Where and what roots are considered to be has implications for how the self, community, and displacement are understood. Roots as a metaphor, however, also provides a powerful language for expressing loss. To have roots in the first place leaves open the possibility of being ‘uprooted’. Mizrahi memoirists, for example, draw upon organic imagery and liken themselves and their communities to trees being torn asunder in order to express the trauma of their displacement.
A profound connection to homeland, when severed, can bring with it the trauma of separation. This is the subtext present within Benjamin’s poetic introduction to her memoir, speaking of self and nation as embodied and inseparable.144 Revealing a personal
and emotive understanding of homeland and identity, her use of a well known line of poetry implies that Benjamin’s very being was created from the “branches” of Iraq.145
While these are linked to the waters of the river Euphrates, the word also activates an association with trees, thereby likening the nation (and its ancestral peoples) to a primordial ‘mother tree’ where life does not exist without its (or their) presence.146 Read in the context
of Mizrahi displacement, the organic metaphorical image bears witness to Benjamin’s personal anguish and pain. It poignantly asks, if the person is separated, absent, or ceases to exist, what then is Iraq? Does the previously singular entity shatter, with a myriad of shards living on, carried within each person having left her boarders? Does permanent departure
143 Kazzaz, Mother of the Pound, 38.
144 Benjamin, Last Days in Babylon, xi. As previously quoted: ‘I am Iraq, my tongue is her heart, my blood her
Euphrates, my being from her branches formed’.
145 Benjamin, Last Days in Babylon, xi.
146 Benjamin, Last Days in Babylon, xi. My first reading of this line I had the impression of tree branches,
similar to the ‘Tree of Life’ as previously mentioned by Kazzaz in reference to the Torah. My subsequent readings have revealed the alternative (and more direct) interpretation of ‘branches’ being a reference to the structure of the river Euphrates. Either interpretation, I believe, could be valid and does not lessen the central point of embodiment of person and nation as implied by the poem’s line as a whole.
124 rent apart and cause the ‘death’ of each, through the violence of separation? Or does something else emerge entirely?
Organic metaphors enable memoirists to describe and make sense of a rapidly changed post-displacement reality. At a universal level, the “rhythmic pattern of persistence and change” observable in trees can easily be read as a parallel for changes occurring in human life.147 Like Benjamin, Jawary feels a deep personal and historical connection to her original
homeland of Iraq.148 It is, however, the land itself to which she feels the most attachment
rather than the nation itself.149 This ambivalence is not surprising given the betrayal many
Mizrahim felt at the national structures that were ideally meant to protect rather than destroy the people they supposedly represented.150 Resettling in Australia, Benjamin
contemplates what the loss of her homeland and beloved city of Baghdad has ultimately meant for her:
Now I am like a tree that has been transplanted with care. The tree had its roots well entrenched on the banks of that river they call Dijla (Tigris). The tree survived the process, but did not thrive. The aim was too high and the prospect too short! The end of time – empty.151
This same imagery and narrative pattern is echoed by Sabar’s father, Yona, who was originally from the city of Zakho in Kurdish territory within far northern Iraq.152 He
confides to his son, who relates this within his memoir, that: “I feel like a tree uprooted . . . You can plant it somewhere else, but it will never be the same”.153
The type of tree chosen for use in metaphor can also have special significance that helps the memoirist to express a distinct heritage or national identity. For example, for Iraqis, this preferred symbolism is often the date palm tree.154 Easily associated with being Iraqi, date
palms form a clever and emotive metaphor for Shabi’s parent’s narrative of being
147 Macnaghten, ‘Nature’, 348. 148 Jawary, Baghdad, I Remember, 194. 149 Jawary, Baghdad, I Remember, 194.
150 Abbas Shiblak, Iraqi Jews: A History of Mass Exodus, 2nd ed. (London: Saqi, 2005). 151 Jawary, Baghdad, I Remember, 194.
152 Sabar, My Father’s Paradise, 284. 153 Sabar, My Father’s Paradise, 284.
154 Shabi, Not the Enemy, 1-2. Considered a quintessentially Iraqi dish, Shabi’s Iraqi Jewish parents “have a
particularly devoted relationship with the [date] palm fruit,” Shabi writing that “It’s the dates that really clinch their Iraqi origins. A habit that clung to them as thickly as the Arabic language, music and customs. My parents migrated twice, first to Israel and then to England – but maintained their Iraqi-inspired date consumption throughout”. Previously dates played a very important role in the Iraqi economy being prized for their exquisite quality and considered national treasures. In Chapter Four: Sense-scapes and Soul Food I explore the sensory aspects linking food and memory more in depth. The fact that Shabi’s parents’ continued their consumption of dates remains a tangible and transferable aspect of their heritage and lived identity.
125 displaced.155 Within this family’s story, their fate was pre-empted and intertwined with the
date palm trees that covertly made their way to Israel before the dispersal of Iraqi Jews.156
Shabi shares that:
In the late 1930s, or so the story goes, Jewish settlers in Palestine smuggled date palms out of Iraq, out of the fertile valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and into the soils of the soon-to-be Israeli state. But, my parents say, the stolen shoots never bore fruit as delicious as the original, magnificent Iraqi dates. How could they having been transplanted into a foreign land? . . . A short time later, 125,000 [Iraqi] Jews, my parents included, pulled up roots and left Iraq, migrated en mass to Israel . . . They’d borne all kinds of fruit – cultural, linguistic, artistic, religious, and professional – living alongside Arab and Muslim peoples, for the most part in peace, as good neighbours. Now they like the smuggled palms, were sowed into the new soils of Israel. And this land, they say, seemed unaccountably hostile to Middle Eastern and North African Jews – so they didn’t grow right either.157
The choice of the date palm is particularly significant because it contrasts with the olive tree which has close personal associations for Israeli Jews.158 The olive tree is considered
resilient, easily transplanted, and able to thrive even in the harshest conditions within the soil of the State of Israel.159 Within Shabi’s family’s narrative, however, in the date palm’s
experience, forced transplantation instead inhibits their previously glorious growth rather than enabling them to thrive.160 Within the common language of organic metaphor then we
see the tensions and interplay between Zionist narratives and Mizrahi narratives of resettlement within the State of Israel. For Shabi’s parents, their personal story speaks of the loss of their homeland, but also their frustration and disillusionment with the far from inclusive Israeli society of the time.161
Despite the damage of uprooting and transplantation, this narrative of a lack of potential growth does not always necessarily carry down to the next generation’s understanding of themselves.162 Common to the narratives of Jawary, Sabar’s father Yona, and Shabi’s
parents is that separation from their ancestral lands of origin through being uprooted and transplanted was damaging and personally stunted their growth.163 They all, however, had
155 Shabi, Not the Enemy, 3. 156 Shabi, Not the Enemy, 3. 157 Shabi, Not the Enemy, 3. 158 Aciman, False Papers, 86. 159 Aciman, False Papers, 86. 160 Shabi, Not the Enemy, 3.
161 Shabi, Not the Enemy; Haddad, Flight from Babylon. Haddad had a similar experience of alienation and
disillusionment while living within Israel, detailing this throughout his memoirs.
162 Separation from heritage and loss of cultural and historical knowledge, however, is considered an ongoing
issue.
126 previously well established lives within Iraq and something tangible to lose. The possibility for pragmatism on the issue of growth, however, emerges when considering their descendants. For instance, although Sabar’s father, Yona, personally felt “like a tree uprooted”, he specifically decided not to return to live within Kurdish territory, ultimately deciding there were greater opportunities for his children by continuing to live in the United States of America.164 In the Egyptian case, Lagnado ultimately came to the same
decision by realising that despite her personal nostalgia for Egypt, she had created another separate life for herself and her family in America that she wasn’t willing to relinquish by returning in practice.165
Nevertheless, the experience of damage to roots and stunted growth is different from perceiving you have lost your roots entirely and that they are unrepairable. Each stance has implications for personal ongoing emotional and psychological wellbeing, especially in the case of choosing (or being forced) to relocate again or not. Each time such a scenario arises, the benefits of a move have to be considered against the added impact of reencountering loss – a challenge sometimes made more extreme for those who are still overwhelmed by feelings of that their roots have already been destroyed. This is a recurrent theme that emerges strongly within Aciman’s reflections on his displacement from Egypt.166 He explains:
It is precisely because you have no roots that you don’t budge, that you fear change, that you’ll build on anything, rather than look for land. An exile is not just someone who has lost his home; he is someone who can’t find another, who can’t think of another. Some no longer even know what home means.167
This intense fear of any form of change, stemming from the original loss of home, is expressed specifically using organic metaphors that reference different soils and the risks of transplantation:
It [that is, any change in anything] reminds me of the thing I fear the most: that my feet are never quite solidly on the ground, but also that the soil under me is weak, that the graft did not take. In the disappearance of small things, I read the tokens of my own dislocation, of my own transiency. An exile reads change the way he reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss.168
164 Sabar, My Father’s Paradise, 219-220, 226, 284. 165 Lagnado, Man in the Sharkskin Suit, 331-332. 166 Aciman, False Papers.
167 Aciman, False Papers, 39. 168 Aciman, False Papers, 39.
127 Aciman’s narrative differs from those already discussed in this chapter – they describe the trauma of being uprooted followed by stunted growth in new soil, while Aciman’s image is one of being uprooted followed by complete loss of roots and any chance to even the smallest regrowth. He describes how displacement has personally caused permanent and ongoing feelings of spatial and temporal dissonance that cannot be rectified by attempted returns or resettlement.169 Although Aciman’s experiences are Mizrahi, his representation
of his post-displacement state directly echoes Black experiences of living within a different “syncopated temporality – a different rhythm of living and being” where “linear history is broken” and a changed sense of time and a distinct rupture in continuity is continually felt and precipitated by ongoing diasporic disruption.170 With any sense of historical grounding
lost, Aciman feels forcibly transformed into a state that he describes as being perpetually ‘diasporic’.171 Despite frequent travel and the appearance of being nomadic, ‘diasporic’ in
this subjective sense means being trapped within a static and stifling state of internal non- movement.172 This implies that Aciman will always carry the trauma of that initial
displacement with him. He represents this as a fear of further changes and an ever present anxiety about the degree, or lack, of a sense of belonging to any person or place that constantly undermines him in every location and situation he finds himself in.173 From this
perspective, the damage to roots severely torn, or indeed, completely removed, is irreparable.
Aciman therefore sees loss of roots as a permanent situation once done, which prompts the subsequent sense that a perpetual loss of any secure sense of home, meaning, and belonging has occurred.174 This perspective has implications for the children of the
displaced as well as future generations. Kazzaz too has also directly observed that the rupture of displacement has severely impacted on the ability of some Mizrahi parents to retain a sense of a historical and personal past they feel able to teach their children.175 As a
consequence of this situation, the loss of history perpetuates the sense of being “adrift” within the next generation, many of whom feel utterly “estranged from family roots”.176
169 Aciman, False Papers, 39. Aciman makes multiple return visits to Egypt but never a permanent move. He
finds the ‘nostalgia’ trips useful for thinking, but appears to still suffer the same melancholic dissonance nonetheless.
170 Clifford, ‘Diasporas’, 318. Clifford here is discussing Paul Gilroy. 171 Aciman, False Papers, 39.
172 Aciman, False Papers, 39. 173 Aciman, False Papers, 39. 174 Aciman, False Papers, 39. 175 Kazzaz, Mother of the Pound, 435. 176 Kazzaz, Mother of the Pound, 435.
128 There are troubling implications if Aciman’s concept of inescapable trauma and perpetual irreparability is expanded from the personal level to that of the collective. This is not in any way to dismiss the validity of his viewpoint not the depth of his personal grief. If the authenticity of displacement and the identity of an exile equates to, or necessitates, existing within an internal limbo in a state of inescapable melancholic suffering, this is indeed highly problematic given the state of ongoing and incurable pain. Given that collectively within Mizrahi memoirs there is an ongoing thematic longing to once again feel or re-establish a connection to history, place and people, if viewed entirely from Aciman’s standpoint, this is a longing will never be fulfilled. Such a position undermines the potential for personal agency and removes the possibility of any improvement in wellbeing at the risk of losing the validity of that identity. Within this, however, pain imprisons and fear destroys the possibility of hope. A total absence of hope is not only tragic – it is dangerous. Without any roots a tree ultimately dies.