In The President’s Gardens, Refusing to Forget Iraqi History
This
week, around the world, readings will
commemorate the Mutanabbi Street bombing of 2007. Muhsin
Al-Ramli’s acclaimed novel The
President’s Gardens is also a
refusal to forget. The novel chronicles the Saddam Hussein years, and
it has moments when the reader needs to close the book and process. But it also has moments of great
delight:
By Valentina Viene
In
1990, Iraqi author Muhsin Al-Ramli got a personal taste of Saddam Hussein’s
iron grip: His brother, Hassan Mutlak, a celebrated poet, was hanged for
attempting a coup d’état. Al-Ramli fled Iraq as soon as he could, although he
first had to complete his military service, or else he risked imprisonment.
After a period in Jordan, Al-Ramli settled in Spain in 1995. In 23 years of
exile, every single piece of work he has produced has been about Iraq. At an
event organized by Banipal magazine in London this January, Al-Ramli
said he would continue writing about his homeland as long as it was riven by
conflict.
Al-Ramli
is adamant that Saddam Hussein is no hero, contrary to what some Iraqis
currently believe, and that the country’s current situation in Iraq is part of
Saddam’s legacy. Al-Ramli attributes the current idealization of Saddam to a
destructive forgetfulness. That’s why he wrote The
President’s Gardens, a novel published in Arabic in 2012 that will
be available in English this April, thanks to Luke Leafgren’s seamless
translation. The novel is an attempt to write the testimonies of life under
Saddam’s dictatorship into posterity in a way the history books can’t—lest we
forget. All the events described in this novel were either directly experienced
by the author or related to him by others. He assures us they are all real.
Secrets in the president’s gardens
The
President’s Gardens revolves around three men whose
friendship lasts until their death. Two of them, Abdullah and Ibrahim, are
forced to join the army during the Iran-Iraq war and the invasion of Kuwait.
The third, Tariq, is relieved of military service because of his studies and
follows in his father’s footsteps as a religious leader. The idyllic village
where they grew up is a remote place in Northern Iraq where life continues
almost magically—the author fills village life with legends and stories from
the past.
The little community has secrets the
narrator reveals gradually, not just to the readers, but also to the
characters, leaving scars on their souls. It is to this timeless, nostalgic
place that Abdullah and Ibrahim dream of returning after the war, but things
don’t go according to plan. Abdullah had hoped to marry Sameeha, Tariq’s sister
and a woman who loves him, but during his absence she is betrothed to a man she
does not love.
Ibrahim meanwhile moves to Baghdad to
work and support his wife, who has cancer and needs treatment. Soon she dies,
and he finds himself doing a job he both hates and has to keep secret: He’s a
gravedigger in the president’s gardens. Ibrahim has information he could be
killed for, and, as a consequence, he becomes increasingly withdrawn. He spends
more time with the dead than with the living. He finds meaning in secretly
cataloguing the corpses so that, if someone were ever to go and look for them,
they could be identified.
When Abdullah and Ibrahim finally manage
to return to Baiji, after the Kuwaiti invasion, they are so demoralized all
they wish for is peace and safety. While struggling to rid themselves of the
ghosts of the past, they reflect on how the wars have taken away the best years
of their lives and, what’s worse, they can’t move on. Ibrahim finds a purpose
in life, in secretly taking people to consult his catalogues of the dead in his
Baghdad flat. For this, he is killed.
Untold stories
The novel explores the untold stories of
those Iraqi soldiers who were made prisoners in the 80s, during the
Iraq-Iran war, the last of whom were released in 2003. It also offers an
insight into military life: hazing rituals, torture, the UN’s attempts to
document the degradations of some prisons, the submission soldiers had to learn
from very early on, the friendships amongst comrades, and upsetting scenes of
death. There are moments when you need to close the book and allow yourself to
process what you’re reading.
Luckily, to compensate, there are some
absolutely delightful moments. Some are poignant images, as when Abdullah
returns to his village after years away and his blind adoptive mother touches
his beard, asking if it has become white. Some of these are moments of love, as
when Ibrahim visits his wife in hospital wearing his wedding suit, and they
forgive each other for their shortcomings. Or there are funny moments as, in
the three friends’ youth, when they hide in the forest and pull their pants
down to see who is the most “equipped.”
The reader senses the characters’
indissoluble relationship with the earth is a reflection of the author’s own
ties to his homeland. He depicts the Iraqi soil as one with an ancient history,
a place where, “People often found urns, bracelets, earrings, tablets, belts,
swords, and armor made from brass, gold and silver” when they built their mud
houses. By the end of the novel, this soil becomes ground for the deceptively
luxurious presidential gardens, a symbol of Iraq’s flowering of carnage.
The perils of refusing to remember
A central theme to the novel is the
tragedy of forgetting. After Ibrahim comes back from the war in Kuwait,
adolescent Qisma, his daughter, looks at him with contempt. As she’s had no
dialogue with her father, all she sees in him is a weak man who always accepted
his fate, even the choice of a wife.
Qisma, which in fact means destiny,
hates her father’s acceptance of fate so much so that she changes her name and
rebels against everything her father represents. She marries a man who has a
picture of the tyrant tattooed on his arm, who chooses Saddam as a name for
their son. On the one hand, the older generation hates Saddam, as they barely
manage to survive their tragic experiences. On the other, the new generation
has completely lost touch with reality and has gone so far as to idolize the
dictator. But no one is exempt from his oppression: Qisma’s husband is tortured
to death, and she is raped by none other than Saddam himself.
The
President’s Gardens is reminiscent of One
Hundred Years of Solitude in its effort to commit to memory
the history of a country and, like Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece, it is an
intensely political book. We are presented, in the very first page, with the
arrival in the village of nine banana crates, each containing a severed head.
One of them is Ibrahim’s. This episode coincides with the American invasion of
Iraq. Here, the author highlights how the banana boxes have come from abroad,
as bananas are not native to Iraq. In this scene, Al-Ramli makes us question
who the instigators are. It could be the Americans, or more likely Saddam’s
henchmen, or even his opponents. The macabre scene suggests we are entering a
new cycle of violence but, at the same time, Ibrahim’s small act of cataloguing
has allowed some families to find the bodies of their relatives and, with them,
some form of closure.
The
President’s Gardens was longlisted for the IPAF in 2013 and
won the PEN Translates award in 2016.
Muhsin
Al-Ramli is a Professor at Saint Louis University, Madrid; he has published
both novels and poetry. Two of his novel,s Scattered Clouds and Dates on my Fingers,
have been translated into English. He is co-editor of Al-Wah,
an Arab cultural magazine based in Spain, and he has also translated several
Spanish classics to Arabic, including Cervantes’ Don
Quixote.
Valentina
Viene (valeviene.wixsite.com/kashafa) is a translator from Arabic into
English and Italian and a literary scout focusing on contemporary Arabic
literature. A graduate of the Orientale, Naples, she has translated a number of
Arab authors and her articles have appeared in Italian academic journals and
blogs. She has lived in and around the MENA region for several years.
-----------------------------
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario