20 March 2003: The US launched the third Gulf War to remove Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power. On 9 April, US forces entered Baghdad. In a dramatic scene, the statue of Saddam was toppled. Kamal Medhat’s son Meir, now a major-general, arrived in Baghdad with the allied forces.
2004: His son Hussein returned to Baghdad from Tehran, along with Shia political forces and joined the political system. His son Omar also returned to Baghdad from Cairo in opposition to the US occupation and to the whole political process in Iraq.
5 March 2006: Kamal Medhat was kidnapped by an armed group in mysterious circumstances. On 3 April, his body was found near the Jumhuriya Bridge in Baghdad.
This is the brief biography that I prepared before leaving for Baghdad to write his story. I prepared it for one character, although I could have created it for three. A complete report on his life was published under the name of John Barr, the well-known journalist at US Today News, which I had ghost-written. With the escalation of the conflict from 2004 onwards, it became impossible for foreign reporters to get into Baghdad. Newspapers, news agencies and TV and radio stations therefore decided to remove their crews to nearby Arab capitals, such as Amman, Damascus and Beirut. There, an Iraqi reporter would be commissioned to prepare reports that would not be published under his own name but under the name of one of the well-known reporters at the newspaper, news agency or TV station. This was intended to give readers the impression that the agency had a presence in Baghdad despite the dangers and hazards. The ghost writer, who undertook the whole assignment, simply got the money.
At this point we return once more to the game of assumed names and blurred identities. The person who changes his name is that of the tobacconist as he appears in Pessoa’s poem. As for the ghost writer, his existence becomes dependent on that of another. There is, therefore, a basic difference between the ghost writer and the tobacconist, for while the latter assumes three or more personalities, the former lends his identity to another, in all likelihood a Westerner. Here we find what may be termed colonial textuality, which is a kind of absorption or extraction based on the total erasure of another being’s existence and the creation of a vacuum. In order to explain how I constructed my report, I would like first to explain how I came to work as a ghost writer for those agencies.
II Ghost-writing: an imaginary paradise or a journey into the unknown?
In the early nineties, right after the ceasefire that ended the second Gulf War, I was demobbed from the army. I spent the whole summer unemployed, living with my family in our old house in Al-Karradah. I translated various poems from English and French that were never published. During that time I also tried and failed to write a long novel about my experience as a soldier and the dangers I’d faced during the war. In spite of the many drafts and manuscripts that I produced, they all seemed so worthless that I couldn’t find it in myself to continue.
During that period, the orange trees in our garden were in bloom and the olive trees were laden with fruit. From time to time, I went to the Al-Hindiya Club where I swam in the clear water beneath the trellised roof. The blue water under the bright summer sun of Baghdad took my breath away. In those months following the war I didn’t leave Baghdad at all. To make up for this, I used to visit a very rich friend of mine who was in the habit of throwing wild parties in his little house, with dozens of young women and men, and plenty of foreigners, all partying till the morning. I would go home at dawn, tottering drunkenly through the narrow alleys, and climb my stairs high on fun and summer.
I was unaware, at that time, of the huge numbers of people who were dying as a result of torture, poverty or politics. I was totally engrossed in myself, in my friend’s parties, in the women I got to know, and in the priceless stories I wanted to write. By pure chance, however, I was introduced at one of those wild parties to a German activist of Iraqi descent called Katrina Hassoun. She was a reporter for the well-known German-language Swiss newspaper from Zurich, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. She was also working as a researcher for human rights organizations and was a regular visitor to Baghdad in the nineties.
That evening at my friend’s house, we stood together drinking white wine beneath a small green-glassed arched window. The music soared and the river breeze was fresh and soothing while Katrina spoke to me about the demands of her work in Baghdad, and particularly her dealings with the authorities. I wasn’t really listening or showing much interest; I was just pretending to listen, for in those days I couldn’t have cared less about such things. I didn’t even pay attention to the news that was published or broadcast every day, although I was fully aware of the ever-deteriorating political situation in Baghdad. But the most significant turning point in this whole little episode occurred when Katrina Hassoun, whose Arabic wasn’t very good, offered me a paid job as her interpreter. Seeing as I had no work at the time and my novel was at a standstill, I accepted her offer. My objective was, first and foremost, monetary.
At the house that she was renting on Al-Saadoun Street, I met groups of disabled veterans, former communists who’d been jailed and tortured, women who’d lost their husbands and mothers who’d lost their sons either in war or in prison. Their stories hardly made an impression on me. I listened to them as though they’d taken place in some faraway land. None of this was really my concern, for I was only the interpreter. I stood by the window, watching silently until the last visitor left.
One day, on my way back from work, I was arrested by the secret police. They asked me for the names of people who’d visited the activist and what they’d talked about. All of a sudden, I found myself implicated in affairs that I’d tried all my life to steer clear of. My understanding of the situation in my country was fairly poor at the time, for I was too busy drinking wine, smoking a variety of cigarettes and getting to know women of every sort to really bother about people’s suffering. From that point onwards, however, I began to take a real interest in what was going on and wrote press reports for this activist under various pseudonyms. I chose foreign names, naturally, in order to be above suspicion.
It was from Katrina Hassoun that I heard for the first time about Fernando Pessoa’s Tobacco Shop, the poem written by the third of Pessoa’s characters. Katrina even suggested that I use ‘the Tobacconist’ as my pseudonym. As I was beginning to lose all my rights, both moral and financial, she then proposed that I work as a ghost writer, which meant I would write important stories on Iraq to be published under the name of a well-known journalist, while I would be paid handsomely.
For me the distinction between the tobacconist and the ghost writer is clear. Regarding the tobacconist, as Fernando Pessoa has said, two creatures co-exist in the soul of each one of us. The first is real, appearing in our visions and dreams, while the second is false, appearing in our external image, discourses, actions and writings. The ghost writer, in contrast, is a kind of negation, an abstraction. He represents a form of colonial discourse that is based on appropriation and rejection.
Months before she left Baghdad, Katrina Hassoun had introduced me to a correspondent for US Today News, a woman of Lebanese descent called Aida Shahin who became a close friend at the time. She commissioned me to write features that were off-beat, or at least unfamiliar and unusual, and I produced a great number of excellent stories for her. Among these, a piece on the English detective novelist Agatha Christie’s time in Baghdad got noticed. She had visited and lived in the city in the forties and fifties. I tracked down the houses she’d rented and the guest-houses she’d stayed in with her husband, Max Mallowan, the famous archaeologist. I described the streets she’d written about in her novel They Came to Baghdad, the trains she’d ridden on her trips to Aleppo or Turkey and the places of entertainment in the Rusafa neighbourhood where she’d spent long summer evenings. This story encouraged the paper to give me further assignments, particularly about the foreign artists, writers and Orientalists who’d visited Baghdad and about the homes on the Tigris built by those Westerners during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.