A gallery of Iraqi characters
Duna Talib, Al-Nuqta Al-Ab'ad (The Furthest Point), Damascus: Dar Al-Mada, 2000. pp215; Harb Nameh (The Book of War), Damascus: Dar Al-Mada, 1998. pp204
Duna Talib, an emerging and promising voice in Iraqi fiction, was not trained in literature but in horticulture and date palm cultivation at the University of Basra. Her novel, Al-Nuqta Al-Ab'ad, and her collection of short stories, Harb Nameh, teem with characters from Basra University. Students and professors act and interact on the charged background of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) and of the Gulf War (1991). Basra has been in the eye of military storms in the last quarter of a century and has suffered from fighting and bombing.
The title of Harb Nameh (The Book of War) includes the Persian term for book, "nameh", thus suggesting an epical dimension and a measure of grandeur as in the Shah Nameh (The Book of Kings). The epical in this collection lies in the war setting, not in heroic characters. The heroism of the protagonists is that of surviving against all odds rather than performing grandiose acts. These stories start and end in medias res, permitting the reader a glance at cases rather than at their unfolding from beginning to end. Characterisation is Talib's strong point in this collection, but the narrative plot is either absent or thin.
The first story in the collection foregrounds the coffins and funerals of fallen soldiers in the 1980s. The story opens in wounded Basra with the first days of an academic year: students, professors and peasants cross the river in a ferry against a setting of gulls and palm trees. A sense of place -- tranquil and simple -- is contrasted to the drama of air attacks pushing the newcomers to the university into a corner in the campus behind a wall of protective sandbags. Writing in fragments and alternating between telling outward details and inner thoughts, Talib allows us to glimpse human intimacies and personal tragedies as these are punctuated by the sirens of ambulances and official braggadocio.
In one of the short stories, a mother with her infant ends up getting picked up by a car containing four men. She goes willingly with them, and once they find a deserted spot in the desert, they sleep with her one after the other. The story does not explore the reasons behind such prostitution, nor does it pass judgement. In a deadpan tone, the narrator zooms over the scene: the woman lies on her 'abaya, with the infant next to her, while the four men take turns penetrating her. The fictional lens lingers on her back, hands and knees, as the woman gazes at the flaming sun while she experiences sex devoid of passion or affection. A cinematic precision distills a succession of copulating positions. The passage is neither erotic nor pornographic; it is dispassionately clinical. Talib excels in these close-ups, whether she is depicting drinking bouts, throbbing migraines, or menstrual cramps. The body is ever present and perceptible in Talib's fictional world.
In a short story entitled "Nightmare", Talib depicts the uprising following the 1991 war in all its spontaneity, violent destruction and eventual repression. Talib's fiction is neither political nor historical in orientation, in the sense of its having an axe to grind. Hers is what we might call "anthropological fiction", as it provides for detailed, neutral descriptions of what takes place on the street and at home -- in the kitchen, in the living room and in the bedroom. Everyday rituals and centuries- old customs are presented without rendering them exotic or folkloric. This is the way people actually live in Talib's realistic setting. They consult palmists, sacrifice a chicken to smear a new car with its blood, use computers in their research, store food in freezers, drink beer and 'arak, and consume Valium under stress.
Talib's collection of short stories, Harb Nameh, published in 1998 reads like a rehearsal for her more accomplished novel Al-Nuqta Al-Ab'ad. The heterogeneity of characters remains her hallmark in the novel, but she seems to have learnt how to join them in parallel lines and provide for the diachronic unfolding of their stories. She continues to use her earlier technique of intercutting, moving her novel along three narrative lines related to three couples. Essentially, we are presented with three stories whose characters intertwine.
The novel's title Al-Nuqta Al-Ab'ad (The Furthest Point) refers to Saad Square in Basra, a crossroad leading to many places. It seemed to one of the protagonists, Wafa, when she was a child like an "eye emitting rays of different lengths, dangerous rays: a ray that narrows towards Safwan, another that spirals like a snake towards Fao, and a shorter one which widens and branches into the centre of the city [Basra], and the longest goes on towards Baghdad".
The novel is divided into three parts corresponding to three moments, before, during and after the war of 1991. The novel is about three couples: Hiyam/Salim, Bushra/Khalid and Wafa/Falah. Chapters of the novel are named after these six characters, and each chapter revolves around the character named. The unfolding of events is recounted by an omniscient narrator, and the thoughts of the characters are sometimes presented in the first person to give them more immediacy. The novel can be read in two ways: either from cover to cover, where the stories of the various couples who are neighbours and friends are interwoven into the narrative fabric, or alternately, the reader can follow the narrative threads one by one, reading selected chapters related to a single character and then moving to chapters related to another character, and so on.
The author delves more into the minds and misfortunes of the women protagonists: Wafa, Bushra and Hiyam. This is evident from the number of chapters she devotes to each gender: 14 for women and seven for men. Bushra is dead by the end of the novel, Hiyam has lost her wits, and Wafa, who was awaiting her return to Iraq, comes back to find her house has been confiscated and, consequently, she has to leave her country once again. The confiscation order was based on a report by rivals claiming that Falah, Wafa's husband, had sought asylum when he was abroad.
Duna Talib creates an Iraqi universe with its vibrant and tense moods through the cumulative effect of stringing scenes from the everyday lives of Iraqi academics and their families, by resorting to Iraqi colloquial in the dialogue and by exploring the emotional and social concerns of her protagonists. The Iraqi critic, Shakir Al-Anbari, describes Talib's style as "spider- weaving". Through verbal spinning, she weaves a delicate web capturing the attention of her readers.
We get to know the couple Wafa and Falah gradually. At home he is anxious and excited about the fellowship he has obtained that will take him with his wife and daughter to England. The wife is brooding and unhappy about having to leave Basra; she prefers the "hell of Iraq" to foreign havens. She hardly talks or responds while he bosses her around and complains about her silence and critical attitude. As the novel unfolds Falah's petit-bourgeois profile surfaces. He is an academic not because he cares about scholarship, but because he wanted to avoid military service and family business, and he sees it as a way towards upward mobility. He wants to own new gadgets, make more money, have more prestige. He has an appetite for food and sex; he is involved in an extra-marital relationship with a laboratory assistant whom he does not really care for as a person. The couple's marriage is conventional: he seemed, with his academic status and respectable family, a good husband-to-be and Wafa had reached the traditional age for getting married. She was reluctant to commit herself to some one she was not in love with, but then a pragmatic impulse resolved her hesitation.
Once in Manchester in England, the conjugal gap grows bigger and a sense of being out of place overwhelms Wafa, while Falah mixes with all kinds of Iraqi expatriates -- the exiles who oppose the regime and the ones who intend to go back. The novel exemplifies through the life of this couple and their acquaintances how Iraqis carry on abroad: their frequent visits to the Rusholme neighbourhood to buy condiments from Indians and from an Iraqi Jew who pines for Iraq; their socialising, smoking, drinking, and preparing Iraqi dishes; their endless political discussions and arguments. Domestic fights between the couple abound. The clash of personalities is inevitable given their contrasting dispositions. Wafa is a nail-biting introvert who nurtures idealistic values; her husband is a collector of objects and status symbols with a mercantile mentality.
In this stifling ambiance, Wafa develops an affinity and friendship with Adel, a soulmate and an Iraqi family friend who has been living in England for years. Both Wafa and Adel seem uneasy with the gang of Iraqis, and they are not dazzled by Britain as the others are. This emotional and intellectual kinship is crowned by an erotic fulfilment.
Falah is a flat character resembling "carriage horses with covered eyes and directed movement". The system has no doubt contributed to his opportunistic and crooked disposition. Falah at one point in the novel recalls how he was asked to analyse the water in Basra, and when the honest results did not match the expectations of the authorities, he was interrogated. Rather than stick to the scientific results and confront the consequences, he backed down and disowned his own research. Wafa, on the other hand, preferred to give up her secretarial job rather than put up with political directives, attend government- organised demonstrations, and be watched by security men planted in her office. When Wafa says "I don't feel I have a role; in fact I feel there is no role for any one," she seems to be putting the social psychology of Iraqis under authoritarianism in a nutshell.
The other main characters fare even worse. Bushra, a schoolteacher married to a professor at Basra University, is a more practical type who dreams of owning a boutique. Her mental deterioration in an air raid, when she tries to calm her two children, is powerfully rendered. She ends up dead, having been hit by a rocket. Another wife of an academic, Hiyam, gets involved despite herself in the crowds taking part in the spring uprising of 1991 while she is on an errand, and she gets hit on the head brutally. She loses her memory and becomes demented. Other minor characters, like Ahmed in Manchester and Umm Hussein in Basra, display psychological validity. Though they appear in passing in the novel, they strike the reader as persons that one could actually meet. Deformed or lost, Talib's major and minor characters constitute a gloomy kaleidoscope. Every Iraqi in this rich gallery of characters seems to be a tragic project in the making.
Reviewed by Ferial J Ghazoul
