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Circus 2 Iraq: Replacing Nightmares with Dreams
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People may
ask what a bunch of clowns is doing in
Iraq
at a time like this
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“Some
of these girls,” Maha said, “I have not seen them smile since the war. It
makes me think there is still hope.”
It
was the same in Baquba. As we were leaving one of the workers from the youth
center came to us and said, “I haven’t seen the children laugh like that
since the war.”
In
the Turkish Kurds’ refugee camp in Maxmur they have been talking about the
clowns ever since we left, and in Nasariya the children have started drawing
pictures of jugglers and very tall ladies instead of tanks and guns.
It
started with a four-year-old boy called Muhammad whose house had just been
destroyed by a
US
bomb in
March 2003. Traumatized, he retreated into a walled world of his own. The first
thing that made him reach out of there was a bubble. He watched for a while and
then popped one and smiled.
Over
the summer I started to imagine bringing into being a thousand, a hundred
thousand bubbles, a group of clowns, bringing color and laughter and play back
to the children of
Iraq
, replacing
their nightmares of violence and explosions in the dark with dreams about color
and magic.
Psychological
Reconstruction
Throughout
the three months the clowns were on tour, it became clear that as essential as
the physical infrastructure of reconstruction is, the psychological
reconstruction process is equally vital for adults as well as children. Decades
of being crushed between the agendas of the
United
Kingdom
, the
United States
, and Saddam;
of war, sanctions, and occupation; of bombings, night raids on houses,
uncertainty, and insecurity; of hunger and unemployment, which are still going
on, that have weighed the people down.
Dr.
Ali Rasheed and his colleagues in the post-traumatic stress program believe
there is not a single child in
Iraq
without some
degree of post-traumatic stress. The circus wasn’t therapy and it wasn’t
diagnosing or treating the kids, but it did play a role in rehabilitating them,
nonetheless, by displacing the war and other violent incidents as their most
vivid memory.
One
day we needed to practice a new part of the act, and the only available space
was the street. Before long we had a crowd. The kids are joining in, the adult
men itching to, and the women laughing and waving from their balconies. Play is
powerfully and profoundly transformative, changing the street and the things in
it. By the time we had to leave for the afternoon’s show, an off-duty
policeman was among the grown men skipping over the rope that I and another
stilt-walking clown were turning.
"Boomchucka!!"
Decades
of being crushed between the agendas of the
United Kingdom
, the
United States
, and Saddam; of war, sanctions, and occupation; of bombings, night
raids on houses, uncertainty, and insecurity; of hunger and
unemployment, which are still going on, that have weighed the people
down.
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The
transformative effect extends to a kind of cleansing. One of the schools we
worked in was in
Sadr
City
, and the
teacher told us at the end that it was the first time anything fun had happened
in the school yard—anything apart from being made to sing songs praising
Saddam.
It
is surprising how effective two jugglers, a stilt walker, a magician, a
translator, and a big red parachute can be. Across
Baghdad
and
surrounding areas like Hilla, in and around
Erbil
in
Kurdistan
, and in
villages, towns, and cities throughout the south, kids are shouting the word
“Boomchucka.” There’s a group of street kids we worked with regularly, now
living in long-term accommodation in an orphanage, who yell it in celebration
when they score a goal in the back garden. The kids in one of the squatter camps
use it in greeting.
“Boomchucka”
is the peace cry of the circus: the show starts with all four of us on stage
calling “Wo-oh! Boomchucka” and the kids repeating it at the tops of their
voices, clapping in time. It doesn’t mean anything, but it feels good to do
something that everyone is doing together, with full exertion.
The
show isn’t meant to impart any particular moral lesson, although the two
jugglers discover that it’s more fun when they share the balls instead of
fighting over them, and the clown with the music box finds magic on her side
when she resists the bullying boss clown. The kids know whose side they’re on
and find the courage to stand up to the boss, too. The parachute games,
likewise, are primarily fun and energetic, but they also demand, and so improve,
cooperation, coordination, and communication.
Girls
in the south are suffering developmental delays, such as poor spatial awareness,
as a result of the lack of opportunity for physical activity. The prevailing
insecurity means they are less likely to be allowed to play in the street, and
the increase in threats against girls and women from certain groups has
restricted theatrical, musical, and artistic activities. Lots of girls don’t
go out at all, except to school. Impairment of spatial awareness affects their
abilities in tasks like writing and arranging objects in a room.
Maha
spent a couple of weeks before our show in the youth center at Al-Asuka near
Nasariya going into the girls’ schools and talking to their families to
persuade them to allow their daughters to come. Still she was surprised when
several dozen turned up. “This is an old Baath party building. It’s the
first time these girls have ever been in this hall.”
Ultimate
Icebreaker
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Parachute
arms up
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Some
were overwhelmed. The excitement in the room before we started was intense, and
a few burst into tears and hid, creeping back in when the show began and
laughing, as Maha said, for the first time in a year. She hopes it means
they’ll be allowed to come back and use the center more.
Seeing
a woman in the show has an incredible effect on the girls. Pete juggles for a
while before I walk on, multi-colored and nine feet tall, and they go wild. It
was the same when Uzma or Amber appeared. I don’t know what it is, whether
it’s anything as deep as seeing a different possibility for themselves or some
kind of identification with us, but I know they love it. Often there would be
women about, teachers and cleaners and mothers who hovered on the outskirts of
the playground, the theater or the concrete square. When I or the other women
appeared on stage, they would collectively come forward up to the back of the
crowd and stretch on tiptoes to watch us.
Layla,
from the Organization of Women’s Freedom in
Iraq
, told us
that the girls and women in the squatter camp at Shuala talk about us all the
time: the women from the circus. The first time we went there the girls were too
shy to join in with the parachute games. The second time they came to play. Now
they run up to us and scream and shout and beg to be picked for cat or mouse or
floater, or plot tactics for parachute football. Layla said it’s made a real
difference to them.
As
well as this, a circus is the ultimate icebreaker. The last circus that came
here was a Russian one in the early 1980s. There’s no indigenous tradition of
circuses, and people have to stop and discuss among themselves for a while if
you ask them the Arabic word for clown. But when the clowns arrive in a place,
sometimes a very poor place, a place where people live in unmitigated misery,
and we haven’t come just to look and leave, or to assess needs and supply aid,
but to play and to bring something intangible, immensely valuable, and freely
available to any and all of them in unlimited shares, then the barriers
disappear.
Of
course it didn’t change everything. If people had no water supply when we
arrived, they still had none when we left, but we were able to put out e-mails
about the conditions in the camp at Shuala and about the residents’ plan to
build a drainage system. Within a week we had enough money to enable them to
finish their project, which got rid of the pool of waste water and sewage that
had been lying open in the camp.
A
Bunch of Clowns?!
There
have been criticisms. People ask what a bunch of clowns is doing in
Iraq
at a time
like this. Interestingly, none of those criticisms have come from Iraqis and
certainly not from the ones we worked with. The results were so positive that
there is a plan for the circus to start another tour in autumn. Given the recent
fighting and security problems (even by
Baghdad
standards)
the planned Boomchucka Bus Tour, a mobile youth center, is on hold.
Still
the influx of families from Falluja seeking refuge in Baghdad has brought a
whole new population of terrified, horrified children—physically
sick, homesick, war sick—to
shelters and tents where there’s nothing to take their minds off what
they’ve gone through. So the bubbles and the balloons and the drawing stuff
and the parachute came back out and Boomchucka lives again.
Jo
Wilding is an Iraq-based British human rights campaigner, writer,
and trainee lawyer from
Bristol
,
UK
. Twenty-nine-year-old Wilding first came to
Iraq
in August 2001 with Voices in the Wilderness. She returned to
Iraq
as an independent observer in February 2003 and stayed for the month before the
war and the first 11 days of the bombing as a human shield, before being
expelled by the Iraqi foreign ministry as part of a purge of independent
foreigners.
Currently inside Iraq, Wilding is taking part in Circus 2 Iraq, "a small group
of circus performers—fools, clowns, jugglers, stilt walkers and
magicians—set up to perform and give circus skills workshops to children [in
Iraq] traumatized by sanctions, war and its aftermath."
Her writings about
Iraq
and ordinary Iraqis were published in The Guardian, The New Zealand Herald,
Counterpunch, Australian radio, and in
Japan
,
Korea
, and
Pakistan
. Click here to
visit Jo Wilding’s Web site
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