Dr. Hamdan Dammag
28/12/2023

During a recent literary seminar we attended in Sharjah, the Iraqi novelist Betool Khedairi gifted me two of her novels, including this beautiful one titled “Absent”,  and her debut novel “A Sky So Close.”

The protagonist of “Absent”, a young woman named Dalal with a crooked mouth caused by a mild stroke in childhood, recounts the stories of many characters who she considers her small family and their neighbors living in the same apartment building in central Baghdad. She tells the story in a stunningly cinematic style, describing scenes about daily encounters of the characters living under grim sanctions after many wars (and more that are coming) during a historically critical and sensitive period in Iraq’s life — for both its people and its nation.

The author, Betool Khedairi (who is the daughter of an Iraqi father and a Scottish mother, and currently resides in Jordan), was quite successful in making dark  comedy, sharp, witty humor the backbone of the narrative in this beautiful novel which made this an enjoyable read.

 You are continuously squeezed between smiles and laughs that the writing  extracts out of you through the characters that pull you in quickly, and your deep  awareness of the catastrophe and tragedy that the side events throw in your face — details you come to know for the first time in their most human and intimate level in the context of disaster, war, and fragmentation.

Despite the acceleration of events and the fates of the characters towards the end of the novel — which does not quite match the elegant narrative development from the beginning — and despite the novel being crowded with scientific information that was not necessarily essential, it remains a truly beautiful and enjoyable read. Its core message reaches you at the end, loud and clear , as you sigh with sorrow, certain of a truth you have always known: The tragedy of Iraq is your tragedy, O Arab — wherever you are, and wherever you may be.