Interview by Michael Jansen/ Amman  21/3/2003

© The Irish Times     

 

 

Though expected, missile attack still came as shock

 

Although Iraqis living here have been expecting a US attack on Baghdad for many months now, yesterday's salvo of Cruise missiles came as a shock.

Betool Khedairi (37), a novelist, shook her head when asked what she thinks of the beginning of the Bush administration's military campaign against her country. "I can't imagine anybody wanting war. Why did they invest in diplomacy, for heaven's sake?"

Her first novel, A Sky So Close, published in Arabic and English, is about a girl of mixed Iraqi and British parentage, like herself, growing up in a small town in the Iraqi countryside. Written in London during the 1991 Gulf war while she nursed her dying Scottish mother, the book is about the journey of a girl seeking to bridge the gap between the Arab and British cultures. "I was writing away to keep my balance."

Once again she is far from Baghdad, watching "my British side attacking my Iraqi side. That really hurts."

She asked: "If the voices of all the demonstrators and of the human shields [in Baghdad] couldn't  stop this war, how are we going to have peace in this world?"

She is distressed that nothing individuals do can change a course set by politicians. Some- times she wonders, "Why do I bother writing? It doesn't spread awareness."

In 1991 among the first targets were the bridges of Baghdad. The attacks were "to paralyse the city and disrupt communications," she observed. "The bridges that will be bombed in this war are the bridges we are trying to build between east and west."

Echoing the title of her first novel, Ms Khedairi called the current offensive "a war so close". She explained: "When we were young children we used to sleep on rooftops in summer. We felt we could pick the stars out of the sky. But now instead of stars children see balls of fire.

"Since some of my friends died when I was a child, I used to ask my British mum, 'Where do children go when they die?' She replied that they become little angels. But my Iraqi father told me these children went back to Allah because it was maktoob, written, from the day they were born. But nobody told me that when I grew up many countries were going to bomb my country and deprive its children of food and medicine to the extent that reports say every 10 minutes an Iraqi child is dying of sanctions.

"So, if my parents were alive now I would ask: 'Does God really need so many angels? . . . was all this maktoob?" She continued: "I write fiction based on reality but the catastrophe of war asks fiction to step aside, it's so horrific. The tonnage of bombs dropped on Iraq in the first war equalled seven Hiroshima atomic bombs.

"What can we expect this time? We can create heroes in fiction, but this one-sided onslaught has no heroes. My people just have to survive." On Monday Ms Khedairi sent off the English text of her second novel to her publisher in New York. This is a humorous work, comparing the "good old days" with the years of the embargo and describing how families which enjoyed the "good life" have changed during war and sanctions.


© The Irish Times