Inspiring Books About Iraq

In 2003, when the invasion of Iraq was imminent, I put aside the novel I’d started set in Baghdad in the 1920s and looked in the library for books about Iraq in English. I didn’t want history books, though there weren’t many of those anyway, or political treatises, and there weren’t that many of those either. There were quite a few about Saddam Hussein and the Gulf War but that was it. I was searching for books about Iraqis as a people, Iraq as a place; novels, memoirs, and translations of literature, Iraqi poetry. I found almost nothing.

This gave me pause. No wonder it was easy to make Iraqis into an amorphous and terrifying enemy. We in the West had no way into their world at all, except through continuing awful news stories about sanctions and Saddam. It was then that I realised that I had to write something personal about my family that would show what an Iraqi was—in the case of the ones I knew, just ordinary, middle-class people trying to live normal lives in exceptional and unbearable circumstances.

One book I found that did inspire me was Baghdad Diaries: A Woman’s Chronicle of War and Exile by Nuha Al Radi, an account of life in Baghdad during the first Gulf War and the horrific embargo that followed. Here was a voice of an Iraqi woman, telling her tales with dark humour as she would to a diary. This was my first taste of contemporary life in Iraq with all its contradictions and impossible situations. She also compared the fate of Iraqis to the fate of their trees, as I do in my book: “6 June, Isabel said it is the bad environment that is making the oranges fall off the tree; a result of bombs (with barium) dropped during the war. She said that we need to plant four million bomex, ficus and other large leaf trees to improve the quality of the air. The government can import them from Pakistan, which has a similar climate, at the price of 1 dollar per tree; otherwise all our trees will die. What about us, will we die too, and where are we going to get 4 million dollars?”

Two well-known blogs, written by Salam Pax and Riverbend, also became memorable books. Through the Internet, not newspapers, magazines or books, we got the unadulterated opinions of Iraqis as the war was about to start, through the invasion and into the chaos of the aftermath. Again, the humour with which they wrote about the darkest and most terrible events was moving, and a relief to me as an Iraqi who knew that perspective through my own family and friends. The fact that these people couldn’t reveal themselves and yet continued to write added to their allure. For the first time, writers could bypass politics and the mass media and let their audience hear the truth.

Betool Khedairi, author of Absent and A Sky So Close, had not yet been translated into English, but now her novels are widely available and admired in the West. Absent is a black comedy about Baghdadi life told in rich, vivid prose that is modern and arresting. Her characters explode all stereotypes we readers bring to the Arab world and so we are drawn in page after page into the life of mostly Iraqi women living through the sanctions before the 2003 invasion. Khedairi explains in the readers’ guide to the Random House edition that she too was inspired by the same realization I was having at that time, that Westerners did not know anything about Iraqi life and she wanted to invite them into it.

Finally, two memoirs about Jewish Baghdad before World War II, Farewell Babylon by Naim Kattan and Memories of Eden; A Journey through a Jewish Baghdad by Violette Shamash, evoke a cosmopolitan world where all the religious and ethnic groups mixed together, mostly peacefully. Both these books offer details of Iraqi life that are truly gone forever, and for that they are precious. Because the age they write of was not as desperately conflict-ridden as ours, they also depict a peaceful place where people did the usual things, in truly exotic ways, and so we comforted by our sameness while awed by our differences. 

The Orange Trees of Baghdad by Leilah Nadir is published on 13th March 2014 by Simply Read Books.