Postmarked Iraq
Inaam Kachachi, Paroles d'Irakiennes: Le drame irakien écrit par des femmes (Iraqis Speak: The Iraqi Drama in Women's Writing). Paris: Le Serpent à Plumes, 2003. pp213.
This comprehensive yet small book presents French-speaking readers with a panoramic view of the ongoing Iraqi drama as articulated by Iraqi women who have undergone an infernal mélange of war, detention, exile and siege. Though published just before the recent Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, many of the literary works reflecting the bombardment and massacres of the Second Gulf War (1991) echo those of the Third Gulf War (2003) as the latter duplicates and amplifies the former in terms of horrors. The writing of Iraqi women at the end of the twentieth century is equally pertinent for the opening of the twenty first.
Paroles d'Irakiennes selects poems, short stories, and excerpts from novels by Iraqi women of different generations writing in the last two decades. Some are renowned and established writers such as Lamea Abbas Amara, Alia Mamdouh, Lotfiya Al-Dilaimi, and May Mudhaffar; others are new voices of emerging writers such as Dunya Mikhail, Siham Jabbar, Betool Khedairi, and Rim Qais Kobba. These selections are introduced by Inaam Kachachi, an Iraqi journalist who studied in Baghdad and obtained her doctorate in History of Journalism from the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III). The text of the book was translated by Mohammed Al Saadi, an Iraqi translator, journalist, and creative writer. Both author/compiler and translator live and work in Paris; the book is an admirable product of their collaboration and a most timely contribution.
Why devote a book to Iraqi women writers rather than to Iraqi writers, men and women? Kachachi in her Preface anticipates such a question and argues that although war impinges on all members of society, the response to it varies according to gender. Iraqi men, young or old, are conscripted into the army and their literary language abounds in military vocabulary and scenes. Women encounter war in their homes and experience it differently, often with a sentiment of fear and solitude.
The 77-page introductory essay makes delightful reading. Informative and anecdotal, it presents the writers whose selected works make up this mini anthology. At the same time, it contextualises their concerns and anxieties within modern Iraqi society. Kachachi makes a point of linking this contemporary Iraqi writing to narrative traditions of The Arabian Nights and of women's writing in ancient Mesopotamia. On the first page of the book Shahrazad is invoked, showing how she managed to outwit death by narration. The present-day writers are seen as grand-daughters of our model story-teller in their use of ruse to outwit destiny through their writing. Such writing, Kachachi argues, is more genuine than "tous les bulletins du monde," all the media networks. This 'slyness' -- which Homi Bhabha associates with the colonised and the oppressed -- allows a literature of insurgence, protected by a language that simultaneously conceals and reveals. In its quality as imaginative, literature makes no claims to the factual, yet it manages to present the real and the experienced. Its obliqueness thus bypasses official straitjackets. Perhaps literature cannot be counted on to know, but it can be counted on to understand.
Besides Shahrazad, Kachachi invokes Enkhidoannna -- a historical princess (2370-2316 B.C.), daughter of Sargon the Akkadian -- as the first Iraqi woman who signed her poems by her own name. Needless to say, there must have been before her others who wrote anonymously or recited their poetry without ever keeping a record.
Writing is difficult in a country where freedom of expression is curtailed, and also where paper, ink, and printing are not available because of sanctions. Iraqis have taken to writing, as Kachachi reports, on scratch paper, on the back of receipts, on brown bags, on anything and everything. A friend of Kachachi told her an indicative incident related to the difficulties of procuring writing instruments. She hit her grandson for having went on wastefully sharpening his pencil, not realising how dear a pencil is since the embargo rules considered the graphite in pencils might be used for military purposes! After punishing the child for his prodigal behavior, the grandmother went to her room and cried by herself.
Despite the lack of such basic necessities Iraqi women produce literature -- as writing becomes an act of mental survival -- but not before they have attended to the needs of their families, children, and work. Iraqis are known for being avid readers and for their fondness of books. Lotfiya Al-Dilaimi writes in a novella about a man who is forced to sell his books in order to afford food and basic necessities. He is torn between giving up his Tawhidi or his Camus. The author admitted that she herself had to face this dilemma in her own life: which of her dear books would be sacrificed? This is not unlike Sophie's choice in William Styron's novel. One cherishes books as one does children. As for new publications, the Iraqis have been very innovative, proving the dictum "need is the mother of invention". Books are photocopied using cheap paper and stapled. Writers type their works and then stitch them together into a book.
The most prominent theme in the works of Iraqi women writers in the last two decades is that of a woman recalling a man who is away in the battle field or in exile (for political or economic reasons). Some women writers were tempted by self-exile or professional opportunities abroad. Dunya Mikhail and Lamea Abbas Amara live in the US, Alia Mamdouh and Haifa Zangana in Europe, Bouthaina Al-Nasiri and Irada Al-Jibouri in Egypt and Yemen respectively. But wherever they are, their eyes are on their homeland. Al- Nasiri's short story, "The Road to Baghdad," embodies this collective longing for homecoming; or as Kachachi puts it, alluding to a verse by Mahmoud Darwish: "Elles portent la patrie dans leurs bagages" (They carry the homeland in their suitcases).
Some Iraqi women writers have been recognised for their fiction and rewarded, like Ibtissam Abdallah and Lotfiya Al-Dilaimi; others have been recognized in other Arab countries for their talents. One of these is Rim Qais Kobba, known as "New Nazik" in reference to the poetic and kin relations she has with Nazik al-Malaika -- the great Iraqi woman poet who carried out a poetic revolution in Arabic in the late 1940s. By describing what it took Rim Qais Kobba to reach the Emirates where she was to be awarded a prize for her poetry, the reader comes to know the bureaucratic labyrinth in Iraq as well as the absurdity of the embargo restrictions on air travel. Kobba's round about trip to UAE took thirty-two hours instead of the usual three had there been a direct flight. Kobba's poem entitled "Souhaits" ("Wishes") ends prophetically with a Third Gulf War:
"Ah! Si les roquettes devenaient palmiers!"
Un court instant,
et notre troisième guerre a éclaté.
Plus de place pour les souhaits:
du mutisme, tu as fait ta profession,
et moi, de la catastrophe, mon métier.
["Ah! If the rockets could become palmtrees!"
a short moment,
and our third war broke out.
No more room for wishes:
you have made of mutism your profession,
and I made mine of catastrophe.]
But perhaps the most dramatic figure among the writers is Hayat Sharara. The combination of internal and external pressures led a sensitive soul like her to leave an autobiographical novel to posterity after attempting a triple suicide (with her two daughters). One of her daughters survived and the manuscript was published in Beirut in 2000. Haifa Zangana's novel, Through the Vast Halls of Memory, is also autobiographical relating her harrowing experience in jail. Another writer who wrote about herself during the 1991 war is Noha Al-Radhi, the sculptor, under the title Baghdad Diaries. Brought up in India and later educated in the American University of Beirut and London, Al-Radhi masters English and chose to write her eye witness testimony directly in English. It was later translated to Arabic. Her black humor and dead pan style mark the otherwise apocalyptic text. Many of the writers discussed in this book are available in English translation: Bouthaina Al-Nasiri, Dunya Mikhail, Alia Mamdouh, Betool Khedairi, and Haifa Zangana. Nevertheless, there is no single book in English in which the reader can sample the different writings of Iraqi women in one of the most dramatic and tragic periods of Iraqi history.
Kachachi's book ends in a poem by Dhikra Mohammed Nader which refers to the bombing of a very old Iraqi monastery, Mar Matta (St. Matthew), by the Allied forces in 1991. The poem ends with:
Seigneur, ne leur pardonne pas:
Il savent ce qu'ils font.
[Lord, forgive them not
for they know what they are doing.]
This citation reverses what Christ said on the cross: "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do." As readers, we can only conclude with this strong finale that the crucifixion of Iraq is undertaken with premeditation and will not be forgiven. It is noteworthy that Iraqi poets have not limited themselves to motifs from their own faith, but in a non- sectarian spirit they call upon motifs from different religions, using them as sacred and spiritual correlatives of their secular and humanist quests. The poets know too well that Via Dolorosa and Kerbala's processions are two faces of one thing -- our tragic condition.
Reviewed by Ferial J. Ghazoul
