Baghdad Journal

The Road to Duwiniya and Musings on the Condition of Animals

There was a donkey carrying a bundle of dry twigs and reeds on a dirt path that ran parallel to the road to Duwiniya. "That is a spoiled donkey," Salaam said. "This is no good. A donkey should not be spoiled. He will ruin the other donkeys." We drove through Al Kassam, a small town with a big mosque--one of the holier mosques in Iraq where one of the prophet Mohamed's grandsons is buried. We drove through a busy marketplace that made good use of the beasts of burden. Donkeys pulled flat carts stacked with bricks, scrap iron, beat-up gas tanks, chopped palm wood, long blocks of melting ice, and mountains of grapes. Some were stooped over in the sun eating hay, others listlessly blinked their eyes resigned to their donkeyfate, waiting for their owners to mount the carts and beat them into traffic again.

In Al Maseeb the donkey situation was much the same. Their rump checks were calloused from their drivers hitting with sticks as thick as baseball bats. They would strike their donkeys as if they meant to kill them, and the donkey's would pick up speed before falling back into the same slow trot, what they could manage on the roads as hot as grill fires.

There were men in dishdasha (white robes) walking out of the market place, their hands gripping the legs of chickens (like the plastic sacks your average American carries from his local Wal-Mart) and the chickens hanging upside down flailing wildly, throwing feathers.

Outside of town we passed a large camel crammed into the bed of a small Nissan pick-up. It sat on its folded legs, as contained as it could be, trying to keep its long neck from spilling over the side.

Near Hilla there were lots of goat-herders roaming over the baked, biblical fields under the mid-morning sun. The goats were accompanied by an old man or young boy walking between the date palm groves, near the bombed tanks and trucks of Saddam's defeated army. The goat-herder in the middle of his flock. The goats must keep him good company, looking to him to move them, to find them good fields of fresh grass. On the other side of Hilla, we passed a beat-up taxi with three men crammed into the front seat, a large, wooly goat standing in the back, it's head sticking out of the halfway rolled down window.

In Duwiniya we were looking for a plate of dijej and timman, chicken and rice, when we passed a boy clubbing the ass of his donkey. The donkey's ribs poked out like the support poles of a tent, and it had a bloody dripping hole in his rump. The boy was beating the sore place with a stick as thick as a club, the end of it as blunt as a sledgehammer. The donkey barely moved, giving up on life perhaps. Salaam asked me if I remembered the animal rights activist who was trying to sue the whole of the Middle East for Their treatment of donkeys. I hadn't, but it seemed like a hard case to win.

Back in Baghdad I found myself eating skewered chicken in a restuarant full of caged, unsinging birds. I was eating heartily with Rahman and Brandon, and I told them we should free the birds who were sitting stonestill in their perches. Rahman said it wasn't a good idea because inevitabley the canaries and lovebirds would end up skewered on some one's plate, he joked, they would make for a full belly. The electricity went and we were sitting in the dark shoving lamb and chicken in our mouthes, the cook in the kitchen fanning the fire in the brick oven so that I could faintly see my friends faces in the orange light below the caged birds somewhere in the pitch black.

Posted by Adam Shemper at August 20, 2003 12:21 PM | TrackBack