MEMOIR: MARY RUSSELLreviews Late for Tea at the Deer PalaceBy Tamara Chalabi, Harper, 414pp, £25
VISITING BAGHDAD during the Saddam era, I had a taxi driver point out to me the signpost to Saddam City (now Sadr City), a collection of tower-block slum dwellings and home to some two million Shia. “Are they suffering much under the sanctions?” I asked. The driver shook his head wearily. “The Shia suffer from everything,” he replied.
Late for Tea at the Deer Palaceis the story of one well-known and influential Shia family that did indeed suffer, and not only under Saddam – though not from poverty. Tamara Chalabi's book charts the fortunes of her large family alongside that of Iraq, for the two were threaded through the complex tapestry of history into which is woven the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Nazism, the Middle East, the community of Iraqi refugees in Beirut and London and, most importantly, the magnificent and historic city of Baghdad.
The Chalabis were good at networking. They knew the right people in power, their entrepreneurial skills enabled them to consolidate their already considerable wealth and they invested in their children’s education. But despite all this there is always the sense that they were outsiders in their own land. This was partly because the family on one side was Azeri and on the other, way back, had entered Baghdad with the Ottomans and so had their origins in and some loyalty to Turkey, which presented problems when the Kaiser, anxious to build the Berlin-Baghdad railway, paid court to Istanbul. Should the Chalabis support Germany or the British? A tough one when you don’t know which side the penny is going to fall.
The other major factor in this was the fact that the Chalabis are Shia and therefore, historically, in direct opposition to the powerful Sunni, who, in the author’s estimation, considered all Shia ill educated, churlish and not to be trusted. She recounts how, when he arrived in Baghdad, Faisal brought with him a Syrian adviser who was Sunni and who, it was suspected, was instrumental in obstructing a young Chalabi’s entrance to university. But to no avail. Many of the family went on to university, and Tamara has a PhD from Harvard.
Strangely, in her account of Faisal’s arrival in Iraq, there is no reference to the iniquitous betrayal by the British of Arab aspirations and only two lines devoted to the doomed but courageous stand made by the Syrians against the marauding French, intent on getting to Damascus to remove Faisal.
The author’s father, Ahmad Chalabi, will be known to followers of the fortunes of Iraq. A political exile, he founded Petra Bank in Jordan and led opposition to Saddam from a base in Kurdistan. Indeed, Tamara’s book in part sets out a defence against the many charges laid against her politician father, that he mishandled the finances of Petra Bank and offered Washington misinformation about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction being the two main ones.
This part of the book makes interesting reading, but even more so is the account of a well-to-do Baghdad family with its spectacular houses. The Deer Palace of the title is one of them. Its traditional lifestyle accommodated male and female living quarters, women-only society soirees, arranged marriages and family celebrations.
Bibi, the matriarch and grandmother to Tamara, rules the roost, whether from exile in London or Beirut. Bibi’s marriage to Hadi Chalabi, a handsome and popular 18-year-old, is described so glowingly by her enchanted grand-daughter – the excited 16-year-old Bibi delighting in her pretty trousseau, glad to get away from her bossy mother – that it comes as a surprise to turn the page and find a photo of her and Hadi in the early years of their marriage and to see that she is short and dumpy and his hair has started to recede. The pair went on to have nine children, of whom Ahmad was the youngest.
There is the aunt who so hates cold weather that she takes to her bed in November not to reappear until April, and there is the author’s beloved uncle Hassan, struck blind at the age of seven, who kept out of politics, became a university teacher and who seems to have been a calming influence in a turbulent world.
There are picnics by the Tigris, rows between mothers and daughters, resplendent gatherings for King Faisal that Bibi has to watch from behind a screen, and, finally, fear and imprisonment as revolution follows revolution.
In fact the Chalabis chose discretion in the 1950s, moving money to a Swiss bank, sewing family jewellery into clothes to get through customs, replacing Saddam-era passports in Peru and getting the children into private schools in England, though by that time much of the family fortune back in Iraq had been taken over by one revolution or another.
Now Bibi is dead, buried in her beloved Najaf. Ahmad is the only one still living in Iraq, intent on some sort of political preferment.
Tamara, having presented her thesis on the Shia of Lebanon – she was born in Beirut – is now a commentator on Iraqi affairs. And still wondering to which country she really belongs.
Late for Tea at the Deer Palaceis a detailed and very personal view of present-day Iraq and, for that reason alone, is a rewarding read.
Mary Russell is a writer with a special interest in the Middle East