‘Dates on my Fingers’ a powerful portrait of oppressed Iraq
The
Daily Star
BEIRUT: In Gabriel
Garcia Marquez’s beloved 1967 novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” the
Buendia family’s endlessly energetic patriarch, José Arcadio, founds the city
of Macondo alongside a river. With it he creates the initially utopian
environment for his ever-growing family, cut off from the troubles of the
outside world.
Iraqi novelist, poet, translator and
academic Muhsin Al-Ramli’s 2010 novel “Dates on my Fingers” shares several
passing similarities with Marquez’s epic magical-realist tale, now evident to
English-language audiences thanks to Luke Leafgren’s nuanced translation,
recently published by The American
University in Cairo Press.
Set in Iraq and Spain in the late-20th
century, this poignant blend of humor and tragedy is narrated by Saleem
al-Mutlaq, grandson of the formidable head of the Mutlaq clan. Iraq is at war
with Iran and ruled over by a ruthless, unnamed dictator. In Spain, a
cosmopolitan society is at odds with the older generations’ lingering racism.
Like José Arcadio Buendia, Saleem’s
grandfather Mutlaq is a visionary and a charismatic, if flawed, leader. His
maxim, “If a dog barks at you, don’t bark at it; but if it bites you, bite it
back,” explains his outlook on life.
A romantic and part-time poet, Saleem
recounts the incident that spawned this aphorism as though narrating a timeless
fairy tale: As child his grandfather was attacked by a dog and he answered by
biting the animal’s face.
It’s one of many such tangential
interludes in “Dates on my Fingers.” Ramli’s short novel contrasts whimsical,
often humorous, incidents with the grim fate the authoritarian state visits
upon the family.
Ramli skillfully moves back and forth
through time, gradually revealing more about his characters’ histories as he
develops the contemporary story arc. The tale begins with Saleem encountering
his father in a Madrid club after 10 years of self-imposed exile but
immediately flashes back to life in the quiet Iraqi village where he grew up.
These flashback sequences allow Ramli to
foreshadow future tragedies, imbuing the slow, poetic pace of his prose with a
compelling element of mystery.
Although Ramli avoids integrating
supernatural elements into the plot, there is something in his style that
evokes the tropes of magical realism. The author’s evocative, tightly written
prose is equally capable of elevating mundane details to great significance and
of reducing the story’s fantastical, fairy-tale-like elements to the everyday.
Like Marquez’s characters, Saleem and his
father Noah are bound to the past. Unable to extricate themselves from
loyalties to the loved ones they have left behind, they are haunted by
memories.
The novel opens with a flashback to
Saleem’s teenage years. While Noah takes his sick daughter to the doctor in the
nearest town, a scrawny young man reaches out of his car window to grab the
girl’s bottom.
Before the crowds can restrain him, Noah
attacks the man, removes three bullets from the chamber of his revolver and
inserts two of them up the offender’s backside.
The young man turns out to be the nephew
of the vice president’s secretary, so Noah is promptly thrown in prison. Led by
the family’s redoubtable, God-loving, vengeance-seeking grandfather, his male
relatives arm themselves and storm the governor’s house, demanding Noah’s
release. Three of them are killed in the firefight. The rest are imprisoned and
tortured.
The final indignity awaits the male
relatives’ return to their village. Soldiers shave off their moustaches and
doctor their identity cards – changing their family name from Mutlaq to Qashmar
(naive fool), a word freighted with scorn, disdain and insult.
Undaunted, the head of the family is
preparing to attack again when Noah is returned, having been tortured to the
point of permanent impotence. Egged-on by his father, Noah swears an oath to
one day find the man whose groping set off the unhappy chain of events, and
insert into him a final bullet.
Having sworn vengeance on the Quran, he
attaches the bullet to his keychain. It remains there for more than a decade,
when Saleem comes across him in Spain.
Saleem’s grandfather decides that the
entire Mutlaq clan must abandon their village and seek a fresh start. He leads
his followers to the Tigris, where they sail out into the middle of the river
and cast out their radios, televisions and state identity papers. Reaching the far
shore, they found a new village, naming it Qashmars to remind them of their
intended vengeance.
Like Macondo, Qashmars initially provides
the family of close to 100 people with a peaceful respite from the world. Here
Saleem and his cousin Aliya, characterized by tiny eyes and a penchant for
smearing dates on her body for Saleem to lick off, share idyllic interludes in
a forest clearing.
Their happiness is cut short when Aliya
drowns. Foreshadowing more violence to come, the event – coupled with frequent
references to 17 corpses rotting in the village – explain Saleem’s self-imposed
exile in Madrid, where Ramli himself has lived since 1993 after the Iraqi
regime executed his brother.
Saleem’s life is a quiet one. He lives
alone in a small apartment, shunned by his neighbors, his walls papered with
newspaper photos of Iraq. It’s unfortunate, he notes wryly, that the photos
almost exclusively depict images of the dictator and destruction. Preoccupied
by sex, he remains deeply religious, shunning alcohol and fornication in favor
of a solitude redolent with memories of his dead cousin.
When he stumbles across his father,
however, his routine is interrupted. Noah appears a changed man. A nightclub
owner wearing a ponytail and earrings, the man who braved torture to avenge his
daughter’s honor playfully smacks the behinds of his female staff. As he and
Saleem begin to rebuild their relationship, however, the legacy of the past
becomes ever clearer.
“Dates on my Fingers” is a beautifully
written, poetic and compelling tale of exile and identity, one that explores
themes of love and loyalty, family, freedom and the weight of history. A
powerful portrait of an oppressed Iraq, Ramli’s novel transforms incidents from
the recent past into timeless fables, allowing readers to draw their own
parallels.
