The New Yorker

Letter From Jordan

The New Yorker/ Fact/ Issue of  7/4/2003  posted 31/3/2003

 

Little Iraq/ by Isabel Hilton/ Frustrated Iraqi exiles view the war with Saddam Hussein

“People don’t want to talk anymore,” said Betool Khedairi, a young Iraqi writer whose first novel, “A Sky So Close,” which was published in the United States two years ago, evokes life in Baghdad before and during the Iran-Iraq war. She said that her fellow-exiles were tired. “Twenty-five years,” she said, “and three wars already. Give us a break.” She tried to shut herself away to write, but images of the casualties of war intruded. “I saw a picture the other day, of a little boy with half a head. Last night, I couldn’t sleep. I got up and wrote something.” She had written about an April Fool’s joke that her father played on her when she was a child. He announced at breakfast that the suspension bridge near her home had fallen into the Tigris River. She set off for school, wondering how she would get there without the bridge. “My bridge was bombed in the first Gulf War and lay in two pieces,” she wrote. “Then my people built it up again. Now the second Gulf War has started, will it be bombed again? Leave our bridges alone. Our children want to go to school.”

Khedairi said that, in a sense, she had never left Baghdad: “You cannot imagine the internal dialogue I have with my eight-thousand-year-old civilization every time I sit down at my desk. We love where we come from. I grew up surrounded by art and books of every kind. In the Arab world, they say that Egyptians write, Lebanese publish, and Iraqis read. But now, after wars, sanctions, children dying, unbelievable rates of cancer and disease, I am so angry I can hardly pick up my pen. I ask myself what is the use of writing? This horrific reality is telling fiction to step aside.”