Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village (33 page)

clay seemed only to give flavor and sweetness to the water. I

drank slowly, savoring each mouthful, until I looked up to see

the girl waiting for me to finish and replace my glass on her

tray.

“Thank you very much,” I said.

“By the Prophet, good aunt, may we trouble you for more

water?” Fadhila asked.

“Ahlan wusahlan,”
the square-faced woman replied, and

more water was brought.

I thanked the woman again. There was a pause. Then she

said to Fadhila, “Why doesn’t your new friend talk very

much?” Fadhila replied that I was American and didn’t speak

Arabic well.

“Don’t they speak Arabic in America?” piped up another

woman.

“No, of course not,” Fadhila said.

“Then what do they speak?”

“They speak English,” answered Fadhila.

The woman said, “Say something for us in English so we

can hear what it sounds like.”

I smiled, remembering my American friends who had made

the same request in reverse, and recited:

“Under

a

spreading

chestnut-tree

The

village

smithy

stands;

The

smith,

a

mighty

man

is

he,

With

large

and

sinewy

hands;

And

the

muscles

of

his

brawny

arms

Are strong as iron bands.”

A spurt of laughter followed my effort. “How funny it

sounds,” said the young woman, but she stopped talking at a

look from the square-faced woman.

“Why did you come to El Nahra?” asked our hostess.

“I came with my husband.”

“Her husband is an effendi; his name is Mr. Bob,”

announced Laila, as though that explained everything.

The girl had returned and set down in front of us a brass

tray containing several spoons and a large soup plate full of

what appeared to be porridge centered with a well of slightly

congealing oil. While we watched, the square-faced woman

rose and sprinkled sugar over the porridge.

“Eat,” she urged. “It is
hareesa
, a special dish for the tenth

of Muharram.”

We began to spoon it up, mixing the oil and sugar together.

I found it not unpleasant, but the plate was enormous and after

five minutes we all stopped eating. The square-faced woman

urged us on. We protested. She urged again. She was so

insistent one might have almost believed that not to eat more

would incur her lifelong displeasure, but I had been around

long enough now to know that this was not necessarily so.

Several other people would eat from what we had left.

“It is simply delicious, good aunt, but we have had

enough,” said Fadhila, and Laila and I echoed her.

The girl took away the tray and brought us a basin of water

and a towel. The damp towel and the tea which followed

revived us enough so that we could converse with enthusiasm

about the spectacular performance we had just witnessed.

“The horses were very beautiful,” I offered.

“Always in Suffra the shabih is performed very well,” said

our hostess.

“Majid rode very well today,” the weaver’s daughter

Hathaya said.

The square-faced woman nodded and smiled and the young

woman who had asked about my English looked gratified.

“Majid is her son,” explained Hathaya, “and is married to

her” (pointing to the younger woman).

“A good boy,” said the proud mother. “He does not forget

me even though he has his own children now. He gives me a

pound every month,”

“Sons should always care well for their mothers,”

murmured the young wife deferentially, and cast her eyes

down.

The weaver’s child was thrust forward. “Good aunt, what

can I do about this?” asked Hathaya, pointing to the baby’s

horrid scabrous rash.

Our hostess took the child in her lap and examined the sores

gently. “A poultice, I think,” she suggested, and described the

ingredients which should go into it.

“You have no children?” she asked, turning to me.

I shook my head and then the women asked if I had any

inside me and where my mother was and how much gold my

husband had given to my father as my bride price.

I explained, or tried to explain, that our customs were

different, and that no bride price was given.

“No bride price?”

“Then what do you furnish your house with?”

“Who pays for your trousseau?”

“Don’t you have
any
gold jewelry?”

I said that the families of the bride and the groom gave

presents to the couple to furnish the house, and that the bride’s

family bought her trousseau and the groom offered gifts of

gold jewelry. Anyway, some did.

“Where is your gold?” they asked eagerly.

“I have left it in America, so it will be safe,” I replied.

This dodge was greeted with a snort from the young wife,

but Fadhila came to my rescue and said that I did have some

small gold earrings and one gold bracelet which was worth,

she thought, about twenty Iraqi pounds. My wedding ring was

also said to be gold, she said, though she personally thought it

was silver.

In all fairness, she added that the schoolteachers had said

my ring was made of white gold, but how much that was

worth she did not know.

“Let’s see,” the women clamored. I took off my ring and

passed it around.

“Gold, that’s not gold,” asserted the young wife.

“That’s what I feel,” agreed Fadhila, “but the

schoolteachers said—”

“Let me see it,” said the square-faced woman. She

examined it carefully while we awaited her verdict. She

weighed it in her hand.

“Well,” she said, “I don’t know. It’s not very heavy. If it
is

white gold, which I doubt, then it’s not very much white gold.

But,” she added kindly, returning it to me, “it’s quite pretty.”

I was both annoyed and amused.

A knock on the door was the signal that the men were

going. We rose, exchanged numerous elaborate farewells and

trooped down the narrow street to the taxi.

“Tomorrow,” Laila said in my ear as we neared El Nahra,

“is the
dafna
, the burying ceremony. My sister and I will come

and get you after lunch.”

A single costumed horseman circled quietly around the

open area near the taxi stand. Laila was pushing through the

watching crowds of tribesmen and townsmen so that we might

have a better view. But when we finally stood near the front,

there was nothing to see except the horse, in green trappings,

the color of Hussein, walking slowly around and around.

Still, there was something strange about the rider in his

medieval dress and sash and headdress, trailing a long white

handkerchief in one hand. And then the horse turned toward

us and we could see the rider’s face, swathed in heavy white

bandages like a mummy or a victim of the horrors of war.

Only his eyes were visible. He continued to walk the horse, in

its trappings, around and around. The crowd was silent.

A young boy in black, carrying a green flag, pushed

through and began to follow the horseman around the ring.

We were still quiet. What were we waiting for?

I was pushed violently from behind and stumbled against

Laila. Amid cries and shouts, the crowd parted to let the

taaziya in their black cut-out shirts and black head scarves

pass. The chains rustled against my shoulder as Laila

whispered, “Here, Beeja,” and pulled me out of the way.

Behind the taaziya, carried by eight men in abas and

kaffiyehs, came the funeral bier, on which a headless body

lay, draped in black velvet.

“It’s not real, Beeja,” hissed Laila at my side. “It’s made of

straw.”

Straw or not, the body had a macabre realism about it, for

the butcher (according to Laila) had supplied a freshly

slaughtered neck of a cow for the occasion and this protruded,

still bloody, from the black velvet.

At the bier’s appearance the crowd wailed, the horseman

began to wipe his eyes with his long white handkerchief, and

the procession, led by the horseman, the taaziya and the boy

with the green flag, headed down the main street of El Nahra.

“Beeja, we’ll go with them,” said Laila.

The procession moved quickly, and from every alley and

side street along the way women and children and more men

streamed, swelling the crowd following the bier out of town.

Groups of women would stop in the middle of the street and

spontaneously began beating their breasts and chanting the

way I had seen them do in the krayas. Little girls stood near

their mothers, imitating the breast beating and trying to keep

on the beat.

We passed the mayor’s house, the jail and the school, and in

a moment were out of the village limits, onto the dusty road

that led to Diwaniya. Where were we going?

“Not far,” said Laila. Her sister Fatima, who had appeared

from nowhere, greeted me, then turned away, pulled her

abayah over her face and emitted a piercing wail.

The horseman turned off the road toward an abandoned

brick kiln. Here, around a slightly raised platform, eight black

flags had been placed at regular intervals. The boy with the

green flag moved until he stood at the head of the platform,

and the bier was set down in front of him.

Reining in his horse, the rider halted at the foot of the

platform. The crowd—so large now that people surrounded

the platform and filled the road we had just left—surged

around him. A few old men circulated among us, distributing

handfuls of straw over the heads of the multitude. One man

had a container of mud which the women took and smeared

over their faces, hands and abayahs.

“No, Rajat, no,” Fatima spoke sharply to her little sister,

who was vigorously applying the mud all over her clean

cotton dress.

“Ya, Hussein, beloved,” shouted a woman in face veil, and

in a frenzy plucked dust and stones from the ground and threw

them over herself. “Hussein. Do you not mourn for Hussein?”

She came closer. “Laila. Beeja.” She stopped in the act of

throwing more dust and raised her veil briefly to smile at us. It

was Amina, Selma’s servant. She quickly let her veil fall and

resumed the dust throwing.

A ceremony was in progress on the platform but we could

hear nothing above the noise of the crowd, which thronged

around, still tossing straw and mud and beating themselves

intermittently. The horseman turned his swathed face to us,

raised the hand with the long handkerchief and spoke. He

sobbed and mopped his eyes, exhorting us, it seemed, and the

people responded with cries and wails. The taaziyas swung

their chains. Laila and I were talking to the sheik’s daughter

Samira and consequently hardly noticed what was happening

before the bier was lifted off the platform and the procession

started out of the burial area and back to town.

“They are taking it to the mosque,” said Laila, and we fell

into line with the crowd behind the sobbing horseman, the boy

with the green flag, and the eight pallbearers bearing the

velvet-draped bier with its grotesque, bloody burden.

But this time we moved slowly, for every few steps the

bearers would let down the bier and the horseman would stop,

wheel and deliver to the crowd another short sermon

punctuated by his own sobs and echoed by the wails of the

women.

At the mosque the whole town seemed to have gathered,

and the noise and confusion were overpowering. People

fought for positions near the door in order to see the ceremony

inside, and we were jostled back and forth until we had

difficulty keeping our balance.

“What is this? Have you no manners? We are near the

mosque,” shouted Fatima in cutting tones.

No one listened.

“Fatima,” Laila cried to her sister. “We must see. Beeja

must see. I will try to get near a window and you see if you

can get someone inside to open it.”

“All right,” said Fatima. She departed, and Laila took my

hand and dragged me until we were against one of the

shuttered windows of the mosque.

In a moment we could see Fatima again at the edge of the

crowd, red-faced but triumphant.

“Don’t move,” she called over the heads of the people who

separated us. “Stay where you are.”

As she elbowed her way back, the shutters of the window

suddenly banged open outward, and an old woman grinned at

us.
“Ahlan wusahlan,”
she said.

At this coup, the people behind pushed us even harder,

mashing us against the wooden bars of the window. Although

we were uncomfortable, we had an excellent view of the

ceremony inside. The sobbing, bandage-faced rider had

spurred his horse into the mosque; still mounted, he stood in

the center of the mosque, alternately exhorting the crowd and

muffling his sobs in the long white handkerchief. By the

niche, which I assumed to be the
minbar
of the mosque,