The Mango Juice is a Needle, and We’re the Thread; or, The Non-Transactional Ethics of Iraqi Karam (or, gheira)

Words by Arran Walshe

Wala yahimak, ahlan wa sahlan bil Iraq, the man says, waving me away from his juice stand. I protest against his “don't worry about it, welcome to Iraq” with a stuttered refusal, mustaheel habibi, khalli itdafak -- 'Impossible', I say, 'friend, let me pay you'. I offer the money with one hand – amounting to around fifty cents – across his cart towards him, my other hand awkwardly grasping the fresh mango juice he's just given me. He pushes the money back, his face stern, and after some more back and forth I relent, grateful for the gift.

In the wide expanse of Arab culture, karam, or generosity, is an indelible feature. All cultures value, in one way or another, the hospitality that karam embodies, its sense of reciprocity understood to be a basic feature of what allows us capricious and jealous humans to transcend our parochial, selfish interests. But generosity is also often spoken of as tragically faded from our modern world, victim to the vicissitudes of mechanization, capital, and the alienation of urban and suburban life.

"We are, fundamentally, a Bedouin, tribal people," a friend told me later as we smoked shisha at a cafe, "before things changed, we traversed the deserts and needed to care for each other, and for strangers, and this has stayed with us." This is the common, atavistic story of karam's embeddedness in the region's cultures: it is a vestige, a holdover from an outmoded and superseded age that lingers on in a culture where the past's traditions and practices hold a tenacious grip on the present's denizens.

But if the city (so weighed by its many significations) is the site of selfish individualism's victory over the authentic and communal, why then do we see karam so widely given today on Iraqi streets? Iraqi karam has something of a mythical quality, and it's often said that Iraqis do it to an extreme. Throughout my time in Iraq I've had taxi drivers and restauranteurs refuse payment, been hosted by individuals and families I've only just met, and had more people than I can count stop where they're doing to escort me to where I'm going. A policeman once stopped me in the street, took my passport, and asked me where I was going. "To the ATM, to get money for lunch," I told him. To my surprise, he handed me my passport back and attempted to give me money from his wallet, telling me no guest in Iraq should be paying for their own lunch. Of all the encounters I've had with the law, this was certainly the most congenial. I was allowed to refuse his offer, but we traded numbers, and he now sends me pictures of him and his family on the famous Iraqi Arbaeen pilgrimage.

Having experienced so many innumerable expressions for generous kindness and hospitality everywhere I've lived and travelled in the Middle East, it’s hard to deny that there is something excessive and notable about the way that Iraqis give to each other, and to strangers. So much so that Iraqi social media is full of 'social experiment' videos where, watched by a hidden camera, young men fall in the street, or are hit by cars, or claim have lost all their money while visiting from abroad, and are in all cases cared for, offered housing, money, or protection. In Iraqi Arabic, this specific form of karam, the unreflective and immediate giving of aid to a stranger, has its own name: gheira. Gheira is near untranslatable but could be thought of as a jealous protective care for the other, often a stranger in need, defined by a reflexive imposition of aid in a moment of crisis.

In the seminal work 'The Gift', the Sociologist Marcel Mauss argued that giving and receiving are at the centre of what makes human culture. Its reciprocity forms the very social threads that weave a community together, and individuals to one another. But for all its critiques of the profit-maximizing, utilitarian ethics of exchange, Mauss' account still privileges the transactional nature of generosity. His work is often summarized to argue that 'there is no free gift', since all giving assumes reciprocity in a social world. You've got to give to get back. But karam, critically, denies the reciprocal, the very attempt at equalizing a slur on the gift. To attempt to return in kind is unseemly, and it is only with great subtlety that one may, at least try, to return the favour.

Mauss' metaphor of the thread, however, it a powerful one. If relationships are the thread, it is the generous gift that is the needle. Each act of generosity threads us to one another and binds us together, often against our will. When the social breaks down, or is under attack, it might be that generosity is the first line of defense, a primary strategy of repair. In a country like Iraq, which has suffered under so many waves of violence over so many decades, karam can be an act of rebellion and refusal. Rebellion against an inactive, corrupt, and sectarian government that pilfers the nation’s wealth and jealously guards its politicians’ privileges from behind militia guns; rebellion against the bombs that the U.S-led coalition rained down on the country, and its brutal occupation in the name of peace; and rebellion against the bloodthirsty millenarian jihadists who would sacrifice and murder all to serve their single-minded pursuit of power.

Whether simple, everyday acts of karam are the patrimonial legacy of the region's Bedouin forefathers or not, today it is a resource on which many Iraqis draw on to assert their autonomy in a world which is bent on denying them their freedom be a human in a social world. The freedom to be a thread, and their endless gifts, the needles. An autonomy that the agents of war, authoritarianism, violence, and sectarianism have, unsuccessfully, sought so endlessly to deny them.

Twenty years since the invasion of Iraq, we are often told that victims of war and social violence must be rehabilitated, and shown again, or for the first time, how to live together. And this may be true in many cases. However, in Iraq, the strength, tenacity, and power of karam may humble us when we are given gifts, even so slight a one as juice, by those we see as our paradigmatic victims.

Arran’s work focuses on the intersection of cultural politics, law, and bureaucracy in the contemporary Middle East. He explores these ideas with the support of the Middle East & Islamic Studies Department at New York University. His dissertation, Martyred Citizenship: Law, Culture, and Sacrifice in Iraq examines how narratives and values of sacrifice and martyrdom were bureaucratized by the post-2003 Iraqi state and embedded, mediated, and exchanged through global governance institutions and the humanitarian industry. More broadly, he’s interested in how and for what projects we are asked to sacrifice in our contemporary world, and how we respond to those demands in our personal, social, political, and cultural life. He is also interested in how these local demands intersect with broader struggles for justice, dignity, and democracy. Outside of his scholarly work, Arran’s creative practice includes photography, loud music, and collaborative projects in dance.