Written in the 1980s and revised in 2024, Camille Roy’s “Land Behind Baghdad” is a series of prose-poem fragments exploring her childhood memories of Iraq, where she reflects in several passages on the Arabic grammar and expressions that she learned as a child and later forgot. The rewrite sparked a return to the historic Iraqi city of Nippur (Nifr), which was once the capital of the Sumerians and Babylonians, and to a particular person she met there — a Kurdish man who cared for her in her childhood and was the first to teach her Arabic. Her decision to revise the collection was sparked by renewed contact with another Iraqi man from Nippur, now living in exile, whose reappearance unexpectedly brought back the memories of her early years.

Translated into Arabic by Dima Ayoub
With editorial support from Azza Nubi

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Land Behind Baghdad

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I get a satisfaction from doing this. Most of the time

it seems windy, some days dust hangs in the air
an orange fog which I want to rip apart. I stuff cotton into

my mouth, so I can breathe. My bed sags like a hammock. Next
to it a nylon filament hisses and gives light. I’m gloomy

until Marguerite and her husband join the expedition. She’s French
Canadian & mystifies me: her small bones

seem soft. The hems on her dresses hang
delicately. Engaged in a pattern of following or waiting

for her husband she walks calmly through our courtyards.
She is bilingual. I follow her, I want to reach into her mouth

for that candy. In all those months I remember only one word
a bead to break my teeth on. I know the Arabic for eggplant.

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All the apertures are painted blue. A large blue gate empties a courtyard lined with rooms, one of which is mine. Through my blue-rimmed window I can see hills rise behind the sweet curve of dunes. Also, the first expedition house, now abandoned, whose mud walls appear to be melting. Behind my room, out of view, lies the city. Deep in its ruins, past garbage dumps worn into ridges, there’s a mound of dirt shaped like a pyramid. The Ziggurat. At the top, like a nipple, is a pert brick house. It was built by an Englishman at the turn of the century. There he ran out of water while under siege in the summer and perished quickly. He was a widely respected general whose fortunes changed with the shifting allegiances of the tribes. He held his enemies off until he starved to death, to be commemorated by a Victorian postcard portraying his last breath. He was eaten by dogs in a bad year, then put to death as an oppressive colonialist. All these stories are well-formed stories. Each is an isolated bit of activity in a landscape so that when lightning hits the dirt in front of the blue gate, it chars a circular patch, varying the color of the ground-up debris. There’s a dark circle we all gather around to look at.

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All the women wear the black abaya. I have one. It’s the heaviest shiny black cloth, difficult to balance on my head. Wearing it requires circumspection as religions do so that it elevates my body while obscuring it. Perhaps this is a compliment in the form of a denunciation. In the village where we get water there is a girl my age who has just taken the veil. It kills me, the yearning in her expression, when she leans out from her doorway and into the street.

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The field of green barley is an astonishing sight.

Only a few weeks before the barley appeared, wildflowers popped up — just one variety, a coarse and knotty lupine — as single-minded as the rain had been. The stems bore thick heads of white and purple buds which smelled like lilacs.

Only a few weeks before the wildflowers, the plain was knee-deep in water from which dunes rose in smooth and modest curves. I had gone wading, looking for the spots where I could see nothing but dunes and water. Only dunes, pure water. Sky.

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Once a month we go for supplies, it’s five hours along a straight dirt track. We drive through the outer agricultural regions, past abandoned farms where salt tips the furrows like snow. What I see along the road: a saluki, gypsies, a dead man in a ditch. My parents cover my eyes, so I won’t see the men hanging in the main square.

That was Baghdad, 1967.

In the countryside there were many qualities which when encountered next to one another became rules. For me it was like watching an old film: everything I saw flowed back into something I didn’t remember.

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We travel to your village in the north.  

The mountains are drier than any I have ever seen.

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The road takes us through Samarra. There we pass the dome of a mosque covered in pure gold, hammered into a thin gleaming skin. In this city women wear a veil over their faces, in addition to the cloak over the body. I can glimpse their facial bones through the fine gauze, like tracking fish in water.

In the outskirts is a vast and ruined mosque next to a tall minaret. Its conical design is unusual, with an outer stair ascending counterclockwise. A guard watches as we climb (as we drive a corkscrew into the sky). There’s no railing, but the stairs are intact. We hug the wall all the way to the top then carefully seat ourselves on a sort of platter in the open air.

Back on the road, headed north again, we approach a range of spiny mountains. In the foothills children herd sheep and goats and we pass a few women with water jugs clustering around a well. Otherwise, the earth is so bare it’s abstract. This is Kurdistan. As we near your village, women begin to appear on the hillsides unveiled, in black, blue, or green dresses stitched with brilliant embroidery. Your village is a collection of huts on a slope overrun with children. When we enter your courtyard there are many girls my age whose necks are heaped with strings of glass and stone beads.

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After many years colors blend and lie down together in the dirt
though exceptions exist. In Babylon mosaics emboss the walls like braille.
(The blue lions beside a gate.)

A memory turned inside out is bounded by no known limit
although what I’ve forgotten makes a boundary.

I experience flows of circumstance or conversation
in which some messages are random, and others I don’t recall.
My sister tells me that you are angry.
I’m crouched in the back of the Land Rover at the edge
of a language I’ve lost.
Dunes lift off the shimmering earth.

Forgive me. If I’m not here, it’s not silence
which is diffuse but I’m dragging my skirts. When I walk

there may be a shift to something older or at least without
as much definition. A destroyed context.

At first it was only language and nothing else
walking & talking together.
Then forgetting became me.

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I tried spoon-feeding stories and noise, to acquire character.
What I learned permeated a story of empty spaces.

Now it’s enough to lie here waiting
though dry grass pokes my body.

Your death is the window whereby I distinguish past events.

Dough approaches the color of the table
as it is rolled thin. Lift the skin
& observe light passing through
as a child turns over
into a shallow bed of water.
Iridescent bitterness.
I am at sadness (watering place)

waiting in line for blue breath in a jug.

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