Beyond Love (Middle East Literature in Translation) (2 page)

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-some 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.