There’s no place like utopia:
Muhsin Al-Ramli’s novel
addresses the agony of Iraq
Malcolm Forbes
April 24, 2014 Updated: April 24, 2014
Peace is never allowed to reign long in fiction. Its
readers are driven by negativity, transported by narrative tension. Its better
practitioners are aware that permanent sunny vistas won’t do; we crave blots on
the horizon, trouble in paradise, dystopias not utopias.
An attempt to build a viable, thriving utopia – “what
might be called ‘The Ideal City’, or at least ‘The Ideal Village’” – is one of
several sources of tension in Dates on My Fingers, Muhsin Al-Ramli’s latest
novel to be translated into English. There is tension because we know the
enterprise is destined for failure: the Iraqi tribal community that constructs
it is cutting itself off from the despotic regime which it has recently fallen
foul of. A lust for vengeance threatens stability until separate calamities and
key departures shatter it. What begins as a novel about the need to preserve
family foundations, values and honour in times of tyranny ends up a trenchant
and occasionally poignant commentary on the immigrant’s struggle to start anew
while living with the past.
Al-Ramli opens with his narrator, Saleem, explaining
how his father, Noah, encouraged him to write his family’s story and expose its
shame. It doesn’t matter if Saleem makes a mess of it, for “nothing will happen
worse than has already happened”. We are taken back to a day when Noah set out
from his village with his sick daughter to seek medical treatment in Tikrit.
When she is groped in the street by the driver of a
passing Mercedes, Noah hauls him out and viciously beats him. But the man has
government connections. First Noah is thrown into jail and tortured and then,
after a failed effort to break him out, all male members of his family suffer
the same fate, including Saleem and his grandfather, Mutlaq.
We fast-forward to Madrid. Saleem, now a driver and a
writer for Iraqi opposition newspapers in London, bumps into the father he
hasn’t seen for more than 10 years in a packed nightclub. Noah, with his long
dyed hair, shaved moustache and pierced ear, is virtually unrecognisable. Only a
revolver bullet gives him away – a bullet he carried in Iraq and carries now in
exile in Spain to use on the man, a diplomat here in Madrid, who grabbed his
daughter and unleashed misfortune on his family.
The novel unfolds along two tracks. There is the
Madrid section, in which Noah introduces his son to his new lover, Rosa, and
his radically different lifestyle; and the other, in which Saleem falls for
Fatima and tries to find a place for his father in his “bifurcated world”. Then
there are the flashbacks to Saleem’s formative years in Iraq, particularly life
in the utopian village his grandfather founded and ran as “absolute governor” –
until a redoubled onslaught of government iron-fist force warped dream into
nightmare and sent father and son fleeing.
Al-Ramli darts back and forth, using incidents in the
present as triggers to activate Saleem’s recollections: the stink of rubbish
bags in his Madrid apartment brings back the stench of rotten, unburied bodies
in the Iraqi village; Fatima’s shower-wet hair reminds him of his childhood
sweetheart Aliya “when she swam – or when she drowned”. Al-Ramli teases us with
these snagged memories which often take the form of half-told tales, deft
little cliffhangers, with Al-Ramli routinely breaking away at crucial moments
and making us wait to hear critical fates and resolutions. Did Noah leave his
homeland after murdering his father? What happened to the family left behind?
What went so wrong?
Dates on My Fingers is subtitled “An Iraqi Novel”,
despite being only half set there. It is understandable that Al-Ramli should
utilise Spain: he writes and teaches in Madrid and has translated Don Quixote
into Arabic. However, his lighter Spanish sections are easily eclipsed by his
grainy snapshots of Iraq. Saleem’s past, both darkly exotic and bitterly
realistic, is charged with that tension we need. It is there that we encounter
mystic healers and tragic lovers and feel the full wrath of Grandfather Mutlaq,
a commanding voice of reason who bites dogs and lops off fingers. It is also in
Iraq where Al-Ramli is most playful with his descriptions: twin girls squirm in
the cradle “like two rats drenched in milk”; Noah hates the English and their
“yellow smiles”.
Al-Ramli builds to such a powerful war-of-words
showdown that we end up overlooking both the novel’s chief flaw (a chance
reunion between an Iraqi father and son in a Madrid nightclub) and its lesser
one (the book’s title). We may grumble at the Jane Austen-style ending in which
everyone lives a little too happily ever after, but Al-Ramli proves to be one
step ahead with his crafty, game-changing last line.
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