Top 10 List of Iraqi Fiction/ The Markaz

 

here are 10 books that will help further explore the diversity of Iraqi literature available in English right now.

The President’s Gardens by Muhsin Al-Ramli,

translated by Luke Leafgren

 (MacLehose Press, 2017) 

Set during the last fifty years of Iraqi history, this novel begins with a horrific morning. It is the third day of Ramadan and the village without bananas wakes up to find nine banana crates stacked by the bus stop, each with the severed head of one of its sons. One of them belonged to one of the most wanted men in Iraq, known to his friends as Ibrahim the Fated. The novel explores what it is that warrants such a gruesome ending. Described by Hassan Blasim, Iraqi author of The Iraqi Christ as “a contemporary tragedy of epic proportions,” the novel is masterfully woven from the miserable stories of the real people of Iraq, while highlighting resounding and universal concerns. Think One Hundred Years of Solitude meets The Kite Runner.

When the novel appeared in English in 2017, it was acclaimed by all critics and went on to win the 2018 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. The translation of its sequel, Daughter of the Tigris (2019) was practically published at the same time as publication of the Arabic.

https://themarkaz.org/reading-iraq-our-top-10-list-of-iraqi-fiction/

من عشرة كتب ستساعد في استكشاف تنوع الأدب العراقي المتوفر باللغة الإنجليزية في الوقت الحالي.

حدائق الرئيس لمحسن الرملي

ترجمة لوك ليفغرين  (MacLehose Press, 2017)

تدور أحداث هذه الرواية خلال الخمسين عامًا الأخيرة من التاريخ العراقي، تبدأ بصباح مُرِّوع؛ اليوم الثالث من شهر رمضان حين تستيقظ القرية الخالية من الموز لتجد تسعة صناديق موز مكدسة بجوار محطة الحافلات، ومع كل منها رأس مقطوع لأحد أبناء القرية. كان أحدهم ينتمي إلى أحد أكثر الرجال المطلوبين في العراق، المعروف لدى أصدقائه باسم "إبراهيم قسمة". تستكشف الرواية ما يبرر مثل هذه النهاية البشعة. وصف الرواية حسن بلاسم مؤلف كتاب "المسيح العراقي" بأنها: "مأساة معاصرة ذات أبعاد ملحمية"، الرواية منسوجة ببراعة من القصص البائسة للشعب العراقي الحقيقي، سلطت الضوء على الاهتمامات الهائلة والعالمية. تبدو الرواية وكأنها مائة عام من العزلة وقد دُمجت برواية عداء الطائرة الورقية. عندما نُشرت الرواية باللغة الإنجليزية في العام 2017، نالت استحسان جميع النقاد وفازت بجائزة سيف غباش بانيبال للترجمة الأدبية العربية للعام 2018. نُشرت ترجمة الجزء الثاني: بنت دجلة (2019) عمليًا في نفس وقت نشر اللغة العربية.

https://themarkaz.org/ar/reading-iraq-our-top-10-list-of-iraqi-fiction/

Review: Dates on My Fingers. By: Azeez Jasim

 A Book Review:

 Is it ‘Dates on My Fingers’?

 

By: Azeez Jasim Mohammed

Novel title: “Dates on My Fingers”
Author: Muhsin Al-Ramli
Language: Arabic
Publisher: Al Mada House for publishing
Pages: 173

“Dates on My Fingers” is a novel of moral values that advises readers not to spend time thinking of a plan that reaps nothing finally. The novel focuses on the discrepancy between achieving one’s ends after consuming long time by harnessing all self-abilities and the quality of the results that one reaches afterwards. It gives a lesson that not all enjoyable actions leave good impression after they are over.

Noh, an obedient son of a Shaikh who belongs to a tribe of a huge number of his own people, is changed suddenly into a man who lost his temper and starts behaving savagely. The change in his personality frightened psychologists as his sudden transformation into a whimsical man proves how people can change easily to this extent. Noh spends most of the remaining of his life seeking revenge; not for the sake of ecstasy but for regain rectitude that he lost when his ill daughter is harassed, in his presence, by a son of an influential man. He does not know that he is going to be fatigued by the psychological thinking of revenge which will put an end to his clannish, social and moral pertinence. In the same way that Hamlet does when he abnegates the luxurious and royal life he lives just to make himself convinced whether his mother and his uncle are betrayals when they lead such a harmful conspiracy against his father or not, the inner conflict that leads to his fate.

The context of the story shows the reader that the more time you take to achieve your end, the more disastrous results will be not only on your shoulders but also on those whom you like as well. His reaction to get revenge, which is supported by his relatives, burdens him insofar as burdening them all and it becomes a boring mission though it still sounds interesting to him. The loss that Noh faces, so to speak, is not only ideological, but it is a loss of an individual’s own social entity. This is because the decision of counterattacking, as a reaction to revenge, is a conduct of challenging a state, and it comes to be thought politically as making a rift in the entity of the state itself. No one cares about Noh’s feeling as a father who is insulted in public and in his daughter’s presence. Noh spends his life respecting others in the same way that he expects respect from others and that’s perhaps why he expects more from those who find him doing nothing rather than destruction.

From a rural character into a dude one, from a man of social commitments into an apathetic man, and from obedient into indocile, Noh is seen changed completely throughout the plot of the story. All his family members are shattered here and there in this world, and he finds himself travelling to different countries, changing his habits and dropping most of his values just to bite a dog in the same way that the dog bites him.

The novel reflects Muhsin Al-Ramli’s bad impression about life in diaspora through his experience of living abroad. The author calls for compromise and he tries to forward a message of hope to those who suffers from consuming their life just for the sake of getting revenge. The concept of this novel is quite clear that if you want to live with peace of mind then think as Dale Carnegie puts it “stop worrying and start living.”

-------------------------------------------

*Published: Oman Observer. Feb 26,2023

https://www.omanobserver.om/pdf/2023/02/27/omandailyobserver-20230227-1.pdf?ts=221721

https://www.omanobserver.om/ampArticle/1133323

 

https://www.amazon.com/Dates-My-Fingers-Modern-Literature/dp/9774166442