Return to the Marshes by Gavin Young

Author:Gavin Young [Gavin Young]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571280971
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2011-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

When I returned in the sheikh-less 1970s, I began one day to murmur these almost forgotten words at Sahain’s crowded house and at once people laughed, ‘Good God, he remembers that!’ – and they started up the song again, the older men explaining to the younger ones what it was all about. Naturally not all sheikhs behaved like little Jenghis Khans. Falih, for example, was a son of the awesome Majid, but his tribesmen regarded him quite differently. He was tough, all right, and proudly aware of his power and position. He expected immediate obedience and could be harsh if he didn’t get it. Most important, Falih was not pompous and stand-offish. He was hospitable; he was available; he listened. He bandied jokes with villagers and tribesmen; he dropped in on the Madan whom some people of his class despised. He was not afraid, as we might say, to get his hands dirty. He had a reputation as an excellent horseman, shot well and could even handle a Marshman’s wobbly canoe.

There were other sheikhs more gentle and born to lead. One I know, Maziad bin Hamdan of the Al Isa, a shepherd tribe on the northern edge of the Marshes, lost a small fortune out of his own pocket trying to improve his tribe’s crop production. A sign of the times: he now spends half the year running a small hotel in Basra. Another sheikh, an almost saintly old figure, Jasim bin Faris of the Fartus tribe deep in the Marshes, was a gossamer scrap of a man always puffing at a cigarette-holder, who worked and guided and led his people with a voice not much more emphatic than a whisper. He survived the purges of the revolution and was still sheikh of the Fartus up to his death in 1976 – at heaven knows what age – to the satisfaction of all concerned.

But an era died when the monarchy perished. As the post raj British disappeared so did the sheikhly landlords of the Marsh world. From the abortive upheaval of 1920 and the subsequent imposition of the monarchy by the British to the late 1950s, nationalism had proliferated in the Kingdom like a strong creeper grappling a wall. By 1958 the wall was ready to fall, and did so. The collapse buried not only the royal family and those close to the palace, but merchants, too, and politicians and land-owners. Pompous sheikhs were banished from their lands to easy exile in Baghdad where they live comfortably but without power.

So the fiefdom that Majid feared for in the hour of his son’s death passed into other hands – the hands in fact of Majid’s own tribesmen, now at last landowners in their own right. Perhaps Falih died in good time, before his familiar world disintegrated. The great mudhif with, its eleven reed arches and 60 feet of length is no more. Not a stone remains of the house that stood just behind it where Falih, the family that survived him

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