Review
A touching and traumatic
journey through Iraq’s troubled Twentieth Century.
Spilt Ink Review
The President’s Gardens follows Iraq’s Twentieth Century through the story of three best
friends, giving depth, humour and humanity to a country, the name of which is
for so many synonymous with war and strife.
Ibrahim the Fated, Abdullah Kafka and
Tariq the Befuddled (the former for his resigned nature, the next for his
melancholy and the latter for obvious reasons) are the three friends whose
personalities dominate and entertain their tiny village. Between them they span
Iraqi society from rich to poor, devout to cynical and their journey to
adulthood is told with a delightfully twinkly eyed, distinctly earthy humour.
From their childhood playground antics, adolescent forays into masturbation and
sex and eventual coming of age through military service you feel and deep
affection and attachment for them making their trials (and the trials of their
country) all the more personally felt.
Their rustic and
rural village is an isolated spot, the outside world only occasionally
intruding in the form of illicit arms trading with neighbouring Kurds and news
brought by camel by the Bedouin. However as the 20thCentury rolls on and war creeps closer
to home, the elders rose tinted talk of the distant ’48 Palestinian war gives
way to the full horrors of the Iran-Iraq War so often forgotten in the west
with all its pointless death, chemical weapons, decades spent in prison camps
and the endless hatred such experiences produce. For the three friends the war
brings loss, heartbreak, disability and captivity, teaching them all to be
cynical of and resigned to the horrors of the dictatorship that tightens its
grip on Iraqi society throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s. We meet this
dictatorship when Ibrahim the Fated gets a job as a gardener for the president
and he is first exposed, first to the opulence of the countries ruling caste
and later their brutality, when he is ‘promoted,’ to the role of burying the
bodies of the purged. This section of the novel outstrips any of the war scenes
in its depiction of unbridled, functional brutality and horror, the bodies are
at least buried however, unlike in the books closing pages as he vacuum left by
the toppling of that dictatorship brings forth new horror as humanity crumbles
as people lose their restraints and the most aggressive and unscrupulous of
people are allowed to flourish.
This is the Iraq so many know from news
footage of desolate and corpse strewn streets. Vicious militias rule in the
absence of any central authority and have turned the cities into, “labyrinths
of ghosts,” and Iraq in plundered from all sides but despite that Al-Ramli
never stoops to finger pointing. Blame is apportioned to wrongdoers regardless
of faith or nation and the central tenant of the book is upheld. That the
common people are good, and the common people can survive whatever history and
circumstance throws at them with at least some sense of decency intact.
Having never read any modern Arabic
literature before the writing style is light as a feather and completely
refreshing compared to the often deliberately complex writing of so many
western authors. Weaving together modern language, humour and references with
an older style of storytelling that allows each character to tell his or her
story all in one go is relatively unusual in the modern novel and is as
instinctively well absorbed as it is enjoyable. This never gets in the way of
the terror of the present day however, the book closes in a disturbing, open
ended fashion that reflects the danger Iraq’s current instability.
As an
introduction to Iraqi writing and recent history, The
President’s Gardens deserves recognition as a brilliant
depiction of a nation’s transformation from garden, to gaol to graveyard and
through it Muhsin Al-Ramli has given a voice to a people for so long crushed
and buffeted by the forces of history that lie so far outside their control.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario