An Iraqi-British playwright's exercise in teasing out inner turmoil through humour

Words by Dalia Al-Dujaili.

“Write like nobody [is] going to watch it.” This was the approach Jasmine Naziha Jones took when writing ‘Baghdaddy’. Deeply personal, vulnerable and candid – sometimes brutally so – the play unravels on stage at the Royal Court Theatre like the words of a diary falling off the page and springing to action in the form of larger-than-life characters. Three of these characters represent different parts of the young protagonist Darlee’s inner psyche, who is a mirror of a young Jasmine and portrayed by the playwright herself. And despite the intimacy and specificity of the work, ‘Baghdaddy’ is both hilariously and upsettingly relatable to perhaps the entire British Iraqi diaspora.

‘Baghdaddy’ – a play on the words ‘daddy’ and ‘Baghdadi’, describing someone from Iraq’s capital – opened on 18th November and is a personal and individual story of a father and daughter watching war from their British television screens, and thus it becomes the universal and shared story simultaneously, not only of the Iraqi diaspora, but of any community who has watched conflict sweep over their motherland from the safety of their living room. Jasmine felt called to use an autobiographical narrative to tell this wider story because she “needed to give words to an inner weight” whilst feeling strongly “that it needed to be witnessed and that people from the diaspora needed it to be witnessed, and needed to see it as well. I just felt I couldn't be alone in withholding this agony if there were people like me out there.”

As we follow Darlee’s memories of her Iraqi father’s life in the UK, we are taken through Iraq’s infamous modern history of conflicts – from the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, to the first Gulf war of ‘91, up to the US-UK invasion of Iraq in 2003. And all the time being humoured by scathing satire, a favourite form of Jasmine’s along with expressionism and absurd comedy.

Jasmine’s theatrical voice has always been one used in proximity to comedy and “the grotesque… my work is not subtle,” she says. Although she’s never explored her relationship with Iraq through her work before or created an autobiographical work, Jasmine’s creative career has always flirted with the boundary between joy and despair. So for her first solo play, she says, “I threw all the tools and techniques that I had into the melting pot to try to extract from myself my own experience and to try to understand my father's experience using the tools that I had in my kit.”

For Jasmine, writing the play was a therapeutic exercise. Teasing out “inner turmoil”, she was able to grieve during the process of playwriting whilst also scrutinising experiences and tropes she has herself dealt with as an Iraqi. “I've always felt that it’s not me that has the problem. It's other people,” she tells me of her feelings around being ‘Iraqi enough’. “This is a problem in our society, that other people think they get to decide how authentic you are. Based on a prescribed set of rules that seem really arbitrary, that undermine your experience – your lived experience.” Growing up in the UK, Jasmine would commonly be asked if she could speak Arabic, or be told she didn’t ‘look Iraqi’ – all points of tension that the play investigates. “The play… was a way of taking back control to go back and retrieve these memories, to try to string them together,” Jasmine continues.

After watching ‘A History of Water in the Middle East’ by Egyptian-British poet Sabrina Mahfouz, Jasmine was inspired to write about her experiences too. Sabrina’s gig-style, informative and sketch-y production is an anti-imperialist account of how water and its access has historically been exploited by Britain in the Middle East for commercial and colonialist means. This experience led to a “productive anger” as Jasmine calls it, after which she wrote the first ten pages of ‘Baghdaddy’, which she used to apply for the Royal Court entrance playwriting group before she received Arts Council funding to develop the play further. Iraqi playwright Hassan Abdul Razak was also a key inspiration during the development process for Jasmine, having attended his workshop where he told his attendees that “anger is a really great tool to fuel your writing,” as Jasmine recounts in her words.

Looking back, she tells me, “there were three people in my parents’ marriage; my mom, my dad and Iraq.” Speaking to her dad about his experiences when he first came to England and to her uncles and aunts, the play is informed by these accounts which give it the richness that only a family’s personal story could offer. But her research extended beyond her family too; “I did a lot of research which was very kindly supported by the Arab British Centre. I spoke to other people in the diaspora to see if there were any similarities, and there were so many similarities in our experiences.”

For the writer, comedy is a “Trojan horse”. In order to provide the work with the longevity that the stories of Iraqis, like her father, deserve, the play “seesaws between breathtaking tragedy and disarming comedy” as so to give the audience a piece of Jasmine’s pain “without being didactic and hitting them over the head with it,” she tells me. Iraqis are well used to watching their stories told through the lens of gore and violence, “we see it on the news every day,” as Jasmine confirms. This was a chance for the writer to turn a page for other Iraqi creatives to vocalise their individual experiences. And while Jasmine is not done with the subject of war and conflict, she’ll be moving away from the autobiographical for now – “There’s only so much you can do.”