Excerpt from an article in French ‘Elle’, 18 November 2002
Annick Le Floc’hmoan

Betool Khedairi is wearing a short, open-neck blouse and driving her car through the streets of Amman. This young 37 year-old woman, a writer whose first novel will soon be published in French by Gallimard, was born in Baghdad to an Iraqi father and a Scottish mother. She left Iraq, where she grew up and studied, in 1990; her father had just died and her mother, who was suffering from cancer, was undergoing treatment in London. She now lives in Amman: “I needed to be in an Arab country, in this culture and this sensibility, for I dream and feel in Arabic. But when there’s a problem to be solved, I think in English,” she explains. She wrote her first book, A Sky So Close, in Arabic. This beautiful coming-of-age novel, set in Iraq, was warmly received in the United States. In it, Betool Khedairi writes with much tenderness of a childhood spent near orchards of apricot trees with intertwining branches, of a very gentle father, of nights spent on the rooftop, sleeping under the stars. But then, as she writes in her book, everything changes when the war with Iran breaks out in 1980. From that moment on, children can no longer sleep outside due to the air raids; students are unable to go overseas to study and bring back the richness of other cultures; foreign magazines disappear from the bookstores. Formerly quite open to the outside world, Irak now shrinks into its shell. Pharmacies no longer sell contraceptives: it becomes necessary to increase the country’s population in order to replace the thousands of lives lost on the battlefield. Marriage is promoted on television, with a view to encouraging pregnancy, and the new custom of ‘mass marriages’is born: thousands of brides, all dressed alike in the same white gowns, simultaneously say ‘I do’ to bridegrooms who are about to leave for the war. Today, Betool Khedairi refuses to talk politics, maintaining that she lives only in the world of literature. Her novel, however, paints a gripping portrait of Iraq during the 80s, when loved ones returned from the war wounded, and the screech of sirens obliterated the good life of happier times. Sadly, as grim it was, the Iraq depicted in Khedairi’s novel was not yet the Iraq of extreme terror and poverty that it is today.