The Jewish Museum of Baghdad
In Development
Created & Written by Sivan Battat
Tables covered in an assortment of old objects. It seems kind of like junk. A dusty phone starts to ring. A woman in her eighties enters the space, makes her way to the phone and answers it. She pauses, looks out at us, suddenly hangs up.
Where are the keys? Pouring through a mountain of iron objects on a table she finds them and unlocks three padlocks on a huge heavy door. Light pours across the stage as she swings the door open to reveal a room impressively stuffed to the brim with dust covered artifacts, cluttered haphazardly on tables, floors and walls. Spoons, photo albums, chandeliers, candlesticks, keychains, hats, bicycles, stacks of books, Torah scrolls, dishes, political posters, clocks, maps, musical instruments, Backgammon sets: the remnants of Jewish Baghdad. She begins to take us through a journey of objects left behind, telling us stories on a disoriented tour of sorts. Eventually, she comes upon a pair of Shabbat candlesticks. These ones carry a different stillness in her hands.
“These were Daisy’s.”
Hiba begins to tell the story of her friendship with Daisy. Two teenage Arab women enter, Daisy is Jewish, Hiba is Muslim. The women play out the scenes of this friendship, grabbing dusty objects from around the room and bringing them to life as they do. They take us on a journey through a friendship in 1940s Baghdad, through Daisy and her family leaving.
Through their lives, we learn of an entire people disappearing from a place. We learn what it is to say goodbye to someone who holds your entire heart. Over the course of the piece, the women clear aside the objects and the dusty space opens up to reveal the sky above a rooftop, over the river Tigris where Daisy and Hiba look at the stars. What remains at the end is just today’s Hiba, the ghosts of the lives of the objects she has gathered, the memory of her best friend.
In my own body and history, stories come fragmented. There are pieces that are lost, that fade into a disappearing. What does displacement leave behind?
