Iraq II

God in Pink
Hasan Namir

During a recent work trip, I had some downtime and popped over to Santa Cruz, a surf–hippy college town on the Pacific Coast, some 100 km south of San Francisco. Walking around the bijou downtown, I came across the fantastic if unimaginatively named Bookshop Santa Cruz. I could have wandered the shelves for ages, but I spent an alarmingly large amount of money in a distressingly short amount of time.

 The shop had a whole shelf of international LGBT authors, whose contents in large part went directly into my shopping basket. A couple of the authors were from countries you would not typically expect to find such writing, including Nigeria, South Korea and Iraq. I was particularly pleased at the prospect of updating my 4,000-year-old previous entry for Iraq with something more contemporary.

Set in wartorn, 2003 Baghdad, God in Pink focuses on Ramy, a young man struggling to find the impossible balance between his sexuality, religion and culture, and Ammar, an imam whose beliefs are tested by his dealings with Ramy. The violent horror of war is made to seem nearly normal, a contrast with the vivd urgency of Ramy's self-doubts and questioning.

Another Middle-Eastern book, along with The Sand Fish from the UAE, where the outcome didn't fall into my Western narrative expectations and was more thought-provoking than its 151 pages would belie.

Lebanon

Beirut Blues, Hanan al-Shaykh
حنان الشيخ  بريد بيروت

I really had the most difficult time remembering the title of this book when I was compiling the list of countries I'd already read. I picked up this book by chance off a bookshop shelf when I was at uni, drawn by the look of the cover, with its airmail envelop chevrons and stamps. – I can confirm that it is quite difficult to find a book when all you remember is the cover!

Eventually, with a bit of applied thought, I remembered that the author was a woman, which narrowed down the field of possibilities rather considerably. Hanan al-Shaykh was born into a conservative Muslim family; this would influence her writing considerably which often focuses on the place women in Arab society.

Beirut Blues, translated into English by Catherine Cobham, is written as a series of letters – whence the cover which so captivated me – by a woman struggling to make sense of her life and the world in war-ravaged Beirut. She must choose between staying in Beirut's dangers and frustrations, or emigrating and leaving the country she loves behind.

United Arab Emirates

The Sand Fish
Maha Gargash

An Etihad Airways stopover on a recent flight from Asia to Europe prompted the third destination in my journey to read the world: the United Arab Emirates. Although not available in Singapore, The Sand Fish was widely available at bookstores, tourist shops, and even at some newsagents in the UAE. I picked up my copy as I exited the airport into the dusty haze of Abu Dhabi and made my way to sand dunes of the interior.

As the book was originally written in English, I had the impression that The Sand Fish was intended for outsiders looking in. In the afterword, the author states that this was indeed her intent, but not as I might have suspected, for foreigners reading about Dubai. The discovery of oil brought such monumental and rapid changes the UAE, that the 1950s world described in the book is as foreign to Emiratis today as it is to armchair readers anywhere. 

The Sand Fish proved an interesting reading experience as I found the protagonist rather unlikable. I kept waiting for Noora to save herself from herself in a classic (Western) narrative of self-discovery and emancipation. But, of course, the whole point of reading the world is to get away from the tried-and-tested structures of well-rutted literary paths and be exposed to different ways of being. Looking back on Noora's tale, I recognise that self-discovery and emancipation would have been in short supply for an uneducated woman in 1950s Arabia. Such story simply would not have rung true. With that realisation, the veil dropped – as it were – and The Sand Fish offered an beguiling insight into Noora's life and lifestyle, and why "unlikable" might have actually been "realistic" instead.

Turkey

The Black Book, Orhan Pamuk
Kara Kitap

Rather quite some time ago now, my Mum went on holiday to Turkey. As a going-away present, I sought out a book by a Turkish author to give her for her long plane ride. I managed to find The White Castle, which is Orhan Pamuk's first book translated into English. She passed the book onto me, which I read and loved. Shortly thereafter, his second book in English translation was published, The Black Book, which I eagerly read as well. I have to admit that, sadly, I don't remember it at all. Even looking at the book's Wikipedia page didn't really jog my memory other than to remind me that the book was a bit of a challenge to read – rather too esoteric and metaphysical for the state of mind when I read it on a summer holiday. 

Since then, Pamuk has gone on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006 and has now sold millions of books in dozens of languages. Perhaps it's the right time to revisit Turkey on my literary travels now. 

Morocco

La Civilisation, ma Mère !...
Driss Chraïbi

Going way back in my archives to dig out this North African entry that I read for a high school French class. We were free to choose any novel in French from what was available in the school library. French book covers tend to be exceedingly plain, most often with text only, so I was drawn to this one because of the intriguing cover.

Driss Chraïbi was a Moroccan author writing in French, whose novels deal with colonialism, culture clashes, generational conflict and the treatment of women and are often semi-autobiographical, as is indeed the case with La Civilisation, ma Mère !...

The novel deals with the narrators' attempts to introduce their mother to the modern age as telephones and electricity make their way into a traditional household. The book's second half explores the effects of these changes on the mother and the notion of modernity as her second coming of age.

I was lucky enough to have a classmate of North African origin who was able to help me out with the customs and bits of language that would have otherwise eluded me. A big, and much deferred, shukran to her for helping me out.

Available in English translation under the title Mother Comes of Age. English translator: Hugh Harter.

Iraq

Gilgamesh
𒄑𒂆𒈦

A bit of a stretch to consider this as my Iraq entry, as the Epic of Gilgamesh predates the nation of Iraq by about 4,000 years, but it'll do for now.

Stephen Mitchell, who appears already in my list for his new translation of the Bhagavad Gita, presents a new version of what is regarded as the earliest surviving work of literature. It's a "version" rather than a translation, as Mitchell does not speak ancient Akkadian, the language of the original. Instead, he used previous versions and scholarly works to retell the events in a way that would convey the power and meaning of the original yet be familiar and digestible for modern readers. Mitchell clearly has a knack for that kind of thing, as his version is lively and full of emotion. Quite a feat when the source material is a bunch of clay tablets almost five millennia old.