Emilienne Malfatto
“Al-Banaat”
Fatma, aged 8 and a half in this picture, takes a bath an inflatable plastic pool. The pool was bought for her little brother Abdallah during the hot summer.
Chibayish, Southern Iraq, 12/09/2019
Tiktum plays with balloons in the narrow alley leading to the house.
Chibayish, Southern Iraq, 06/02/2019
Fatma and Tiktum's hairstyles.
Chibayish, Southern Iraq, May 2019.
Fatma (left) and Tiktum have disguised themselves with hijab to play "as grown up" after Iftar, the meal that breaks the fast of Ramadan.
Chibayish, Southern Iraq, 11/05/2019
It's Ramadan and Fatma is fasting for the first time. She wears a hijab - a girl fasting should cover her hair. She went to watch boys swimming in the Euphrates. Here, only boys swim.
Chibayish, Iraq, 12/05/2019
Fatma combs her hair after washing them on a winter day. Clothes and hair are very important for the two girls. Every night, their mother Alia combs, brushes and oils their hair.
Chibayish, Southern Iraq, 06/02/2019
Tiktum hides behind a mannequin she found in the patio. Her father Mahmood used to sell women's clothes, but he switched to children's clothes and threw away mannequins. The girls call them "dolls".
Chibayish, Iraq, 21/02/2019
Portrait of a "martyred" great uncle, and an old photo of Tiktum.
Chibayish, Southern Iraq, February/May 2019
Tiktum (right) and her cousin Simsim dressed up with abayas and now play the grown ups sitting on a treadmill. Simsim, 4, lives in Babel. Her family came to visit during a religious holiday.
Chibayish, Iraq, 11/09/2019
Fatma walks across the "diwaniyah" (reception room) in her maternal grandmother's house, where the "table" has been set for Iftar, the meal that breaks the fast of Ramadan.
Chibayish, Southern Iraq, 10/05/2019
Favorite dresses hanging on the wall.
Chibayish, Southern Iraq, 06/02/2019
The daily Indian soap opera is a must for women in Chibayish. A way to get emotions when most marriages are arranged? This photo was taken in the house of the girls' paternal grandmother.
Chibayish, Iraq, 21/02/2019
Less hair and more cloth.
Chibayish, Southern Iraq, 21/02/2019
Tiktum dances and chants as a Shiite cleric is talking on TV. She sings a mix of names, random words, and bits of the Qur’an that she is learning at school.
Chibayish, Iraq, 04/10/2018
Fatma (left) and Tiktum dress up and admire themselves in the mirror. In Chibayish, some girls as young as 6 wear headscarves. In a couple of years, Fatma will have to wear a hijab.
Chibayish, Iraq, 15/10/2018
Fatma and her cousin Kosh interact during a quiet evening, without adults in the room. Between playing and the beginning of a seduction game.
Marriage between first cousins is normal and frequent in this region.
Chibayish, Iraq, 09/09/2019
Alia’s black clothes hang in the patio during the month of Muharram. During Muharram, Shiite Muslims only wear black clothes. But in very conservative Chibayish, women wear black all year round.
Chibayish, Iraq, 16/10/2018
Fatma and Tiktum laugh as their uncle Hussein plays with them in the patio. Hussein, 17, is Mahmood’s youngest brother. He doesn't really study nor has a job, like most young men here.
Chibayish, Iraq, 02/10/2018
Fatma and Tiktum play at home with their father before he leaves for Baghdad. Mahmood works as a body guard for a local politician and owns a small shop.
Chibayish, Iraq, 04/10/2018
Fatma, Tiktum and their brother Abdallah lay in bed before going to sleep. The whole family sleeps on a blanket on the floor, in the main room of the house.
Chibayish, Iraq,15/10/2018
Project Description
“Al-Banaat” (“the girls” in Arabic) is an intimate journey through the world of two little sisters in Iraq. It is a long-term personal project I carried out, exploring the meaning of freedom and childhood from a personal and feminine perspective in contemporary Iraq. It’s a journey that interrogates Iraq’s future, based on the deepest belief that the way a society treats its children – and especially its girls – will shape its future.
Through the portraiture of two little girls, this collection of images takes the viewer into a poetic and colorful world, and shows an unseen face of Iraq.
Fatma and Tiktum are two sisters, now aged 7 and 8 1/2 years old. They live in Chibayish, in Southern Iraq, a Shiite region. Very few places are as conservative as this rural region of Iraq. I met them by chance, by becoming friends with their father as I was working on another story in the region. It was one of those moments of grace: Fatma and Tiktum immediately adopted me, and vice versa. I started to photograph them just for me, and because they would ask for it. It was only after some time that I realised those images made absolute sense, and that this story had become the most significant and important I’d ever worked on.
The sequence of images careens between moments of their daily life, scenes of this magic they seem to conceal and reveal, and still life images capturing the particular environment they live in. Diptychs echo the duality of the subject and reinforce the importance of the bond between the two sisters.
Fatma and Tiktum were born in post-war Iraq, in the early 2010’s. And, very soon, war returned to the country when ISIS took over a quarter of the country in 2014 – although Southern regions like Chibayish were relatively far away from the fighting, the conflict still took a toll on local society as dozens of young men died while being part of Shiite militias battling the jihadi group.
Iraq seems to be now at a turning point: ISIS has officially been defeated (yet is still present in the country, and people agree it will soon be back in force) and tens of thousands of protesters are marching in the streets of Baghdad, trying to – finally – shake up the corruption and economic hardship, but also the rotten “system” that’s been running the country since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Therefore, it seems like a good time to look at Iraq’s future – its children, its girls.
These intimate images are also my personal reaction to the girls’ condition in Iraq – where lawmakers have proposed a law to legalise marriage for girls as young as 9 years old. Only six months older than Fatma’s age today. For now, still considered children, Fatma and Tiktum are free. But this will change at some point, perhaps in a year or two for Fatma. As soon as they become early teenagers, they will have to cover up and “behave”. The project is called “The girls”: it can be the story of every Iraqi girl.
Biography
Nationality: French
Emilienne Malfatto is a freelance photojournalist covering post-conflict and social issues, mostly in Iraq.
She studied in France and Colombia and graduated from Sciences Po Paris in 2013. She then worked for the Agence France Presse (AFP) in France and on the Middle East regional desk. In early 2015 she moved to Northern Iraq as a freelancer. She now lives between Iraq and Southern Europe, with occasional reporting in Latin America.
Her work has been featured by The Washington Post, The New York Times’ Lens blog, UNESCO, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Le Monde, Libération, Le Figaro, among others.
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