Coming of age in Iraq
A Sky So Close, Betool Khedairi, Translated from the Arabic by Muhayman Jamil, New York: Pantheon, 2001. pp241
Iraqis -- as human beings -- have been completely dismissed in the present war-mongering scene. Their suffering ignored -- even the half million children dead because of inhumane sanctions was considered fair play by a prominent American diplomat! The silencing of Iraqis and the slow genocide of Iraqi children, promised to become swifter and more effective in a big-bang war, can be countered by listening to voices of Iraqi writers and artists and highlighting their submerged narratives. Betool Khedairi's first novel, A Sky So Close, represents childhood in Iraq and the coming of age of the young protagonist in the 1970s and 1980s, up to the early 1990s. The original was published in Arabic in 1999 and has received acclaim by critics and readers. The delicately rendered English translation has been very well received and has become recently available in a paperback edition.
The Arabic title, Kam badat al-sama'u qaribatan, which can be interpreted with some license as "almost touching the sky", is derived from an incident in the novel. The child protagonist, a little girl, goes way up -- within reach of the sky -- and then down on a swing, made up of palm fronds, which eventually breaks and our protagonist falls down. One of the reviewers correctly focussed on this incident and saw in it the key image of the novel. In this Bildungsroman narrating the bi-cultural upbringing of the daughter of an English mother and an Iraqi father, the swinging recalls the wavering between two styles of life. The fall represents the shattering of young dreams.
The novel can be read as the problem of hybridity and hyphenated existence that many people experience in an increasingly globalised and transnational world. It can also be read as the process of growing up and learning to cope with loss and death. Gender plays an important role in shaping the personality of our protagonist, who writes in the first person and remains unnamed. Her memoir-like fiction presents the conflict between the Iraqis -- the "natives" -- and the British -- the "colonisers" -- as it unfolds in the intimacy of a household.
Cultural conflicts are exemplified in the different ways a trait is defined. Cleanliness is upheld by both cultures, but its nature differs to the point of making one perspective diametrically opposed to the other. The child narrator addresses her father in her reminiscences: "how many times she's [the mother] begged you to use the paper tissues that she calls 'Kleenex', enunciating each syllable when she pronounces the word. But you insist on spitting into your hankies. You then stuff them down the side of whichever seat you are using at the time... Getting them out was one of her chores." On the other hand, the Iraqi father cannot understand how his English wife could wash her hair in the kitchen sink, and addresses her saying: "It's not a question of cleaning the sink! You rinsed it with boiling water to get rid of the grease from the dishes so that it wouldn't cling to your hair. But did it ever occur to you that the hairs you shed might block the drains? What is this infuriating way of washing your hair? It's not hygienic and it's discourteous."
The novel does more than contrast two cultural ways of perception. Though not spelled out, the reader can sense the narrator's siding with her father when he allows her, in fact encourages her, to mix with the peasants near their house, including her bare-foot, best friend Khaddouja, while the mother is horrified by such mingling, fearing disease and lice. Living in a rural area south of Baghdad, the mother wants her daughter to attend the Ballet School in the capital, thus giving the reader another evidence of her value system. She espouses high culture associated with her part of the world over the local folk culture with its songs and rituals. This is made more concrete as the narrative unfolds and as the little girl tries in her own way to make sense of these parental quarrels taking place on her own body and psyche.
The novel, made up of a series of flashbacks, is written in an epistolary form, as a letter addressed to a deceased father. This supplies the narration with an intimate sense of a daughter trying to communicate with an absent parent in an effort to understand her own unhappy family and the eventual rapport she felt with her mother as she lay dying from cancer. Lyricism and nostalgia are stylistically justified in this work as the issue is lost time and lost lives.
The narrator's father is a chemist by profession. To promote his products, he strives to coin new and captivating names for the various colours of his produce, engaging his daughter in the act. Together, they try to find original names for paints and emulsions. She modifies the instant "blue" she proposes to "light blue", only to be rejected by her father who suggests instead "Spray of the Ocean", "Blue of Dolphins", "Silver Mist", or "Dry Ice". Little by little, the daughter is able to match her father in poetic naming. She calls a dab of white "Angel's Wings, Oyster's Pearl, Waterfall's Froth, or an Ice Cave". This game of naming, which brings the father and daughter together in exploring the poetic possibilities of their common language, Arabic, points to the imaginative play and pleasure as a bonding factor. The girl's view of her mother is that of a woman very much concerned with her looks and engulfed in the trappings of her own culture, unwilling to take into account her actual surroundings. The similes used by Khedairi point inescapably to the artificiality of the mother: "She was wearing a black dress. The whiteness of her skin stood out. It was as though her face, arms, and legs were made of porcelain. She looked like an imported Chinese miming puppet. A rag doll strewn on the sofa. She was listening to the BBC World Service. A fashion magazine and a booklet about slimming lay by her side."
The gender factor is obvious from the onset of the novel. The upbringing of the girl is fraught with prohibitions reserved for females. Flashbacks take the narrator to the roughhousing of local boys and their games in which the display of private parts is no more than a joking matter. Her father is constantly reminding her not to play with marbles and not to ride bicycles as these are for boys. But the most striking gendered aspect of the novel is in portraying the trauma of the mother's breast cancer and mastectomy. A woman's disease par excellence, breast cancer treatment undermines the outward metonyms of femininity, the woman's bosom. The narrating daughter describes at length how her mother felt the lump in her breast and how she was operated on. The mother's feeling of body betrayal, of solitude and pain, are sympathetically explored. Having lost a breast through surgery and hair through chemotherapy, the mother feels the atrophy of her feminine self and of her identity as a woman who was always keen on keeping herself pretty and fashionable. The late Egyptian critic 'Ali El-Ra'i pointed out when discussing a novel by May Telmissani, Dunyazad -- which relates the still birth of a child -- that there is "feminist writing" in areas that only women experience, given their reproductive role. But this specificity goes beyond pregnancy, labour, birth, and nursing to touch on all problems -- physical and mental -- which are the lot of women and their everyday experience.
In Khedairi's novel, set in war-torn Iraq with military communiqués so frequent as to warrant becoming leitmotifs, the devotion of the ballet instructor is exemplary. It signifies the need for art even in critical moments. One cannot help but contrast the discipline of the ballet and its mistress with that of the deadly war games men were playing at that time on the front in the Iran-Iraq confrontation. Likewise, when the Gulf War breaks out in 1991, the narrator cites the pilots' view of the devastation they heaped on Iraq, as has been widely circulating in the media: "Bombing Iraq was like lighting up a Christmas tree!... The first attack was like a game of football... I transformed the area into flaming balls." The novel is not concerned with the strictly political dimension of war, but with its effect on ordinary people. Khedairi opposes the celebration of war by Allied Forces and the official Iraqi denial of defeat in "the mother of all battles", with the grieving letters the narrator receives from Iraq as she takes care of her sick mother in a London hospital. Intimate friends' letters are embedded within her own letter addressed to a deceased father. Their concrete and personal touches challenge the abstraction of militarism.
This subtle and moving novel is first and foremost a plea for life and harmony in a world full of strife. If it puts feminist values above masculine ones, it is not pitting women against men but peace against aggression. Perhaps this is the right moment to read A Sky So Close, before the "steel birds" take over the skies.
Reviewed by Ferial J. Ghazoul
