The heat sizzles off our faces, causing little beads of sweats to sprout on our foreheads and upper lips. The sunscreen I am wearing begins to melt and the side of my hijab is getting drenched. The metal handle of the car bites back as I grasped it A normal summer day in Baghdad, and it's going to get hotter I'm told. But this Friday morning my colleague and I are braving the heat for a chance to drive to the shopping area of al Rasheed Street in Baghdad, and walk down Al Mutanabi Street, an area known as the Book Market.
Mutanabi Street lies in an old quarter of Baghdad and is named after a 10th century classical Iraqi poet. The street used to be the heart of the Iraqi intellectual community, a place where students came to discuss literature, artists swapped tales and people flip through the latest books. Like many things in Iraq, that is now in the past. During the sectarian and militia wars of 2006 and 2007, Mutanabi street was destroyed, the site of a devastating explosion. On March 5, 2007 a car bomb went off killing at least 38 people and leaving more than 100 wounded. Looking at photos of the devastation, I couldn't believe I had just returned from the same place. In the pictures, wounded buildings lie crushed in piles of rubble, singed pages from books flutter in the air and the only colour is blood on the faces of the injured and billowing white smoke. People appear lost, dazed, desperately calling out to loved ones, forever frozen in a frame of tears and hopelessness.
On December 18 the following year, the street reopened after a rebuilding programme. It is cleaner now with shops sporting new signs, new doors and new bricks. But the area is a shadow of its former self, the scholarly air lost, replaced with a more frantic bustle. Books lie in dusty little hills with sellers calling out the prices; young boys weave between shoppers pushing carts filled with comics and old school books; others offer old Egyptian music books or pin-ups of beloved Arab actors. Lining the street, secondhand stores sell old envelopes with Saddam Hussein stamps and stickers, while other shops are bursting with stationery goods like notebooks, colour pencils and printing paper.
Before leaving the book market, we popped into a well-known shop called al Shahabandar which sells a cool Iraqi drink made from raisins, called Sharbett. Droplets of condensation make the glasses of the dark purple drink slippery in our fingers, but the juice cools our throats. Walking through the street in the heat and absorbing the sounds of the Iraqi dialects around me, I return to the surreal state of mind I usually encounter when in the city that was my family's home. It is a feeling of sadness, pride and happiness all at the same time. I have lived in the Arab world for four years of my adult life, can speak the dialect of Egypt, understand the nuances of its culture, yet still I feel a stranger in Cairo - not only because I am a Canadian, but because the Iraqi and Egyptian experiences are so different in terms of history, culture, language and heritage.
But when I am in Baghdad I imagine my father walking through these same streets. I hear his voice in my ear telling me about his favourite cafes, restaurants and hangouts - all now dilapidated or damaged. When I look at the Tigris a sharp pang goes through my chest, not only because its water levels are so low that the mud at its bottom peeps through, but because of my father's story that once he would volunteer with other students to contain the flooding of the banks with sandbags.
Whenever I travel, I report back to my family about the new streets and sites I see, but knowing that my father, my uncles, my grandparents knew the streets I am walking through here in Baghdad, makes me at once closer to everything around me. Hadeel al Shalchi is a writer for the Associated Press, based in Cairo
