‘Dates on My
Fingers': Exploring and Challenging
Traditional Masculinities
By Alexandra Atiya
The opening scenes
of Dates on My Fingers shocked me. The 2008 novel by Muhsin Al-Ramli, now
available in English translation by Luke Leafgren, starts with a bizarre act of
sexualized violence.
The novel’s
narrator, Saleem, tells a story from his childhood in Iraq. The story starts
when Saleem’s sister falls ill and Saleem’s father takes the sister to the city
of Tikrit for medical treatment. As they walk to the medical center, a car
slows down beside them. The driver reaches out to grab the sister’s bottom.
Saleem’s father reacts violently — he pulls the driver out of the car, leaving
the driverless car to roll down the street, and strips the driver of his clothes
and his pistol. He then forces two bullets into the driver’s anus.
The driver, it
turns out, has important government connections, so Saleem’s father gets
arrested and tortured. The violence
between Saleem’s father and the driver then, by extension, turns into the
violence between a family and the government. Saleem’s domineering grandfather
rallies the family, which arrives armed and attacks the provincial government
building where the father is being held. A battle breaks out. The family loses
three men and no police are hurt, yet Saleem’s father is released in order to
prevent any further violence. Upon his release, Saleem’s father vows vengeance
against the young, anonymous driver.
The story then
jumps ahead about 20 years. Saleem is no longer a boy. He is almost 30, and he
has immigrated to Madrid, where he lives alone in a fifth-floor walk-up and
works a regular job. He seems to be far
from the strictures of his father and grandfather, but he still is not
completely at home in Spain. He maintains his virginity, doesn’t drink, and
plasters his walls with pictures of Iraq.
Saleem believes that he has left behind the
world of his Iraqi family. But much to Saleem’s surprise, he finds that his
father is working in a nightclub in Madrid. And, stranger still, the father is
not the obedient, honor-obsessed figure of Saleem’s youth. In his new
role as the proprietor of a Spanish nightclub, the father is glad-handing,
drinking alcohol, preaching peace, and publicly patting his female employees’
bottoms.
The irony of his father’s treatment of
female employees is not lost on Saleem, and for the rest of the novel, Saleem
attempts to understand the conflict between his father’s commitment to the oath
of vengeance and his father’s new life in Spain.
The filial conflict shapes the narrator’s
dilemmas about devotion and denying lust for religious reasons.
The essential conflict of the novel is
couched in two stories. The first is the story of the vendetta between Saleem’s
father and the anonymous driver. The second is the story of the
grandfather’s attempts to create an ideal village in Iraq. The dictatorial
grandfather at once wants to serve as god, government, and father to the whole
family, and Saleem describes him as an “adversary who forced us to sculpt our private
selves in secret.”
The ideal village is described,
almost as a side note, in the middle of the novel, but it seems essential to
the novel’s workings. Throughout the novel, Al-Ramli explores the parallels
between government, fatherhood, and religion, while also showing the ways in
which these three structures compete for one man’s obedience and attention.
Some of the most effective
aspects of the novel lie in its description of Aliya, Saleem’s ill-fated first
love. As an adolescent, Saleem writes dramatic, traditional love poetry to
Aliya, describing chivalric scenes and praising her beauty, including praising
her big eyes even though her eyes are unnaturally small. Aliya responds to his
advances, but she also confronts him: She tells him that there is no reason for
him to lie and exaggerate. She knows her eyes are small – the other women in
her family tease her because of it — and he does not need to make up things
about her in order to convince her of her love.
She says that she responded to his love poetry because she could tell
that his feeling was genuine — not because he paid her absurd and untruthful
compliments.
Saleem is baffled by this
response. He goes back to his grandfather and asks him why the poets tell lies,
and the grandfather tells him that “the sweetest poetry is the most fabulous.”
Female bodies are an obsession throughout the book, and there is an unflinching
eroticism that transgresses the strict rule of fathers and grandfathers. The
novel’s title comes in part from Saleem and Aliya’s shared love of dates.
The writing in the English
translation of Dates on My Fingers is not beautiful or ornate. The novel is straightforward, short, and
simple to read, a fact which seems, after Aliya’s speech, to be a rebuke to
poetry’s pretentions and claims to tradition. At times, the novel is remarkably
effective in generating a picture of authoritarian male-dominated societies. It
manages to depict the power of paternalistic traditions, and their effects on
shaping a man’s conception of himself, while posing a sharp challenge to them.
----------------------------------------------
*Alexandra Atiya
is a writer, reporter, and poet. You can find her on twitter at @lexiatiya
https://arablit.wordpress.com/2014/12/05/dates-on-my-fingers-exploring-and-challenging-traditional-masculinities/
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