Bringing Art To Postwar Iraq

11 Jan 2004
The first day of the circus.

Our first performance was in a hospital in Thawra, which means revolution. Hemce ‘thawrat al-seerq’ is the circus revolution. We went with Fadhil and performed after their play, clowning on stilts, just me and Amber, blowing bubbles and dancing, playing the kazoos and getting the kids to clap and dance along.

Fadhil is into the idea of putting together some kind of pantomime with us, using very little language, for adults more than kids. “We are waiting for the writers to start documenting and discussing the situation here now and the history of the last decades but they are still… “ He put his hands across his mouth. “They are afraid. They are afraid of all the different leaders, the different parties.”

Fadhil kept shaking his head as we clambered into the camp at what used to be the air force barracks. “All this money. All this money. Damn Saddam. He did not feed the people but he had money to build this. And all bombed by the Americans. Why?” Among the opulent rubble were two swimming pools, one indoors, one al fresco, likewise two theatres, their backstage doorways bricked up and a baby crying in the shack created behind one of them.

It would only take about an hour with some shovels to clear the outdoor one enough to fill with people and perform in. The indoor one is a ruin, stripped of everything by people desperate for a living. Four hundred homeless families live here. A baker called Abbas is acknowledged as the head of the camp. Fadhil teased the kids who were leading us to his house, a few rooms in the officers’ quarters. “Whose house is this?” “Abbas.” “Where does Abbas live?” “Here!” “Where is he?” “I don’t know.” “Oh. So whose house is this?” “ABBAS’!”

Abbas was in the bakery, but was into the idea of us coming to do a show, so he sent Mohammed with us to pick a place. The garden was too uneven for stilt walking. Fadhil didn’t fancy the stage dynamics of the concrete space where the boys were playing football. There was another open concrete space with people living in the remains of the buildings at one end, an enclosure built out of metal locker doors sealing one end of the accommodation.

Rubbish heaps bordered the area, where barefoot children were playing. Women came out and complained about the habit people had of dumping rubbish there. Fadhil was excited about the dramatic effect of having us pop up on stilts from behind the locker door contraption and, with his easy charm, asked permission from the woman who lives behind it.

I started doing cartwheels, inciting the kids to try. Some of them picked it up straight away, others just enjoyed flinging themselves about. One of the boys wears a baseball cap to partly conceal burns to his face and a damaged eye from the bombing. His home was burnt when a hospital nearby was hit. He didn’t join in the cartwheeling, but repeatedly shook our hands and thanked us for each cartwheel.

We made a deal – the older kids will clean up the square and we’ll come back and perform. Fadhil and his group will do the play about the tree and we’ll do the circus show and teach them some juggling and stilt walking and play parachute games. The square will be clear of rubbish and broken glass, which will make the women happy. Maybe there will be more dumped, but you never know.

Maybe the act of clearing it themselves gives them some pride in their place, such as it is, some feeling of control, responsibility, ownership, and maybe that means they keep the square as a community space and maybe the kids carry on practising whatever we teach them and maybe it gives them some hope, some fun, something. Maybe.

http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk/feature/display/68/index.php

by Jo
Email: wildthing (at) riseup.net (unverified!)
11 Jan 2004
We took the circus to a shelter for street kids.
Zainab helped me sew a 2 metre long skirt for stilt walking, sitting in the garden waiting for the pick-up to crawl through the traffic to get us. The morning’s show was in a clean, pleasant orphanage, mainly for very young children, with some older girls staying to help look after the babies and toddlers. Fadhil, Eman and Zahra did the cat play, the one with two cats tormenting the chef by hiding all his fruit and playing with his glasses, then starting to blame each other for all the naughtiness, trying to get each other into trouble, before finally agreeing that love is better than war.

Peat did his thing, juggling and making balloon creatures, popping ping pong balls in and out of his mouth; Amber and I did ours, clowning on stilts. Along the way we acquired an accordion player, a Frenchman by the name of Matew, who works for the NGO Premiere Urgence, which supports Fadhil’s group. We got some of the kids up on stilts and they did some juggling. A gang of boys gathered along the railing outside the orphanage to watch and we wanted to give them a go too, sitting them on the car to tie them into the stilts, but it was already half past one and we needed to get to the boys’ shelter.

After the war, the US troops went into Baghdad’s children’s homes. Seeing children in military type uniforms, they assumed them to be prisoners of Saddam and set them free. Terrified, the kids fled to live on the streets and in derelict buildings. In all the chaos, there was no one to protect them from the violence of the street and each other, no one to feed them, no shelter from the searing heat of summer. A friend sent e mails about a horde of them living on the patch of grass near the Palestine Hotel, one of them with a broken leg, in a cast but without crutches.

Later, Iraqi groups and international NGOs started setting up orphanages and taking in kids who were without parents or without one parent, those who were thrown out by their families for various reasons and some whose families were simply too poor to look after them. Children are often referred to as orphans here when they have lost only one parent: if it’s the mother there’s no one to take care of them and if it’s the father there may be no income.

Ahmed, Laith and Saif used to live outside the Palestine, sleeping in the street on a blanket, all huddled underneath. Imad and I taught them a counting game which they loved. The staff of the hotels gave them leftover food sometimes. Journalists and sometimes the soldiers would give them money. Within the fortress surrounding the big hotels was a relatively safe place to sleep. Often they would be moving in slow motion, inane grins plastered over their faces, as they floated over for a hug.

Even as you told them that sniffing glue was no good for them, you wondered whether, in their position, you wouldn’t do exactly the same – fill your head with a solvent that made the ground feel less hard. Yet they couldn’t make the sudden transition from the complete freedom and independence of the street, the solvents they were addicted to and the dirt and the grime, straight into a pristine, sanitised orphanage with strict rules and controls, where they couldn’t smoke and swear and fight.

“Our Home” started taking some of the kids the orphanages wouldn’t or couldn’t. Some of them were turned away because of persistent glue habits or antisocial behaviour, others weren’t ready to live in them. Understandably, a lot of the groups prioritised getting girls off the streets and into safe places, so some of boys fell through the gaps. The crisis centre was something in between, in Bab a-Sherji, close to the basement where several were already sleeping. They took in 20 boys about 6 weeks ago and so far four have moved on to long term accommodation and care.

The cold, ramshackle building had a mezzanine level so there was loads of space for stilt walking. Some of the kids are without shoes because when they were given new ones they sold them. “Then they’d have tantrums because they had no shoes and they’d ask for more and we’d tell them if you sell your shoes then you won’t have any, and we’d leave them a few days without any and then when they get some more they don’t sell them.”

The rules include prohibitions on drugs and violence, enforced with breath tests to detect solvents. Sometimes they’ve kicked one of the kids out for a night for one reason or another. The majority came back the next day and asked to be forgiven. As we drove up Donna said they’d had trouble the night before with a local gang, threatening them and the boys with knives. They said they’d be back at 6.

In fact they were there when we arrived but the kids came racing out to hug us and carry our stuff in, even the stuff we didn’t want carried in and had to bring back out again. Ahmed was there, his eyes clear and bright, free from the glue that he used to sniff outside the Palestine. Now he’s one of the vigilantes, breath testing the other boys to check none of them are using glue.

We started with parachute games, shaking it, looking underneath it, creating a tent by sitting on the edges of it, playing cat and mouse with one boy underneath the chute that everyone else is shaking; another chasing him on top of the billowing cloth. The gang members joined in for a while, some of them, but they were mostly high on drugs and more aggressive than positive, so Peat started juggling and doing his act, silencing the chaotic kids with contact juggling one ball and when he inserted a long stick into Joe the toy clown, balanced the contraption on his nose and played a tune on the penny whistle.

The gang left and we had a short stomp on the stilts before getting the boys up on them. At first only a couple were into it, but then they all wanted to try, tying them onto bare feet. They have to be tied on tightly but they’re all too tough to make any fuss about the severing of their circulation. Hussein was the star, as far as it went. The queue of kids wanting a go was getting longer, but the gang was back making threats. “Yeah, OK, we’ll leave now, but we’ll be back later, and if we see any of these boys on the street we’re going to kill them.”

I promised Mortada and Ahmed with solemn handshakes that we’ll come back and he can do it then. We emptied the circus car of all the gear, packed in all the boys and moved them to the house that they were meant to be moving into for long term accommodation. The managers there had been saying the place wasn’t quite ready for some time, so the emergency forced the issue. “Maybe a few of them will drop out,” Donna said, “but I hope most of them will stay.” We’re going to see them in their new place on Monday and work with them all day.

http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk/feature/display/69/index.php

January 10th - Small People on Stiltsby Jo
11 Jan 2004
The circus in the Childhood Voice youth centre and art school.
Exhausted. Today I tied seven thousand* children to stilts, helped them up, walked them round, fended off the hordes of other kids dancing around my feet and their stilt bottoms and tried to remember which order I promised the next few kids a go in. Peat is a superstar. Luis did funny stuff with a didgeridoo and chains.

(* A small exaggeration for dramatic effect.)

One of the boys in the youth centre in the afternoon joined in with my tumbling show, taking a run up for a cartwheel that ended with a jump, landing in the splits, followed by a somersault, landing on his arse. When we left the kids were begging us to come back tomorrow and if not then when? In the morning we had dozens of kids playing parachute games on the roof of the Childhood Voice school. I think that counts as a good day.

It’s interesting having new people around, because they see all the things I’ve stopped noticing, like bombed buildings. We passed the remnants of the Ministries of Industry and Higher Education – you can see how the latter would be an essential military target – and the others were asking what they were. Strange how soon you would forget that bombed buildings weren’t always the backdrop to your life, which I suppose is why it’s so important to bring childhood back to the lives of kids whose entire existence has been war.

Nadeem came by for breakfast. He quit his job and went to university this year but, he says, he wonders whether there’s any point in being a biology student where there is no lab equipment. A couple of months ago, he says, people were torn between wanting to leave Iraq because of all the difficulties and wanting to stay to rebuild the country. Now, he says, people just want to leave. They’re too depressed, too sad, too tired.

Fadhil showed us the primary school near the Korean embassy, next door to his office. Now officially a target, the embassy is surrounded with concrete walls, sandbags and tanks. He acted out what he was saying, the way he always does. “The children used to come along here skipping and singing. Now they creep along with their eyes on the tanks.”

There are a lot of fighter jets overhead tonight. The local power brokers within the Abu Ghraib area have read the report on the health survey we were doing, decided we weren’t from the CIA and welcomed Hekmet home.

http://www.wildfirejo.org.uk/feature/display/70/index.php