In February 2007 the conflict in Iraq seemed at its worst. Death squads were killing close to 100 people a day, many simply ‘ID’ killings, ordinary citizens pulled out of cars or lines at checkpoints and shot in cold blood. Petraeus’s Big Push was yet to start in Baghdad, the Awakening Councils had barely begun to work in the Sunni heartlands, and in the south Moqtada Sadr’s Mahdi Army seemed poised to displace all other Shia militias and supplant the religious hierarchies in Najaf and Kerbala. The political process was shallow and riddled with sectarianism and corruption. Worst of all, nobody seemed to have any idea how to stop it getting worse.
Official discourse, led by the Frat Boy, was ineffably thin. A Coalition of the Willing was leading the War on Terror against an Axis of Evil, using the Most Wanted Deck of Cards and Gotcha enemy body counts that, even at a tactical level, the generals had counselled since Vietnam were a sure way to lose a war. The geopolitical debate behind it was only marginally thicker. Here or there a think tank or politician mooted concepts such as re-Baathification, dismemberment, and a new rising regional spectre of the Shia Crescent. James Baker had just proposed the deeply subversive idea of talking to Syria and Iran, and been ignored. Half a crop of memoirs from foreign journalists had already arrived in the bookshops, one or two excellent, many atrocious, a few in the middle, as usual.
If Iraqis themselves made it at all into this space it was as soundbite, mostly of anguish, sometimes of defiance or viciousness. Living in Paris at the time, I was put in mind of Roland Barthe’s exposition on the relationship between public discourse and power. The strong speak, the weak listen. The strong take it upon themselves to speak about the weak, to represent them, and this primordial truth says more about the protagonists and the conflict than what is actually said, whether the substance of any given speech “attacks” or “defends” its particular speech object. And if he ever does speak, “the speech of the oppressed can only be very poor, monotonous, immediate: his destitution is the very yardstick of his language”1.
This rang true. One night I idly searched through the online catalogue of Saqi Books, a specialist Middle Eastern publisher. They had over 400 titles in print in English with the word Iraq in the title or blurb. Perhaps 20 of them were by authors with Arab names but less than half of those were recognisably Iraqi2. One, an anthology of poetry of the last few decades, was published in April 2003, even as the coalition forces rolled into Baghdad. None dealt with the war and its aftermath.
Early on in the war, two books by Iraqis were published which were rightly celebrated. Salam Pax rose from the blogosphere in June 2003 to become feted by the media, and published a book of the same name in 2004. In August 2003, a blogger called Riverbend appeared, became famous, and the writings from her blog were published as the book Baghdad Burning in 2005.
Both books were written in English. Salam Pax has since been identified as a trained architect, born in 1974. The American journalist Peter Maess, who had employed him as an interpreter, recalls how when he went to interview him for the job he found him sitting in the lobby of a Baghdad hotel reading a novel by Phillip K Dick. RiverBend’s identity remains more elusive. “I’m female, Iraqi and 24. I survived the war. That’s all you need to know,” she declared in her opening post. And indeed her actual identity has remained a mystery to all but a few, including her publisher Marion Boyars. But her own writing of course tells us a great deal about her mental universe. Her blogroll lists Dilbert, the Onion, Slashdot and a site called “Raed in the Middle”, an apparent pun on Linwood Boomer’s Emmy winning sitcom on Fox “Malcolm in the Middle”. In the space of ten minutes on the blog you can chance upon such references as Britney Spears, Men in Black, Oprah, the board game Monopoly, and Mission Impossible. The book caused a mild flutter in British literary circles when it was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize in 2006 alongside Alan Bennett, Carmen Calil and a biography of Mrs Beeton.
None of which is to diminish the enormous courage and achievement of both books and authors, and the great perspective they added of seeing the war and subsequent occupation from the other end of the gun barrel.
Iraq had been unique in the Arab world for developing oil wealth and the apparatus of a modern state after a striving and well-educated middle class had already established itself, a middle class moreover that was connected to a small but successful and significant diaspora all around the world but particularly in the United States. It is worth remembering the USA only became bogeyman for the Baath’s Iraq after 1990. Up until then thousands of Iraqis had studied in American universities, including Kanan Makiya, who before he wrote the classic work “Republic of Fear” under the pen name Samir Khalil in the 1980s had kicked off his academic career as a student of architecture at MIT. There is the famous, perhaps apocryphal story of US marines surrounding an Iraqi entrenchment on the road to Basra in February 1990. Fingers on the triggers they shout to the Iraqi soldiers inside to come out with their hands up. First out is a smiling young man, jacket open, bling on his chest, who happily remonstrates with them in perfect middle American: “Hey, guys, what kept ya? We been waiting for you for, like, forever.” He had been home on vacation from college in the States when Saddam invaded Kuwait on August 2, got stuck, then drafted into the Iraqi army.
This strong human resource base had been battered by Saddam’s disastrous wars then eroded by the decade of sanctions imposed after the Kuwait war in 1991. But the remnants of it were still there in 2003. It seems reasonable to assume Salam Pax and Riverbend both belong to this heritage.
Kudos to them. Nevertheless, it seemed to me, browsing Saqi’s list of 400 books, that something ought to be done to bridge the language barrier. There had to be someone out there, in the middle of it, who was crafting their experiences, steeped in the long, rich literary traditions of Arabic.
Arab cultures are among those most shaped by language. In Islam it is the Qur’an that is God’s major injection of perfection direct into the course of Man, not the Prophet Muhammad. It is the Qur’an that more nearly resembles the role played by Jesus in Christianity, not Muhammad whom Muslims avow to be mortal like all men. The Qur’an not only defines the standard of classical Arabic to this day. It is referenced by God within the text as being essentially Arabic: “We have sent down a clear, Arabic Qur’an to you”3. Just as the Greeks referred to all non-Greek speakers as “bar-bar speakers”, or barbarians, Arabs in classical times referred to the non-Arabic speaking peoples around them, Persians, Kurds, Berbers and Turks, literally as “dumb” or “speechless”4. It was not a question of faith. The ‘ajaam were Muslims like the Arabs, in contrast to the kafir Franks or animist Africans. But as non-Arabic speakers they would always be marginal.
In more modern times Arabic was an integral part of Arab nationalism and it was often the language which served to define who is an Arab, as it does in Sudan today, rather than purely ethnic or religious considerations.
Apart from the very rare writers (at least in modern times) who can achieve literary distinction in more than one language, the language you write in defines who you are as a writer.
There was also something in the nature of Iraq’s violence just then, both gargantuan and baroque, which made the search for beauty urgent.
I was raised on the First World War poets, particularly Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves who made me and I suspect many other boys and young men want to touch the extremity of Ypres, Passchendale and the Somme. One of my favourite poems is Sassoon’s “Everyone Sang”, which describes how even for tired, wounded, shell-shocked soldiers who might die within the hour, the world could come right, just for a moment, and joy well up from nowhere. I have always imagined it taking place on a long march back from the front, perhaps after a night of hellish trench fighting: “Everyone suddenly burst out singing/and I was filled with such delight/as prisoned birds must find in freedom… Everyone’s heart was suddenly lifted/and beauty came like the setting sun/My heart was shaken with tears”.
Later, on a stint as a foreign correspondent in Jerusalem, I immersed myself in the literature of the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi and Viktor Frankel. It has always seemed incredible, and uplifting, that people can not only survive but triumph in the most horrific conditions.
In Iraq, the violence by then had run away with itself and ceased to have a pure political logic. Civilians were not only killed, their heads were cut off – ineptly – in videos posted to the Internet. In Baghdad, the notorious Abu Dara was rumoured to have notched up 700 murders in what had become nightly sport. Media reports dutifully placed each incident in the usual political or ideological frameworks – Sunnis killed Shia, Sadr opposed the government – for the very understandable reason that they are the shortest way to classify and define when you’re competing for column inches on a deadline. But these same labels also have the effect of sweeping everything up and dumping it into a neat row of boxes that might just as well be marked “Warning: for political scientists and military boffins only. Do not touch”. Because for the rest of us it’s just so, like, mediaeval, dude.
And yet shift perspective slightly, from newsroom to culture at large, and what was happening might become more accessible. The killing spiralled up even as the country got mobile phones, the Internet, an explosion of satellite TV and popular music, and the borders were thrown open to allow New York emigres and the al-Qaeda international brigade alike to come make their stories in Iraq. Break the Islam fixation and the gangs of marauding young men in “religious” militias terrorising huge slums on motorbikes and pick up trucks start to look like dystopian science fiction, Mad Max with turbans.
Was there anyone out there capturing it? Barthes might be right about the poor speech of the oppressed in general but that makes the exceptions all the more important. And in any case time had moved on. Mythologies was published in 1957, when the Mau Mau were battling the British in Kenya, the Viet Cong the French in Vietnam and Frantz Fanon was busy working with the FLN to analyse the “native” mentality imposed on the Algerian psyche by France. But two generations of mass migrations, education and communications had created the global village. To accept Iraqi muteness as the inevitable result of the global disposition in 2007 seemed a little too Armchair Left.
Could there be a Shakespeare in Sadr City? And if there were, could I find her?
I had been to Iraq twice but the last time was in 1992, and I didn’t have current contacts there. Through my work for Reuters and others I knew quite a few reporters that were in and out of Iraq and wrote asking if they knew anyone who was writing inside Baghdad. In Paris, I went to the Middle Eastern bookshops along from the Institut du Monde Arabe just by the Seine and pulled all the works of modern Iraqi fiction I could off the shelves – Fuad al-Takarla, Ali al-Soudani, Ahmad al-Baqiri, Zuhair al-Jezairy, Bitool al-Khedairy.
Straight away I realised there was a problem of form. Poetry continues to dominate over prose in Arabic literature. Of course Arabic can boast many fine prose writers, novelists and essayists. But in standing and public imagination the poets still won. When Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish last year it seemed as though the dream of Palestinian nationalism in its first form had died with him. He represented the innocence of Palestinian loss, and anyone who was anyone came out of the woodwork to reminisce. It was more of an end to an era than, for example, the death of Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz in 2006, which passed with the usual florid tributes but not much more.
Of course this is not unique to Arabic. In many languages poetry is still seen to embody the soul of its literature, even, to this day, in English. The figure of the Romantic Poet still has more traction on the popular mind than, say, that of the Great American Novelist. But in most literatures of the industrialised world the revenge of prose, fiction and non-fiction, is to be widely read. It beats back the undeniable but fragile superiority of poetry by sheer weight of sales. But whoever heard of a best-selling poet? How many contemporary poets can you name in your language, compared to how many prose writers of one kind or another?
In the Arab world, however, all forms of literature sell in unimaginably small quantities. Mahfouz’s publishers in Cairo told me in the 1990s, after he had become the first Arab to win the Nobel prize for Literature, his latest book might sell 5,000 copies in Egypt, a country of 70 million people. Since prose is not redeemed by presence, and carving a literary reputation is never about sales, poetry tends to retain its primacy in the Arab world as the exalted essence of the language.
Yet it is famously hard to translate. The peculiarities of each poetic tradition are stronger than in prose. There are meter, rhyme and assonance to consider before you even get to allusion. I have never seen a translation of poetry that I would read in preference to struggling through the original, not even the iconic ones such as Dryden’s of Virgil, or Pope’s Iliad. Plus the fact that the idea was to find an Iraqi voice that could make it onto the front tables of Waterstones and Borders. That just wasn’t going to be poetry.
I played with an anthology of stories published, in an unusual initiative, by the Red Cross in Beirut in 2006. They had gathered contributions from a dozen Iraqi writers and I translated three of them. But the different forms, some short stories, some essays, would jar in the same book. The idea of finding the ‘Other’ and rendering it into English is, of course, not new. Perhaps the biggest reason many such initiatives in the past have failed in the past is anthologies of uneven quality and discordant styles, thrown together as a ‘representative’ gathering of writing from the source culture. A bit like a 1970s cult a relative of mine once belonged to where for some reason they believed in serving all the food of a meal on the same plate at one time, soup and custard and main course all congealing into each other to create an uneatable lowest common denominator. No literary work should be enjoined to cacophony by political correctness and the need to be ‘representative’, to portray ‘real’ or ‘ordinary’ life.
Another problem was that virtually no works of literature had been published inside Iraq in recent years. In ‘software’ terms, as the delightful Indian English phrase would have it, many writers had already left, in stages, one large wave in the 1970s when the Baath were tightening their grip, and another during the 1990s sanctions. The exiles, if they wrote at all, published in Beirut, Cairo, or further afield, London and Paris. Writers who remained inside the country retired into the shadows. For those who did publish, the most critical issue was whether to make sense or not. If you wanted to write something your mother would understand, the formats were limited. You could write turgid encomia, hagiographies or polemic. But there was a second path available. You had more freedom if you were prepared to use a style so obscurely allegorical that it qualified more as solipsism than surrealism.
In terms of hardware, there were book printing presses inside Iraq, but they had deteriorated in number and capacity throughout the sanctions period, and suffered a kind of collective heart attack at the time of the 2003 war.
Meanwhile, I received an interesting submission from the friend of a friend of a friend, a professor in a Baghdad university who had composed lively prose poems. One involved a short sexual encounter with an American soldier who was surprisingly well hung. The gender of the Iraqi voice in the text was indeterminate, achieved by referencing him/her only through first person verbs, which are gender neutral in Arabic, without any give-away adjectives: “I saw his body before his face…” You have to wonder. The professor was sharp and witty but too avant-garde for the Western mainstream. I tried to imagine if he composed his pieces as he was being shaken down by US troops at the campus gates, or stalled at a militia checkpoint.
Another small treasure was an mp3 of a poem entitled simply “Fuck Iraq”, gloriously obscene, angry and funny. “Fuck the Iraq that we were brought up in,” it begins, “Fuck its people and places…” and goes on to fuck the Americans, the Shia, Sunni, Kurds, Baghdad, the north and south in a string of expletives that are too well-turned to render. The recording is live in some front room somewhere. The poet is invited to recite by a friend, other friends in the background, and they giggle and quip before, after and during the poem, which he finishes with the traditional “compliments of the bard”. Listen to it and you can hear the clangy echoes of a building with no carpets, thin floors and walls, and ill-fitting doors. You can see the blue smoke and strip lighting and smell the arak.
So there were creative minds at work. But Iraq was so far away, and my day job and general sanity meant it was likely to stay so, that these fragments were like scraps of parchment from some long lost civilisation, miraculously preserved in the dry desert sands, tantalisingly promising what they could not deliver. It was frustrating.
Finally, six months later, a text for a full book arrived by email. From an old acquaintance, an Iraqi who had lived in Britain since the 1990s and was now a British citizen but who had gone back to Iraq in 2003 and has stayed there ever since. This is the work, and Zuhair al-Jezairy the author, which Saqi Books publishes in April. I printed it out and read it through.
“War of the Powerless”, as the Arabic title would be translated literally, detailed Zuhair’s experiences as a writer, exiled since Saddam assumed the presidency in 1979, coming home to his extended family in Baghdad, then installing himself in a series of journalism positions which involve travelling the length and breadth of the country, witnessing everything from the heady first days to the descent into barbarism.
OK so I’m biased but… what was immediately apparent was the closeness of the personal and the political. Corruption means being offered a job as a minister by an old friend of his grandfather’s from Najaf. The destructiveness of Saddam means the virtual derangement of his mother caused by the death of his younger brother Tha’ir during the war with Iran. The impact of sanctions? A sister who died of cancer in the 1990s in a great deal more pain than she need have (no drugs) after treatment in London which had jeopardised family finances. Increasing religiosity? Another sister’s incessant praying, and tracking down women he partied with as a student in the 1960s, now locked up at home wearing the veil. The divisiveness of ideology? Figuring out that he, a Communist oppositionist and sworn enemy of the Baath regime, and his brother Sabeeh who served in the Iraqi army might actually have been firing on each other in the mountains of Kurdistan in the 1980s.
And a sense of humour and modesty that give the heaviest of subjects the lightest touch. He and Sabeeh buddy up to tour Baghdad when he first gets home in 2003 and Zuhair describes the dawning realisation that by travelling together they are catastrophically increasing each of their individual chances of attack: all kinds of Baathis and nationalists of other stripes might want to kill him for deserting the army, fighting with the Kurds, going into exile abroad. Just about everyone else might want to kill his brother for serving so many years in the Baath’s security apparatus. And nobody would care about the collateral damage of killing the other guy. The two brothers observe this wryly. And then carry on exactly as before. Pitiless Baghdad is not the kind of place where you sacrifice the companionship of a long lost brother to accommodate some kind of petty calculation of death. At least live warm.
What I liked most about it was that you cannot tell from the book if Zuhair ultimately supported the war against Saddam or not. It is not a political tract. In fact, after two years and several hundred hours in his company, I would still be hard pressed to say.
Being for or against a war in such simple terms might almost be considered the luxury of those who aren’t in it. I myself, as it happens, was for Desert Storm going to Baghdad to take out Saddam in 1990 and against the war in 2003. But I could probably change my mind about either, given new information. It is the peculiar deceptiveness of media saturation, the way it seems – falsely – to collapse distance and put us all on the same footing, that allows us to stick at classifying Iraqis themselves in the same way. For sure, within range of the soundbite, since you ask, many Iraqis tend to be for or against… America, al-Qaeda, Nouri al-Maliki or Iran. Beyond it, in real life, they tend to be for and against other things, things which make them more like us. For having a job and against feeling fear as they walk down a street. For decent schools and against having their doors kicked down in the middle of the night.
Zuhair described agonising over the war in London in early 2003, recognising in those fervent times that while he definitely wanted to go and march, he wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted to march for. How could be he against a war which got rid of Saddam, his nemesis who had sent him into exile for a quarter of a century, the man on whom, as a writer, he had “wasted 1,300 pages of foolscap”? And yet how could he support bombs dropping on his family in Baghdad?
He reserves rare scorn for the Arab intelligentsia who reflexively, like some narky teenager, oppose the USA out of knee jerk instinct: “Everyone in the Arab world wanted our army and people to fight until the last bullet, the last soldier, and the last drop of blood – except us Iraqis. For the rabble rousers, our people are predestined for martyrdom,” he wrote. “There are always demagogues who can turn defeat into victory.”
It is this searing honesty, together with a lightness of touch, that endears his writing, as indeed his company. Zuhair is a font of stories about just about everything and cheerfully admits his career as a Communist militant was short and unsuccessful. Unable to persuade any of his friends to join, as party discipline dictated, he wrote their names down at the weekly meetings anyway, beggaring himself by stomping up their dues out of his own pocket. When I asked him if he regretted coming back to Iraq given the mess it has become, leaving his comfortable home in Ealing, he answered: “Not at all. I have failed many times in my life and each time has been an opportunity to observe, and to write.” In an environment characterised by so much bitterness and bravado, it is hard to overstate the trust that such an unusual attitude triggers. Zuhair really is 62 years young.
The book is one both of memory and rediscovery. The street he returns to in Baghdad, where the family house is, reflects the unsettled kaleidoscope of 2003, when former Baathists who used to park anywhere they liked are now ingratiating to the neighbours. Yet it is also the house where he recalls his father and mother in their prime. He travels to Najaf, where he grew up as a boy, scion of a minor clerical family, and can’t find anyone he knows except two spinster cousins, withered and secluded in the last piece of the family compound his grandfather didn’t sell. He attends a poetry festival in Basra and recalls how in the 1960s a group of them had fallen with a doctor in a public park and ended up drinking in his surgery most of the night. In Kurdistan he embarrasses his hosts, once peshmerga comrades, now paunchy ministers in dark suits, by reminiscing in a fancy restaurant about the time three of them shared a single plate and spoon in the mountains.
Few people in the modern world have his range of experience. As a dinner companion, he can be telling you one minute about how his grandfather used to go down to Zubair on the Gulf every year and buy slaves – whatever the legal niceties of Iraqi law were in the 1950s – and how two of them taught him to ride. The next is an anecdote about meeting a Republican Guard who managed to switch bosses from Uday Hussein to L Paul Bremer in the space of three weeks by losing the Baathi moustache and fatigues.
In between Najaf and his cosy house in Ealing he had gravitated up to Baghdad and university, lived the life of a young Communist artist cum journalist for a few years, then fled to Jordan, Damascus in the sternest days of Hafez al-Assad, Beirut in the middle of the Lebanese Civil War, then infiltrating back into Iraq in the 1980s to fight against the central government with the Kurdish guerrillas. He is one of only a few dozen Arabs granted official pensions by the Kurdish regional authority as “peshmerga”. Then out again to exile in the Eastern block, the destiny of so many Third World Communists. Then a move to Britain as an asylum seeker in the days before the system was deluged, and something resembling a career in the cluster of Arab media houses and TV bureaux in London through the 1990s and early 2000s.
I translated a couple of chapters and sent them back to Zuhair, who was now running Iraq’s first independent news agency. We corresponded for a couple of months and then I went to see him in Erbil, where the agency, Aswat al-Iraq, was head quartered. I spent a week sitting in his office while he dodged between answering the 200 odd annotations and queries I had on his original Arabic text, and running the news agency.
Some of these were references Zuhair assumed fell within the general knowledge of his Arabic readers. For example he describes walking through the centre of Baghdad “past a statue of Saadoun who is pointing to his chest (I killed myself!)”. This referred to a mid-20th century prime minister who shot himself. We could have added this information as a footnote but decided that footnotes were the kiss of death to the Waterstones 3 for 2 table. So instead, Zuhair incorporated the answers to all the contextual queries in his amended text: “the statue of prime minister Abdel Mohsein al-Saadoun, the cast pointing to his own chest, foretelling, or retelling his suicide: “I have killed myself!”.
Others were confusing time sequences or continuity issues. Zuhair had written the manuscript in a hurry, in the evenings where he still had any mindshare left over from running Aswat, as it was harried from place to place by the ever worsening conflict. The original manuscript bore the dateline Cairo, where the agency had moved after closing its Baghdad office in 2005. But he also worked on it when they moved again to Erbil.
As we worked through the smaller queries larger ones emerged. Why is there nothing about the Sunni Shia conflict, I said, or your current work? I was seeing someone in front of me who combined huge life experience with deep knowledge of every aspect of Iraq’s current situation and how it had got there, and to cap it all rigorous self-awareness. The sectarian divide was so pervasive that nobody wanted to touch it. At a time when 100 people were dying a day, intellectuals would deny that sectarianism truly existed in Iraq, endlessly repeating the platitude ‘we are all Iraqis’. They would then explain the apparent paradox of the violence either with colourless truisms – “there are bad people everywhere” – or theories that were themselves tinged with sectarianism. Sunnis were adamant it had been imported into Iraq by Iran, whom Iraqi Shia followed either because they were easily swayed, or wicked. Many Shia on the other hand knew that Saudi Arabia, spiritual home after all of al-Qaeda, was fermenting it because it could never allow an Iraq in which the Shia majority found its voice.
Zuhair is the only Iraqi I have met who was prepared to look himself in the mirror, confessionally speaking. He will tell you, or write, how he always felt nervous around armed forces because the Shia, overwhemingly confined to the ranks in the Iraqi army, never developed any martial tradition. How his mother embraced Iraq’s Communist movement as a young woman, totally convinced it would fail, out of a very Shia sense of the moral superiority of the underdog. How all worldly distinctions – writer, newspaper editor, whisky swilling poet – slipped away as you approached a checkpoint, and how you could feel a whoosh of warmth, of blood fellowship with the bunch of thugs manning it because, at the life and death level, they were your guys and you were theirs. Even if you knew an hour before and an hour after that you really despised them.
At the height of the carnage, he also told self-, or Shia-deprecating jokes, the kind of gentle humour that is a rare source of hope in despair.
There was a Sunni who could see the Shia were taking over the government, so decided to convert so he could get on in life. He went down to Najaf and asked to see an ayatollah, but was so nervous that he took a Shia friend along with him. Eventually he was shown in to a bare room, where the old man sat cross legged on the floor looking down. The henchmen gestured to him to stand in the middle of the room. There was silence for two minutes. Suddenly the ayatollah looked up and shattered the calm: “Who killed Hassan?” he shrieked (one of the Shia imams martyred in the seventh century). The young Sunni shuffled his feet. “Who killed Hassan? Who killed Hussein?” the ayatollah shrieked? “Who?”. More shuffling of the feet. Eventually he made it out of the room. “How did it go?” his friend asked him. “I’m not sure,” he said non-committally. “You know there are these two guys Hassan and Hussein who’ve been murdered and now they’re looking for the killers. The ayatollah’s pretty upset about it and seems to think I had something to do with it”.
The emerging editor in me needed this kind of material from Zuhair in the book and luckily he agreed. He didn’t respond to another suggestion, to add a chapter on attitudes towards the Americans. There are references here and there, how as a young man he wandered round Baghdad with his collar up and a James Dean haircut, cigarette diligently drooping from the corner of his mouth. But he said he hadn’t had enough contact with real life Americans to create anything meaningful.
The translation became a full-scale collaboration, and I had to unlearn decades of conditioning by academia. I had read Classics as a degree and was used to translation as decoding. The main thing, in rendering Cicero or Aeschylus, was to show you had absorbed exactly and in every last detail how the original was put together. Lip service was paid to style but really it was understood that the translation would have one reader who knew the source text better than you did, and any licence with grammatical structure carried the risk of being interpreted as ignorance. I spent long and enjoyable hours in musty libraries, fuelled by cheap canteen food, building tortuous English homologues to passages of elegant Latin and Greek.
Here, though, style and lucidity was all. We had to avoid all suggestion of worthiness. I schooled myself to be more cavalier with the text, working up the strength to prune first redundant adjectives, and then, occasionally, sub-clauses. I added connecting snippets of background myself, highlighting them for Zuhair to approve. It came more and more to seem as though translation was about respect for the text, certainly, but also liberation from it. The ultimate thrill was taking a problem passage already translated and having another go at it, without reference to the Arabic. Sacrilege and joy.
At a certain stage the book needed a title in English. Nothing anywhere near the original seemed viable: “War of the Powerless”, “War of the Impotent”, “A Powerless man’s war”. I had ten minutes one afternoon to suggest something. “Better the Devil you know than the Devil you don’t know” sprung to mind and I liked the idea of grounding the title of an Arabic book in an English proverb, so we ran with it. For Zuhair, of course, Saddam was the Devil he knew, what comes after the Devil nobody knew. And so the latent question everywhere in the text – was life better now than before? It seemed to do at that moment and in all the subsequent stages of evolution there was never a chance to undo it. So Devil You Don’t Know it is.
And now we come to the vexed question of where to place this book in the traditions of Iraqi literature.
Zuhair has been a writer all his life and this is a bookish book. When first back, he happens upon several of his old friends in Baghdad’s flea markets as they, like he, root around among the books laid out on blankets on the pavement. The bibliophile in him takes delight in finding a cook Douglas Hurd has inscribed for his counterpart Tariq Aziz on sale for a trifle, the seller unaware of its historical titillation.
As a youngster he had immersed himself both in the Arabic canon and foreign literature in translation, Camus, Colin Wilson, Nietzsche, Sartre. The striving young Communist also waded dutifully through the complete works of Mao Zhe Dong and Che Guevara, keeping himself awake by scribbling copious notes in the margins. One of the first things he does on returning to his family house is to dig out all his books from the loft with his nephew Yassir.
In the 1960s, he strolled up and down the streets of Baghdad’s cafe district with his friends, loose change to last them the whole day, peering in through the windows to see the writers of the day taking their ease inside, Fuad al-Takarli, Nezar Saleem and others: “We couldn’t gather the courage to meet them and sit with them in a cafe like this, way above the level of us street punks.”
He writes that at one stage, moving from exile to exile, he realised he was using the succession of temporary libraries he would build for himself as a way of weighing himself down, a cure to the perpetual floating of the refugee: “I wondered what impelled me to spend my precious money on
books I already know I won’t have time to read? Why do I need to prove my existence with
books, to create around me the illusion of solidity? Sometimes I excuse this compulsive hoarding as something the future will justify, making light of it. ‘You’re just creating the right atmosphere for a writer steeped in all things.’”
He is acutely aware of how living in a world of ideas marks him out. Yasser is bemused at his otherworldliness, the library in the attic, and his refusal to cash in on his cachet as a clean cultural figure returned from exile: “All your lot who came back from abroad, they are all ministers, or heads of department stashing away piles of cash. Because they can see the country collapsing with their own eyes.”
This had always been the case, the iconic chasm between intellectual and ‘ordinary people’. When Zuhair was packing up to flee abroad in the 1970s, his mother, whose understanding of Communism was somewhat visual, burned all the books in his library whose authors sported facial hair, mistaking Tolstoy for Marx and Nietzsche for Stalin. A guard at the block he lived in then once came in to his apartment and, staggered by the size of his library, could only assume he was a bookseller.
But in today’s Iraq that gap is not just a matter of neutral distance. The Baath so successfully killed, intimidated, coerced, coopted and bought an entire generation of intellectuals that for ordinary Iraqis they are all compromised. How can thought be free when it has always been bought, always directed to a power agenda?
In Basra, the cabbie driving Zuhair and some fellow writers away from a festival asks them who they are. Poets, they reply. This festival and this security is for you, he asks, derisively? Is it the Leader’s birthday? “In the mind of this man, who must have been about thirty-five, born and weaned in a culture of praise for the Leader, poetry was inextricably linked to public occasions. And these public events could only relate to the Leader himself.”
Another time he is sitting in the garden of the family house reading al-Jawahiri’s histories when his sister gets into a debate about Saddam Hussein with her washing woman, Om Mohamed, who still believes he was a great man. He gave us so much, the woman says. Like what, says the sister, harshly? Your husband was virtually crippled in his wars and none of you has any economic security. With her ritual defences beaten down one by one, in the end Om Mohamed she deploys Zuhair as her last ditch argument: “’What do I know? I’ve never seen him. But everyone was praising him to the skies, including all the intellectuals who read books like sir here, and write the newspapers’.”
For me, it is Zuhair’s response to this incident which is remarkable. He admits to searching for the perfect put down in his mind for a few moments, to subdue Om Mohamed and make her see the error of her ways. He has enough manners and self-awareness to realise the futility of that. But if he does not lecture Om Mohamed, neither does he condemn her to pity, as so many other intellectuals do. Whatever she has been subjected to in terms of personal tragedy and devilishly clever propaganda, Om Mohamed is not, in his eyes, just a passive victim. One of the reasons she is invested in Saddam is personal pride, the very understandable and flawed human need to believe all this must have been for something: “A day will come when this woman and others like her realise the price they have paid for their pride, and from this realisation could come embarrassment. Embarrassment is where real humanity begins.”
It is a conversation in a garden in Baghdad, lasting maybe five minutes, which everyone involved in it had probably forgotten by breakfast the next day. But a key, in my mind, to where to place this book in the accepted canons of Iraqi writing – nowhere.
Two brief diversions here. First, perhaps the best known work of modern Iraqi prose internationally is Fuad al-Takarly’s “Long Way Back”, published in 1980. Hailed as a masterpiece of social commentary, Takarly had begun the work in the mid-1960s while working as a judge in Baghdad’s Court of Appeals. It chronicles four generations of a Baghdad family and their vicisitudes through all of Iraq’s tumultuous changes, revolutions, republics and wars. Takarli first brought it to publishers inside Iraq in 1977 when the Baathi noose had not yet fully tightened. Takarli was an acknowledged literary giant and above all it was a novel, and hardly anyone read novels. The censors considered publication but demanded Takarli remove one of the characters in the book. Takarli refused arguing the character was central, and so they came to an impasse which he solved eventually by publishing the unabrogated version abroad, in Beirut. The point here is that the character, Adnan, represented the Baath Party, the reason of course that the censors rejected it.
Second diversion: one striking thing about the modern greats of Iraqi poetry is their feverish translation of foreign works. Badr Shaker al-Siyab published a collection in 1955 in which, among others, he translated Louis Aragon, Nazim Hekmet, and T.S. Eliot. Siyab worked as a teacher of English in a secondary school for a time so it is no stretch to imagine he could have mastered English to the extent needed for literary translation, even of Eliot. Aragon’s French and Hekmet’s Turkish are more surprising for a man who was born in a village near Basra and is not known to have travelled beyond Iraq and the Gulf countries, then highly insular. Saadi Youssef likewise has published translations of Greek poet Constantin Cafavy, the Spaniard Federico Lorca, the American Walt Whitman and the Turk Oktay Rifat. Elsewhere Siyab explained how in his own poems he used symbolism to escape censorship, criticising the 1958 July Revolution by shifting the name of the month from the normal Tammuz I Arabic to Adonis, a Phoenician god associated with the month. Interestingly, Adonis is mistakenly defined by Siyab as Greek, perhaps because of his ‘crossover’ into broader Hellenic culture in later antiquity.
The common factor is symbolism and representation. There was a modest flowering of liberalism in Iraq under the monarchy, small circles of writers who between the 1930s and the 1950s played musical chairs between minor posts in officialdom, editorship of publications and relatively genteel prison terms5. Perhaps it is the very essence of monarchy as a traditional institution which allowed a certain space for the influence of ‘modern’ thinking. But in the last 50 years, since the 1958 ‘progressive’ revolution – the Baath merely perfected rather than initiated this – the overall environment has been one of such repression that, in the arts as in so many other things, nothing can just be itself. A character in a novel represents a political party. Poets from other languages say what you need to say. Symbolism, the metaphor, the simile, the allegory, is all, even when it gets so abstruse that not even the inventor of the allusion, like Siyab, may have mastered all of its connotations.
Zuhair comes from that same background and heritage. But he has also spent the last 30 years working in journalism in a free country, and has the innate habit of self-observation. And paradoxically, there may be a certain licence for the Iraqi intellectual in the very anarchic crudeness of Iraq’s violence post-2003. You are more likely to be killed because you write than for what you write. You might be killed for being a Shia, or wearing a beard, or not wearing a beard, but you are free to come and go through as many checkpoints and borders as you like. The risks are terrifying and perhaps statistically greater than they were under the Baath. But they are also highly unpredictable and you get to take the risks yourself. And there are hardly any ideologies left standing for the intellectual to take refuge in, nor any kind of measured compromises to be made with a regime stably in power and able to guarantee you something in return – a stipend, your freedom, your life. All kinds of terrible things can happen. But self-censorship and habitual recourse to symbolism and representation make less and less sense.
In this new environment, the memoir, a literary work of non-fiction based in Iraq, in the here and now, becomes possible for the first time. Just tell it like it is. It is Zuhair’s genius to be able to give that form richness by being both canny and humane, to have not been made bitter by a lifetime of hardship and struggle, to avoid demonisation of a few people, groups or names, and yet not to let Om Mohamed off the hook because she is a washer woman but to do her the courtesy, actually, of including her with her infinitesimal ounce of blame in a new world where fault of this kind is normal and expected and forgiveable. And you throw yourself in for good measure. He exchanges life stories with a call girl when a friend of his throws a return bash in ‘traditional’ style, roams around Basra late at night forlornly trying to buy whisky, finds himself alone and friendless in Najaf, the town where he was born, has a shouting match with his wife as they watch the bombs fall on Baghdad on their widescreen TV in Ealing.
So now the book is finished and will be published in Britain this spring. Saqi are looking for an American publisher and, with Zuhair managing 100 journalists and his news agency in Iraq, I gear up to try and find some way to raise Devil above the jostling crowd of new releases this month, this season, this year. There are few industries more subject to the laws of complexity and emergent effects than modern publishing. The first print run is 3,000, clearly a limited risk with, let us say, correct rather than comprehensive marketing and distribution resources put at its disposal. If we – and I don’t even know who the we is, really, beyond myself in my free time, and an unspecified amount of effort from a very nice young publicity agent at Saqi – cannot get enough attention in two to three months after April 28, the book dies there. But if it could gain currency as the first literary rendering by an Iraqi of the post-2003 experience, if the hundreds of hours trawling for listserves and newsgroups to post reviews paid off and it caught fire by word of mouth, then the sky is, in theory, the limit. Zuhair as the new Khaled Hosseini? Why not. You can always dream.
Meanwhile, a broader thought is germinating.
I spent three years living in Afghanistan working on a project to build a network of local radio stations and was lucky enough to get there early in 2002, before a class of young Afghan NGO professionals emerged speaking fluent English, so had the chance to learn Farsi. The brother of a friend of mine, a well known poet called Samay Hamed, recently sent me a manuscript entitled “What Barack Obama Can’t Change”, an account of his experiences going back to Afghanistan in 2001 to set up a series of cultural centres.
Like Zuhair, Samay is an extraordinary character who has retained a writer’s fine powers of observation while living through a series of experiences which are almost unimaginable. Originally a doctor, he relates how he was ordered to report to Taliban headquarters to talk to the commander responsible for health care after the Taliban retook the city of Mazar-e Sharif in 1997, an action accompanied by wholesale slaughter of civilians. He was stunned to find a man leerily flogging corpses outside the building, then more stunned to find this was his new boss.
Like Zuhair, Samay also paints himself in, but honestly. In the manic days following September 11 he describes wondering whether George Bush had been behind the attacks. However unpalatable that may seem to mainstream opinion in the West, the fact is there can hardly be an Afghan of any political persuasion who has not indulged themselves in that speculation at one time or another. In political terms both Zuhair and Samay represent people the interventions are designed to win over. They are the natural enemies of ‘the Others’, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, and have sacrificed far more than we have in those struggles. If we are not prepared to listen to even them telling the world from where they stand, the Dialogue of Civilisations will be so muted it hardly seems worth the bother. Like Zuhair, Samay combines intimate rapportage of his extended friends and family with honest introspection, and a literary sensibility. He was the first writer, in fact, to be attacked in Afghanistan after 911, stabbed through a luckily rather thick overcoat in the middle of Kabul. Poetry remains his main medium, enriching his prose. Like Zuhair, Samay was only exposed to English in adulthood, and could never write in it. Yet he can read it well enough to feel comfortable, or not, with a translation, turning that translation into dialogue rather than mechanical process.
Like Iraq, Afghans have been pretty much voiceless in the English language in the seven years since we invaded them. I haven’t done the late night online search but I’m pretty confident that there is a similar picture out there, dozens of analyses, diaries, breathless exposes and tales of daring-do by grizzled old hacks and breathless young NGO workers, a few measured works of political science, footnoted and bound for campus reading lists. There are a host of different circumstances in the societies at large, of course, and their literary traditions. They are very different countries.
But if Zuhair, why not Samay? If Iraq, why not Afghanistan? And, come to that, why only Afghanistan? Why not Gaza, Iran, Sudan? Can we find voices that authentically come from these societies and yet are authentic enough to represent only themselves. And can we engage them in an edit process which they feel is faithful to their art and words, and which yet makes their work easier on the Western ear, so to speak?
Can there be a ‘world music’ of literature from places which speak other languages, as English itself has already been internationalised by Indians, Africans and all the immigrants into Anglo countries who have so excelled in English literature of recent decades?
1“Mythologies”, 1957.
2The Arab world has many names which originate or predominate in particular countries though, like its Anglo-Saxon counterpart, centuries of shared culture and complex migrations mean many names can now be found and thought of as local in many places.
3Chapter and verse
4“’ajami”
5Just as similar periods occurred in the early to mid-20th century under the Egyptian and Afghan monarchies, only to be erased in the sweep of both countries ‘progressive’ revolutions.
دلپاک - Johnny's random thoughts 