Photograph by Tamar Sahakian, May 2019
Camp, Erbil, Iraq. Photograph by Tamar Sahakian, May 2019
Becoming Known
The following essay first appeared in Michael Rakowitz: Nimrud, published by the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, Clinton, NY and DelMonico Books/Distributed Art Publishers, 2021. The publication accompanied the exhibition Michael Rakowitz: Nimrud, curated by Katherine Alcauskas at the Wellin Museum of Art (October 19, 2020- June 18, 2021)
Babylon, Assyria, Sumeria—these names are brightly lit, illuminated by the aura of what theirdemise can tell us about our world. In Michael Rakowitz: Nimrud, an installation at the Wellin Museum of Art, the artist reconfigures a room from an ancient Assyrian palace destroyed by ISIS in 2015 in an area already mutated by the Gulf wars, by despotic rule pre-invasion and dystopic rule post-. The work is part of a series by Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Does Not Exist, in which he reconstructs sculptural works from the era of the Assyrian Empire via composites of contemporary Middle Eastern scraps—food wrappers, newspapers, cardboard, the packaging materials of everyday life. In reviews and exhibition texts, his use of these throwaway materials to recompose highly valued sculptures has often been interpreted as elucidating the fact that the sites where those sculptures were (and continue to be) destroyed, stolen, or salvaged are also sites where whole populations reside. People have eaten the food held in these wrappers, read the pages of these newspapers, and carried these cardboard boxes. Viewers may have seen the original sculptures in museums and textbooks and read about their historical significance, but the names of those who live among the ancient sites, who are descended from the people who built them, will never land on viewers’ lips. And their stories, their intangible experiences of unspeakable terror over far too many moments—absent.
Perhaps then, it is important to see the empty spaces that Rakowitz leaves in the mounting of his room reconstructions not only as spaces to mark the displacement of the original artifacts to various overseas museum and university collections, or even their loss to terrorism of the Daesh (ISIS) variety, but also as testaments to the absence of any markers to the specificity of the lived Iraqi experience—to the precise history of the excavation of Iraqis from their homes and lands, and from their physical bodies. To live in infamy as part of a never-acknowledged series of mass annihilations is a mortal’s reminder of the world’s capacity for cruelty. This is a silence one is required to become inured to, to take on as yet another requirement of resilience in the face of occupation and exodus, the inexorable forces that perpetually endanger one’s long-standing habitat.
Exciting archaeological discoveries make it into international science journals, set off Google alerts, and tickle us with origin stories. We love to learn about ourselves. DNA tests, genome results, astrological signs . . . what deep-down revelations can we obtain? What gossip about the always interesting me in the investigation of us might we mull over in the digging up of earth and alignment of time with the stars?
One tidbit of news in the early winter of 2020 was a discovery that seemed to affirm scholars’ earlier suspicion that Neanderthals may have buried their loved ones with flowers. Plant remains found near a preserved skull placed nearly one hundred thousand years ago in Shanidar Cave, less than one hundred miles (160 km) from Nimrud, set off a flurry of headlines. It is certainly fascinating that archaeologists may be able to affirm that a certain group of ancient individuals held burial rites similar to those used today. But just as pronounced is how unlike us most readers probably imagine the actual descendants of those individuals to be, if they imagine them at all. But, in fact, the descendants of Nimrud still cultivate the same lands, speak the same languages, and bury their dead. The erasure of their history, not only by U.S.-led wars and by Daesh but also in the list of “objects of value” in the popular imagination, is suffused with the indignity of refusal. After all that has been, and continues to be, endured, waiting for recognition would be a fool’s game.
Instead, those who survived have either spread throughout the world or stayed in their ancestral villages and cities to reinvent a life. For example: Bartella, a modest village that sits outside Mosul, between the city and Shanidar Cave, is my maternal ancestral home. When Daesh neared the town in the summer of 2014, Kurdish Peshmerga forces alerted inhabitants that they had twenty-four hours to leave. Homes inhabited for centuries were emptied in hours as residents fled in cars and on foot. The newly homeless packed into camps, churches, parks, and homes in Erbil, the neighboring capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. Just forty miles (65 km) away from their town,
they were never far enough from Daesh to forget, even if they wanted to; they could see the smoke from the fires, hear the demolition of their earth. Because these spaces—considered by the world at large to be empty, destroyed—are only ever momentarily abandoned. They remain part of the planet, beating with wildlife, with creatures known and unknown, and with bodies that continue to pass through long after the reporters, the archaeologists, the fixers, and those in uniform are gone. The rubble doesn’t stay on the newspaper page; it becomes fixture in the neighborhood, a reminder you walk by daily. A cleanup site, an imperfect memorial of its own. The myth of the empty space, a placeholder for what once was, lives only in the minds of those who never return or were never really there.
In the spring of 2019, residents who had only recently returned to Bartella saw torrential rains fall, more than anyone could remember. When my family went to see what had become of their town, both the scattershot of homes in pieces and homes intact were suffused in wildflowers, rising between them, up out of the cracks of thousand-year-old steps. This time, it wasn’t strangers clutching AKs who were closing in on the village but vines and blooms spraying green and yellow, white and pink. Thousands of caterpillars swarmed over roads and pathways, telling us, in the language of their many legs, the splendor of their transformative species: This ground you walk will never be alone. We return with you, we make this earth with you. My family, too, and the others who returned, were creatures of hope, in disbelief to be here, in a fresh spring, surrounded by the still fresh signs of destruction. A multilevel home, once housing several families, now a pile of bricks. A couch in the middle of a field. The possibility remained that bodies could be trapped beneath the rise and fall of rubble, and the excavations for those more recent artifacts, which would never be internationally assessed for their value, were going slowly, if at all.
The elders who returned to their homes were resourceful, future-oriented. Whatever plastic outdoor furniture remained was brought inside, turned into kitchen and dining room tables. Looted couches were replaced by twin beds, pillows carefully arranged to mimic living room seating. Why beds? Because they would be ready to house any survivors of future violence, wherever, whenever, it might strike. Chai was sipped on these beds, as though conditions were perfectly normal. Those who returned spoke matter-of-factly of past violence and of their preparations for the days ahead while cutting fresh romaine lettuce, strawberries, and bouquets of roses from meticulously maintained gardens. Every home held a bounty. Small, potent fruits, icy lettuces, flowers, each bite, smell, sight, a gloriously indifferent beauty. The cumulation of the escape, the return, the rains, in an arrangement on a plate—bloom, fruit, sheaf of lettuce—offered up by these women who ferociously rebirthed them. This portrait, a sacred trinity of desire: land, nourishment, faith. A cast of a thousand caterpillars could have made a frieze as telling as any cuneiform seal to provide a future understanding of the earth at this time: the hunted Homo sapiens, our bodies continuously offered up to a study of the capabilities, the capacities, of humans and their paraded civilizations.
In 2003, then Vice President of the United States Dick Cheney delivered to reporters the now-infamous line that American forces invading Iraq would be greeted with “flowers” as “liberators.” He parroted these words from a meeting with the Iraqi American professor and prowar lobbyist Kanan Makiya, who worked closely with the Bush administration at the time to advocate for the U.S. invasion. More than fifteen years after that invasion, alone in a ravaged town, Umm Hanna, a great-grandmother who had seen the town though nearly ninety consecutive years, pointed out all the damage done by Daesh, Iraqi forces, and Americans alike while gathering methodically, eyes glittering, her flowers. Umm Hanna had been able to return. But many stayed in the camps, fearing another cycle of violence. Maryam was one of the many thousands of women who fled Bartella that summer night with twenty-four hours at her heels. Once arriving in Erbil, she and her family made their home in the camp. A sea of corrugated-steel rectangles the size of train cars with makeshift entryways, ringed by barbed-wire fencing, weeds, and plastic water bottles. Maryam had operated a small business in Bartella making tahini—the viscous, oily liquid famously produced from sesame seeds throughout northern Iraq. An ingredient in hummus, cookies, and breads, also eaten simply on its own with bread, tahini is a staple food sold in large plastic jars. Maryam made hers with a traditional millstone and poured it into old olive-oil containers for sale. When forced to flee her home, she was also forced to leave her business. Undeterred, she set up shop again in the camp, continuing to make her tahini and selling it out of her container home.
In recent years, a kind of boutique interest in tahini has arisen in the U.S.—it is rich in vitamins and minerals, healthy fats, and antioxidants. Around the same time I learned of Maryam’s story and tasted a jar of her nutty tahini in the comfort of my California home, I heard a segment on public radio about, of all things, tahini: “You can use it in sweet dishes, you can make sauces out of it—tah-heen-eee is just so versatile. And best of all, it’s gluten-free!” I thought about that segment, introducing listeners to the culinary uses of tahini, but devoid of its history, devoid of Maryam’s history. Of course it was. How would they know? And who would want to include that story—a story of violence and ugliness and laborious survival—in the beautifully packaged world of artisanal food and cooking that has taken over so much of popular culture’s portrayals of eating well? Refugee camps aren’t for Instagram or the myriad “maker”platforms for budding foodies, and neither are the tired women who toil inside them. When I pass the newly branded tiny jars of bespoke tahini on upscale market shelves, I think about its absolute nutrition, the perfect simplicity of its production, how it has been eaten for hundreds of years, and, yet again, about what makes it onto the news and delights our senses. I think about the branding that has erased so much history, whether the brand is Whole Foods or Operation Desert Storm or the caliphate. I wonder if there will ever be enough space to hold all that lost history or enough earth to dig up and recover what was left behind. In some sense, perhaps, Iraqis know how to use their history better than anyone, not as something to be revered in a precious, ancient state but as an infinite set of determined imaginings and practical skills in a state of constant play.
One grotesque example of this was perpetrated by former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who reconstructed parts of the ancient city of Babylon in 1987 in his own name as an assertion of his timeless authority and in homage to the generally kitsch aesthetics of dictatorial power (the ruins were later further damaged by U.S. and Polish troops who used them as a military base during the opening years of the invasion, in 2003 and 2004). But more recently, Iraqi youths calling for an end to the devastating political corruption, violence, and resource exploitation in their country have resurrected imagery from the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Sumerian eras and morphed it into a kind of present-day collage of power and resolve emerging from their extensive understanding of history and of their own place within it. This country-wide revolution, which can accurately be called epic—an ignored and warred-against people fighting the most powerful companies and nation-states in the world, including their own—can perhaps only be sustained by the kind of otherworldly, magical belief in self provided by the ancient world, especially if that world emerged from your own, indigenous land. The murals that draw on this history are hardly museum-quality, but that is not their purpose. What they make room for, make space for, is the imagining of a new world. They are here not to inspire a return to another time but to invoke the strength to take down kingdoms for another kind of earth.
-Rijin Sahakian