1001 Nights Cast

Whenever Ali Rekaad is let out of school he runs straight to the local practice field to play soccer with his friends. ‘He tells me that one day he will make the national team,’ says his uncle Mahdi Nawaf, ‘and it’s true he is the best player at his school.’ Ali is twelve and he can never sit still. He loves to chase the family’s goats around the paddock just for something to do. He also likes to tell jokes, but when he does he starts to giggle before he ever gets to the punch line. His brothers and sisters tease him about this, especially his two older sisters Rabha, and Zahra. But everyone says he is the life of any family party.

I have often thought about Ali, since I first came across his name in the paper. My own son, Felix, is much younger than him, only sixteen months old as I say this, but you can’t help but project forward and wonder what kind of boy he will grow up to be. Of course Ali was born in Iraq and Felix lives in Brooklyn, so their lives couldn’t be more different. The fact that we, the ‘coalition of the willing,’ have invaded Iraq, in Australia’s case merely to protect an already corrupt wheat deal, means that Ali and Felix are connected, whether they like it or not. Are we responsible for the actions of our governments, even when we disagree with them? I will be very brief. Yes.

I write about images, mostly about photographs. We see photographs of Iraqis every day, in our newspapers and magazines, usually in a state of stress, or worse, as anonymous bodies strewn on the bloodied street. The least we can do, in these circumstances, is to find out something more about these people. As a first step, we have to turn them from statistics to flesh and blood, from ciphers of our own fears and anxieties to real people with lives and names and dreams. That’s part of what I do, as an art historian; I make up these kinds of stories on the basis of the pictures I look at. And then I share them with others.

How about this picture? It shows a pair of outstretched hands holding eight small photographs for me to see. They’re not snapshots but rather ID-photos, a common form of photography in the Middle East, where the need for state-issued papers is unavoidable and personal cameras are relatively rare. Left-over ID photos become the equivalent of our snapshots, photographs that, despite their repetitious pictorial banality, become invested with sentiment and memories, that act as prompts for recollection and conversation. Obviously someone took the trouble to keep these ones; they have literally become keepsakes.

Several of these photos are of children. Perhaps one of them is of Ali Rekaad? I try looking him up on the internet but it’s hard to find much information about individual Iraqis. I’m left to imagine his life, forced to call on the rhetorical flourishes of fiction as a way of joining my existence to his. I worry about the ethics of this, but any kind of speech seems better than compliant silence. To give him a life, even an imaginary one, is to refuse the abstraction of otherness. In my mind’s eye I replace his photo on the outstretched hands with one of my own son, just to bring home what is at stake in the daily carnage over there. And then I weave a simple story together out of what I know from news reports and what I can imagine, about an Iraqi boy who likes to play soccer and whose parents worry about his future.

This is how that story concludes:

Ali spent several days preparing for the big wedding of his brother Azhar. Extended family members were coming from nearby Syria and everyone was busy getting food ready and making sure the wedding tent was in order. His mother, Marifa, wanted Ali to be looking his best and kept reminding him that he was a man now and had to represent the family with dignity. He told her not to worry, but in his head he was always somewhere else, scoring the winning goal for Iraq in a World Cup that he will never see.

Ali Rekaad was killed, along with his mother, father, sisters and two younger brothers, by an American helicopter gunship that bombed their tent in Makr al-Deeb, Anbar Province, at 2.45am on May 19, 2004.