The American Age, Iraq

Baghdad collage welcome you, the sign reads along a street that is ordinary, but only if you live in Baghdad. Nothing really escapes the detritus of death in this wreck of a city. Certainly not the cement barriers along this wayward street, painted yellow and white but more distinguished by the chisel of wear, tear and bombings. The date trees are unharvested, fruit shrivelled by the sun falling into a pyre of overgrown weeds. A dusty black banner mourning two Iraqi soldiers killed ‘in the line of duty’ stretches along its kerb ploughed with bottles of Tuborg beer, plastic bags – some of them snared in barbed wire – and empty packages of Foster Clark’s Corn Flour.

Unlike Beirut or, closer to home, Fallujah, Baghdad was never destroyed by its war. The city here feels more like an eclipsed imperial capital, abandoned, neglected and dominated by the ageing fortifications of its futile defence against the forces that had overwhelmed it. Think of medieval Rome. An acquaintance once described all this refuse of war as athar, Arabic for artefacts, and I thought of the word as I drove down the road to Baghdad College, past piles of charred trash, to see a teacher there.

It was a sweltering day. Alaa Hussein welcomed me with coffee and we sat in the high school’s dusty Internet room, next to computers that had no Internet. The red trash can was full, even though there were no students during summer to fill it. He squinted his grey eyes, magnified by thick lenses, and delivered a judgement that I have heard often in Baghdad. ‘A jungle,’ he called it all, wearily looking around. He meant the school and its disorderly decline. But his terminology felt elastic to me, as if something unruly had encroached on what was here long ago.