari people are not stuck in their ways of life, we are stuck under colonial capitalist structures, how have we not achieved liberation yet? When will we go back to the land for enlightenment? 

 

Bashu, The Little Stranger by Bahram Beyzai

“The overwhelming majority of films set in Iraq – including documentary and fiction films since 1945 – have centered squarely on male protagonists, perspectives and issues and lack complex female characters. Many deal in some way with themes of war, politics or military service framed as the domain of men.”—Mona Damluji (2018).3

Bashu, The Little Stranger by Bahram Beyzai is a 160min drama that takes the viewer on the sweet budding relationship between a Gilak woman and an Afro-Iranian child. The Gilak woman, Nai, is a bold, self assured, beautiful, grounded, skillful woman, tending to her land, taking care of the house and her children; Bashu finds her, and she becomes his mother. 

Nai welcomes Bashu like motherland welcomes its lost children. Bashu, dark skinned, speaks Arabic and Persian, but he represents the mix of indigenous ethnicities. The story unfolds in the Northern part of Iran, as Bashu was fleeing the events of the Iran-Iraq war. Traumatized, he often spirals and dwells in his past, remembering his family that passed away, leaving him orphaned. But welcoming him into a new family, Nai and her two children take him in. 

Bashu and Nai do not understand each other with words, but develop a codependency filled with lessons on love, care, and alienation. 

Throughout the film, we see Nai circle the sky with her eyes tracing the flow of the birds, cooing, mimicking their sounds, speaking to them as an extension of herself. In her expression, and in the final scene of the film, she chases off a troublesome bore with wild sounds. The family joins, in a territorial display of community and oneness. 

Language here is relational: Bashu and Nai exchange names of objects at first, approximating a geishe (doll) to an aroos. Then they start speaking to the wild, and to the land that embraces them. 

 

Labor of Love

Because of his dark skin, when Bashu enters Nai’s sphere, his presence is conditional. Nai’s neighbors and relatives ask her to put him to work, or else he’s leeching off her. Nai doesn’t listen, she bathes Bashu like she does her kids, she clothes him and gives him money to spend. Bashu picks up on Nai’s habits of work, and gradually becomes a helping hand. Although visions of his mom haunt him, he slowly leans into Nai’s care. 

We see Bashu live under her matriarchy, although he is addressed as the man of the house, in the letters Nai sends her husband, a war veteran. Another condition for Bashu to be accepted is for him to take on a form of labor, and the responsibilities of the house. 

Nai falls sick, and although her community gathers at her house often, with tea and gossip; at this point, we see Nai alienated. Bashu runs around to maintain her responsibilities as she rests. He stays on the lookout at night, mimics the sounds she makes to communicate with animals (and ward them off), and dresses and clothes the children.

Bashu, The Little Stranger, is an ode to communal love, how we can take part in eachother’s social spheres in the way we add to them, through self sufficiency, giving to the land, respecting each other’s cultural differences, and extending ourselves. This drama is a rebellion to structures that count on cultural erasure and the dismantlement of indigenous groups for the sake of “social integration.” 

 

Piecing Narratives

"AT LAST, WE BECOME A FILM.” This is how Kassem Hawal ends his documentary, The Marshes (1976).

If The Marshes is considered an important archival piece, depicting the Ahwari people’s wetlands and way of life, could Bashu, the Little Stranger, do just as good of a job in archiving the politics of emotionality? 

Where a documentary attempts to grab at society’s threads, a drama imbues new meanings. The deconstruction is in the details, as Maysoon Pachachi, an Iraqi filmmaker describes:

“I think that it’s possible in a fiction to go into greater depth. I think in a documentary…which is more observational, you’re mostly on the surface of things. Quite deep things can come out, but it’s not a kind of depth you can really go into as well as in writing a drama…It’s different, what documentary does.” 4

Could we piece together emotional narratives to restructure collective memory? Especially at the cost of erasure, and with the weight of loss, perhaps defying structures of hate: maybe Nai’s care for Bashu is a radical form of resistance. 

In Sara Ahmed’s affective economy, she describes: “Emotions can lead to collective politics and social alliances; this social power is exhibited through politics and social movement, even to create national identities.”5