Iraq's suffocating silence over climate change

Environmental activists have even warned that the two rivers could even disappear, as some expert research predicts, and issued an emergency call for action. 

To work, such appeals need not only to get attention, they need to keep it. One way of doing that is through literature, which can capture the popular imagination and then channel it. This has happened around the world, in works such as Margaret Atwood's novel The Year of the Flood and George Turner's The Sea and Summer.

In Iraq, visual art has drawn some attention to the country's damaged and endangered environment. But its literary scene has not yet found a voice about the enormity of the challenge the country faces from climate change.

Writers remain preoccupied with themes of terrorism, violence, war, political corruption, and sectarian conflict. These are the dominating issues that have become all too commonplace since the political transition in 2003.

A strange silence

This silence seems strange.

After all, Iraq has been struck by suffocating dust storms, including 122 within 283 days in 2022. Then there is the disappearance of the wetlands due to drought, and the loss of animal life due to water pollution.

Why have Iraqi writers not deemed these tragedies worthy of attention? Are they worried that poems and stories cannot save a river from death?

Al Majalla asked some Iraqi authors for their views on this significant silence.

The poet and critic Ali Saadoun said: "The producers of culture and literature in the Arab world are preoccupied with ornaments, aesthetics and rhetoric, turning their backs on crucial issues."

"Iraq and its culture are a particular example of such an intellectual and cultural diversion, through an inherited culture that stretches back more than a thousand years."

"It is the culture that leans on a past in which enormous historical problems wrestle together. Thus, the producers of culture have wasted their lives debating revolutionary and ideological conflicts without even thinking a moment about the fate of humanity, which is being tampered with by fate and the strikingly aggravating dangers."

Saadoun agrees that contemporary writing "does not turn towards important issues such as the environment and the safety of nature in our country."

But he referred to the recent interest in the environment in academic circles around the world, which involved a noticeable change in the way of thinking in discussing similar topics.

"Criticising desertification and addressing it artistically and culturally through visual arts, theatre and novels, as well as cultural conferences that are interested in the human connection to water scarcity, have become one of the hot topics in world literature."

Saadoun is from the Maysan Governorate, where beloved wetlands have declined significantly over the past three decades. There were hit by deliberate attempts to drain them during the Ba'ath party's rule. Then there were severe water shortages after 2023.

He asserts that the cultural devastation in Iraq "prevents serious thinking about addressing these phenomena whose danger for future generations must now more than ever be eliminated." He believes that: "Culture must take a decisive stance by mobilising public opinion – at least the readers – and protesting against the manifestations of underdevelopment that are seriously damaging the environment at the heart of their interests and cultural action."

"We need various artistic forms of expression such as stories, novels and poetry to affirm our rejection and condemnation of any intentional actions that destroy nature and ruin life."

A poet's lament

Storyteller and poet Muntaha Imran laments that Iraqi literature ignores the climate change crisis that threatens both the country and its people.

She calls for attention to be drawn to the grave danger facing 40 million Iraqis: "This neglect deserves a detailed and thorough investigation."

"Writers are a product of their society's environment, and it is no secret that the wars that the Iraqis have endured, along with the long-term economic blockade, have greatly contributed to the development of a psychologically and economically exhausted personality, to the extent that it has become a personality with a submissive tendency to all the evil that happens around them."

Imran asserts that any destruction that takes place would soon be linked "to the government and the political class," when the nation's collective "exhausted personality" will hold them responsible.

She also agrees with Saadoun's analysis of what is getting attention from writers: "Most of what the authors write revolves around war, death and politics, sometimes with a burst of emotion or nostalgia for the old days despite their hardships."

Imran, originally from Basra —  a city suffering from the effects of fossil fuel extraction and oil refining—  is concerned with climate change and pollution. 

Basra is surrounded by 300 blazing flames burning in the wells of Al-Hartha, Rumaila, Al-Zubayr and Al-Siba which burn 24/7, leaving behind huge emissions of poisonous gas, which in turn led to an above-average 20 percent increase in cancer rates in the city, according to the Iraqi Health Ministry's statement last year.

Imran told Al Majalla: "This sensitive issue preoccupied me at the level of my city Basra, in particular. So I wrote several poems under the title 'My City', the city most affected by climate change in the world and the most polluted by oil the smoke emitted from oil extraction."

'Our morning is different

with smoke

My city sky

Shares her depression with us.

Water died

His funeral was carried by Al-Shatt.'".

A global problem reaches a world-famous waterway

The Shatt al-Arab, a historic river created by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, is another sad story of climate change, again near Basra and it caught Imran's eye.

Over the past years, the waterway has been subject to the effects of the rising salty armlet coming from the Arabian Gulf due to the drop in water levels and the disruption of the Shatt tributaries, as well as the effects of diverting the course of the Karun River east of the city.

This creates a lethal environment for fish in its waters and orchards on its banks. Polluted by sewage and heavy waste, the water is no longer suitable for human consumption. The state of the Shatt al-Arab was one of the causes of a major uprising in Basra in 2018 after it led to mass poisoning.

Protestors accused the authorities of negligence.

Imran, believing that the responsibility is shared between the people and the government, wrote:

"In the evening

We stopped at the Shatt

Who has not bathed since the first war

We took pictures and giggled

We looked like kids chasing after a moron

Threw it in the trash

And ran

When we got back to our homes

Shatt threw up on us from the taps."

Imran, who organises cultural events in Basra, also wonders why writers don't point out in their writings the absence of trees and flowers that filled the city's streets until the 1970s."

 "This absence had a significant impact on the city's climate. We are experiencing a real crisis that is affecting public health. Future generations will curse those who came before them for encroaching on nature and polluting the environment, even though we are a religious nation whose religion urges us to protect the environment and nature."

Visual arts – keeping a sense of the past as places change

The visual artist Hamid Saeed believes Iraq's image of itself in terms of its natural environment has been lost due to the rapid changes and decline in its natural world.

He tries to preserve this lost picture of the country in his work, capturing a sense of the moderate climate, clear skies and fresh rivers whose banks are blessed with hundreds of palm trees and their shade, at least in popular memory.

Saeed, who spent his life in the orchards of Abu al-Khasib in the southern region of Iraq, bears witness to the environmental destruction caused by the First and Second Gulf War and by oil exploitation: "Man is a killer of nature, driven both by his senseless wars and insatiable economic machine that has turned the wealth of agriculture, water and fisheries into the wealth of banks that thrives on oil spills and black oil, which for the sake of its extraction many orchards have been wiped away in my hometown."

"Man has made water channels conduits for his military wars, replaced trees with his concrete architecture, and then shed tears for the planet in his climate speeches, conferences and organisations."

In a telling allusion, Saeed addresses a person who hides under the shade of a tree on picnics and camping trips and then lights a fire in its trunk for a barbecue, saying: "To plant a tree is better than a thousand poems and paintings."

In his solo exhibition 'The Impact of the City', held in Amsterdam in 2018, Saeed addressed the devastation that has ravaged his pristine city of palm trees and rivers. And just two years later, his exhibition 'Things Like Painting' expressed the importance of a green city and the impact of a sense of place on the artwork.

He continues his efforts in his latest solo exhibition, 'No Gravity' Amman: "In the last exhibition, I emptied this time everything I had outside the surface of the planet, into space, where there is no gravity and no environmental harmony between the creatures of nature and the artificial earth."

"I have become insensitive to the city, which no longer resembles us. If you don't have an address in nature, no matter where you live, you are a stranger."

A writer in the wetlands

Ghassan Al-Burhan, the author, asks: "Does nature interact with our writers? It may seem like an unfair generalisation, but dozens of poetic collections and important novels lack the sheer presence of nature, let alone its presence as a subject in its own right."

The resident of Dhi Qar – one of the cities in Iraq most affected by climate change caused by the drying up of the wetlands, decline of agricultural land and rising temperatures – argues: "Iraqi culture today bears the legacy of accumulated wars, conflicts and many violent crises. That is why, in times of bloodshed, it is considered an unbearable luxury to write about nature."

"Given these layers of accumulated beliefs, disseminated by successive ideologies, there was no chance to reconsider the perceptions imposed on the writing market or the importance of nature in literature."

He adds: "It seems that climate change will only be taken seriously when it takes a sharp turn with catastrophic consequences such as famine and terrible epidemics."

"Furthermore, the assumption that this topic will attract the attention of Iraqi writers depends on literary grants and awards, provided they carry the same weight as their counterparts related to supporting minorities and other concerns that benefit from significant financial support."

And concludes:  "The literary voices heard in Dhi Qar, like others, are subject to the beliefs of the writing market. The use of nature does not happen by itself but rather serves other purposes, such as pride in one's identity or expressing grievances."

"When it comes to the drought in the province's wetlands, the art of photography or calligraphy has a remarkable and dominant presence that far transcends that of literature."