Chicago is the World

What I remember first is blood.

It wasn’t everywhere and it was only one day when I went searching in Iraqi hospitals for colleagues badly hurt in a blast that is stuck in my mind’s eye. A door swung open in one hospital and there was blood everywhere. On the floor. On the walls. On the beds. And there didn’t seem anything else.

But that’s not what I talked about when I talked about Iraq the other day at a presentation on the Iraq war at the MCA, an exhibit that is amazingly brilliantfor its reliance on dozens of people to sit and tell their stories one at a time, day after day: soldiers and refugees and anti-war activists and scholars and physicians.

I talked about the Iraqi psychiatrist in Baghdad who told me how Iraqis were too numb to feel because of all they had suffered and this was in the early days after the U.S. led invasion. I talked about the fear I remember seeing on the face of young soldiers headed out on patrols and how one night at a military hospital a young soldier waiting to hear what happened to a pal said he wished he got hit too so his waiting would be over. And I talked about the smothering oppression in the Saddam years and how I met people digging up mass graves and families searching for lost friends or relatives and people who had spent years in prisons for the slightest disregard to the former regime.

There was so much to say and I seem to have said so little and I wanted to say more.

In the days to come folks will sit, as I did, on a couch in the middle of the very modest exhibit, drink tea and nibble on Middle Eastern sweets and talk about what they know from their time in Iraq or from their contact with those of us touched by Iraq: a VA hospital psychologist, soldiers who have fought in Iraq, Major L. Tammy Duckworth (Nov.7) who is now an assistant secretary with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, artists, anti-war activists, human rights experts, and Iraqis from Chicago and its long-established Iraqi community, some new arrivals and some passing through. Some of the sessions will also be Arabic.

In so many ways this too is a Chicago story.

The picture up top is of Muntabbi street, a street of booksellers, a revered place for Iraqis who sought books banned by the old regime, and a place the exhibit commemorates with the wreckage of a car blown up in an attack there. A place where I bought a caligraphy of great art work and lovely meaning from the Koran from a well-known caligrapher who was killed in a random attack some time after.

The exhibit runs until Nov.15

click here to learn about the exhibit at the MCA:

http://tinyurl.com/yfm5pwk

And here is wonderfully reported and told story from the Trib about the despair of some newly arrived Iraqis in Chicago – a story that could easily be told in parts  and across the ethnic news media

http://tinyurl.com/yz7ky4h

And this is from a soldier’s blog about Essam Pasha, an Iraqi artist now living in the U.S., who is traveling with the exhibit.

As a soldier serving in Iraq, I saw for myself how high the stakes can be for our Iraqi friends. My interpreter, Esam Pasha, was a charismatic young painter who spoke four languages and loved American movies. He bravely painted the first post-war mural on a public building–a historic piece covering a huge portrait of Saddam Hussein called

In addition to being talented and smart, Esam was also the most important weapon I had on the battlefield. On tense patrols, during dangerous house searches and at dark checkpoints, he often had only a few crucial seconds to help us explain to civilians why we were there and what we were asking them to do. More than once, Esam’s quick thinking and careful words saved lives – both American and Iraqi. He was “one of the guys”–and we trusted him with our lives. When my unit left Iraq in 2004, Esam was left behind to fend for himself. He was repeatedly threatened, and his name added to a public death list by local insurgents. Every day I checked my email, hoping to hear news that he was still alive. After many nervous months of constantly looking over his shoulder and navigating red tape, Esam finally escaped Baghdad to Jordan, than eventually made his way to New York City. He got a student visa, has refugee status pending, and is now thriving as an artist in Connecticut. His work was featured in

“Resilience.”a gallery in SoHo, and he was even on CNN. But Esam is one of a small number of lucky ones.

salaam,

Stephen