The title of this blog is a reference to a 1921 book by a British artist named Donald Maxwell. Maxwell was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum in London shortly after World War I to represent Iraq through sketches and paintings. The result was A Dweller in Mesopotamia: Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden, which is available online in original form through the University of Georgia library.Although I can find very little information about Maxwell and his travels, my understanding is that he spent most of the time for A Dweller in Mesopotamia in Baghdad, although the title suggests he traveled to other places in the Middle East as well. "Mesopotamia" is generally assumed to refer to the area between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers (literally "between rivers"), of which Baghdad was the major city. Although historians generally agree that the location of the Biblical Garden of Eden, Maxwell, like many in the early 20th century, believed it to have been in Mesopotamia. Since the British had assumed control of Iraq at the end of the Great War, Maxwell was charged with showing people back in London what the historically significant land looked like.
Much of Maxwell's writing is dated and somewhat impenetrable, but his brief introduction speaks passionately about the importance of Baghdad.
To have travelled in the land where Sennacherib held sway, to have walked upon the Sacred Way in Babylon, to have stood in the great banquet hall of Belshazzar's palace when the twilight is raising ghosts ... to wander in the moonlight into narrow streets in Old Baghdad, with its recollections of the Arabian Nights: these things are to make enduring pictures in the Palace of Memory, that ideal collection where only the good ones are hung and all are on the line.
In thinking and writing about Iraq, this history is tremendously important but all too often ignored. Through reading several works of history and taking inspiration from Maxwell, I hope to always remain conscious of it.
The pseudonym I chose has nothing to do with Maxwell or Iraq. Rather, it is the name of a favorite character from a favorite novel: Ian McEwan's Atonement.
3 comments:
The Garden of Eden can also be understood as the place or state of being in which we most fully experience what it is to be in communion with the Divine and with one another. It is, of course, also the place or state of being in which that communion becomes broken. Some theologians will understand this as the location of the so-called 'original sin' - the place where our human sinfulness caused to us to be cast out by the Divine.
Other theologians (and I include myself in this later category) understand that it is we, not God, who did the casting out. We turned our backs on what it meant to live fully and without rivalry with God or with each other.
The consequence of human rivalry has been violence; human violence that has made us inhuman, far less than what we are created to be.
The inhumanity exposed in Mesopotamia may be a metaphor for our common history and certainly for the current tragedy.
How will your writing illuminate the options we have left?
Mom
"It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you." Briony Tallis, 13, in Ian McEwan's Atonement.
See if you can find out anything about the Iraqi Trade Union Movement. Here is my take on the topic -
http://threescoreyearsandten.blogspot.com/2007/07/submission-to-iraq-commission.html
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