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Magnetic Memories: 
How To Mend That Which Has Been Ruptured?


Reman Sadani



Filmmaker Abbas Fahdel arrives at the Baghdad Cinema Studios. It is April 2003, almost a month since the US-led invasion of Iraq. He is accompanied by Sami Qaftan, an established actor in his sixties. Like a patient tour guide, Qaftan stops once and again to wipe his sweaty forehead while naming the damaged government institutions in the surroundings. He points to a burned building in the distance that was the Department of Cinema and Theatre, indicating that the damage to the exterior does not measure up to the damage that has been done inside.

To understand the despondent sentiment in which the Iraqi discourse on archives often gets mired, I return to this scene in the documentary film Homeland: Iraq Year Zero (2015). When Qaftan enters the dark Baghdad Cinema Studios, he stumbles upon a hat pierced by a bullet. He smiles and explains, “It is bullet. It’s from the revolution of 1920.” The prop comes from Mohammed Shukri Jamil’s film Al Mas’ala Al Kubra (Clash of Loyalties, 1983), in which for ty-one-year-old Qaftan once played the role of Suliman, an Iraqi patriot who led the assassination of British Colonel Gerard Leachman.

Qaftan walks away with the hat and guides us on to other departments. He wipes dust from a flatbed editor and turns the knobs to revive the dormant machine. He finds Ta’er El Shams (The Sun Bird, 1991), a film about an Iraqi pilot’s attempt to return home after being captured by Iranian forces during the Iraq-Iran war. After inspecting a few frames on the cellu loid strip, Qaftan brings the reel close to his chest, expressing regret, “ma’ al asaf.”





Still from Homeland: Iraq Year Zero (d. Abbas Fahdel, 2015)



The filmmaker does not allow us to look away. In the next shot, Qaftan shakes tangled reels of film as if they were a dead body he wants to bring back to life. He asks someone off-cam era, “Is this Iraqi cinema? Is this where it ends up?” The dramaturgy of this shot captures the 2003 moment. It conveys a sense of helplessness in the face of chaos spawned by the US-led invasion. It evokes a poetic image engraved in Arab memory of al wuquf ’ala al atlal, standing at the ruins, which the filmmaker repeatedly brings to bear as if seized by a perpet ual lament. This offers a glimpse into the way in which the Iraqi discourse on archives has fixated since 2003 on a sentiment of loss, whereby one stands at the ruins with nothing but recollections.

Situating the discourse of loss exclusively in the context of the US-led invasion falls short in explaining the failure of public institutions in Iraq to reconcile with the past thus far. Iraqi state-funded institutions have been unable to devise a strategy for archiving national audiovisual material or allowing the public access to them.1 While a portion of public records and archives were completely damaged in 2003, another portion was removed during lootings or rescue operations initiated by individuals. Anonymous looters actively targeted the archives of the State Radio and Television building, the Department of Cinema and Theatre, and army and state newspapers like Al-Thawra and Al-Jumhuriya.2 

What was spared of this audiovisual archive is now housed at the Iraqi Media Network, a company established in 2004 to manage state-funded Iraqi television and radio stations as well as print-based media. It is other wise difficult to verify what archival material has been returned to public institutions since 2003, what remains displaced, and what is held in institutions. While researching the lootings, I came across only one committee that was formed in 2003 to investigate the theft of the radio and television archives. Their findings were never published.3

Ba’thara


Film historian Mahdi Abbas and VHS collectors Ali Sadik Al Amily and Marwan Ali, who were all interviewed for this piece, unanimously use the term ba’thara, dispersal, to describe a body of national archives separating and moving apart across a wide space, without order or regularity.4 The pre 2003 archive that remains is now subject to institutional negligence, dis placement, and privatization. A few names repeat across my interviews, pointing to a few private collectors who handle original material relating to film, television, and performing arts. While there is no way to verify the provenance of what they own, the commodification of such archives removes them from public use and circulation.
 Wherever the original physical material may be, fragments of Iraqi audiovisual material dating to pre 2003 have found their way to cyber space, circulating across social media platforms and communication apps. The digital clips include excerpts and unabridged film, as well as tele vision broadcast and performing arts. They’re often copies of copies, bearing erased and reapplied water marks, uploaded over and over by various users. For the purposes of this piece, I am mostly interested in the YouTube channels of individuals such as Ali Sadik Al Amily, Marwan Ali, and Dureid Abdulwahab, among others, who regularly publish content they refer to as “archival” from their own private collections of VHS tapes.

The Blackout

While satellite dishes were completely banned under Saddam Hussein’s rule (1979–2003), the state owned four television channels. Daily programming featured state-funded productions such as films, theater, music, and television shows. Saddam Hussein saw the media as one of the revolutionary democratic means for “enlightening, informing the people, and acting as a surveillant.”5 Note that from his modern predecessors, Hussein inherited the task of creating a unified sense of national identity and concealing the illegitimate succession of political power by staging a sense of historical continuity.

The Baath party’s attempt to restructure historical memory crystallized in Hussein’s so-called Project for the Rewriting of History, a project that envisioned national identity and local heritage as a fusion of pan-Arabism and Iraqi nationalism.6, 7 Central to this nationalistic narrative is a bygone era of ancient Mesopotamian civilizations that Iraqis of all stripes can feel proud of.8 The writing of historical accounts and cultural production — to which state television contributed — were therefore deployed to construct a common relationship to the past, gov erned by a conscious national project.

In Al-Dhat Al-Jareeha (Wounded Essence, 1997), Selim Matar writes that Iraqi national identity has been “brit tle” throughout the modern history of Iraq due to the way successive regimes renarrativize history into distinct periods without coherent linkages, ultimately excluding many sects and ethnicities from the historical record.9 Matar expresses that, as a result of this renarrativized history, Iraqis lack a common historical affiliation even if they may share similar habits and practices in their day-to-day lives.10 He views ruptures, erasures, and conflict as grave threats to the community’s access to spiritual and material heritage. Matar warns, however, that people’s heritage becomes stranger, more mysterious, and ultimately, unable to be substantiated when this access is severed.11

In recent memory, this condition of rupture from a cohesive past was exacerbated as a result of the US-led invasion in 2003. One of the last televised news programs in March of that year was titled Ma’arekat Al-Hawassim (The Decisive Battle) documenting the efforts of Iraqi forces to combat the US-led invasion. Shortly after it aired, the government collapsed and television broadcasting went dark. The occupying forces resumed the broad cast a couple of months later with a daily four-hour program consisting of reports on life after the fall, local songs, and news headlines authored by US officials.12 At the same time, in May 2003, satellite dishes found their way into Iraqi households as the thirteen-year-long trade sanctions were lifted, giving people access to regional and international content for the first time.
Still from Muqtatafat Min Ma’araket Al Hawassim, 2003 (source: Omar Al Kazemi, 2020)

Ali Sadik’s home collection of VHS tapes, Baghdad 2022 
(source: Reman Sadani)
In this moment of dissonance, three forces were at work: unprecedented access to the outside was granted to Iraqis, they were simultaneously cut off from their own pre-2003 era as the occupying force seized and controlled state-run media, and public records and archives were being actively destroyed and displaced. In a context where the relationship to the past is already unstable, this deepened the gap between the past and the present, compounding Iraqis’ inability to position themselves in a continuity between the past and the future.13

VHS Tapes


In 2016, Ali Sadik Al Amily uploaded an episode of the show Al Layla Layltak (Tonight Is Yours, 2000) to YouTube. He had originally taped it for a relative who makes a brief appearance. Following the success of the first post, Al Amily published most of his collection of VHS tapes, which mainly consisted of pre-2003 television broadcasts as well as commercial VHS releases of Iraqi films and cartoons. He quickly became the com munity manager of a popular social media page called “Ali Sadik Archive.” 

To meet growing public demand, Al Amily now buys from flea markets what is known as “sharwa” — batches of VHS tapes that come from Iraqi
households and are sold by a network of secondhand dealers. The archival content found online is, of course, incomplete. It offers fragments of what personal collec tors have access to and have decided to share. A title song of a show might be uploaded but not the full episode, and if a few full episodes of a program were to be found, their chronology may not be discernible. A major fan of the musician Ismael Al Farwachi, Al Amily tells me that he had always dreamt of finding Al Farwachi’s music video Shma’na Enti? (Why You?, 1994). In 2019, he managed to find only three minutes of the video, and it was not until three years later that he laid his hands on the complete version. These two clips, both published on Ali’s channel, are starkly different in their quality — the short clip is quite clean while the complete one is water marked with the Al Shabab TV logo and includes onscreen song requests from audiences.

The Double


In The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (2009), Jalal Toufic applies a quantum theory of time to propose that we live in “a block universe of spacetime, where nothing physically passes and vanishes, but where occasionally things [i.e. tradition] withdraw due to surpassing disasters.”14 In a surpassing disaster, certain texts, moving images, musical works, paintings, buildings, as well as “the holiness/specialness of certain spaces” withdraw immaterially despite surviving collateral damage.15 In response, individuals may engage in resurrecting what withdrew or in abolishing tradition altogether.16 However, nothing can guarantee the origin of what is resurrected. And this uncertainty invites us to contend with “the double,” which “insinuates a distance between the one or the thing that has been resurrected and himself/herself/itself.”17

In the case of Iraqi VHS collections, these magnetic memories are literally “the double” of an original archive stuck at a conjuncture of loss, institutional enclosure, and privatization. This “double” emerges from personal collections, bearing glitches, faded hues, and receding details, revealing an informal archive created in parallel to the institutional one. While the images stored on the tapes were hand crafted by an authoritarian regime, they survive in the hands of individuals today. This challenges the fixation on loss in the discourse surrounding Iraqi national archives. Preserving and circulating such an archive is unavoidably complex and may be driven by different nostalgias. Yet it’s import ant not to lose sight of how the private space, in this case, disrupts the centralization of cultural production and preservation in a nation state. A parallel Iraq comes to life here, imbued not with the singular narratives of its dictators but with the memories and affinities of its people.

The 2003 moment in Iraq saw the collapse of the Baath party, an invasion, and a rushed attempt to form a new government amid a hasty process of de-Baathification. As the possibility of national reconciliation dwindled in post-Baathist Iraq, state institutions became less capable of integrating into the present what survived from before. This acutely disrupted the transmission of knowledge and experience. For example, in 2020, the US returned to Iraq Baath paper archives. They included personnel files of party members and citizen reports originally removed by Coalition Forces in 2005.18 Despite hopes for the paper archives to serve as a “historical resource” for reconciling societal divisions,19 it was seen as a “reckless” move by several Iraqis.20 The government officials in turn decided to store the documents in a secret location, due to concerns over the country’s lack of readiness to face its past.21
Still from Shma’na Enti?, 1994 
(source: Ali Sadik Archive, 2022)
Still from Law ‘Endi Hadh Wyak, date unknown (source: Ali Sadik Archive, 2022)
Still from Shma’na Enti? (Why You?), 1994
(Source: Ali Sadik Archive 2022)
I find myself returning here to the potentialities of “the double” and particularly to what Toufic articulates as a “distance” between the resurrected thing and its essence. In a presentation of The Withdrawal of Tradition, the artist Walid Sadik draws attention to the Arabic word “esti’naf,” to start again, followed by the question, “how do you mend that which has been ruptured?” Walid does not give a definitive answer but implicitly proposes a practice of “convers[ing] over the gap.”22

A few instances of conversing over the gap can be seen in Al Amily’s YouTube channel. Take a scroll through the page and you will start to notice classic song covers performed by Al Amily himself on his acoustic guitar.23 These creative contributions sit comfortably among other archival content challenging the need to classify and categorize. In another example, Al Amily reimagines the lost music video Law ‘Endi Hadh Wyak (If I Were Lucky) through a montage of found footage of the musician Ra’ed George.

In the comments on a music video titled Mahad Hichalak (Nobody Told You, 1994) by Khalid Al Iraqi, a viewer thanks Al Amily for the video, describing it as a “beautiful memory.” Someone else points out the physique of the musician, stating that most youth were thin in the nineties due to the conditions of the sanctions. Another person recalls that the leather jacket worn by the musician was expensive at the time. Someone else lists other songs by Al Iraqi and asks Al Amily to find them. Two other people speculate about the video’s production date, concluding that it would have been 1994. The interactive nature of YouTube invites audiences to exchange personal and collective memories, providing valuable insights into viewership habits and the affective quality of archival material.
 Unavoidably, there is a complex sense of nostalgia that surrounds these archival clips.24 During their inter views, Marwan Ali and Al Amily both describe to me that their fascination with Iraqi music was the impetus to collect more VHS tapes, with Al Amily expressing that a song could transport him to a childhood memory and move him to tears. A documentary film by Victor Haddad titled Al Bo’d Al Rabi’ (The Fourth Dimension, 1983) depicting everyday life in the eighties receives touching comments on Al Amily’s YouTube channel. Audiences describe an irretrievable time and a sense of disbelief over the deterioration of the country. A few people reflect on their present, drawing comparisons along changes in architecture, mobility, cultural production, and economic growth, pointing to the failures of the current Iraqi government. Others express Baathist sentiments, while the rest describe dreams and aspirations aborted due to the deficient leadership of the Baath. In the case of other vid eos, differing political views quickly escalate into conflict, which Al Amily and Ali curb by turning comments off or steering away from political content altogether.
Still from Mahad Hichalak, 1994 (source: Ali Sadik Archive, 2022)


Still from Al Bo’d Al Rabi’ d. Victor Haddad, 1983 (source: Ali Sadik Archive)
 It is rather exciting to witness how viewership can stimulate a conversation across the gap where the archival comes in contact with the personal. I would like to borrow from John Akomfrah to articulate what is unfolding here: “One begins to understand that embracing the archival is not so much about finding the past or some body else’s past, but instead the beginnings of self or the beginnings of one’s own claim on that past.”25 Akomfrah expands the idea to suggest that in invoking memory, the archival opens a passage through which individuals come into dialogue with their culture to find themselves.

As to the sustainability of this grassroots mode of sharing VHS col lections, there are a number of structural challenges at hand. Secondhand dealers have been demanding higher prices for tapes due to growing demand, while collectors struggle to provide the proper storage conditions. Technology tends to be a challenge too, since the taped content is processed using old playback devices which are no longer in circulation and are difficult to maintain. Also, as dependency on web platforms such as YouTube makes collectors vulnerable to hacking as well as intellectual property and copyright issues, they have started to explore other dissemination possibilities like selling to private tele vision stations such as Dijla Zaman. The television channel, however, does  not credit collectors for their work and is selective about what it publishes, only sharing content that is clean, complete, and does not run the risk of aggravating the status quo. Lastly, it is important to acknowledge that while television archives extracted from VHS tapes are critical windows into past cultural productions in Iraq, they also point to what had been excluded from production or distribution in the first place. I refer here to what is pushed to the margins for failing to serve the nation-building project(s) of modern Iraq. This therefore complicates the question of what constitutes an Iraqi archive, when many have been excluded from it on the basis of race, sect, gender, and political affiliation. I conclude this text freed from the urgency to work against the forces of loss and dispersal, having accepted them as inherent conditions to archives as well as the Iraqi community’s complex relationship to the past. When modern Iraqi history is fragmented at its essence and the historical affiliations of the people are diver gent, official archives serve as only one avenue to access the past. Private, and specifically domestic, spaces serve as essential archival resources when the institution otherwise fails. Just like the VHS collectors, I shift my attention to personal collections and alterna tive claims on the past. Yet, I remain certain that serious attention and resources must be invested to facili tate in-person and communal access to archival content in offline spaces.

Reman Sadani


Reman Sadani is a moving image artist, creative producer and researcher based in London. She is the recipient of the 2020 JFVU Film Awards. Her films have screened in London Short Film Festival (London), Pavilion (Leeds), Safar Film Festival (London), Mizna Arab Film Festival (Minneapolis), Open City Documentary (London), Aesthetica Short Film Festival (York), Arab Women Film Festival (Rio de Janeiro), MoMa Modern Mondays (New York), Jerwood FVU Film Awards (London).

References

  1. Ala Al Mafraji, “Mahdi Abbas: On Lack of Strategies  to Document the Cultural Legacy in Iraq,” Al Mada (2021). Retrieved from https://almadapaper.net// view.php?cat=237052.
  2. Mustafa Sa‘doun, “Stolen Iraqi Memory,” Al Arabi Al  Jadeed (2019). Retrieved from https://alaraby.co.uk/
  3. ذاكرة-العراق-المنهوبةآمال-مفقودة-الستعادة-أرشيف- اإلذاعة-والتلفزيون Sa‘doun.
  4. Al Mafraji.
  5. Saddam Hussein, “Democracy: A Comprehensive Conception of Life,” On Democracy by Saddam Hussein, ed. Paul Chan. (Athens: Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art, 1977), No. 61, 8.
  6. Eric Davis, Memories of the State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq, (University of California Press, 2005), 148.
  7. Negar Azimi. “Saddam Hussein and the State as Sculpture,” Chan, On Democracy, 97. 
  8. Azimi. 
  9. Selim Matar, Al Dhat Al Jareeha: Ishkalat Al Hawiyya  Fi Al ‘Iraq Wa Al ‘Alam Al ‘Arabi (Wounded Essence:  Problems of Identity in Iraq and the Arab World), 1997,  127–128. 
  10. Matar, 363.
  11. Matar, 284 
  12. “Iraqi TV Resumes with a Trial Broadcast Under American Supervision,” Al Jazeera, May 15, 2003. Retrieved from https://www.aljazeera.net/ التلفزيون-العرايق-يستأنف-بثه/2003/5/15/culture
  13. To articulate the rupture that the Iraqi community experienced in 2003, I paraphrase a line from André Habib, Survivances du Voyage en Italie, 74, cited by Ghadda Al Sayygh in ‘‘An Ba’dh Al Mafaheem Al  Taqwfiqiyah,” Kalamon, Issue #4, Autumn 2011, 193–198.
  14. JalalToufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (Hong Kong: Forthcoming Books, 2009), 73. 
  15. Toufic, 11.
  16. Jalal Toufic in an Ashkal Alwan seminar blurb, 2014 https://ashkalalwan.org/program.php?category =4&id=226
  17. Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition, 30.
  18. Michael R. Gordon, “Baath Party Archives Return to Iraq, With the Secrets They Contain,” Wall Street Journal, August 31, 2020. Retrieved from https://www. wsj.com/articles/baath-party-archives-return to-iraq-with-the-secrets-they-contain-11598907600
  19. Kanan Makiya in “Baath Party Archives Return.”
  20. “Return of Baath Paper Archives Opens Old Wounds,” Rudaw, September 11, 2020. Retrieved from https://www.rudawarabia.net/arabic/middle east/iraq/110920202
  21. “Return of Baath Paper Archives Opens Old Wounds.” 22. Walid Sadek, “Walid Sadek representing Jalal Toufic Beirut, 5 March 2006,” Ricardo Mbarkho, posted on February 11, 2021, YouTube video, 53:56, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=tKpmHB9Taig
  22. See “Droub El Safar” performed by Ali Sadik Al  Amily and Wassim Al Sumry, Ali Sadik Archive, September 25, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=qp8hDc9TFU. Also, Ismael Al Farwachi
  23. “Yali Rihti,” performed by Ali Sadik Al Amily, Ali  Sadik Archive, November 21, 2022, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=jUb9O0E_NVE. 
  24. The notion of “nostalgia” here is used to refer to “a yearning for a different time” as understood by Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
  25. John Akomfrah, “Memory and the Morphologies of Difference” Politics of Memory: Documentary and Archive, ed. Marco Scontine and Elisabetta Galasso (Berlin: Archive Books, 2017), 29.


An earlier version of this text was originally published in Shakhsyat, issue #5 on MalaffatNAAS.com (winter 2022/spring 2023). This version was published in Mizna 24.2—The Cinema Issue (2023) and republished here with permission.

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