Depicting Past and Future: Tamara Abdul Hadi and the Iraqi Marshlands

On a biting overcast day 14 months ago, I wandered the quaint, monied streets of Bloomsbury in central London. I found myself at Skoob Books, a second-hand bookshop that rarely lets me down. As I descended its narrow metal steps, I was abruptly met by a familiar face, an iconic image of an anonymous man.

There, in the store’s display that showcases rare books, was a person known only to me as “Man from the Marshes.” His depiction dons the cover of Nadhim Ramzi’s striking book of photography, Iraq: The Land and the People.

“Man from the Marshes” is a captivating front to Ramzi’s collection. The man is not looking at us. His eyes are shut, his head cocked slightly back. Ramzi’s camera, hovering around the man’s torso and angled upward, captures him laughing jovially.

I stopped on the platform halfway down the steps, my face abutting the glass, staring intently at “Man from the Marshes.” I smiled slightly and had two thoughts.

The first was of a person: Tamara Abdul Hadi. She introduced me, a few short years ago, to this collection and Ramzi’s work. Tamara’s admiration for the book helped inspire her own photographic endeavours, portrayals that often represent joy rivalling the laughter snapped in Ramzi’s marsh image.

The second thought was dark and melancholic, conjured by way of today’s history. “Man from the Marshes,” a grin shaping his face, was animated. There I stood, two months into a genocide in Gaza, one that began in Palestine more than seven decades before, unsure what to make of such exuberance.

The collection of photographs intimidated me. I was apprehensive of the emotions it began to stir. Books can have right and wrong times, when we are more or less prepared for what they offer; this one felt no different. Rather than purchase the opus then and there, I did what I often do when stumbling upon photography on and in Iraq: I texted Tamara.

“Look what I found!” I exclaimed. “Should I buy it? It’s expensive, but I don’t own a copy. It’s important to have, no?” After a few emojis and enthusiastic punctuations of her own, Tamara asked if the book was in good condition. Does it have its original jacket? Are the pages torn? It seemed in decent shape, I reassured her. She replied without hesitation: “Omz, buy it. You should have a copy. Don’t think twice.”

I didn’t listen. I thought more than twice, departing the shop empty handed—thankfully without much consequence. I returned weeks later with intention. “Man from the Marshes” was waiting for me. The image and collection appeared different, somehow warmer, more welcoming. Tamara’s encouragement was a reminder—an insistence—of what such a collection, even when encountered amidst ruin, can give. Calm, steadiness, sustenance.

I knew Tamara’s work before I knew Tamara. My exposure to her early oeuvre preceded our friendship, which grew out of a meeting in Beirut five years ago, only days before the people of Lebanon and Iraq catapulted themselves into simultaneous moments of revolution.

One need not be on texting basis with her to apprehend the worlds Tamara at once captures and helps create. For gallery perusers, I offer briefly three considerations to help situate Tamara’s wider work and the terms through which it might be engaged.

First, in her debut book, Picture an Arab Man, Tamara offers portraits of men from across the Arab world, in Ramallah, Beirut, Rabbat, Dubai, Amman, and Tunis. The book insists on “confronting” the visual regime that has vilified Arab men for decades. This regime dominates; it does work by making our bodies killable, murderable, genocidable.

Writing of Tamara’s work in the esteemed Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Rend Beiruti celebrates Tamara’s Arab Man collection for how it “allows viewers to humanize and identify” with those pictured, “becoming familiar with their details: their freckles, wrinkles, and scars.” Her work ensconces: “It feels like being let in on a secret or private moment,” Beiruti adds. A slow but intense political fire simmers under this work, a vital element for “new directions in Arab arts” that Tamara is lighting.¹

Re-Imagining Return to the Marshes is coloured by her past work. Tamara’s portrayals in her first book challenge tropes. In this project, the confrontation is similarly with orientalist depictions, yet of a different hue: she targets voyeuristic shots of the people of Iraq’s marshes, depicted living staid off their land and water. These are distinct forms of violence Tamara aims to combat.

Second, most who visit this work, on display in Toronto, are at once privileged and plagued by diaspora. Privilege is the more straightforward of these conditions, especially in times of violence and war, destruction, and genocide. Murkier are the ways diaspora can plague.

Some of what often troubles me about diasporic engagements with our places of origin, at least among many Iraqis I know, love, and respect, is the fatalism of the tragedy—the mourning for what Iraq once was but was lost. Destroyed, stolen, pillaged—but still, lost. The sources of pain and trauma should be explored and given their due, at times even honoured. Yet such inclinations can also cage. Narratives of the better yet buried past, the better as condemned to history, can trap people in memories—usually rose-tinted. How might we account for ambivalence in these histories amidst and within new creations of today and tomorrow?

Tamara turns to the public for an answer, to those inside and outside and in between Iraq. Asking for contributions of personal and family photographs from the Iraqi marshlands, Tamara has slowly compiled a visual archive that belongs to us all. Tamara has not merely reached out to those who call the country more a place of origin than home. She collects fragments of modern visual history from those willing to contribute, placing them in conversation with conditions of our present, with existing people still living these lands.

The visuals from individuals and families were gifted not to Tamara but to her efforts. Emplacing and overlaying her own photos from today is a call to overcome the colonial present, to embrace and extol all that the colonial can never claim. Tamara’s work invites us to refuse, to re-fuse ourselves to the places that will always be ours.

So, third, to Tamara’s re-imagining. Tamara’s work is intensely personal. Her family is deeply intertwined in this work—her father in particular. This familial presence charges the work with an intimate energy that at moments almost overwhelms, running through the viewer in a manner that fosters discomfort, calling on her to confront colonialism through kinship.

Criticism here tempts. Such intimacy can feel untouchable, a wall rather than a welcome. Am I being brought in or kept at bay? Yet this invitation becomes a demand, to sit with this tension and what it partly aims to impress: re-imagining through re-imaging the person, and her ties to land.

For 15 months, we have been forced to bear witness to how the colonial present—namely Israeli Zionist genocide—has wiped out whole bloodlines, entire family networks in Gaza. Israel’s project of obliteration of Palestinians, as Samera Esmeir identifies, is one aimed at “the historicity of the people and their bond with the land.”² That this intimacy is an adversary of such violence speaks to its force. Iraq’s particular colonial encounters differ. Yet Esmeir’s insights from Palestine, more generally, direct us to the struggle for land.

Through her bonds, Tamara’s work foregrounds what is urgent about these marshes. Existential threats have long been posed to ahl al-ahwar, or the people of the marshes, the families of the marshes. Drought and climate change, damming, poor agricultural policies, and the geopolitics of water. The intimate is an instigation that centres what is at stake for the families and peoples still living these lands.

Tamara Abdul Hadi’s majestic work offers reprieve from the melancholic—but not by occluding it. She wrestles with past and present to re-imagine and hold space for different futures. Her political aesthetic serves as her compass, one we can all benefit from following.