I’ve just finished reading The Prince of the Marshes by Rory Stewart. Published in 2006, this is the autobiographical account of the year Stewart spent as deputy governor of, first, Amara, and then Nasiriyah, in southern Iraq during 2003-2004. It’s a pretty even-handed description of the situation at the time, from someone who obviously believed in what he was doing but was also realistic enough to recognise when the game was up for the US-led coalition.
I was struck by one of the quotations Stewart used to introduce the final section, just before he is bombed out of the CPA headquarters in Nasiriyah. It comes from the Lament for Urim, describing the fall of the Third Dynasty of Sumer, c. 2000 BC. I reproduce a slightly longer version here, rather than the one Stewart uses, which is in bold:
O city, your name exists but you have been destroyed. O city, your wall rises high but your Land has perished. O my city, like an innocent ewe your lamb has been torn from you. O Urim, like an innocent goat your kid has perished. O city, your rites have been alienated from you, your powers have been changed into alien powers.
I don’t necessarily believe that history is cyclical, but the coincidences are too obvious to ignore. Stewart does not say whether he was making a reference to Nasiriyah, to Baghdad, or even to Iraq, which is, of course, the ancient kingdom of Sumer. Even the mention of a wall has direct relevance to current activities in Baghdad (see a recent Subtopia post for a discussion of the Adhamiya wall and the broader global phenomenon of wall construction).
You could take this alienation concept a step further, and generalise it to include the obsessive manipulation and surveillance of public space in many western cities. If we, the people, are the city and the state also, our ‘rites’ have been curtailed and are subject to social engineering, our ‘powers’ have been rescinded and replaced with the ever-watchful eye of governments increasingly looking to control, rather than serve.
OK, so this is deliberately rather melodramatic, especially if we consider public complicity in the participatory panopticon, but the congruence between a 4,000 year old cuneiform text pressed into a clay tablet, and modern urban trends in Baghdad and elsewhere, is striking.
Wall in Adhamiya, Baghdad. Ali Haider/European Pressphoto Agency, via New York Times.
Note: the title of this post is a bloody awful pun – see here for an explanation.
Filed under: Uncategorized
