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Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family
Tamara Chalabi
A lyrical, haunting, multi-generational memoir of one family’s tempestuous century in Iraq from 1900 to the present.The Chalabis are one of the oldest and most prominent families in Iraq. For centuries they have occupied positions of honour and responsibility, loyally serving first the Ottoman Empire and, later, the national government.In ‘Late for Tea at the Deer Palace’, Tamara Chalabi explores the dramatic story of her extraordinary family’s history in this beautiful, passionate and troubled land. From the grand opulence of her great-grandfather’s house and the birth of the modern state, through to the elegant Iraq of her grandmother Bibi, who lived the life of a queen in Baghdad, and finally to her own story, that of the ex-pat daughter of a family in exile, Chalabi takes us on an unforgettable and eye-opening journey.This is the story of a lost homeland, whose turbulent transformations over the twentieth century left gaping wounds at the hearts not only of the family it exiled, but also of the elegant, sophisticated world it once represented. When Tamara visited her once-beautiful ancestral land for the first time in 2003, she found a country she didn’t recognize – and a nation on the brink of a terrifying and uncertain new beginning.Lyrical and unique, this exquisite multi-generational memoir brings together east and west, the poetic and the political as it brings to life a land of beauty and grace that has been all but lost behind recent headlines.



TAMARA CHALABI
Late for Tea at the Deer Palace
The Lost Dreams of
my Iraqi Family




To my dearest ammooooo, Hassan Chalabi



Contents
Maps
Family tree
Chronology
Prologue
Book One: Fallen Pomegranates

December 2007
1 Duty Calls: A Busy Day for Abdul Hussein (1913)
2 Stacking Rifles: Hadi and the War (1914–1916)
3 All That is Good Will Happen: A Marriage Prospect (1916)
4 Sugared Almonds and Jasmine: Bibi and Hadi’s Wedding (1916)
5 A Giant Broken: The End of the Ottomans (1917–1918)

November 1999, Beirut
Book Two: Replanting Eden

September 2005
6 Café Chantant: The British in Baghdad (1918) 77
7 Rebellion: Fighting for Freedom (1919–1920) 86
8 A New King for a New Country: From Mesopotamia to Iraq (1920–1921)
9 Fesanjoon, a Royal Luncheon: Faisal Visits Kazimiya (1921)
10 Banished: Out of Kazimiya (1922–1924)
11 Accidents of Nature: The Baghdad Boil (1925–1926)
12 In Between: A Home Between Two Cities (1926–1929)
13 Stolen Hopes: A Young Life Lost (1928–1929)
14 Bursting Energy: Hadi’s Growing Empire (1931–1933)
15 Prison: Uninvited Guests at a Feast (1935–1936)
16 Carefree: Growing Up in the Golden Age (1936–1938)
17 A Dark Cloud: The End of a Generation (1938–1939)
18 A New Home: The Shadow of Death (1937–1939)

October 2006
Book Three: A Dangerous Garden

May 1993
19 Mountains and Floods: Domestic Changes (1939–1941)
20 Blood and Salons: Mounting Tensions (1941)
21 An Education Overseas: Mixed Fortunes (1941–1945)
22 Love in Strange Quarters: Of Marriage and Other Unions (1946–1947)
23 The Girl on the Bridge: Anger on the Streets (1947–1949)
24 Precious Things: Towards a New World (1950–1951)
25 Storm Clouds Gathering: Family Feuds and Revolution (1952–1956)
26 Defiance: A Crisis and a Key (1956)
27 Revolution: Slaughter of a Family (1958)

February 2005, Sadr City
Book Four: Fields of Wilderness

December 2007
28 Lost Lands: Seeking Shelter (1958)
29 Migration: Precious Cargo (1958)
30 Hunger Pangs: Yearning for Home (1958)
31 Arrivals and Departures: The Importance of Contacts (1958–1959)
32 Escape to Nowhere: The Threat of the Clown Court (1959)
33 A Temporary Home: Visits to the Park (1959)
34 Return to the Shrine: A Life by the Sea (1959–1963)
35 Of Carpets and New Blood: The Emergence of New Patterns (1967)
36 The Ruins of Kufa: A Coup and a Birth (1968–1972)
37 Civil War: A Shattered Sanctuary (1975–1982)
38 Creased Maps: A Move to a Different Land (1980s)
39 Lessons in Humility: The Loss of Everything Precious (1980s)
40 The Mortality of Gods: Burials of the Banished (1988)
41 The Lost Talisman: When Everything is Taken (1989–1992)
42 A Question of Identity: In Search of a Way to Be (1990–2009)

30 January 2005, Election Day in Baghdad
Epilogue
Glossary of Iraqi Terms
Acknowledgments
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher

Maps





CHALABI FAMILY TREE





Prologue
THE KITCHEN WAS bare, an abandoned room. The sole trace of its former occupants was a squat, white bone-china teapot. I reached for it, turning it over in my hands. On its underside were stamped the words ‘State of India’. Alone in this silent space, the teapot spoke to me of a bygone era that had come to an abrupt end.
It was 19 April 2003, ten days after the fall of Baghdad to the US-led coalition forces, and the city, depleted and derelict, was grappling with a new reality. The heat of the day was intolerable, and I could feel my very eyeballs become coated in perspiration, a strange and unwelcome sensation. This was my first ever visit to Baghdad, my father’s home, his parents’ and grandparents’ before him, and theoretically mine as well. I had arrived in the capital after a long car journey from the south in the company of my father – Ahmad Chalabi, a leading opposition figure to Saddam Hussein’s fallen regime.
Everybody asks me about my father. He has been labelled a maverick, a charlatan, a genius. He has been named as the source of supposedly faulty intelligence that led America into the war in Iraq. He has been called a triple agent for the US, Iran and Israel. But this is my story. He has his own tale to tell, although I acknowledge that my father has played a pivotal role in shaping my relationship to his country, Iraq. As with everything in the Middle East, nothing makes sense until you understand the past, and the past is never straightforward.
During this, my first visit to Baghdad, whole convoys and fresh hordes were descending on the capital: the streets were busy with an assortment of opposition leaders, formerly exiled professionals, gold diggers and prospectors, sceptical foreign journalists – and ordinary Iraqis: doctors, lawyers, carpenters and shopkeepers who were returning home. For many, their homecoming was clearly a source of mixed emotions. For my part, as I entered the city with a large group of Iraqis who had been working for the opposition in exile, I swiftly understood that my life here would not be governed by a familiar set of values based on logic, chronology and order.
All of my companions, including my father, had their own personal memories of Baghdad. Like little children, they sparked with enthusiasm and anticipation when we entered the city in which they had been born. Many kissed the ground in tears before rising hastily, anxious to find their relatives and loved ones. I had none to find here. I stood by, silently searching their faces for an emotion I could recognize. None came. I felt cold and detached. This place was as foreign to me as any other, and I had no memories to draw upon to make me feel otherwise. What came instead was an image of Beirut, my birthplace. I remembered clearly the feelings of comfort, safety and warmth I always had deep inside whenever I was on a plane coming in to land in Beirut, the sea shimmering against the horizon. As much as I wanted to push that image away and connect with the ground beneath my feet in Baghdad, I couldn’t.
It quickly became clear on our arrival that the promised ‘liberation’ had not happened. The sense of excitement and expectation with which I had travelled was replaced by a deep foreboding as I entered a shattered world. I went to my grandparents’ house in Baghdad. Forty-five years had passed since they had been forced to flee the country. A big, solid, four-storey home, it was designed in the Bauhaus style and built in the late 1940s. The clean lines of the windows, the large rooms and elegant staircases were all suggestive of that era’s faith in a better future. The place smelt the same as my grandparents’ subsequent homes in Britain, infused with an aroma of rice and something indefinable. In London, they had recreated what they could of all that was soothing and familiar to them, building altars to their old life through the objects that had followed them into exile – their photographs, silver and precious carpets. However, they had merely been repeating a process they had already been through during an earlier period of forced expatriation, in Beirut, before the Lebanese Civil War drove them on once more.
I knew this house from the stories of other relatives, stories which had been told to me over and over again, but I could never have imagined the sense of emptiness that echoed down the long corridors and through the airy rooms. I tried to remember the rhythms of my grandmother’s deep voice as she spoke of her former home when I was a little girl: ‘You can’t imagine the wonderful life we had in Baghdad, Tamara. I was like a queen …’
A life-size stone statue of a deer stood in the withered garden outside the house. I knew that my grandfather Hadi had loved that deer as much as his father before him. Someone had beheaded it. My first impression was that the deer looked almost offensive among the unkempt grounds, as it suggested a more carefree time when the people and the country had been very different. It was now a dirty ivory colour, yet there remained a certain sensuality about it as it stood proud, the fluidity of its hind muscles elegantly carved. Even the amputated head lying on the ground was playful. Its large dark eyes were well defined and penetrating, their gaze frozen in time.

My journey to Iraq had really begun in my head many years earlier, in my grandparents’ house in Beirut. It was 1981. I was seven years old. A man’s voice, sonorous and beautiful, cut across a crowded room, singing about a land I did not know.
A man fired an arrow that slayed the child.
Oh my child, they killed a child
Woe is me, woe is me …
Although the singer was tucked away in a corner, his voice held the room captive. I could not understand why the audience wept as he sang about a thirsty child killed in his father’s arms. I had never heard anything like it before. It disturbed my sense of the established routine and quiet of my grandparents’ house.
I crawled through the legs of the grieving adults towards the familiar figure of my uncle Hassan. He sat listening intently, inscrutable in the dark glasses he wore to mask his blindness. I squeezed myself in next to him, watching as he tapped his knee with the palm of his hand in time to the song. I asked him why everyone was crying. He told me that it was in memory of Imam Hussein.
‘Did he die today?’ I asked.
‘No, no, Tamoura,’ he said fondly, calling me by the nickname he had given me. ‘He died a long time ago, before any of us were born.’
‘So why are you still crying?’
He explained that the singer was commemorating the Battle of Karbala, when Imam Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson, was confronted by Caliph Yazid’s forces of 4,000 men. A very long time ago Hussein had gone to war, taking his family along, and a small army of only seventy-two men, many of whom also went into battle with their women and children. When the armies clashed on the banks of the Euphrates River, in the month of Muharam, Hussein was defeated. He, his infant son and his men were slain and the women and children taken into captivity.
My uncle smiled sadly. He said that time did not lessen the sense of tragedy of an act that had the power to haunt people forever. He told me that Hussein had been killed by an evil man for the sake of haqq – truth and justice.
‘But if it was so long ago, then why are you still crying?’ I persisted.
Hassan told me that during the first ten days of Muharam, which were called Ashura, this event and its consequences were remembered. My grandfather Hadi used to host a recital in Baghdad on the last day of Ashura, and hundreds of people would go to his home to commemorate it. He added that Ashura was especially painful for our family, because it reminded us that we had been deprived of our own country.
‘We are foreigners everywhere, and we have lost so much,’ he said. He touched me lightly on the shoulder. ‘You should know these things. They are part of your history, of who you are.’ I hated what he said. Surely I belonged exactly where I was? My uncle sensed my discomfort. ‘Do you deny your roots?’ he asked, smiling. I didn’t understand what he meant; he explained that he, my father, my grandfather and grandmother had once had another country, but that they had lost it. Their homeland was my home as well. I scowled. Lebanon was my country and my mother’s country, Beirut the city where I had been born. I was not a foreigner here.
A slice of chocolate cake soon made me forget what my uncle had said, but on some level I dimly perceived that the grievance captured in the words of the song was the same as that which made my father’s family weep in their exile. They were waiting to return to their homeland. Their lost country maintained a hold over them, the legacy of an inheritance centuries old.

The earliest indications of a settled civilization in the world are found in the region that is known today as Iraq. Between the fifth and fourth millennia BCE, lower Tigris and Euphrates basin cities such as Ur, Uruk and Larsa emerged and stratified societies developed within them. Mesopotamia – as the Greeks referred to the region between the two rivers – covered roughly the central southern part of what is now Iraq. Mesopotamia was also the term used to describe the provinces of the Ottoman Empire that belonged to this region. The ancient history of Mesopotamia is now lost to us, but it was mythologized by the Sumerians in epics such as the story of Gilgamesh, which was first written down in around 2000 BCE and which is a story of kingship and heroism that has informed and inspired people ever since.
The region that corresponds to the north of modern-day Iraq was the birthplace of the world’s first empire. The Assyrians, descendants of the Akkadians who settled in the land of Sumer, engaged in what amounted to a conquest of the known world of their time – from Persia to Egypt. The Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians and later the Babylonians created what are, in effect, the foundations of civilization today. Our seven-day week, sixty-minute hour and much of our understanding of the constellation of the skies are the direct legacies of this defining period in human history. The mythologies of a large cast of gods and goddesses survived from this period too: Anu, the heaven-god of Mesopotamia, was the equivalent of Greek Zeus, while Ishtar or Inana was the goddess of love, war and fertility, and the precursor of Egyptian Isis.
The fortunes of Mesopotamia were largely dictated by its geography, in particular its position in relation to the frontier lands of the Graeco-Roman and Iranian worlds. The territory changed hands as part of the ebb and flow of the respective powers of these historical entities. Alexander the Great and Darius the Persian fought over the land, while many prophets passed through it, including Abraham and Mani, the founder of the ancient but now extinct religion of Manichaeism.
The Muslim conquest of the region in the seventh century CE reconfigured the coordinates of Mesopotamia, and the Islamic empire transformed this former frontier land into the centre of a global empire. The region became central in shaping the ensuing Islamic civilization. In the ninth century, the Caliph al-Mansur ordered the building of a round city with four gates, which grew into a dazzling capital: Baghdad. Baghdad was not only the capital of the Abbasids’ Islamic empire, but of a civilization. The Tales of the One Thousand and One Nights, many of which speak of Baghdad, represent a vivid example of the city’s fusion of cultures, mythologies and styles. The city also became an important trading centre on the Silk Road.
By the thirteenth century, Mesopotamia was a frontier territory once again after the Mongols’ invasion that left its cities and sophisticated irrigation system devastated. In 1534, the region was captured by Ottoman Turks, but from 1623 to 1638 it lay in Iranian hands. My father’s family originally came to Mesopotamia with the army of the Ottoman ruler Murad IV, Sultan of Sultans and God’s Shadow Upon Earth. Murad was a warrior prince, famed for his prodigious strength and the last Ottoman Sultan to command an army on the battlefield. His campaign against Persia led to the invasion of Azerbaijan and Armenia. And, in the last decisive feat of Imperial Ottoman arms, Murad recaptured Baghdad from the Persian Shah Abbas I in 1638. The city remained under Ottoman rule for nearly four hundred years.
The three Ottoman wilayets, or provinces of Mesopotamia, that were referred to as the pachalik of Baghdad included Mosul in the north (which comprised part of the high Zagros mountain range extending from Turkey to Iran), the Kurdish regions, Baghdad itself and Basra in the south, perched on the Persian Gulf. These were subject to various different forms of administrative rule after their conquest by the Ottomans, whose central government was based in Constantinople in Turkey. Most usually, the pachalik was administered through indirect rule, which meant that local families or tribes controlled the areas but paid taxes to the central Ottoman government. The system was changed in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the authorities in Istanbul decided to impose direct rule and sent an army along with a wali, or governor, to re-establish their authority over Baghdad and to collect taxes in the name of the Sultan. This diminished the power of many of the local leaders, especially amongst the tribes, who remained resentful of the central government in Istanbul.
By the early twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire was contracting. It had lost control of the Balkans and earlier of Greece, and was gradually whittled down to half the size it had been in the sixteenth century. As in the rest of the Empire, there was a multi-ethnic and multi-religious population in the area of Mesopotamia that became Iraq, consisting of Arabs, Kurds, Turks, Persians, Lurs, Sunnis, Shi’a, Christians, Jews, Mandaeans and Yezidis, among others. The Iraqi dialect of Arabic had strong Turkish and Persian influences. The blend of cultures made for a rich, diverse but highly complicated society.
By the time they were exiled in 1958, as a consequence of a revolution that overthrew the monarchy, my family had become firmly entrenched in Iraq’s political life and society. Over the course of three centuries they had transformed themselves from warriors into administrators and the confidants of the ruling family. They had arrived as Sunni Muslims, but they left as Shi’a Muslims. They became the administrative rulers of Kazimiya, where they lived, which lay across the Tigris to the north of Baghdad, but which is now a part of the city itself. With the Ottoman reforms, the family’s administrative role in the town came to an end by 1865. However, they retained their high standing in society.
Across the region, the Sunnis were dominant, with the exception of shrine cities such as Kazimiya. Generally excluded from political power, the increasingly disenfranchised Shi’a populations of these areas immersed themselves in learning and religion, criticizing their Sunni overlords from the high ground of their religious authority. As Shi’as who were deeply involved in politics, my family was caught between two worlds. They were both insiders and outsiders.

The rudiments of my family history, with its tale of loss and privilege, were relayed to me principally by my uncle Hassan over the course of a few years in Beirut and London. The story whose seed he had planted in my seven-year-old head gave Iraq a status that grew inside me as I grew, and slowly came to embody my sense of the future: I created the country in my mind long before I ever saw it. Its importance was heightened by the impact Iraq had on my family once my father entered the world of politics in opposition to Saddam Hussein’s regime in the early nineties, adding a layer of gravity, urgency and uncertainty to our daily life. Iraq came to dominate my thoughts, and I poured my imagination into this mythical place.
I first found a doorway to my Iraqi inheritance through learning about Iraq’s culture and history. I imagined a place of scholars and antiquities, music and poetry, a multicultural haven of different peoples – Arabs, Kurds, Turks and Persians – and languages mixing together peacefully in a green and lush land by the riverbanks. This vision defied all the horrors of the country that I read about in the news.
But it was really anger that triggered me to write this book. My anger grew out of my experiences in Iraq in the aftermath of the war in 2003, with the US occupation of the country and the new political powers that were in place. I was angry at what I perceived initially as a country hurled back to the Middle Ages through misrule, neglect and sanctions, and a beaten people who had lost their voice long ago. I was also angry about what I saw as the expropriation of those people’s silent voices, and of Iraq as a land by the US civil administration and the international press to serve their own agendas, political and otherwise. They became the designated spokespeople for an Iraq they barely knew and didn’t care about, in the shadow of a greater preoccupation with the role of America in the region. They reduced Iraq to a desert of tanks, screaming women and barefoot children. The country’s ancient history and cultural output over millennia meant nothing to them. I tried to understand the silence of the Iraqis themselves – perhaps it was the consequence of enduring fear, or a habit developed as the result of decades of oppression; perhaps it was their unfamiliarity with the latest means of communication owing to those long years of sanctions, I didn’t know. One of Iraq’s burdens has always been the way it is presented to the outside world as patchy, Manichaean, extreme. It is a nation that is portrayed either through its politics, most notoriously through Saddam and his regime, or through its ancient and glorious history, but never through its people.

The Iraq that I witnessed in person for the first time challenged all my preconceptions. It continues to do so, throwing back at me contradictions and tangents just when I think I am beginning to understand it, raising as many questions as it provides answers. It makes me wonder why there should be such a strong attachment to the country in my family. What does this attachment suggest? Does it represent a refusal to move on, to grow and embrace the world?
In the wake of what I saw for myself in their homeland, my family and their stories made me wonder anew about my own origins. Writing about their experiences challenged my notions of language, as I tried to render an Iraqi Arabic with all its idiosyncratic nuances into English. Most of all, it made me wonder about the very concept of Iraq: as a modern state, an ancient land, a nation, a word, a song, a river, a grave, a shrine, a statue of a deer.
In writing this book, I have been fortunate to have had access to a wealth of material: oral histories, archive materials, newspapers, buildings, relics, memoirs, music, interviews and photographs. This book is my attempt to make the unruly disciplined, to assemble the disordered, unorganized parts of the past into a cohesive narrative. As Iraq has an ancient oral tradition, and a great deal of this story was transmitted to me orally, I have tried to respect those elements, and to remain faithful to and respectful of the memories my family have entrusted to me. The timescale of memory is not the same as the timescale of history. Major periods of history can be summarized while minor periods can be expanded. This was certainly true of my family, who when speaking to me dwelled on their happy childhoods in Iraq, but for whom the revolution and many of the years following it passed in a blur. My family’s stories of Iraq are more personal and intimate than a dispassionate and neatly constructed history. They show the country through the lives of people who have loved it.

BOOK ONE
Fallen
Pomegranates







DECEMBER 2007
I am walking through Kazimiya’s alleyways, exploring the crumbling houses with Fatima, a friend from the town, and looking for the old family home. We are following the directions of an elderly historian who is too frail to show us the way in person. He has directed us verbally: turn left by the old train station, right at the donkey stables and left again by the old water pump. Because Kazimiya is a shrine town, and therefore quite conservative, I am wearing an abaya – a long over-garment – which keeps slipping off my head.
Narrow channels of water flow through the middle of the cobbled streets we walk along. Children play and old men sit in their shop fronts, watching us and muttering to each other as they wonder what these strangers are looking for. I wince, thinking about the century that has passed since my grandmother walked these same streets as a little girl, a daughter of this town, and of the many waves of people who have passed through this frontier land, contested between the Ottomans and Persia over many centuries, and later between the British and now the Americans. My grandmother was born an Ottoman subject, just like a native of Istanbul or Izmir, and here I am trying to find remnants of that time and place. She certainly wouldn’t have struggled with the abaya as I do now, nor needed directions to find the main square.
We head towards the side gate of the shrine, Bab al-Murad, said to have been designed by the angel Gabriel, where my grandmother and many others once gave offerings to the poor in gratitude for prayers answered by the seventh Imam. I stop and do the same as I wait to go inside to make my wish.

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