Thursday, February 05, 2004

DISPATCH: Portrait of the Dictator as an Old Man  

Wisam Rady was working in his studio as usual--when he first saw the video of Saddam Hussein on a tiny five-inch black and white television. A mesmerizing image of the ragged former dictator, fresh from his "spyder hole" baring his tonsils for all the world to see. How the mighty had fallen, Wisam thought, the indignity of it all. The once defiant ruler of Iraq, now being inspected for lice. It was too much. Wisam wept. Uncontrollably. Tears of joy. There was no consoling him in his happiness. So he went to Ferdus Square, where Saddam's statue had been so famously toppled after the war. And there he danced until dark.

An odd reaction, one might think, for someone who used to make a living glorifying the old regime. As an editorial cartoonist for the Al Jumhuriya newspaper, a Bath party rag, Wisam was a first rate propagandist. A man who could draws with a pencil as effortlessly as he could draw his breath. But that was just his day gig.

I had to have a job, I had to make money," he tells me, while finishing one of his latest--and very popular series of paintings.

Saddam's Ministry of Information, which oversaw the work of writers and artists during the regime, provided a list to each Iraqi newspaper of how to portray Saddam Hussein (as a symbolic Falcon), the Iraqi flag (always as a top banner,) the military (strong and heroic).



He shows me a collection of yellowing newspapers containing his work. They are quite nearly, I think, the black and white notes of martial music in ink. The drawings, with their flapping flags, birds of prey and unflinching defenders of the homeland, are reminiscent of the melodramatic, patriotic excess of the old Soviet propaganda machine. Wisam could do it with his eyes----and his heart closed. And did.

But now he uses both again. And this is what he has produced: there on the canvas in front of him in his studio, is the unmistakable visage of post-capture Saddam Hussein, his eyes vacant, his hand touching his scruffy beard ala Rodin's " The Thinker."

It is done in an almost Renaissance-quality, chiaroscuro. And like the work of say, a Vermeer, it is has allegorical qualities. For perched upon Saddam's shoulders are four gray rats.

An Iraqi Casanova, Wisam Rady knows what it's like to suffer for love. He doesn't want to tell me this, but finally, on the way to his house for lunch, reluctantly, does: under Saddam Hussein's regime, he got a twenty-year sentence for sleeping with the daughter of a government minister. This was not the official charge, obviously, but a sufficient infraction was found--something to do with political mischief making.

Lucky for him, he only served a year and half of the sentence before being freed--but it was a year, he says, in which hell would've made a nice holiday. It was spent in Iraq's Abu Graib prison; infamous for it's sprawling wretchedness, sadistic guards and merciless criminal population. Not the most nurturing environment for a sensitive, young artist.



"I learned my lesson," he tells me through my translator, Saad. "For the rest of my life I will never be with a rich girl again, only poor ones."

For the son of an army sergeant and the middle child of eleven, it's surprising Wisam could've breached Baghdad's inner power circle with a romantic liaison. Even more remarkable because he grew up a Shiite in one of Baghdad's poorest suburban slums, Ath Thawra, which the dictator renamed Saddam City because so many of the young men who died in the Iran-Iraq War were drawn from there. After Saddam's fall it was renamed again, now Sader City, after a Shiite Imam, killed by the regime.

Wisam, like so many other children in Ath Thawra, had to peddle trinkets on the street to help his family make ends meet. He also used some of his earnings to buy arts supplies, pencils, paper and paints. By the third-grade he won first prize, 100 dinars (about 10 cents) in a school contest--in which glorifying the regime was the goal. It would be a prelude to his later career.

Wisam is 36 years old, but still lives at home with his parents in Ath Thawra or Sader City. Partly he says it's because his family is so close. His mother still waits outside the gate for him to come home at night. But it also has to do with prison. His time at Abu Graib deeply wounded him, he says; his loss of time and place, which perhaps only home, only the familiar, can heal. It seems strange that healing can be done here, a city so strewn with garbage that goats feast along the median strip, among the passing traffic.

It is also, the inspiration for the rats on Saddam's shoulders.



"There were no rats in Ath Thawra," Wisam says, "And then one morning we awoke and the city was infested with them. "It was a scheme by Saddam to make the people sick." Or so the people of the city believe.

Wisam says he first did the Saddam paintings for his own catharsis. He shot a digital picture of the television video and turned reality into artistic realism. When he added the rats, the work somehow transcended the painterly necessities of so many Iraqi artists who knock out quick commissions on popular contemporary motifs. Now the work was more than just a colored mirror of a current event. Now the work found an audience. Local newspapers began doing stories on Wisam. American Army officers and western journalist began buying the paintings at $100 a pop. A steal, by Soho standards, but a good price in post-war Iraq.

At his home, I ask Wisam's mother what she thinks of the rat paintings. She is dressed all in black and covered with a scarf; only her hands and face are exposed. But despite the covering her animated personality is easy to read.

"Saddam," she laughs, "It should have been something much worse than rats on his shoulders."

She says she's happy with Wisam's current success, but worried about him during the regime. Like the time he had to go into hiding because of one of his newspaper drawings. Wisam knew an unflattering image of Saddam Hussein could get him killed, didn't feel the same sense of danger from some of the other Batthists. He should have. When he drew an unflattering image of Saddam's right-hand man and now the coalition's most-wanted man in Iraq--Izzat Ibrahim Al Douri--he had to go into hiding for three months. It took a 500-thousand dinar bribe to a Ministry of Information official (about $250 at the time, an absolute fortune) to undue the damage.



While he now has a studio in a ritzy part of Baghdad, Wisam has lived in Sader City all of his life. And while during his youth his family was obviously poor, it is now flush with success and not just Wisam's. His brothers and sisters have gone on to become doctors, teachers and engineers.

"My father," Wisam says, had no education, "so he scraped and saved to that we could go to university. Not easy on an army salary--and so many children."

In his room he shows me a painting that he says he did last night-- in the dark. It is a portrait of a woman in modernist style. The face a simple oval, Picasoesque, fills the 3x4 canvass. The lines are thick and black, but the shading is in florid colors; violet eyes, shadows of fluorescent green and orange, ice blue forehead, blood red lips. It is a portrait not so much of a woman, but of overwhelming sadness. It is--and has been, although once very secretly, typical of his real signature work. Not the empty and dishonest black and white editorial cartoons, not even the allegorical realism of his commercially successful Saddam series. Wisam, is and always has been, he says, an expressionist.

For years, Wisam painted pictures of Iraqi suffering. But did it out of sight, in a small, dark, seventh floor apartment--where Saddam's henchmen and women--could not see. These paintings did not glorify the regime or Saddam or the Batthists. That was the donkey toil of the day. This was moonlight work, powerful and contradictory to the public face of the Saddam's Iraq. It is work that could've put him behind bars again--or worse.

They were Wisam says, pictures of the collective Iraqi soul; intelligent, innovative, proud people--made to live the daily lies of Saddam's thuggish, egocentric rule--and as a result their inner turmoil was represented by subtle physical deformity, crossed eyes, misshapen heads and, without exception, rendered in carnival midway colors.



It was surreptitious protest; seen only by friends and fellow artists he could trust. But it was also a spiritual antidote, an artistic firewall constructed to separate his daytime government pimping from his nighttime passion.

Wisam shows me the apartment where he did this kind of work in secret for so many years--and where most of it still hangs. It is not commercial enough, he thinks, to sell easily in his at his studio. They are images of darkness, flaunted by a calliope of colors. Each one heartbreaking in its depiction of physical isolation (the deformities) and emotional torment, characters screaming into emptiness. Not just a little of this, one surmises, has been created from Wisam's own prison experiences, torture and humiliation. Something, he says, he cannot really talk about, aside to say it was part of his life.

Wisam doesn't want to just be known as the artist who paints Saddam and the rats. He says he will stop painting those kind of pictures very soon. But it is ironic, he knows, to find success now-- depicting realistically, a man whom he was once paid to depict mythically. A man he despises, yet who inspired him to document the pain of a nation, and his own.

Note: A collection of Wisam's expressionist work is now being exhibited in one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces.

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Kevin 9:42 AM