CAIRO, 17 May 2003 — An Arab woman in black robes sits on a curbstone outside a cemetery, wailing loudly and wiping tears from her eyes.
She looks overwhelmed by grief. In fact, she is a professional mourner, hired by a photographer who videotaped her wailing and exhibited it at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo.
“It’s a fake expression of sorrow,” explained photographer Hala Elkoussy, who thought it represented the fleeting impact of the Iraqi war on Egyptians. “We went out and did a few demonstrations ... and then it’s gone, it’s old news.”
In poems, cartoons and satirical theater, Arab artists and writers have rushed to express themselves about a war that seems to have delivered the biggest shock to their world since Israel defeated three Arab armies in 1967. “I believe the impact (on writers) will be even bigger than the impact of 1967,” said Gamal Al-Ghitany, an author and editor of the weekly Akhbar Al-Adab, or Literary News.
Playwright Mohamed Salmawy was inspired by a distraught woman in Baghdad he saw on television who screamed at the cameras, “Arabs, where are you?” He wrote a poem published in the leading newspaper Al-Ahram that referred to US soldiers stomping on Iraq while the wealthy of Cairo invited friends to watch the war on satellite television. He wrote:
Forgive us, Baghdad, For not being brave.
Forgive, We opted for safety.
Salmawy, who edits the French edition of Al-Ahram, said the poem reflects Egyptians’ guilt over the war. “Egyptians have this feeling that whatever happens in an Arab country concerns them. And that if an Arab country is in danger, the rest of the Arabs should come to its rescue,” he said.
Most of these works present the Arab view of the war: US President George W. Bush vs. Iraq, a fellow Arab country, rather than the Washington and London version of Western allies vs. the dictator Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.
Ali Fekry drew a cartoon published in Egypt’s Caricature magazine that portrayed Bush as a muscular thug, complete with spiked club and leather armband, folding his arms in grim resolution over barrels of oil labeled “Iraq.”
Fekry and 24 colleagues felt so strongly about the war that when the government gave rare permission for a demonstration, they enlarged their best cartoons and carried them on wooden placards in the protest outside Al-Azhar Mosque.
Americans would regard many of the cartoons as vicious attacks on Bush. One depicted the American president as a butcher about to slaughter an Arab child. But there was some subtlety — Mustafa Hussein of Akhbar newspaper drew the Statue of Liberty naked “to say America has stripped itself of its values,” he told the Associated Press.
The Egyptian poet Hoda Hussein captured the widespread feeling of Arab impotence at being unable to prevent the war, referring to a story in the Qur’an about a crow that watched Cain kill Abel, and then showed him how to bury his brother. It is titled “The New Crows”:
We are the new crows, We watch all these disasters with no effective response.
Our role comes later,
When the war ends, We will teach the survivors how to bury cadavers.
Arabs were shocked on April 9 when — after numerous reports of intensifying resistance — Iraqi troops deserted their posts and American soldiers overran Baghdad.
Jordanian playwright Hisham Yanis wrote a satire about the hopes, jokes and disillusionment of the war. Yanis said his “Goodbye Saddam, Welcome Infidels,” to open in Amman later this month, portrays Arabs who knew Iraq could not win the war, but were bitterly disappointed when the Iraqis failed to mount a respectable defense.
Other cartoons and poems echoed that theme, indicating Arabs found Iraq’s defeat more upsetting than the defeat of 1967 or the establishment of Israel in 1948.
One amateur poet, Mohammed El-Shahawy, turned his pen on the Iraqi army. Published in Akhbar Al-Adab, his poem “Baghdad is Falling” told Iraqis:
You people in ruins: What will time say about you? You brother enemies, creating rifts and turmoil. You are cursed, you are rotten. Foreigners cannot be trusted. How is it that you did not understand this?
But most writers leveled their words against the Americans. Salmawy lamented the much-publicized fate of young Ali Ismail Abbas, the 12-year-old Iraqi boy who lost his family — and his arms — in a US air strike. Of the Americans, he wrote:
They only protected the oil,
From pillage and total destruction.
The joy that many Iraqis experienced with Saddam’s overthrow is missing in almost all the poems and cartoons. In a poem of 200 lines, Salmawy fails to mention the relief expressed by Baghdad’s people.
Asked about this omission, Salmawy said: “I’m talking about the tragedy that has happened, not the byproduct that could be beneficial. The idea of democracy is not such a thing that all Arabs cherish so much.”
