Return to the Marshes - Gavin Young

Gavin Young first met the Ma’dan, the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq, in the 1950s. Following his return in 1973, he wrote this account to celebrate a people whose culture and way of life was not going to last forever, and his friendship with them.
 
It’s a simple, personal tale, prefaced by some history. For me, it was an insight into the lives of a people who I’d never heard of, whose home and existence existed off the land grid: in the vast maze of waterways between the Tigris and the Euphrates that are the marshlands.
 
The only way in or out was to leave car or bus behind and take a thin, silent, paddled launch, so that to enter was to cross a threshold. There, the Ma’dan had lived for centuries in a constellation of tiny one-family islands, in houses made of reeds, where they fished, kept buffalo, and moved between each other in canoes short and long.
 
The cover photograph by Nik Wheeler suggests an otherworldliness of the living marshlands that was clearly mesmerizing.
 
Since the book was published, the Ma’dan’s story has been one of decline. For being proud, disobedient and independent people, who would typically harbour political fugitives, Sadam Hussein had their marshes drained and the wetlands have never recovered. Back then, in the 1990s, there were a quarter of a million of these descendants of the Sumerians. Now there are just a few thousand, the rest dispersed to their fate in the cities.
 
Young’s affectionate memoir relates happier times. His encounters describe what can seem like a rare species that evolves and flourishes, only to suffer setbacks, languish and fade away. Individuals and civilizations, butterflies and stars, all have their day, a chance to shine, and are gone.