Bringing Baghdad to Georgia: Mary Helen Stefaniak Discusses Role Models & Cultural Connections

by Shana Thornton

Mary Helen Stefaniak at Flannery O’Connor’s Andalusia Farm, October 2010

Adventures tempt us forward, tiptoeing our way around the corner, or purchasing a ticket on a dare, and better still, raising a hand to venture curiously into an unfamiliar locale. We crave the exhilaration of change as much as we are nervously unaware of what the shift will mean in the end. At times, some people resist differences, pushing aside variety in a demand for permanence or same-ness. Novels that can sweep all of this onto a carpet, where the reader might sit, legs crossed, turning the pages with speed, those novels depict the cycles of not only our social challenges and growth as human communities, but they also depict our greatest internal desires and fears, our motivations. The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia (W.W. Norton & Co., 2010) by Mary Helen Stefaniak bridges history and imagination, innovation and a child’s delight with the complications of displacement, limitations and discrimination.
In a Depression-era small town in Georgia, the community is seduced by the story-telling of Scheherazade, introduced to the children at school by their new teacher, Miss Spivey, in the form of all the volumes of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. Miss Spivey is a woman in vogue, having traveled to Baghdad and riding a wave of feminism into Threestep, Georgia. She succeeds in pushing the limitations of stereotype, belief and social roles, not only concerning women and leadership roles, but also in terms of racial discrimination and fear of human differences and the changes those differences inspire. Miss Spivey transforms the small town of Threestep into Baghdad with an elaborate bazaar, complete with building replicas, which the people in the community volunteer to re-create.

In consideration of the 2010 protests and vandalism of Mosque locations around the United States, and especially the controversy about a mosque at Ground Zero, I asked Stefaniak how a character like Miss Spivey can help us to overcome these challenges of acceptance and community. In response, Stefaniak sent a letter to me that she had mailed to some in the media and public life. In the letter, Stefaniak writes, “Given the recent furor over the proposed mosque at Ground Zero and the general atmosphere of intolerance that seems to hang like a poisonous cloud over us, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, I offer this book, humbly and hopefully, as a kind of corrective. In it, the Arabic tradition of stories within stories meets the tropes of Southern literature, producing, if not an antidote, at least an alternative to the fearful and often hate-filled rhetoric that continues to bombard us.
“From the beginning, I have hoped that readers would experience The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia as an alternative, rooted in both history and imagination, to our vexed relationship with ‘Baghdad.’ Lately I have come to hope that my readers will see and feel the many ways in which, as Paul Krugman said (last year) in The New York Times, ’1938 = 2010.’
“The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia… takes place (mostly) in 1938-39, when a well-traveled new schoolteacher decides to revive the defunct town festival as an exotic Baghdad-style bazaar, complete with camels. While Miss Spivey has her ardent supporters (among them eleven-year-old narrator Gladys Cailiff), her efforts to bring ‘foreign’ culture to the citizens of tiny Threestep, Georgia, meet with some resistance. Far more troublesome, however, is her decision to involve black children in the preparations, specifically, to enlist the help of the Cailiffs’ very talented African American neighbor as ‘Chief Engineer’ and set designer of the Baghdad Bazaar. (…)
“In March 2003,” Stefaniak’s letter continues, “I decided that I wanted to write a novel in which Americans had a relationship to Baghdad that was different from the one being developed at that time. As I did my research, I never expected to find out that literate African Muslims were enslaved in Georgia and other parts of the South, but that is what I learned. Many Americans are unaware of Islam’s long history in our own country. In The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia, that history is imagined and dramatized in a night of story-telling that comes just when the citizens, beset by tragedy, need it most. Tales within tales carry them (and us) back through time, connecting threads of our history to the broad swath of history and culture that Baghdad represents.”

I wondered how Miss Spivey would handle protests and demonstrations, even vandalism of mosques within her community. I asked Stefaniak what cities, like Murfreesboro, TN, where the summer of 2010 was fraught with turmoil for the Muslims in that community due to protests, would say about hosting a Baghdad Bazaar in the spirit of Miss Spivey? How would Miss Spivey handle our contemporary controversies? What would the citizens of Threestep, Georgia, the setting in her novel, do to protect the rights of the citizens of their city?

Stefaniak responded by email to my questions, “Judging by the response I’ve gotten from readers in the South—including some who contacted me via The Baghdad Bulletin website to ask about attending next year’s Bazaar—I’m guessing that there are many people in every Southern city who would welcome the chance to host a Baghdad Bazaar. And I suppose Miss Spivey would handle her opposition the same way she handled the Klan, which was chiefly to appear to ignore them while arranging events in such a way as to get their goat. A very active kind of ‘passive resistance.’”

Gladys Cailiff, the narrator, becomes the vocalization of not only a story that holds many smaller anecdotes and adventures, but she also bridges the women in the community. Even those girls who would seem to be her enemy are described with appreciation for each girl or woman’s strengths. I asked Stefaniak to discuss the connections between women and story-telling as it relates to family history and the establishment of community.

“Women are the culture-bearers, no?” Stefaniak wrote. “And storytelling is the source of our identity, both as individuals and as a community. In most societies, mothers are the ones who start telling us the story that is who we are. In my father’s Eastern European immigrant family, it was my father’s older sister Madeline who told the stories. I have some wonderful tapes of Aunt Madeline telling me in her inimitable way the story of coming to America with her mother in 1910, when Madeline was five years old. Their arrival at Ellis Island, five-year-old Madeline’s measles and quarantine, my poor grandmother’s inability to understand why or where they were taking her daughter (not a single official spoke Croatian or Hungarian, her two languages)—these episodes of our family history are part of who we are. Growing up, I was always aware of my connection to my grandmother’s village on the Drava River in the former Austro-Hungarian empire. Later in my life, I visited that village and imagined my grandmother’s life there—and how it shaped the lives of her American children and grandchildren—in my first novel, The Turk and My Mother.
“In my mother’s Georgia family,” Stefaniak explained, “there were some good storytellers among the men—I have to give credit, for example, to my mother’s cousin Royce Califf—but what you wanted most was to sit at (or under) a table that had my mother and her sisters and a couple of the great aunts gathered around it. There were many tragic stories—my mom’s parents died within a month of one another when she was eleven, and May’s final scene in the book comes from the story Aunt Sissy told about my grandmother—but there was also a lot of laughter. My great-aunt Aileen (the model for Ildred Cailiff in the book) and her sister Gladys would break up into helpless laughter in the middle of a story about some date that one or the other of them had been on or a ride they’d taken into town from a stranger who didn’t realize he’d bitten off more than he could chew when those girls climbed into his back seat, and pretty soon everyone would be truly helpless, laughing, and the story would be lost, tears flowing, the box of tissues that a tragic story had brought to the table getting passed around again. Those women could laugh. (The helpless laughter appears to be an inheritable trait. My mother is recovering from a stroke these days, and while we’ve had our share of tears and frustration during the past couple of months, we’re just as likely to collapse, laughing, because she’s put her cardigan sweater on backwards or mistaken the microwave for the refrigerator.)”

Stefaniak’s female characters in The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia represent the strength of women in different positions in life. In her characters, there is a range of ages, races and different social backgrounds. She does not present a demonized or victimized stereotype. Neither does Gladys (the narrator) communicate a prescribed path to becoming a powerful woman. She seems to see that motherhood could be gratifying as long as the individual continues to feed her spirit. I asked Stefaniak what she wanted Gladys to reflect about motherhood and career, especially in light of the way that Gladys memorializes and idolizes her sister May who is married and has several children.

Stefaniak wrote, “As a married woman of child-bearing age in a low-income stratum of society, May faces obstacles to freedom and empowerment that are almost as great as the obstacles Theo Boykin faces. Like him, she both triumphs over and succumbs to the limitations imposed on her by the place and time. When Theo Boykin objects to his brother being the Slave of the Lamp and Miss Spivey responds with a litany of all the powerful magical feats a jinn can perform, it’s May who says, ‘Long as somebody lets him out of the lamp first.’”
Theo Boykin is an intelligent, creative inventor as a teen, but because he is African-American, Theo isn’t allowed to attend school, receive up-to-date textbooks in order to pass his exams, or participate equally in his community, even though his abilities could be a wise asset to the town. Miss Spivey breaks several of the social rules in order to help Theo and many others, including May.
Stefaniak continued, “One thing I wanted Gladys to appreciate (and to help us appreciate) is the sheer physical courage and stamina that motherhood requires. I think May’s role as a mother feeds her spirit just as much as her desire to learn and her talent for story-telling do—but it’s also a role that uses her up and wears her out. May refuses to learn that there are things she can’t do, given her circumstances in life. Like Gladys, we admire her for that, but we can’t help but notice that Gladys chooses not to marry.”

One of the achievements of Miss Spivey, and the book itself, is the realistic portrayal of role models, as well as the importance of a young girl’s search for a mentor and her movement into that role as well. The reader sees the transformation of young minds and a spark for the older opinions, both of which initiate change in that small Georgia community, a change that resonates further and that connects to a history that was almost forgotten. The characters see their own stories in another culture, in the history of another part of the world, one that is exotic and foreign to them, but one that is also electrifying and unnerving. They are pushed beyond the boundaries of their ideas, of their social constraints, of their own land borders, and simultaneously, the characters must embrace their place and their individual personalities.

About Miss Spivey and the importance of teachers and role models, Stefaniak wrote, “Miss Spivey did for Gladys and Threestep what good teachers do for us: they transform us, they empower us, they endow us with a love of learning that lasts our whole lives—and then, in the vast majority of cases, they disappear from our lives before we’ve gotten wise enough to know what they’ve done. Perhaps it’s because Gladys herself becomes a teacher that she knows (by the time she’s doing her ‘Afterwords’) that there’s nothing else we could know about Miss Spivey that would add to our understanding of her role in the lives of the people of Baghdad, Georgia. We do know that by the time Gladys writes her Afterwords, her feelings toward Miss Spivey have changed to gratitude and an appreciation of the gift Miss Spivey gave to each person who was able to receive it: ‘We have to thank both Theo Boykin and Miss Grace Spivey for bringing [the secret that everybody knows] to our attention.’ And of course ‘that secret’ is that ‘We are not superior. We know very well that the Almighty has no particular wish for us, whoever we are, to prevail.’”

Stefaniak uses a few characters based on or inspired by actual people in history. Two of those were women who do represent a prevailing strength to overcome barriers.

“I can’t overstate how thrilled I was,” Stefaniak wrote, “early in my exploratory reading for the book to discover The Camel Bells of Baghdad, a kind of travelogue published in 1934. The author, Janet Miller, was (as Gladys Cailiff says of her fictional counterpart in The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia) a medical doctor from Nashville, Tennessee. Dr. Miller was, in fact, a kind of one-woman Doctor without Borders back in the 1920s and 1930s. She battled sleeping sickness in Africa, worked for women’s health in Japan, and traveled in the Middle East as well. I looked around but found nothing written about Janet Miller—only her own book about traveling in Iraq and Iran (then Persia) between 1926 and 1930. That book was my first solid ‘historical’ link between the Middle East and Georgia (since Miller is from TN, and TN is very close to GA!) so it was a big factor in giving me the confidence to move ahead with my crazy idea of writing a novel in which a group of Americans (modeled on my mother’s people in middle GA) had a different relationship to Baghdad than the one being developed at the time I began writing in 2003.”

In spite of doubt, Stefaniak discovered more of a historical Middle Eastern influence as well. The history of African Muslims connected with the racial tension in Threestep, Georgia, and created a story interwoven with a surprising history.

“Bilali’s daughter Margaret—the Lady with the Veil who heals the lion—is another role model of the first order—” Stefaniak continued our discussion about female role models, “as a woman, a proud daughter, a grandmother, a Muslim, and a person whose solid core of self-esteem and responsibility have allowed her to maintain her beliefs and her dignity (and to make those same things possible for her grandson) in unbelievably adverse circumstances. She, too, is a character rooted in history, although the role she plays in General Sherman’s march to the sea is a role I invented for her. I invented her grandson Malcolm, too, but the fact is that one of Margaret’s great-great granddaughters—a woman named Katie Brown—was among the island inhabitants interviewed and photographed in 1939 for the Federal Writers’ Project volume, Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among Georgia’s Coastal Negroes. As the oldest daughter of Bilali Mahomet, Margaret is the ancestor of some families with members living on Sapelo Island today, including Cornelia Bailey Walker, author of a book about the African American community on Sapelo Island.”

Stefaniak pays tribute to the stories woven into her life but she further pursues the complexities of combining them with new narratives. In one of her biographies, Stefaniak, who grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has this to say about her lifelong connection to the South: “I was raised in a bicultural household. My father was born in Milwaukee; my mother was born in Gordon, Georgia. When I was a kid, I didn’t know there was any such thing as a ‘vacation’ that wasn’t a trip to Georgia. I was in high school when I learned that my mother and her sisters went to Peabody High School in Milledgeville with (Mary) Flannery O’Connor, whom they remembered as ‘the Catholic girl.’ In some sense, everything I have ever written has been both an argument with Flannery O’Connor and a tribute to her.”

Stefaniak is deeply aware of our historical connections and the need for stories to captivate and challenge us.

“I hope readers will check out the acknowledgments,” Stefaniak wrote, “and maybe read “Why Georgia? Why Baghdad?” or watch the video, The Stories behind The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia, to get a sense of where history meets imagination in the book. Readers will recognize historical events like the American civil war and Great Depression as well as the First World War, but there are many other historical events and contexts in the novel that are less well known, like the siege of the British at Kut-al-Amaar, the activities of the Arab nationalist movement Al-Ahd, the enslavement of West African Muslims in the Caribbean and the American South, and the 9th-century war between the sons of Harun al-Rashid. Aside from the many characters in Threestep/Baghdad who have real life counterparts on my mother’s family tree, there are many historical characters in the book—not only General Sherman but Harun al-Rashid, his sons Ma’mun and Amin, Bilali Mahomet and his daughter Margaret, the three brothers known as the Banu Musa, authors of The Book of Ingenious Devices, and, last but definitely not least, Dr. Janet Miller of Nashville, Tennessee. They may or may not be engaged in actions that history records—i.e., but I have taken as much care as I could to ensure that the part each one plays in my novel ‘does not contradict what is known’ (as Donald Barthelme once put it). I think of these characters as real people playing themselves in a fictional story. In any case, the Acknowledgments page offers many resources for learning more about such things as ‘the stimulus package’ of the 1930s—the W.P.A.—and its role in bringing teachers to some of the poorest, darkest corners of America, and the incredible stories of many African Muslims enslaved in the Americas, as well as a little behind the scenes history of Iraq. I hope, too, that the epigraphs at the beginning of the novel might shed some light on its stories and lead some readers to the books from which they are taken.”

The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia is not a finished book when you read the last word on the last page. This novel will lead you onto other adventures, other carpets where you might sit and turn the pages of a new story.

The Cailiffs of Baghdad Georgia, published by W.W. Norton & Company, is available now.
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Mary Helen Stefaniak’s second novel, The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia (W. W. Norton & Company), was chosen by independent booksellers as an Indie-Next “Great Read” for September 2010. Her first novel, The Turk and My Mother (W. W. Norton), won the 2005 John Gardner Fiction Book Award and has been translated into several languages. Her fiction has appeared in many publications, including New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, where “A Note to Biographers Regarding Famous Author Flannery O’Connor” appeared in 2000. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many publications, including The Antioch Review, AGNI, Epoch, The Iowa Review, and A Different Plain (University of Nebraska Press). Her first book, Self Storage and Other Stories, received the Wisconsin Library Association’s 1998 Banta Award, and a novella was shortlisted for the O. Henry Prize. A former commentator on Iowa Public Radio and contributing editor for The Iowa Review, she has taught in M.F.A. programs at Pacific University in Oregon and at the University of Nebraska, and she currently serves as a contributing editor for Cerise Press, an international journal of literature, arts & culture. She divides her time between Iowa City and Omaha, where she teaches at Creighton University. To learn more, visit her website, http://www.maryhelenstefaniak.com/. (Or travel to www.baghdadbazaarGA.com.)

Shana Thornton serves as Managing Editor for Her Circle Ezine’s Books and Literature section. In addition, she writes interviews, features and fiction. She also teaches composition and literature courses, chases her husband and daughter, and runs trails with her dog Mojo.