viernes, 19 de diciembre de 2014

Entrevista con Muhsin Al-Ramli, sobre su novela: Dedos De Dátiles

Entrevista
Muhsin Al-Ramli :
"Después de terminar esta novela, cambié totalmente"
Por: Alexandra Atiya
Hemos hablado con el novelista Iraquí Muhsin Al-Ramli, sobre su novela "Dedos de Dátiles", traducida al inglés por Luke Leafgre y al italiano por Federica Pistono (2014), una novela que comienza con el despertar de la destrucción:
1. Cuándo creó esta novela ¿se vió Vd. construyéndola sobre otro trabajo literario previo?? ¿Español, árabe, otro? ¿Qué tipo de novela prefiere Vd.?
- Empecé a escribirla después de la invasión norteamericana a Irak, y la devastación que la misma dejo sobre todos los lugares de mi infancia, los museos, las bibliotecas, etc. No pretendí ni planeé escribir una novela, era como una especie de escritura libre para revisar mi sentir, mi memoria y lo que quedó en ella de mi primera identidad, los recuerdos y las tradiciones de una familia y de un país. Fue como si me desnudase frente a un espejo para enfrentar la realidad de un ser escindido entre un pasado y un presente, entre dos culturas, después de tantos años de estancia en España. Luego ví cómo los personajes, las historias, y los hilos de la narración iban desarrollándose por sí mismos para dar forma a esta obra. La novela en su totalidad abarca la época anterior a la ocupación y se termina señalando a esta en su final, lo que es como decir que abarca toda la época de la dictadura.
Obviamente no tenía en mente ningún modelo narrativo anterior a seguir, ni árabe ni español, aunque eso no niega la existencia de ciertas influencias de otras obras narrativas que aparecen de forma inconsciente debido a mis lecturas, sobre todo aquellas que tratan de dicotomías en su esencia, entre ellas seguramente la madre de todas las novelas, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. Mi novela en su totalidad está basada en dualidades, de hecho escribí su primer borrador en ambas lenguas, Árabe y Castellano, y a veces mezclando palabras de un idioma y de otro en una misma frase. Una vez terminada, comencé a traducirla entera a ambas lenguas. El lenguaje de la novela y el proceso de su escritura recuerdan a mí en todo.
Personalmente prefiero las novelas que versan sobre las profundas inquietudes del ser humano, sus penas, miedos, sueños, sentimientos, ideas, su visión del mundo y toda la belleza contenida en él.
2. ¿Es alguna parte de la novela autobiográfica?
- Sí, quizás el 80% está basado en mi propia biografía, mi personalidad, mi familia, las personas que conozco, mis recuerdos, y la realidad existente mientras la escribía, así por ejemplo ciertos lugares que menciono de Madrid, que fueron descritos mientras me encontraba en ellos. La mayoría de los personajes proceden de personas presentes en mi vida: para el personaje del abuelo, por ejemplo, me inspiré en la personalidad de mi padre, un hombre de religión y de tribu, por eso el apellido del personaje lleva el suyo, Mutlak; para el personaje del padre, Noah, me inspiré en la personalidad de mi hermano mayor; del mismo modo la personalidad del narrador, es en gran medida yo; el de Alia, es el de mi primer amor; el de la hermana es el de una de mis hermanas, y así sucesivamente.
3. La mayor parte del libro trata de los conflictos entre padre e hijo. ¿Tenía Vd. en su cabeza el enfrentamiento final entre Saleem y Noah, cuando comenzó a escribir el libro?, ¿Fue esa confrontación la razón principal por la que escribió el libro? ¿O se desarrolló posteriormente, una vez que ya se habían definido los caracteres principales y las líneas del argumento ?
- Mi primera intención era identificar los conflictos dicotómicos que sufría en mi interior, entre ellos, mi división identitaria entre Oriente y Occidente, religión y laicismo, libertad y dictadura, pasado y presente, país de adopción y patria de origen, amor y rencor, venganza y perdón, entre otros. Durante el desarrollo de la novela y después de terminarla, descubrí que el origen de todos estos conflictos interiores era, en realidad, exterior  y que yo era uno de los campos de batalla, que no eran mis propios conflictos desde el principio, sino que eran heredados o fruto de la influencia de otros y de las circunstancias de mi vida, o sea, que yo no era la causa ni el origen de estos conflictos. Por eso después de terminar esta novela, cambié totalmente, me reconcilié conmigo mismo y curé muchos de mis padecimientos psicológicos. Era el conflicto entre diferentes y sucesivas generaciones, en mi vida y en la cultura de mi país, que yo heredé y que me transformaron en uno de sus frutos. Nada más percatarme de ello, me aligeré de este peso y no volví a sentirlo jamás. Por eso, el conflicto entre el narrador Saleem y su padre no fue tan duro como aquel entre el abuelo y el padre, y terminó con una especie de sinceridad y de reconciliación.
4. ¿Cuál es el significado en esta historia de la muerte de Aliya, el primer amor de Saleem? ¿Representa esta muerte la del ideal de amor o familia que tenía Saleem? ¿Por qué es Aliya importante para esta historia?
- Sí, Aliya es el primer amor. A menudo este es el más persistente en la memoria, y el más influyente en nuestro desarrollo emocional, tiene algo de idealismo, de inocencia y de sueño y contribuye a crear la imagen de la que más tarde nos enamoramos. Para este personaje me inspiré en la experiencia de mi primer amor.
Acerca de su muerte ahogada en el río, un amigo crítico me sorprendió con una interpretación con la que estoy de acuerdo. Me dijo: “Tu primer amor murió quemada mientras freía berenjenas en la cocina. La escena de su muerte seguía atormentándote, por eso, en la novela, la has hecho morir con la antítesis del fuego, el agua, y has descrito la escena de su muerte de una manera hermosa”. Creo que mi amigo tiene razón, recuerdo haber llorado, efectivamente, mientras escribía la escena de su muerte. En cuanto a su relación con el contexto de la novela, se puede interpretar en cierta medida como la muerte de lo bello en el pasado de Saleem y de su lucha consigo mismo por aferrarse a esa percepción ideal.
5. En la novela, el abuelo de Saleem está obsesionado con la creación de “un pueblo ideal." ¿Está la idea de “un pueblo ideal” basada en un proyecto real o fue una invención para los objetivos temáticos de la novela?
- La utopía de la ciudad ideal (“Ideal city”), la sociedad ejemplar, fue concebida de acuerdo a una cierta percepción del mundo, existe en todos los tiempos y culturas y seguirá existiendo en el futuro.
Cuando se dan ciertas circunstancias, sobre todo las atípicas, algunos tratan de llevar a cabo esta idea a pesar de ser ilógica e incongruente con la realidad, porque en el principio nace como un sueño en las mentes de personas insatisfechas con la realidad del mundo en el que viven, por eso intentan crear un mundo especial que imaginan mejor, y cuando la oportunidad surge, tratan de llevarlo a la práctica aunque suponga un gran esfuerzo.
Y sí, ha habido muchos ejemplos de ello en la historia antigua y contemporánea, el más reciente, lo que está sucediendo en Irak ahora, donde  un individuo se proclama a sí mismo Kalifa y jefe de un estado religioso que ha tenido en sus visiones; incluso leí unos días antes una noticia sobre un ciudadano norteamericano que se fue para habitar una zona entre las fronteras egipcias y sudanesas de unos doscientos kilómetros cuadrados que no pertenecen a ninguno de ambos estados, la instauró como un reinado, le puso bandera y lema, y proclamó a su hija como princesa porque soñaba serlo. Los ejemplos utópicos que se convierten, en realidad, en una dictadura existen en muchos lugares, como lo que ha sucedido con el sueño de algunos países comunistas o lo que pasa actualmente en Corea del Norte, entre otros.
Lo que hizo el abuelo en la novela, es algo parecido, una forma de reacción, de respuesta, de rechazo de la dictadura que gobernaba Irak, para crear una dictadura de otro tipo.
6. Quería preguntarle si podría hablar sobre el papel que la violencia juega en la historia. El abuelo y padre de Saleem son figuras grandes en su imaginario porque son muy violentos. ¿Por qué es la violencia tan fundamental en la imaginación de Saleem y en la novela? 
- Lamentablemente, la violencia se sigue ejerciendo por parte del ser humano, del individuo y de los estados y las culturas en todo el mundo, entre ellas la iraquí. Yo personalmente, estoy en contra de todo tipo de violencia, Saleem tiene mucho de mí, es una persona pacífica, víctima de la violencia que le obligó a salir huyendo de su país. Uno de los temas centrales de la novela es la violencia, y cómo esta influye y modifica los destinos de la gente. La cuestión de la venganza, sobre todo en Irak, persiste profundamente en la mentalidad nacional que ve como un deber, incluso como un honor, responder a la violencia con violencia. Como la dictadura representa la violencia, vemos cómo los personajes de la novela le responden con violencia. Como los norteamericanos irrumpieron en el país con violencia fueron contestados con violencia. A quien cree en la venganza como principio, no le importa la fuerza del que tiene enfrente, sino cumplir con su deber de venganza. El abuelo, que representa una primera generación, creía firmemente en esta cuestión como un deber sagrado; el padre, que representa la segunda generación, cumplía con lo que aprendió del abuelo independientemente de su convicción o no; mientras que Saleem, que representa la tercera generación y que conoce una cultura diferente, empieza a cuestionar y a rechazar la violencia como deber, por eso durante su conversación con su padre le dice: “Es verdad que fuimos nosotros los iraquíes quienes promulgamos la ley del ‘ojo por ojo, diente por diente’ en el Código de Hammurabi, pero yo conocí otra cultura con una lógica diferente, y piensa que si aplicamos el principio del ojo por ojo terminemos todos ciegos”

7. Uno de los aspectos más interesantes del libro es la manera en la que se crea el paralelismo entre la estructura de una familia y la de un gobierno. Del mismo modo se crea ese paralelismo entre la autoridad paternal y la autoridad religiosa ¿Cómo ve usted la relación entre familia y gobierno?
- Es una observación correcta y muy importante,  la cuestión de la autoridad paternal, jerárquica y patriarcal que seguimos padeciendo en las culturas de Oriente, en general, ya sea sociales, religiosas o políticas, y en nuestra cultura Árabe e Islámica en particular. Toda nuestra vida está basada en una estructura autoritaria, ya sea religiosa, de sistemas de gobierno o tribal, y hasta núcleo social más pequeño, la familia. En un ambiente regido por la dictadura, la imagen del dictador se refleja en todos los espejos que lo rodean, el ministro ejerce su autoritarismo sobre sus subordinados, el director general, llegando hasta los directores de escuela y luego hasta la familia, donde el abuelo se convierte en dictador, seguido por el padre, el hijo, etc., de modo que la imagen del abuelo en la familia se confunde con la del líder y hasta con la de Dios. De hecho, en el idioma árabe, seguimos llamando al padre o al patriarca de familia el “dios de la familia”. En la novela, describí esta realidad, explicando la rigidez de sus presiones, que causan luchas sociales externas e internas que influyen profundamente en la psicología y en el destino de las personas.
8. El Río Tigris es clave en dos escenas, cuando Aliya muere y cuando el abuelo ordena que la familia entera se libre de sus posesiones y sus documentos gubernamentales. ¿Cuál es la importancia del río dentro de la historia?
- El río es el símbolo de la pureza, la purificación, la madre naturaleza, la vida y la eternidad, llegando a relacionarse con lo sagrado en muchas culturas, como la india, por ejemplo. En lo que a Irak se refiere, todas sus civilizaciones y las etapas de su historia están vinculadas con los ríos, sobre todo, con los ríos Tigris y Éufrates. Para mí, entre los más bellos nombres para designar a Irak y más cercano a mi corazón está el de “Tierra entre dos ríos” (Mesopotamia). Yo nací y crecí en un pueblo a la orilla del río Tigris, por eso el río, sobre todo el Tigris, está presente en casi todo mi trabajo. Durante el tiempo en que viví allí, el río siempre representó nuestro refugio, la seguridad, lo más bello en un país donde todo se destruye diariamente. El río fue siempre lo único en lo que confiamos, creemos en su eternidad, el que nos otorga la esperanza y el refugio con su eterno flujo sin fin.
Sobre la muerte de Aliya en el río, es una muerte piadosa y bella que significa su unión y conjunción con la pureza, la naturaleza y la vida eterna. En cuanto a la idea del abuelo de construir su refugio en una pequeña isla rodeada por el río, significa el recurso de una barrera que garantiza la protección de un guardián único en el que confiamos, el propio río.
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*Publicada en la revista (ILA) en 11/12/2014
 

Reviewer Alexandra Atiya found a challenge to received ideas of masculinity in Iraqi novelist Muhsin Al-Ramli’s Dates on My Fingers

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.
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*Alexandra Atiya is a writer, reporter, and poet. You can find her on twitter at @lexiatiya

‘Dita di datteri’ di Muhsin Al-Ramli: il romanzo dell’esilio/di Lorenzo Mazzoni

Dita di datteri’ di Muhsin Al-Ramli :
il romanzo dell’esilio
di Lorenzo Mazzoni
Dita di datteri‘ è un romanzo incentrato sui temi dell’emigrazione, dell’amore, della violenza, del conflitto, del concetto di onore familiare. Gli avvenimenti descritti, così come i pensieri, le idee e i personaggi si spostano dai villaggi e dalle zone rurali dell’Iraq ai locali notturni di Madrid. Il romanzo descrive la vita quotidiana in Iraq nell’epoca in cui Saddam Hussein governava il paese, tratteggiandola con grande umanità, e racconta la storia di un giovane e dei suoi rapporti con la famiglia, specialmente con il padre e con la ragazza che ama e che vuole sposare.
Selim, fuggito dall’Iraq di Saddam Hussein per motivi politici, vive a Madrid. Lavora come autista di un furgone che distribuisce giornali e vive in un piccolo appartamento solitario, dove solo alcune vecchie foto del paese natio gli offrono qualche conforto. Selim è nato e cresciuto in una famiglia patriarcale e conservatrice, dominata dall’autorità e dal pugno di ferro del nonno, che ha educato figli e nipoti al rigido rispetto della tradizione islamica e, al tempo stesso, alla costante opposizione al regime di Saddam. I ricordi dell’infanzia e dell’adolescenza nel villaggio natio, nei pressi di Tikrit, sulle rive del fiume Tigri, i volti dei genitori, del nonno, dei fratelli, delle sorelle e, soprattutto, dell’adorata cugina Alia, suo primo e unico amore, annegata nel Tigri, accompagnano Selim giorno e notte.
Ma un giorno il destino lo attende al varco e gli rivoluziona la vita: in una discoteca di Madrid, incontra per caso il proprio padre, che credeva ancora in Iraq. Nuah, il padre, è irriconoscibile: l’iracheno severo, rigidamente osservante, si è trasformato in un personaggio bizzarro, che sfoggia capelli tinti, indossa abiti stravaganti, porta più di un orecchino e gestisce una discoteca nel centro della capitale.
Il romanzo in Italia è stato pubblicato da Cicorivolta edizioni e tradotto da Federica Pistono, già traduttrice, tra gli altri, di Ghassan Kanafani, (L’altra cosa (Chi ha ucciso Layla al-Hayk?), Uomini e fucili, Susine di aprile e Il cieco e il sordo, contenuti nell’opera dal titolo L’Innamorato). Ha inoltre tradotto Primavera nella cenere e altri racconti e la raccolta Il tuono, tratti dall’opera di Zakaryya Tamer, nonché il romanzo L’oasi del tramonto di Bahaa Taher, già vincitore dell’International Prize for Arabic fiction, Sarmada di Fadi ‘Azzam, romanzo finalista all’Arabic Booker Prize del 2012 e La nipote americana di Inaam Kachachi, dalla short list dell’International Prize for Arabic Fiction del 2009.
Uno dei temi del romanzo è quello degli iracheni che, emigrati in tutto il mondo, hanno perduto la propria identità nelle nuove case e nelle nuove vite, senza riuscire a inserirsi e ad integrarsi nella nuova società che li ha accolti. In questo romanzo profondo, Muhsin Al-Ramli dimostra di essere un maestro, tocca le corde della nostra sensibilità illustrandoci pensieri e sentimenti dei personaggi, utilizzando una sottile ironia per affrontare temi drammatici (in primis lo spaesamento e la rassegnazione) ironia che dona alla storia un aroma poetico e piacevole. Come detto dalla traduttrice in una recente intervista: “Sicuramente è la storia di una maturazione nella condizione esistenziale del migrante.
Il protagonista fugge giovanissimo dal natio Iraq per approdare in Spagna dove diventa adulto: come ogni migrante, deve necessariamente lasciarsi alle spalle una parte di sé e reintegrare il suo io amputato, privato delle categorie di pensiero della cultura di appartenenza, con valori e stili di vita nuovi. In questo senso il personaggio si crea una coscienza e un modo di sentire europei. Quindi, da questo punto di vista, siamo di fronte a una storia di formazione.
Spesso i romanzi arabi contemporanei, specialmente quelli provenienti dalle aree devastate dalle guerre degli ultimi anni, come Iraq, Siria o Palestina, sono storie tragiche, affrontano i temi della dittatura, del carcere, della tortura, della guerra, della morte. Lo fa anche Muhsin Al-Ramli, che tratta nel suo romanzo tutti questi temi, dalla dittatura di Saddam, alla vicenda del padre del protagonista arrestato e torturato in carcere fino a riportare lesioni permanenti, ai lutti della guerra Iran-Iraq. Ma lo fa con una certa levità, con una vena di sottile ironia che pervade tutto il libro, anche i passi più drammatici. Per questo ho amato subito questo romanzo, per la sua capacità di far riflettere il lettore senza precipitarlo nell’angoscia.
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*Lorenzo Mazzoni; Scrittore | 9 dicembre 2014

lunes, 8 de diciembre de 2014

Alexandra Atiya talks with Iraqi novelist Muhsin Al-Ramli about his Dates on My Fingers

Muhsin Al-Ramli:
 ‘After Finishing the Novel, I Changed Completely’
 
Alexandra Atiya talks with Iraqi novelist Muhsin Al-Ramli about his Dates on My Fingers, trans. Luke Leafgren (2014), a novel that began in the wake of destruction:
Alexandra Atiya: As you wrote Dates on My Fingers, did you see yourself as building on any other literary work? 
Muhsin Al-Ramli: I began to write the novel after the US invasion in Iraq, which left devastation over everything: the places of my childhood, the museums, the libraries. I didn’t intend nor did I plan to write a novel, it was more like a kind of free writing to edit my being, my memory, and what was left in it from my first identity, the memories and traditions of a family and a country. It was like getting undressed in front of a mirror to face the reality of a being divided between a past and a present, between two cultures after so many years of living in Spain. Later I saw the characters, the stories, and the threads of the narrative were developing on their own to form this work. The novel in its entirety includes the period before the occupation and it finishes by signaling that it is at the end, which is to say that it covers the period of the dictatorship.
Obviously, I didn’t have in mind any prior Arabic literary model or Spanish literary model to follow, although this doesn’t negate the existence certain influences from other narrative works that appear unconsciously from my reading, above all those that deal with dichotomies in their essence, among them certainly the mother of all novels, Don Quixote.
My novel in its entirety is based in dualities. In fact, I wrote the first draft in both languages, Arabic and Spanish, and at times with some words from one language and some from the other in the same sentence. Once I had finished it, I started to translate the whole thing to both languages. The novel’s language and the process of writing it resembles myself.
AA: Is any part of the story autobiographical?
MR: Yes, about 80 percent is based on my own biography, my own personality, my family, people that I know, my memory, and the reality of what was in the moment of writing, in such a way that some of the places in Madrid that I mentioned, I wrote their descriptions while being in those places.
The majority of the characters come from people present in my life: for the character of the grandfather, for example, I was inspired by the personality of my father; for the character of the father, Noah, I was inspired by the personality of my older brother; as such, the personality of the narrator is in great measure me; Aliya’s character is that of my first love; the sister is that of my sister; and so on.
AA: Much of the book centers on father-son conflicts. Did you have in mind the final confrontation between Saleem and Noah when you first started writing the book? Was that confrontation the central reason for writing the book? Or did the idea of that confrontation develop later, after you had already established the main characters and plotlines?
MR: My first intention was to recognize the dichotomous conflicts which I was suffering inside, among them, my identity between East and West, secularism and religion, freedom and dictatorship, past and present, fatherland and adopted country, love and hostility, vengeance and forgiveness, among others. In the process of writing the novel, and after finishing it, I discovered that the origin of all these interior conflicts was in reality exterior, and that I was one of the grounds of the battle, which were not my own conflicts from the beginning but inherited ones, or the fruit of the influence of others and the circumstances of my life.
For this reason, after finishing the novel, I changed completely. I made peace with myself, and I cured many of my psychological sufferings. It was the conflict between different and successive generations, in my life and in the culture of my country, which I inherited and which transformed me into one of its products. I didn’t notice it anymore; I was relieved of its weights. For this reason, the conflict between the narrator Saleem and his father wasn’t as hard as the one between the father and the grandfather, and I ended with a kind of sincerity and reconciliation.
AA: What is the significance of the death of Aliya, Saleem’s first love, in this story? Is her death meant to represent the death of some kind of ideal Saleem has about love or family? 
MR: Yes, Aliya is the first love. Often this is the one that remains longest in the memory, and the most influential in determining our emotional makeup. It contains something of idealism, innocence and dreaming, and it contributes to creating the image about which later we fall in love. For this character, I was inspired by the experience of my first love.
About her death by drowning in the river: a critic friend of mine surprised me with an interpretation that I agree with. He said to me: “Your first love died of burns while she was frying eggplant in the kitchen. The scene of her death continued to torment you, and for this reason, in the novel, you have made her die with the antithesis of fire, with water, and you have described the scene of her death in a beautiful way.” I believe that my friend is right, and I remember having cried while I was writing the scene of her death. About its relationship in the context of the novel, it’s possible to interpret it in a certain fashion as the death of whatever beauty there was in Saleem’s past and his fight with himself to cling to his ideal perception of it.
AA: In the novel, Saleem’s grandfather is fixated on establishing an “ideal village.” Was the idea of an “ideal village” based on an actual project, or was that an invention for the thematic purposes of the novel?
MR: The utopia of the “ideal city,” the model society, was conceived in accordance with a certain perception of the world. It exists in all times and cultures and it will continue existing in the future.
During certain circumstances, above all atypical circumstances, some people try to carry out the idea even though it’s illogical and incompatible with reality, because in the beginning it’s born as a dream in the minds of people unsatisfied with the reality of the world in which they live. For this reason, they try to create a particular world that they can imagine as better, and when the opportunity arises, some people try to put it into practice, even if it is an effort.
And yes, in both ancient and contemporary history, there have been many examples of this, most recently, what we are experiencing in Iraq now, when an individual calls himself the same Caliph and chief of a religious state that he has envisioned. Examples of utopias that become, in reality, dictatorships exist in various places, like what happened with the dream in certain communist countries or what is currently happening in North Korea.
What the grandfather did in the novel is similar to that — it is a form of reaction, a response, a rejection of the dictatorship that was ruling Iraq, creating a dictatorship of another kind.
AA: One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the way in which it creates parallels between the structure of a family and a government. It also creates parallels between paternal authority and religious authority. How do you see the relationship between family and government?
MR: That observation is correct and very important. It is the question of authority — paternal, hierarchical and patriarchal — which we continue to endure in the social, religious and political cultures of the East in general, and in Arab and Islamic culture in particular. All of our life is based in an authority structure, whether in religion or in the systems of government or tribes, up to the smallest social center, the family.
In an environment ruled by dictatorship, the image of the dictator is reflected in all the surrounding mirrors, the minister exercises his authority over his subordinates, the director general, reaching to the director of a high school, and then to the family where the grandfather becomes a dictator, followed by his father, his son, etc, by which means the image of the grandfather in the family becomes mixed with the image of the leader, and even with the image of God. In fact, in the Arabic language, we continue to call the father or the patriarch of the family “the god of the family.” In the novel, I describe that reality, explaining the difficulty of its pressures which cause social fights, external and internal, which influence in a great measure the psychology and destiny of people.
AA: The Tigris River features prominently in two scenes – when Aliya dies and when the grandfather orders the whole family to rid themselves of their possessions and government documents. What is the importance of the river within this story?
MR: The river is the symbol of purity, purification, Mother Nature, life and eternity, and related to the sacred in many cultures, such as India, for example. With regard to Iraq, all of its civilizations and time periods in its history are tied to the rivers, above all, the Tigris and Euphrates.
For me, one of the most beautiful names for Iraq, and one of the ones that is closest to my heart, is the name “the land between two rivers” (Mesopotamia). I was born and grew up in a town on the banks of the river Tigris. For this reason the river, especially the Tigris, appears in almost all my work. During the period in which I lived there, the river represented for us a refuge, security, the most beautiful in a country where everything was being destroyed daily. The river was the only thing in which we trusted and we believed in its eternity, which granted us home with its eternal flow.
About the death of Aliya in the river: It is a compassionate death that signifies the union and conjoining of purity and nature and eternal life.
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Alexandra Atiya is a writer, reporter, and poet. You can find her on twitter at @lexiatiya.
*Muhsin Al-Ramli, born in Iraq in 1967, is a writer, poet, translator, and writes in Arabic and Spanish. Al-Ramli has lived in exile in Madrid since 1993, where he is a professor. He is the author of several books, including short story collections, plays, poetry, nonfiction, and novels, and has translated a number of Spanish classics into Arabic.  Dates on my Fingers was longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2008, and Al-Ramli’s The President’s Gardens was longlisted in 2013.