Sinan Antoon: “Home” was the first stop in my tour. I thought I was lost at first, but I recognised the street I walked back on from school every day for so many years. The giant eucalyptus and palm trees on both sides of the canal were gone. The canal itself was dry and full of sewage. I recognised the bridge near our street. Traffic slows down. There is a checkpoint before we enter to the right. The street is empty. No children playing soccer or riding their bikes. I see our neighbours’ two palm trees. They are pollinated and much taller now. I am happy that the new owner is tending to them. We pass by our house. The facade is different and painted maroon red. I take two pictures, but the friend who is driving asks me not to: “The residents will be afraid and think we are terrorists scouting a target.”
No one will know me here. All our neighbours have left except for one family and they are travelling this week. We reach the end of the street and I ask my friend to make a U-turn. I take several pictures. The wall is much higher. It hides the garden entirely. There is no trace of the giant mulberry tree near the front gate.
No trace of the bougainvillea whose branches and orange blossoms used to climb the walls. Did it die? All the neighbourhood’s walls are all much higher. “Do you want me to go back again?” asks my friend. “No, it’s enough. Let’s go.”
Places are pale and dusty versions of the old “originals”, and much is crossed out. Do the streets remember their own history? Do they yearn for their past and suffer from selective nostalgia too? I walked with my friend and publisher from our hotel on Abu Nuwas to al-Mutanabbi Street, Baghdad’s book market. I noticed something I had never seen in Baghdad before. There were so many stores selling equipment for the physically disabled.
My publisher, the Iraqi poet Khalid al-Maaly, organised a reading and book-signing at the Baghdad Poetry House right by the Tigris. I was surrounded by friends I had known for years through email, but was meeting them for the first time. The students from the Sada School, whom I had taught on Skype, were there too. The hope and thirst for life in those young eyes of my readers was my only solace. I still had a home in Baghdad. Poetry and writing was my indestructible home. More here.