My first encounter with the Ahwari people occurred when I was a teenager browsing through the pages of a travelogue titled Six Years on the Banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, written by Gazanfar Pashayev, an Azerbaijani translator who had been posted to Iraq. He was there to accompany Soviet hydrologists during the construction of the Tharthar-Euphrates Canal at various points between 1960 and 1970. Interestingly, in Azerbaijani, the author referred to the people as “Lake Arabs.”1 Years later, I came to realize that they are commonly called “Marsh Arabs” in English. A perfect example that reveals how language and naming are not neutral, but rather a dubious act of translation shaped by geography, perception, and the politics of designation.

While watching Kassem Hawal’s documentary Al-Ahwar [The Marshes] (1976), the scenes from Pashayev’s world came to life before my eyes. One scene in particular stayed with me and seemed to quietly shape the direction of this essay. In the film, men and women moved through the marshes, cutting reeds and bundling them to be delivered to a paper factory. The same reed that rose tall and upright from the water would pass through machines, rolled and flattened into sheets of paper. They seemed unaware that the reeds they gathered would be pressed into blank sheets and also fashioned into pens whose carved lines would inscribe maps onto those very pages. Maps that are used to regulate, to chart, to draw boundaries around a life that once flowed freely.

Reeds commonly found across the Middle East and the Mediterranean have historically served many purposes. They have been used in traditional medicine, in pharmacology, in religious rituals, in the making of musical instruments and boats, and in countless other crafts. They have also served as tools of measurement. The word “canon” and its Turkish counterpart “kanun,” meaning rule, law, or regulation, both derive from the Greek kanōn, which originally referred to a reed cane used as a measuring rod to draw boundaries, mark laws, impose order, and chart the world. In the hands of surveyors, these measuring rulers (considering the double meaning of the word, as both a person and a tool) divide water from land and clear the ground for governance and engineering for dams, levees, canals, and the machinery of control. Yet, as Dilip da Cunha argues, the division between land and water is not given by nature but shaped by design. It is a conceptual invention that reduces the shifting, porous life of wetlands into fixed categories. The surveyor’s grid erases non-hegemonic and alternative ways of knowing and living with water.2

Marshes shaped by seasonally shifting water bodies defy the cartographic logic with mazes of reed-lined waterways and swampy lands producing an impenetrable terrain. Precisely because of this, the Ahwari people acquire the essential skills of navigating and inhabiting the marshes from early childhood through orally disseminated ancestral and embodied3 knowledge.4 In the embodied form of reading and re-writing the text, translators, just like inhabitants of marshlands, rely on haptic and tactile skills to sense and navigate the rhythms of the source text. They must adopt a gesture, a posture, that allows the body and the hand to think and to make. Just as Polynesian sailors dip their hands into the current to read the sea, translators too, feel their way through a text by dipping into its flow,5 sensing where the writer’s route map bends, where the currents pull, where whirlpools must be avoided, and where the shallow waters might quietly await.6