Re-Imagining Return to the Marshes

As a child growing up in the Iraqi diaspora, Tamara Abdul Hadi’s visual imagination of Iraq was largely influenced by books in her family’s home library. One of these books was Return to the Marshes, a documentation of the Southern Iraqi marshlands by British writer and photographer duo, Gavin Young and Nik Wheeler, published in 1977. The Marshes, or Al Ahwar in Arabic, is a wetland area located between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what was once the centre of ancient Mesopotamia. As few photographs of the Marshes were published at that time, images from Young and Wheeler’s book circulated widely, and continue to do so to this day.

Abdul Hadi’s ongoing project Re-Imagining Return to the Marshes researches the genesis and proliferation of imperial images of the Southern Iraqi Marshes. She is visiting and photographing the marshlands anew, capturing the contemporary environment, where the local inhabitants, the Ahwaris, still follow the same way of life: living by the land, raising buffalo, and building homes using native plants. Creating digital interventions that layer new meaning atop Young and Wheeler’s original pages, Abdul Hadi’s project advances a decolonial visuality that speaks to current, transdisciplinary debates about environmental transformations in the wake of modern colonial projects of statecraft, industrialization, and urbanization.