Adventures in Oil

And so the imperialism and those co-operating with it have been able to control the people of the country and the wealth of the country and begin to smuggle out of the country’s wealth to distant countries in addition to the introduction of poverty hunger and feudal policy.

The illustration and caption above were published by Qassim’s socialist government in 1961 in its official Pictoral History of the 1958 Revolution. The graphic handbook on the history of imperialism and revolution in Iraq was produced in Baghdad for local, regional, and international audiences, presumably to “set the record straight” to any one who might be otherwise confused. The “record” in this case is a revisionist narrative, which seeks to challenge international reports concerning the revolution that had focused on the slaughter of the royal family and the termination of Iraq’s relationship to western consultants and companies without critical insight into the reasons behind the communist-backed revolution.

In the book, the text is printed in English, French and Arabic; however, it is the international language of the political cartoon that best indicates the universal reach the regime intended for this message.

This cartoon comes early in the story, explaining the circumstances that served as a catalyst for the revolution during the 1950s. Here, the illustrator uses symbolism, scale and depth to communicate several important points to the viewer.

First, the behemoth and smug-looking imperialist on the run represents the British government and its London-based Iraq Petroleum Company. His arms are firmly wrapped around a fat sack, bulging with the wealth of Iraq’s petroleum resources. Meanwhile his accomplice, a puny Iraqi monarch, manages to escape the scene alongside the fat-cat with an impenetrable moneybag containing his share of the profits. This of course being his token for willingly allowing the British company full control over Iraq’s oil fields.

In the background, three Iraqi men are cast aside with their arms bound. They are paralyzed and forced to watch as the country’s wealth disappears before their eyes. The men are dressed in “traditional” clothes that apparently indicate their working class position in contrast to the European-style suit clothes donned by the king. Notice that categories of Iraq’s middle class and women are absent from the illustration, in favor of a starker and masculinized portrait of disparity between Iraq’s thieves and its victims.

Comparing this example of government propaganda to the iconic image of oil and the working class put forward in propaganda produced by the previous regime and the IPC (see my second post), reveals a key to understanding the ways in which class representation has been manipulated by both pro-British regime/IPC and the revolutionary government to construct a clear message. In the image by IPC, the working class “hero” stands with dignity, while in the illustration he is shown as a victim.

Thus, this retaliatory illustration by the revolutionary government must be read as a portrait of class struggle situated in conversation with the discourse of the previous regime. Distributed by the revolutionary government, this image speaks directly to the perceived misrepresentations of the working class struggle in pre-1958 propaganda, by offering a stark counternarrative.

Obscured by attention to the Development Board’s modernization projects and dominant discourse on national distribution of wealth through irrigation and housing schemes before 1958, the significance and severity of class tensions in Iraq were thus rendered invisible within the international media and political discourse of the period. Thus the revised and “corrected” narrative delivered in this cartoon highlights the critical class tensions that were inherent to the systems of capitalism and imperialism in place before 1958.

Today, the illustration becomes relevant again as a possible warning sign of the system that is steadily being imposed on Iraq’s people thanks to increasing foreign control over Iraqi oil wealth since the fallout of the 2003 invasion. In a revelatory article last week, Juhasz confronted readers with the question of whether recent contracts won by ExxonMobil and other mega-international oil conglomerates represents an ultimate “victory” for Big Oil in Iraq? “Yes,” she confirms, “If the negotiations proceed on their current path, foreign companies will produce the vast majority of Iraq’s oil. How much control they will exert, and who will reap the greatest benefits (and endure the steepest costs) is yet to be determined.”

Image Source: Pictoral History of the 14th July Revolution. 1961. Higher Committe for the Celebrations of the 14th July Revolution: Baghdad. p. 6

Image copyright: British Petroleum Archive

This week I found something very special in the archives. The photograph and title pictured above come at the head of a feature article written for Iraq Petroleum Magazine by my great grandfather William Subhiyah in 1955. Jiddu William was an English teacher in Iraq, and frequently contributed perspectives on culture to Iraq Petroleum and the Iraq Times during the 1950s.

The photo exhibits a table crowded with delicious dishes prepared by my great grandmother Salma Subhiyah, who sits at the center of the table. Her daughters Samira and Amira sit beside her, on the left side of the frame. The other two women at the table worked as live in help at the Subhiyah household.

Subhiyah’s article was written for ex-pats living in the Middle East, English-speaking Arabs, and company personnel of various nationalities living in London. By 1955 the Iraq Petroleum magazine had been in circulation for over four years. Through the monthly publication, the petroleum company stepped into the role of producing and disseminating knowledge about Arab culture to readers. The magazine featured regular original articles on archaeology, architecture and art in Iraq, focusing on the success stories of the Iraq Development Board’s modernization schemes in education, building, and agriculture.

What does it mean for a petroleum company to concern itself with the problem of cultural production? Although Iraq Petroleum was extremely well-circulated and popular in cities across the Middle East and in London, I find it remarkable that during the first four years of its publication, the editors had only bothered to include dinner party menus - in a regular column, called “For the Ladies” - that catered to the British palette; including recipes for jellies, cakes and sandwiches.

In fact, Subhiyah’s article was the first of its kind to appear in the magazine, broaching the subject of food in the Arab world. He wrote of Middle Eastern cuisine as a novel subject, in a time before it was established as an object of modern western knowledge. Today, we might take for granted that kabob stands are a dime a dozen in US and European cities and as many brands and varieties of hummus are on display in supermarkets as there are ice cream flavors.

Subhiyah begins his article by highlighting cultural differences between Arab and European customs of serving and eating food. He writes with a noted unapologetic tone, sense of pride and wit,

We always cook much more than we can consume at one meal. Even if we expect no guests, people may call unexpectedly while we are eating and, by our traditional laws of hospitality, we are required to ask them to partake of our food. To prove this, call at any Middle Eastern house about meal-time and see if you are not sincerely invited to the meal. Moreover, if you are invited to a luncheon or a dinner party, you can always take along one or two friends with you without having to warn your host beforehand.

He goes on to describe the food and atmospheres he encounters while traveling across the region, from city to city. With each stop on his journey - from Cairo, to Tripoli, and Aleppo - he reminds the reader that within Arab nation one discovers a diverse and rich range of culinary traditions and tastes. The author’s mobility should remind us of the mobility that was still possible in these early decades of the modern Middle East before borders were hardened and militarized. Subhiyah speaks of “nationalism” not in reference to differentiated “Iraqi” or “Lebanese “national cuisines or cultures, but in reference to the vision of a heterogenous yet unified Arab national identity, which is an idea that ruled the day. Today this is a concept that is difficult to imagine in what has become a deeply fragmented Middle East.

Among other things, reading Subhiyah’s article today raises interesting questions about how and when “Middle Eastern cuisine” was actually commodified into a mainstream fare in the U.S. and western Europe. As an example, he writes a mouthwatering description of food he is sure to try when visiting Beirut,

In Beirut I go as a self invited guest to any Tabbuli party that may be given at the time in Ras Beirut (Tabbuli is well-soaked Burghul mixed with chopped parsley, mint, onions and tomato, rubbed in lemon juice and olive oil, and eaten with scoops of vine, lettuce or cabbage leaves); I buy a box of Baqlawa Samadi or Bahsali (thin sheets of pastry with a layer of crushed nuts, cardamons and sugar in the middle, baked and drenched with syrup), Idine of Kibbi Bissiniyah and Hummus Bi Taheenah (Kibbi is a paste made of meat pounded in a mortar with crushed wheat, spread in a tray in two layers, with a layer of minced meat, pine kernels and onions in between, and baked after cutting in diamond shapes. Hummus is a thin paste made of boiled chick peas crushed with crushed sesame, garlic and lemon juice and decorated with parsley, slimmac and red pepper).

Taken in its context, we must realize that his explanatory descriptions point to the fact that quotidian supermarket “products” like baklavah and tabbouleh were veritably unheard of fifty years ago in cities like London and Paris - of course to all but Europe’s best-traveled colonial administrators and orientalists.

In lieu of a thorough historiography, like that presented in a 2007 exhibition at Yale on Middle Eastern & Islamic cuisine, I will briefly contextualize Subhiyah’s article with a condensed overview of how “Middle eastern cuisine” has been produced as an object of western knowledge over time. Historically, writing on eating and cooking customs in the Arab world falls into one of three broad categories: English translations of medieval Arabic texts, travelogues by Arab immigrants, and tutorial texts written by Arabs in English for western audiences.

The best examples of the first category are the many 20th century English editions of a manuscript written in the 10th century by a Baghdad native during the time of the Abbasid caliphate. The original author spent more than twenty years compiling his descriptions of the elite culture of food, drink, and table manners. Thanks to A.J Arberry’s 1939 translation, Kitab al-Tabikh or “A Baghdad Cookery Book” was the only Arabic Cookery book known to the English-speaking world at the time. In 2006, a new translation of the classic text was published.

The last category is a kind of writing tradition that likely began with articles like this one written by my great grandfather. By 1973 the English-speaking world had access to illustrated how-to recipe books like, The Arab World Cookbook: the Book of One Thousand and One Delights, a self-orientalized parade of “Arabian delicacies which are the only rival to the Chinese and French cuisines”. The commodification of Middle Eastern cuisine can be detected in a book like this which promises, “easy and simple recipes that make your neighbors and guests savor the aroma coming out from your kitchen.”

Perhaps bringing the tradition of food writing in my own family full-circle, this year my cousin Salma Abdelnour, a first-generation Lebanese-American living in New York, has started a mouthwatering food blog in which one of her most popular entries is a review of where to procure the best mana’eesh in Manhattan. Perhaps inevitably, I have also been blogging about the meals I have had the pleasure to indulge in while traveling over the past year. A deep appreciation of food and love of writing surely runs in my family; though I am now struck by how profoundly the world in which we write and the “Middle East” about which we write about has changed in these fifty-four years.

Image source: Subhiyah, William. 1955. A Gourmet in the Arab World. Iraq Petroleum 4(11): 24.

Ageless Iraq is a documentary film that was sponsored by the Iraq Petroleum Company in 1954. This still of a young Iraqi woman admiring her own reflection in a dress shop is taken from one of the final sequences of the film. The narration for this scene tells a story of Iraq’s newly liberated generation of women. Women who have visibly benefited from the recent modernization of the country under the Iraq Development Board.

The following narration begins over a montage sequence that shows different young Arab women in school and at work, and closes on this image of the dress shop scene. A deep and confident male British voice explains,

When you see these young girls in their Western clothes, so assured and confident, you’re inclined to forget how surprised their mothers would have been at the idea of training for jobs their daughters take in their stride. Jobs they thought only men could, and should, do. Now girls as well as the boys can take up almost any profession they choose, and know they have a good chance to succeed. […]

It’s natural that with all these modern developments, the women of Iraq are breaking away from their traditional style of dress, unaltered for centuries, to wear the comfortable, practical clothes that are right for this new way of life. It’s a turn of events significant of a wider change, of a more liberal attitude to life.

At the time of its release in 1954, Ageless Iraq was classified as a factual and educational film about the history and development of Iraq; however, when viewing the film today, it becomes clear that more than anything else the film was created as a propaganda tool for the British petroleum company to legitimate its powerful and profitable presence in the country.

First, notice how the modernization of women in Iraq is explicitly equated with westernization. Secondly, I want to point out that within the broader context of the entire film narrative, the message that is constructed is that any promise of progress or change - i.e. for the liberation of women from a “traditional” life to one that is decidedly “modern” - is necessarily made possible only through the prosperity of the oil company.

It is true that in 1951 the Iraqi government renegotiated its agreement with the British oil company, which led to a split in share the industry revenue and the creation of a Development Board that began improving overall conditions for women’s education. However, the singular representation of women in this film sequence assumes a direct relationship between development and the modernization - education and liberalization - of women. However, as Al-Ali discusses in her book Iraqi Women, the women’s movement in Iraq actually began in the 1920s. Al-Ali explains that in these early years of the movement, “while women of elite background were encouraged by their families to obtain an education, neither the Iraqi state nor its British advisers actively promoted women’s education or women’s rights” (Al-Ali, 2007: 12).

This is not to say that come the 1950s, under the final years of the monarchy and after the efforts of the Development Board, that there were not women in Iraq that closely fit the description (and even the likeness) of the westernized Iraqi featured in the film still above. In fact, to the contrary, I have seen boxes of precious black and white family photographs revealing that my grandmothers, great aunts, and their girlfriends living in Baghdad during the Fifties boasted the same European tastes for hairstyles and fashion, as well as the ambitious career-driven and empowered spirit described and pictured in this sequence in Ageless Iraq.

Nonetheless, the film clearly fails to acknowledge that the women being represented were of a certain privileged class. Indeed, the distribution of the benefits of development in Iraq during the prosperous 1950s were distributed unevenly across Baghdad, and across the entire country. Women were not consistently offered the same opportunities, and due to continued economic hardship in many parts of the country, not all women who may have had access to education were able to take advantage of the opportunity.

However, the greater point of my post today is not that this film presents a work of fiction, though it once claimed to be fact. Indeed, all documentaries manage to commit this same offense in one way or another, to varying degrees. Instead, what is crucial to take away is that the way that this film uses the symbolic representation of women - as a means to legitimate programs for national development - is a discursive technique and tactic that exists within the historical context of imperial discourses about the Middle Eastern region, which continue until today.

Images of women have been manipulated in the media and by politicians as symbols of national development throughout the twentieth century. Examples of this range from the secular agendas of Ataturk that “emancipated” Turkish women [e.g. see Arat’s chapter “The Project of Modernity and Women in Turkey”], to the manipulative depictions of “oppressed” women in Islamophobic web-based campaigns today. Furthermore, feminist critiques of orientalist literature, painting, and photography from 18th century establish how a dichotomy between “modern” western or westernized women and “traditional” (subjugated yet exotic and erotic) veiled harem women is deeply rooted in the texts and media that served to legitimate various imperial European exploits in the Middle East beginning with the French occupation of Egypt in 1798. [See, Alloula 1986; Graham-Brown 1988; Lowe 1991; Lewis 1996]

Whether corporate-sponsored or government-made, today’s media is still crowded with examples of how the image of women are used to justify neo-imperial actions in the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia. Germane to this post, Al-Ali and Pratt argue in What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq that contemporary political and media discourse on the liberation of Iraqi women from the oppressive bonds of Islamic “tradition” by the hand of (and only the hand of) western champions remains until today as a key tactic that the United States has employed in order to justify the military invasion and continued occupation of Iraq.

Image Source: Ageless Iraq. Dir. Wallace, Graham. Iraq Petroleum Company and Associated British Pathe. 1954. <http://www.britishpathe.com/results.php?search=ageless+iraq>

Image Copyright: British Pathe

I found these two images juxtaposed, just like this, at the front of a promotional pamphlet for the first of many Iraq Petroleum Company films. The Third River was produced in both Arabic and English, and released respectively in Iraq and London during 1952.

Berger argues that visual representations such as these produce and reproduce particular ways of seeing that are embedded in our cultural assumptions.  What then does this particular example and the editorial decisions that shaped it - decisions to present these selected images and text, adjacent to one another, in this very order, and at this determined scale - tell us about the context of the historical moment in which this film was produced and promoted?

The first (left) image is of an oil worker and a rig in Iraq. The heroic low-angled composition and full-page scale dictates powerful associations with this image that cannot be mistaken: triumph, dignity, and magnificence. Here, the anonymous Iraqi worker stands to represent the company, the industry, the nation, and of course modernization.

As a stand alone image, or poster, this image is not terribly potent or rich. It is a familiar image of capitalist industrialism. It has been produced over and over again, across the globe, in different forms, as a result of this hackneyed, yet powerful marketing logic.

However, this image does not stand alone in the least. Rather, a companion image (right) introduces an altogether different architecture into the frame - one that would not otherwise be associated with the petroleum industry.

The ruined arches of the ancient city of Palmyra are pictured in a similarly glorified low-angle shot; yet this otherwise impressive image is dwarfed here in relation to the scaling and cropping of the first image.

In sum, the oil rig (soaring out of the frame) stands more triumphantly, and with more dignity and magnificence, than the breathtaking expanse of ancient columns at the two thousand year old site of Palmyra.

Moreover, the juxtaposition of these images with the accompanying text convey a deliberate message and narrative that are echoed in ad nauseam in all of the Iraq Petroleum Company films. Namely, that the history of Iraq is the history of oil.

The narrative constructed both here and in the film itself works to persuade viewers that the splendor of ancient civilizations have paved a straight path towards the triumph of Iraq’s future, it’s modern civilization. “Over two thousand years ago, in the old Mesopotamian home of the human race…a strange pitch-like substance oozed from the earth…which was probably near the site of modern Kirkuk.” Here, the path is depicted as a literal one, where the ancient ruins come to represent mere markers of the route of IPC’s pipeline stretching from Kirkuk to the Mediterranean coast.

Ultimately, the this narrative concludes that the exploitation of oil is thus equivalent to the modern progress of the nation. History is rewritten as such.

Finally, I’d like to note that for all my analysis thus far, I have not even begun to address the problematic aspects of the editor’s major geographical blunder - i.e. Palmyra was  located in Syria, not Iraq - and explicitly gendered overtones - i.e. various phalli of capitalism; male-centric historiography - represented here. For now I will end, and take up these further analytic perspectives in future posts.

Image Source: BP 30455/138091. Iraq Petroleum Company Film Unit. 1952. The Third River (Pamphlet). London: Newman Neame Limited.

Image Copyright British Petroleum Archive

My inaugural post features the original cover for the book “Adventures in Oil: The Story of British Petroleum”, published in 1959. Here, Longhurst seeks to write the definitive text on the then nascent history of Britain’s “glorious” exploits in petroleum extraction around the globe - in the Middle East, Africa, South America & beyond.

In his forward for the book, Winston Churchill writes, “The pioneering of the vast oil industry of the Middle East is a story of vigour and adventure in the best traditions of the merchant venturers of Britain.” The image of an off-shore oil rig on the book’s cover captures the sense that for these oil pioneers, the towers stood akin to a climber’s flagpole mounted firmly within the rocky soil at Everest’s peak.

For Churchill - who himself pioneered a ruthless bombing campaign to squash anti-British/imperialist uprisings in Iraq during the initial British colonial occupation in 1920 - these “best traditions” surely include the violent means by which imperial authorities have traditionally sought to capture, colonize and control the resource-rich lands and people of the Middle East.

What makes this book so fascinating is that it was written precisely at the most definitive moment in the history of Iraq in the twentieth century: in the year after the 1958 Revolution in Iraq.

After the figureheads of the British imperial authority in Iraq were toppled by the military coup-cum-people’s revolution in 1958, the Euro-American stranglehold on Iraqi oil reserves was gradually loosened by presiding Iraqi governments. In 1972 Saddam Hussein nationalized the oil industry once and for all.

The chapters dedicated to Britain’s “adventure” in the Middle East, and especially Iraq, are the most salient to consider in light of the U.S. and Britain’s current neocolonial tactics in the region. These attempts to reclaim a firm grip on Middle East petroleum resources is shameless and blatant today, as it was at the time this book was written in 1959.

Fifty years after this book was first published, we continue to bear witness to the story of the U.S. and Britain’s long-standing colonial adventure in the Middle East. Today’s news of BP’s prized oil deal in Iraq bluntly reminds that the “Story of British Petroleum” in the Middle East is far from over.

Image Source: Longhurst, Henry. 1959. Adventure in Oil: the story of British Petroleum. London: Sidgwick and Jackson.