Al-Ahram Weekly | Books supplement

This recent lyrical diary of a young Iraqi poet, Dunya Mikhail, appears for the first time in English translated from the Arabic by the author herself with the help of an editor, Louise Hartung, a native of Michigan and a director of a bilingual, multicultural programme. The publisher has wisely included the Arabic text (which was published for the first time in Baghdad in 1995) as well as the English rendering. The Arabic text was written in Baghdad between 1991 and 1994, and has the imprint of the Gulf War and the on-going sanctions though in the sophisticated medium of literature. The text itself resists formal taxonomy: it partakes of the subgenre of the diary, without the usual chronology and dates. It is not poetry, but in its lyricism, it reaches the soaring heights of poetry. It contains episodes such as the destruction of the Amiriyya Shelter by American fighters ("Planes were flying over the shelters, over the debris that grew into the shelters; over the children who slept under the debris; over the remains that were a short time ago children; over the coal in which the remains journeyed; over the walls that mixed with coal"), but the work shies away from politics and explicit condemnations. It alludes to Biblical parables, but its vision goes beyond the Christian perspective to embrace a humanist and humane position. We come across scientific facts and mythological references in the rich folds of this multi-genre text, which is best described by the Palestinian critic, Khalid Ali Mustafa, as "a spiritual document on the impact of war on Iraq".

Dunya Mikhail was born in Baghdad in 1965, studied English literature at the University of Baghdad and worked for The Baghdad Observer for a number of years. She is presently preparing a Master of Arts degree in literature at Wayne State University (Detroit, USA). This Diary follows two collections of poetry by the author, Mazamir Al-Ghiyab (The Psalms of Absence), Baghdad, 1993, and Ala Washk Al-Musiqa (On the Verge of Music), Tunis, 1997.

The non-chronological diary is in a sense an "anti-diary". It represents fragments of what occurred, what was dreamt and what was recalled -- all in a mode that both questions and contemplates, asserts the immediacy of a nightmarish present and attempts to make sense of it by invoking the mythic and the sacred in the form of Mesopotamian and Greek mythology, and Biblical and Qur'anic subtexts. Mikhail's language verges on the fantastic while playing on an allegorical vein: "The birdcage hung on the post of our yard was similar to a gibbet. There were four birds in the cage that didn't chirp. I didn't know if they were sad or dumb. One of them died after a few days, just like that, without saying a word. I buried it in the garden. Implanting a red rose in its dust as a tombstone, I heard to my surprise, a continuous chirp coming from the blossoms. What increased my surprise was that when I proceeded to pick one of those blossoms, I saw drops of blood on its leaves. I rubbed it to be sure of what I saw, and my hands were filled with feathers."

Dunya Mikhail opens her original work by recalling her childhood and specifically the joys of childhood: playing with sand, jumping on beds and throwing pebbles in the sea. "In my childhood I envied myself for being a child. I thought then that everyone is created like that -- a child or an old man or a mother. I felt sad for my mother because she couldn't hide under the bed." The rest of the Diary stems from the child who managed to remain a child and thus could continue to play hide-and-seek with words, to build sand castles and above all to stretch the sea and its waves into an extended metaphor. The sea-shell with its murmuring, the seagulls with their flights are as real to the narrator in the text as they would be to a child. It is not surprising that she has the audacity to rewrite Genesis in her own words: "In the beginning, there was a sole amoeba with no form. I animated it with my surprise and great and contradicting things grew. The air flew around them. I gave it a matchless lightness, I saw that was good, so stars sparkled with my joy."

The war machine with its deathly message is not the first shock encountered by the narrator. She was haunted by the death of her father, the very parent who gave her a game of chess as a child. The board's dichotomy of black and white as death and life became imprinted in the child's mind as she contrasts the whiteness of the hospital -- where her father spent his last days -- with its "walls, the linen, the uniform, the heart of my father and the ice of the doctors", with the mourning black worn by the women after his death. It is not his departure that breaks her heart but her survival: "When my father's absence found no end, I cried. I was not crying over his absence, but over my presence."

The entire text is generated by the child-like approach to reality -- in its actuality and virtuality -- and the traumatic experience of losing a loving parent. The loss of the father parallels the loss of the fatherland; the father's suffering in the hospital echoes the suffering of the Iraqi people subjugated to a barbaric war and followed by siege and sanctions: "Death always looks for us. It comes from beyond the continents. It crosses long distances holding a basket of fire in its hand. It gives us sun-like balls to play with, until we forget the meaning of the sun."

There are only two exact dates in the Diary, separated by two years and united in their horror: January 17, 1991 and January 16, 1993. The first commemorates the beginning of the Gulf War and the second a recurring raid: "On January 16, 1993 the aircraft returned with their confusing shrieks and sirens. At the beginning, I thought what I heard was but sounds from the memory and that what had been ringing in my ears for years had come out into the air." Here the narrator mixes memory with panic, direct reporting with symbolic overtones. As she talks to her colleague, a poet, the noise of the military aircraft make the speech of the poet inaudible. One thing surfaces in this text: there is no victory for either party as "the victim dies physically and the murderer dies morally".

The sea is opposed to the war in this work evoking not only the contrast between nature and culture, but also the inversion in the Arabic words for sea (bahr) and war (harb). The two are made from the same consonants, but in a different order. There is an unspoken desire in the text to play with words, to change the position of their letters, but not the letters themselves in order to recreate a different world and a different order, as if the author is telling us that recreation, rearranging the elements in a different logic, would give us an entirely different system. This mutation in the signifier is necessarily the work of poets and artists, as can be deduced when reading the deeper level of the text. Perhaps the most poignant aspect of the work is that this proposition in itself is put forward playfully, suggested in a manner far from serious.

The anti-war message is not only addressed to the coalition which strove to send Iraq back to the Stone Age, but also to regional wars over borders and specifically over the sovereignty of the Shatt Al-Arab. In reference to what has been called the first Gulf War (the Iran-Iraq War 1980-88), Mikhail mocks the two sides: "Many races appear and disappear, while the Shatt keeps playing with the pebbles indifferent to all wars that take place on its two banks. Sometimes it thinks, 'What fools are these who always lean to my right and my left? Shall I throw them to the pebbles which were originally their ancestors? The big pebble of projections was one day a king, and that round smooth one was a princess. So when will these fools realise they will finally settle upon my feet, and that I will throw the greedy among them far away?'"

The absurdity of war is also revealed in the dialogue between mother and child. The Blake-like exchange does more than depict a "Song of Innocence". It formulates a mythic explanation of the waning of the moon:

-- "What are enemies, mama?"

-- "They are those ghosts who stand behind the line directing their guns at the moon."

-- "But the moon is shared between us and them. Would they attack our part of it?"

-- "Yes, sometimes they hit the target so half of the moon or more falls down. It becomes a crescent or hides totally."

In this remarkable and spellbinding text, one is reminded of ancient epics and mythology: of Gilgamesh's quest for undoing his tragic loss, of Sisyphus's perseverance following his condemnation to the perpetual rolling of a stone. The beautiful gushing of words to depict a merciless and indifferent world reasserts almost existentially that to survive in an alienating universe there is no alternative but to (re)create incessantly. The key process in this human type of creation and creativity is play, thus putting forward once again what Johan Huizinga argued masterfully in Homo Ludens. It is precisely this contemplative stance that turns the text of Mikhail from a testimony of a War to a philosophy of Being. The multiplicity of genres and the fragmentary structure of the text point to postmodern aesthetics, the content with its anti-war stance in general and against the infernal experience of the Gulf War in particular attests to the spirit of Resistance. The postmodern ethos with its rejection of totalities serves here ironically the victims of what Fredric Jameson has called the "late stage of capitalism".

Reviewed by Ferial J Ghazoul

		Al-Ahram Weekly 11 - 17 November 1999 Issue No. 455
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

Confronting loss