Eulogy for the Tigris
A conversation about the end of the Tigris with photographer Emily Garthwaite
When I tried to think of a photographer who deals with our relationship to nature, Emily Garthwaite’s name was the first that came to mind. Hailing from a family of conservationists, Emily started her career in photography in London’s nightclubs, photographing partygoers while assisting fashion photographers during the day. She started focusing on photojournalism in 2017 and moved to Iraq two years later. Emily loves walking. She walked 1,500 kilometres through Iraq, walked 200 kilometres with nomads in the mountains of Iran and co-created and documented the Zagros Mountain Trail, Iraq’s first long distance hiking trail.
In 2021, Emily, writer Leon McCarron and a team of international and Iraqi environmentalists made a 1,900 kilometers source to sea expedition by boat down the Tigris river. The three-months trip took them through Turkey, Syria and Iraq. Emily has been documenting the Tigris ever since.
We talked about the river’s tragedy while Emily was between assignments in Amman, Jordan. This conversation was edited for clarity and brevity.
You write that your „work weaves together themes of shared humanity, displacement and coexistence with the natural world“. Can you tell me about your relation to nature?
My father was a conservationist for a very long time. My grandfather grew up in Mauritius and my father worked on conservation projects there. He worked with biologist Carl Jones and together they brought back two rare birds, the Mauritius kestrel and Mauritian pink pigeon, from the brink of extinction. That is the bit we are most proud of. But then my parents decided to have children. They couldn't be conservationists and parents at the same time, because the salary was so low. But we always lived surrounded by nature. Either in Australia, where I spent my early years, or in the UK, where we lived on the edge of National Trust land. So nature has always been very important.
You live in Iraq and have covered the country like few other local or international journalists. How has that come about?
I've only ever known one version of Iraq – Saddam, conflict, war, desert and dust. All of which was fed to me through the media coverage. But when I came to Iraq in 2017, I completely fell in love with it. That was the first time I have ever even been to the Middle East. And then I saw the Euphrates. It was filled with plastic, but it was very beautiful, surrounded by deep palm groves, and I wanted to chase these romantic notions of Iraq. So I started walking. I love walking. I've always been walking or hiking. And I walked the entire Arba'een Pilgrimage, the world's largest annual pilgrimage, from Najaf to Karbala twice.
As you said, most conversations about Iraq revolve around conflict, extremism, corruption or displacement. How has your work in Iraq developed?
I started to cover the pilgrimage from a cultural standpoint. I've always been interested in faith, not in religion, but the things that compel people to act, to believe, to follow traditions. I don't have a religion apart from Mother Nature, but this was something that really connected me to the country.
Now you have worked on the Tigris for four years, which is very much an environmental issue.
Iraq is one of the most climate vulnerable countries in the world, and yet it’s not given the same airtime as other nations struggling with the climate crisis. Internally it’s difficult to bring climate change to the forefront. The leaders simply say, “why are you talking about water and environment when we have to deal with all these other more pressing issues?“
The writer Leon McCarron had dreamed of a journey down the Tigris and I agreed to collaborate on the expedition. We worked on this project for many years, and I continue to focus on the project for the long-term. Leon wrote a book titled ‘Wounded Tigris’ about our first expedition.
Has this work changed your perspective on Iraq?
I first saw the river in 2019 at night in Baghdad. I remember thinking, „how surreal to know I'm going to go down this river.“ When I did eventually take the journey down the Tigris in 2021, I lost faith in a positive future for Iraq. I didn’t have anything positive to say about the state of the river or its prospects. And I had very few suggestions about how to protect and save the Tigris. I felt utterly hopeless about it.
I have been making this work for history because, as it stands today, the river is not going to survive. There's going to be monumental shifts required for life to sustain along the river in decades to come. This work is a documentation of the river from source to sea and the accounts of people's relationship with the river. But it feels like the preparation for a funeral.
What are the main forces destroying the river?
One of the biggest forces destroying the river is water mismanagement. Iraq has some of the most water in the Middle East available through the Euphrates and the Tigris. There are dams in Turkey and Iran, which limit the amount of water coming in, but water capture is completely inefficient in Iraq.
Iraq has historically experienced flooding. It is only in recent decades that Iraqis started to experience drought, and the country hasn't adapted to it in any way. Basra should not be under water every time there's rain. Better water capture is something that needs to be brought into the country. But often when those discussions are had, they are dismissed because people say we have more urgent things to deal with.
There are no sewage treatment plants. Every community has a sewage pipe directly into the Tigris. And the majority if not all the hospitals do not have raw waste sewage treatment plants. There is raw medical waste being pumped into the river, which is bringing up cancer rates and hospitalizing people. We have the oil refineries which are not held accountable for any of their practices too, and every other type of industrial factory imaginable.
Masgouf, grilled carp, is the national dish of Iraq, but I stopped eating fish in the country after the first Tigris expedition. Once you see what goes into the river, you can’t look away. I made a second journey down the river, only last month, and I had to tell my friend Sangar in advance. I could tell he judged me, and weeks later, at a sewage pipe, he told me he didn’t want to eat fish south of Mosul again. The Iraqi identity is so tied with the rivers and their relationship to fish and water. Eating Masgouf is part of Iraqi identity.
Why do you think people in Iraq are largely indifferent towards the river while they also take so much pride in it?
It must be one of the most militarized rivers in the world. And everyone, wherever you go, would say how the river was in a good state. But I've seen almost the entire 1,990 kilometres, I've seen every single village, how they are pumping everything in. If people were able to have a relationship with the river, then they perhaps would feel more compelled to protect it. As it stands, only fishermen get to use the river, and only small sections. The Tigris was used for trade, people would swim more, it fed people with an abundance of fish, and it was much wider and present in people’s lives. Now, it is a quiet river, with few fish, and a dying fishing industry.
How are the people faring who are trying to protect the Tigris?
There are very few voices on the river. Friends of mine who have spoken up have been threatened, tortured or forced out of the country. Others have lost their day jobs after their bosses found out they were environmentalists. Understandably, activists in Iraq burn out from all of the stress linked to their activism and witnessing the river becoming more and more damaged. Some of my friends have PTSD from torture, and it is often compounded with the trauma of seeing the damage to the river daily, and with previous experiences of surviving conflict. That’s not including intergenerational trauma, which is a thread stitched across the country.
I've talked a lot about how we can educate people about the Tigris river by showing culture and heritage along the river rather than images depicting a dead, destroyed river. No one will feel compelled to engage if they feel everything has already been lost. And it hasn’t been lost - there is still hope. We have to bring people into the story.
On one side you have the government, you have militias, you have oil companies – some of the most powerful forces in the world. And on the other side you have a bunch of activists, maybe a few dozen. Why do these powerful forces feel so threatened by them?
I don't think they feel threatened by them per se. They know they can get rid of them. I think that's possibly the distinction. A lot of it has to do with the tribal structures. If you go into a village, it’s led by a Sheikh. When there is someone who becomes famous, maybe for building boats, making it into the press, whatever it might be, they often get crushed, because they get too much attention. This is especially true for activists.
Is activism a lost cause in Iraq?
The most successful activist I have met recently is the son of a Sheikh in central Iraq. Together, they’re holding polluters accountable and reaching all levels of their community. The Sheikh is an extraordinary man. ISIS tortured him, smashed his teeth and kept him in solitary confinement for months. One of his son’s was dissolved in acid by ISIS. He told me that they know what is worth fighting for, and spoke of the river as being his child too.
Close to their village is an oil refinery with a pipe that goes directly into the Tigris. The son launched a protest, got together about 200 people and they protested against the pipe. Amazingly, the refinery came back and said, „we want you to know that everything we put in the river is clean.“ They felt they had to respond. And then they sued him, rather than threatening to disappear him, as they do with other activists. This is only possible because his father is the Sheikh and supports him entirely.
That was one of the most instructional things I've taken away recently. We can talk about democracy, but it’s most effective to mobilize tribal leaders in the environmental movement.
Are there moments that question your commitment to Iraq?
I am always very strong in Iraq, but there are a couple of things that will make me break in little ways.
I find it very difficult to see environmental damage, habitat loss and with that dead animals on the banks of the river. I was at the confluence of a wastewater stream that fed into the Tigris. The water was lime green, not a fish or ripple in the water. The banks were hardened by salt. And, at the end, as the water reached the Tigris, I saw a dead soft shell turtle being dragged in and out by the tide. Beside it, two dead terrapins, and a scattering of fish. The children from the village followed me and, intrigued by the softshell turtle, began to push it up the bank in unison. It was such a beautiful creature, and seeing it in the arms of young children was hard to witness.
The Hawizeh Marshes are amongst those things as well. When you are there, you're able to genuinely envisage what Eden might have looked like, but it smells like shit. The water used to be four meters deep, twelve in some places.The last time we were far out in a huge plane of water, where you couldn’t even see the end, just sunrise and sunset reflecting. But then the propeller of the boat got stuck and all the mud was being churned up and with that a smell of sewage. It was bleak to experience, because the water must have been less than half a meter. And this was in the Spring of this year, after considerable rainfall. Thankfully we’ve had more rain this year than previous years.
Why do people stay in these conditions?
We have lost a lot of places forever due to climate change in Iraq. In Diyala province, there are a lot of places, we will never get back, because salination is so high that these are just salt flats now and the agricultural land is lost. It is the worst case scenario. There are places in the south that people have abandoned. For Iraq, displacement from climate change has already happened. It’s part of history now. It has already happened and no one was there to do anything. There are places no one knew before and no one knows about now that have already been lost to climate change.
How are people in Iraq coping?
The other day, I was down at the Shatt al-Arab, the confluence of Euphrates and Tigris. I went to this amazing village by chance. I saw a little pathway and told my friend Sangar we were off for a walk. In the village, the tributaries of the Shatt al-Arab were neon green with nothing in it. Completely dead. And people there had very aggressive cancers and obviously a lack of treatment.
It was the end of my journey after all these years and I wanted to know what people said about the sewage. I asked one lovely guy there, Mahmoud, who had stage four cancer and seven children. He said to me, “what do you expect? The government has to put the sewage in the river to keep the water levels up because of Turkey’s and Iran’s dams.”
Did you challenge him?
I didn't question him, because I thought there's no way I'm going to reach him and I’m standing in his garden, his home. I’m here to listen and to try to understand how we’ve got to this point. But I realized, how high the lack of education around pollution and river protection must be that you believe that the government is being forced to pump sewage and toxic waste into our rivers to keep water levels high. Today the river is deeply tied up with politics.t means that you can't do anything about the river because if you do, it’s deemed as going against the government.
I have to think for a long time before I can say things with certainty. My experiences on the river were crystalised when Mahmoud and I were both standing and looking at the same toxic canal. He can not fish, his whole lifestyle has changed, he lives with smell and is going through chemotherapy. And then he tells me the canal is this way due to Turkey and Iran. I asked him if anyone was responsible in inside Iraq, and he said no.
Where do you find joy in all these stories?
A million places.
Emily pauses for a long time. “I don’t know how to talk about it”, she finally says. “It makes me emotional.”
I love the river, I have had some of the most beautiful experiences of my life on the river, the happiest experiences. Moments of calm and beauty happen all the time along the river. I know, when I talk about it, it sounds entirely negative. But the people who live on the river, the stories that survive there are some of the most beautiful I have encountered. I would not be living in Iraq if I had no hope for the future. I am sustained by these moments of joy. I saw a wild boar recently. I’ve seen a lot of rare birds. I had moments of pure serenity.
The idea of Mother Nature taking sites of trauma and returning them to beauty is very moving for me, a palace where a friend died, somebody was abducted. North of Qayyarah, where a lot of people hid from ISIS for example… wait.
She gets up and gets a notebook. “I have one of my perfect days in here,” she says. Dried leaves fall out when she opens it. “I have plants from every day.” She starts reading from it. The section is titled “Picnic on the Tigris”. It describes an afternoon with a group of fishermen from a village on the banks of the Tigris. “The village used to be on the other side of the bank in the 1950ies, but continual flooding caused them to move”, she reads.
One of the fishermen, Haji Sayed, is so old that his age and his refusal to die has become a punchline between them. Yet he is cheerfully hunting chicken on the muddy banks on the river for barbeque. “There are so many ways to experience Iraq”, Haji Sayed says. “If you put a smile on your face, you can probably have a good day.”
Emily, Haji Sayed and the other fishermen travel along the river. Storks flying overhead, they pass by Syrian antiquities, sites of battles with ISIS, and the place where one of the fishermen found the body of a 13-year-old boy, the son of a friend. When ISIS occupied the village, his friends started to make mock graves for Haji Sayed to tease him. They put stones with engravings in his front yard: “Ahmed died in a fishing accident.” or “Ahmed never woke up.” When he removed the gravestone commemorating his death, his friends put up a new one. At one point he had eight mock graves scattered around his village. The more annoyed he got, the more it encouraged his friends. Ahmed lives to this day, removing gravestones ever so often. “It’s my kind of humour,” Emily says.
Emily’s work will be shown at this year’s Visa Pour l’Image.
What an utterly beautiful interview ❤️