Syria First? State of chaos
or cohesion
A study on the country's de
facto leaders. How Libya failed itself. And a brutalised Iraq
https://thisweekthosebooks.substack.com/p/syria-first-state-of-chaos-or-cohesion-iraq-libya
The President’s Gardens
By: Muhsin al-Ramli. Translated by Luke Leafgren
Publisher: MacLehose Press
Year: 2017
This take from Iraq is only partly fictional because the
author’s brother was executed by Saddam in 1990.
The story is about an unnamed president, who is both
capricious and cruel. Executions are commonplace. One of those who falls foul
of the regime is Ibrahim ‘the fated’. His childhood friends – Tariq ‘the
befuddled’ and Abdullah ‘Kafka’ – reunite in grief over Ibrahim’s murder. The
novel starts with dull-witted herdsman Ismail puzzling over nine banana crates
on the roadside. But bananas were a rarity in Iraq because of a UN embargo
imposed after Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The first line of the book sets
the tone: “In a land without bananas, the village awoke to nine banana crates,
each containing the severed head of one of its sons”.
Choice quote:
“Each head had a story. Every one of these nine heads had a
family and dreams and the horror of being slaughtered, just like the hundreds
of thousands slain in a country stained with blood since its founding and until
God inherits the earth and everyone on it. And if every victim had a book, Iraq
in its entirety would become a huge library, impossible ever to catalogue”.
I hope you find This Week, Those Books useful, thoughtful,
and…a conversation starter. It’s a small operation here at TWTB, and support
from readers like you helps keep this news literacy project going.
https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/muhsin-al-ramli/the-presidents-gardens/9780857056788/
