Beyond Love (Middle East Literature in Translation) Read online

  Abundance from the Desert: Classical Arabic Poetry

  Raymond Farrin

  Alfred Farag and Egyptian Theater: The Poetics of Disguise, with Four Short Plays and a Monologue

  Dina A. Amin

  Canceled Memories: A Novel

  Nazik Saba Yared

  Nadine Sinno, trans.

  Contemporary Iraqi Fiction: An Anthology

  Shakir Mustafa, ed. and trans.

  I, Anatolia, and Other Plays: An Anthology of Modern Turkish Drama, Volume Two

  Talat S. Halman and Jayne L. Warner, eds.

  Ibrahim the Mad, and Other Plays: An Anthology of Modern Turkish Drama, Volume One

  Talat S. Halman and Jayne L. Warner, eds.

  Martyrdom Street

  Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet

  My Bird

  Fariba Vafi

  Mahnaz Kousha and Nasrin Jewell, trans.

  The Pistachio Seller

  Reem Bassiouney

  Osman Nusairi, trans.

  Popular Turkish Love Lyrics and Folk Legends

  Talat S. Halman

  Jayne L. Warner, ed.

  With a Foreword by miriam cooke

  HADIYA HUSSEIN

  Translated from the Arabic by lkram Masmoudi

  HADIYA HU55EIN is an Iraqi writer who has published many novels and short stories. She currently lives in Amman, Jordan. Beyond Love is her first novel to be translated into English.

  IKRAM MASMOUDI was educated in Tunisia and France, where she got her PhD from the University Stendhal Grenoble III in textual linguistics. In 2001 she obtained the Agregation d'arabe and taught Arabic language and culture at the Universite de Provence. She has extensive teaching experience. She has taught courses of all levels of Arabic and courses on modern Arabic literature at Middlebury College, Duke University, and Princeton University. In the fall of 2008 she joined the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Delaware, where she chairs the Arabic Program and codirects the UD Winter Study Abroad Program in Tunisia. Her research interests are in language and literature, and she is currently working on a book about Iraqi war fiction.

  Foreword, MIRIAM COOKE ix

  Acknowledgments xiii

  Introduction xv

  Beyond Love 1

  MIRIAM COOKE

  Long the capital of Arab culture, Iraq is a country that has been wracked by wars for more than a half century. However, coups, military dictatorships, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, and the American invasion have not succeeded in destroying the spirit and creativity of a people that has survived millennial violence. Women have contributed in important and distinctive ways to the construction of a vibrant and resilient culture, and Hadiya Hussein's Beyond Love is a noteworthy example. It is part of a genre of war literature that Arab women have been creating for the past thirty years.

  The novel is set in the post-i99i period when the Shiites in southern Iraq were under surveillance and in danger of death for having participated in the uprising against Saddam Hussein shortly after the Gulf War. It tells of the price people paid for opposing the dictator or even only exercising their right not to vote for the president "who stole our lives and destroyed our hopes." Not to be a Baath member and to be generally disengaged from politics is to be under suspicion: "all citizens are guilty until they are proven innocent." The terror of the system is revealed in the assurance that "the voter's name and address are secretly printed on the voting cards. Electronic machines will find the traitors. The punishment will be stronger than they imagine." The only solution is to change identity and leave Iraq.

  The novel bridges Basra/Baghdad and Amman, war and exile. Intermixing flashback, memoir, intertextual references to other Iraqi war writers, and first-person narration of exilic life in Amman, the narrator interweaves her experiences with those of Nadia, a friend who died before the novel's beginning. They are writers forced into demeaning factory work in the time of the international embargo and then into exile in Jordan after the Gulf War. They are creators whose survival challenges the destructiveness of war.

  In Amman the narrator runs across Nadia's autobiographical notebook that forms a thread throughout the novel. It is a pastiche of memories strung together randomly from the story of her birth to her university years to a "hundred anxious and horrifying hours under the most violent bombing by the militaries of thirty countries" to the twenty-hour car ride to Jordan across the Iraqi desert made famous in 1963 by Ghassan Kanafani's classic story of Palestinian escape Men in the Sun. The narrative moves between Nadia's notebook and the narrator's deadly days in Amman.

  The hardship of life in Amman is evoked through descriptions of small dirty rooms, stinking sheets, respected professionals who are lucky if they can scrape together a meager subsistence, and the enervating tedium that strips the individual of all desire to act. Dreams of home and of beautiful places far from the present hell punctuate the endless wait for work or for notification of asylum that is often refused. The depression is etched in stories of mothers who have lost contact with their sons and who are eventually sent to a place where they know nobody.

  While writing about a very particular case, Hadiya Hussein takes her reader into the universal anxiety of those who have left loved ones behind, who are obsessed with the need to be in touch with them, and who are confused by the possibility of falling in love again. The fleeting promise of love for those who have been through the horrors of war and the phone that rings without answer in the far-away home vividly convey the despair of the alienated exile who no longer belongs anywhere.

  The translation of this novel was made possible with the help and encouragement of many friends and colleagues. I thank Hadiya Hussein for giving me the chance to translate her novel. I am also particularly indebted to miriam cooke, who gave me the idea of undertaking this translation and encouraged me throughout the process. My gratitude goes to my friend Chris Chism, who read the early draft and made helpful comments. Special thanks to my editor, Annie Barva. Finally, I thank very warmly Mary Selden Evans from Syracuse University Press for her constant encouragement.

  Hadiya Hussein is one of the leading voices in Iraqi fiction today. She has distinguished herself in the writing of short stories and novels of war and exile. Beyond Love is her third novel. It gives us a powerful account of the survival of the Iraqi people after senseless wars and portrays the vagrancy of those who have been forced out of the country because of war, taking us to their place of refuge: Amman, Jordan. Hussein opens her novel with a powerful verse by Lisan al-Din Ibn al-Khatib (1313-74), a famous poet and one of the greatest writers and statesmen of Muslim Spain. He was known as "the Double Vizier," a reference to his intellectual erudition and his role as a statesman. Ibn alKhatib was accused of heresy, imprisoned in 1374, and killed by hired assassins. While in prison, he wrote powerful poetry reflecting on his destitution and his fate. Hussein chose this verse for its linguistic and stylistic subtlety:

  It aptly describes the Iraqi people's situation, capturing poignantly how, once forming a great nation, they became subjugated and fell into a state of decrepitude and ruin under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and the many wars he brought upon the country.

  An Iraqi exile in Amman since the 199os, Hussein narrates in Beyond Love the loss and perdition that befell her country after the First Gulf War in 1991. During the thirteen years of economic sanctions that followed the war, the people suffered not only the scarcity of food and necessary products, but the lack of freedom and a strangling state of surveillance and fear from constantly tightening government control. Many of the Iraqis who could afford to do so fled the country-s
ome left under false identities, others under medical excuses. Long before the current war and its dramatic consequences on the fabric of Iraqi society, Iraqis had already become a scattered people, revealing their pain throughout the world and reopening their wounds in an effort to come to terms with the past and heal their memory. Despite its lack of opportunities, Amman is the closest border for the fugitive Iraqi people and a meeting point where they tell their sorrow and grief while waiting to be granted refugee status or to be relocated somewhere else in the world through the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

  One of the most illuminating aspects of the novel is its narration of the defeat of 1991, the Shiite uprising in Basra and southern Iraq, and the impact of the years of sanctions. Basra and southern Iraq are very important in the novel. Two of the main characters, Nadia and Moosa, originated there, and both give us firsthand accounts about what happened. Basra is one of the most important towns in Iraq. Its religious ties with and geographic proximity to Iran and its closeness to Kuwait are important factors in any attempt to understand how the people of this town and of southern Iraq in general were impacted and their lives stigmatized by successive wars with Iran and then with Kuwait and the coalition forces led by the United States in the First Gulf War. Basra's population is mostly Shiite, and many collectively felt marginalized and excluded from genuine participation and collaboration with the northern Sunni communities during Saddam Hussein's regime. It was from Basra that Iraqi troops went south to invade Kuwait in August 199o, and it was to Basra that they returned defeated in February 1991. The novel poetically documents the Iraqi army's humiliation through Moosa, a soldier returning from Kuwait to Basra. He describes how these beaten soldiers not only had to swallow their bitterness and mortification, but also were targeted and crushed by air attacks as they went home.

  This defeat triggered a large-scale uprising of the southern Shiite community. The spark started in Basra and spread to other southern towns. The South in general had suffered much devastation during the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War and had provided the army with the bulk of its infantry units. In addition to citizens and demoralized troops who returned from the front, the revolt involved support from agents of the Islamic Dawa Party and some Iraqi Shia militant groups based in Iran. According to Anthony Cordesman and Ahmed Hashim, "The uprising began when infantry soldiers streamed back to Basra bringing back with them tales of horror and defeat. These troops and sympathetic Shiites citizens launched attacks against government installations, including security party and popular army buildings.... [W]ithin days the revolt had spread to major cities including the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf as well as the towns of Diwaniya, al-Hillah, al-Kut and al-Amarah and Mahmoudiya.."l

  The Shiite revolt spread and benefited from the presence of the coalition forces and from the help of Iraqi militant groups who were based in Iran. But the uprising failed to take root because of a lack of organization and the absence of a clear vision. The Iraqi Republican Guard eventually brutally crushed it; within a few weeks, thousands of people were killed, and many more died during the following months. In addition, nearly two million people fled for their lives. Cordesman and Hashim describe the aftermath: "The rebels paid a heavy price when the Iraqi government fought back with its most loyal units, the Republican Guards, and made liberal use of helicopter gunships in the towns where the rebels were holed up. A large number of hapless civilians caught up in the crossfire fled into the zone of the Marshes, the coalition controlled areas, or even into Iran. The tide turned in the government's favor when Basra and Karbala were secured on March 12 and 17, 1991112

  The regime put to death captured rebels or tortured them in the most horrifying ways. In the novel, the character Nadia fled with her family from Basra to Baghdad when the uprising was crushed. In her diary, she relates how all those who escaped the violence in the South had to be relocated in Basra in 1993. Her lover was among the soldiers who disappeared during the uprising and never returned. Through her diary and her letters to him from her exile in Amman, her love comes across stronger than all the machinery of war and the years of exile that separate her from him.

  The novel's historical context is also dominated by the consequences of the strict economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations against Iraq. Because of the sanctions, Iraq's population was devastated socially, economically, and psychologically. The novel's female characters, Nadia and Huda, experience deprivation and disempowerment in Baghdad while they work at the alAmal Factory (Factory of Hope) for men s underwear. An unhealthy atmosphere of fear and humiliation dominates the factory, and the women workers are abused and controlled by a ruthless boss paradoxically named "Shafiqa," the Arabic word for "kindness" and "sympathy." The atmosphere in the factory replicates the feeling of the whole country. The women working in these humiliating conditions are widows, divorcees, and young women unable to find husbands. They try to survive in a country where the living conditions have become very difficult in the absence of men, who would under normal circumstances be providing for them. Stubbornness pushes Huda, the main character and one of the workers in the factory, to write "No" instead of the required "Yes" on her ballot in a presidential election. But fear of the consequences of her action compels her to flee the country to Amman, leaving behind her grandmother and the Baghdad she loves to join the lines of Iraqis who wait in front of the Refugee Office.

  Her life in Amman is full of sad encounters, grief, and remembrance. In the form of letters, diaries, and memoirs of the war, the defeat, and the uprising, Hussein's characters-Huda, her coworker Nadia, and Moosa, whom Huda meets at the Refugee Office in Ammangive their accounts of these years of fear and torture.

  "This is everything."

  A leather handbag containing a wallet with many pockets and a small notebook... a pair of jeans, a long coat, four woolen sweaters, three shirts ... a few books-some literary and some about Iraq during and after Desert Storm-and a large notebook for memories ...a ceramic cup containing seashells, colored beads, and small, strangely shaped stones-I had no idea where Nadia had gotten them. "I'll keep just the books and the handbag," I told the landlady before losing myself again in the street. "You can give the rest to those who might need it." Nadia's death had struck me like a thunderbolt. How, I wondered, can a car driven by a reckless driver end the life of someone looking only for a safe refuge after fleeing the hell of her homeland?

  The street swallowed me. It was as tumultuous with the noise of cars and pedestrians as my mind was with its many questions and a single, unwavering answer: "This is how death comes, as a visitor whose knock you never expect at your door. Sometimes it enters without knocking and surprises you before you stand up. Death has the keys to everything locked and doesn t need permission to enter."

  I mourned her silently and painfully in my tiny refuge, a room high on the slopes of Mount al-Hussein and cursed the day I'd run into her again. Our memories were supposedly buried in Baghdad. What made them come back to the surface again, weaving once more their web of sorrow and exile in Amman?

  OUR ENCOUNTER in Amman was unexpected; in fact, it seemed impossible. Even when I was still in Baghdad, I never thought we would meet again; I always thought she had settled in Basra. The last time I called her was in 1994, just before all the phone numbers were changed. Over those years, memory had finally come to the verge of throwing off the weight it carried. How else could it handle all the calamities, the wars, the embargo, the uprooting?

  In the Friday market near the Abdali complex, crowded with people, cars, vintage clothing, peddlers, beggars, vegetable merchants, and food kiosks, there we were, side by side. Fate had squeezed us into a narrow corner between a wall of used clothes suspended like hanging corpses and piles of garments crammed into closed boxes and smelling of mothballs. At first, I didn t notice our chance proximity. We were turning over the clothes, looking for the ones that were clean and cheap.

  We might have gone our separate ways if it hadn't
been for her voice, full of Iraqi grief. "What's the problem? Everything is so expensive. You have to bring the price down."

  I started, snatching my hands back from the shirt I was about to buy.

  When I first heard her voice, I wasn't sure that it was Nadia. I don't know if I was attracted by the language-I missed speaking with an Iraqi accent-or if my subconscious recognized her first.

  There we were, face-to-face after a handful of yearsmute, paralyzed. We could find nothing to say. It was as if each of us wanted to release a cry from the depths, but the cry withdrew, clearing the way for tears. We didn't know whether the source of our tears was the joy of the encounter or the sadness about what we had left behind. We stared at each other a long moment before we broke out with names ... and tears.

  THE STORY of my first encounter with Nadia starts at a men's underwear factory called Factory of Hope, Factory of Amal, located at al-Karrada and owned by Mr. Fatih. He was a corpulent man with a dark complexion, prominent belly, and bald head hidden by a cotton hat. He usually came into the factory after two o'clock and never stayed more than two hours. He confidently left arrangements and regulations to the watchful supervision of Shafiqa, a woman heading toward her forties with a constantly terrified but alert face.

  Shafiqa had a sharp and fiery temperament. She had earned her authority through her fierce commitment to handling everything, big or small, as though she were the real owner of the factory. When she spoke, she waved her hands to the left and to the right as if shooting the words from between her fingers. As soon as she finished speaking, she would drop her hands down by her sides, where they looked forlorn without any movement. Her kohl-lined eyes constantly roamed the corners of the rectangular room, where she controlled twenty-five female workers sitting behind sewing machines for eight hours a day. The humid room had only one window, which looked out on a small yard used for the lunch break, and was decorated with shoddy handwritten excerpts from the speeches of the president, whose portrait hung at the factory entrance.