The Loved Ones

by Alia Mamdouh

  Al-Ghulama, Mamdouh says in an interview, is based on a true incident of a neighbor and friend of hers who was raped in the Olympic Stadium, which was turned into a detention center in a somber period of Iraqi history in 1963 when the national guard took it over. The violation triggered in Mamdouh what she calls “all this cruelty in [her] fingers” as she wrote painfully of the incident (Al-Wardani 2004, 8). The rape here is symbolic of the violation of an entire society and reminiscent of innocent and deceived Layla in Mamdouh’s first novel. Salam Ibrahim, an Iraqi critic who lives in Denmark, reads this novel as the disillusionment of an idealist, intellectual woman who then turns into a seeker of instant pleasures. The political utopian thinking of Sabiha—the woman protagonist—gets monstrously deformed as it confronts a hellish reality. In his brilliant article, Ibrahim sees this novel as an anatomy of human deformation in a repressive and pent-up setting. Sabiha, a university student “who believed in the revolutionary discourse and dreamt of freedom,” finds herself violated physically. In an effort to make sense of her life, we are introduced to her writing an autobiography for a literary contest. The text reveals structures of repression where social puritanism is lined by cruelty. From her beginnings as a dreamy Marxist, Sabiha becomes a nymphomaniac seeking sex anywhere and everywhere. She indulges in sex with Mus’ab, the husband of her best friend Huda with whom she had earlier a lesbian relation (thus linking this novel with the characters of Al-Wala‘), with a handsome foreigner in a tourist hotel in Vienna, with a pious colleague, etc. In the process of narrating the tragic conditions of Sabiha, other sub-stories surface, revolving around taboo-breaking.

  The Loved Ones

  The penultimate novel by Alia Mamdouh, Al-Mahbubat (2003a), can be translated as “The Loved Ones,” even though the Arabic is more specific and gives away the female gender of the loved ones. The novel is essentially about female bonding and its role in the survival of the central figure, Suhaila Ahmad, an Iraqi exile in Paris, suffering from a coma caused by a brain stroke. There are, of course, men as well as women in Mamdouh’s novel, and they are of crucial significance in the unfolding of the narrative, most notably Nader, the son of Suhaila, and Faw, her dance partner on stage. However, the novel teems particularly with female voices and presence.

  While Naphtalene is a bildungsroman of an Iraqi heroine in the 1950s and 1960s, Al-Mahbubat revolves around a middle-aged Iraqi woman in her fifties living in Paris. At the opening of the novel, she is lying in a hospital in a state between life and death, surrounded by a dizzying galaxy of Arab and European friends. Scenes of Suhaila in her sick bed and her entourage are reported by her son, the narrator, who resides in Canada and who has come rushing to Paris to attend to his hospitalized mother. Mamdouh chose a very dramatic moment in life to recount the present (1990s), while recalling the past in bits and pieces as memory does at such critical junctures.

  The narrative plot recedes in the work of Alia Mamdouh in general, and in this novel in particular, creating what amounts to juxtaposed tableaux through which glimpses of present life and friendships are exposed and intertwined with remembrance of times past. All of these strata of events and sensations create a vivid view of Iraqi society at home and abroad with an emphasis on the Iraqi diaspora in the last decade of the millennium. While Naphtalene represented the progressive stages of growing up in a politicized, taboo-ridden, Iraqi society, The Loved Ones deftly presents the cultural dimension of a scattered Iraqi society. In The Loved Ones the political is subsumed rather than highlighted. Here Mamdouh succeeds brilliantly in evoking Iraqi ways in a concrete and sensual manner, so that we can almost feel, hear, see, and smell that very special Iraqi way of life; that specificity that makes Iraqis stand out (for better or worse). In conversation and in the protagonist’s reminiscences, various Iraqi dialects and regional colloquialisms, culinary traditions, folk music, modes of dressing, and makeup are beautifully integrated in scenes of a woman on the verge of death, with her friends hovering around her.

  In Naphtalene, the setting is made up of Iraqis struggling on their own grounds against British hegemony; in The Loved Ones, the Iraqis are dispersed in the four corners of the world, trying to make sense of their tragic history. But the novel includes far more than Iraqis. Suhaila’s friends come from all over the world: They are Lebanese, Sudanese, Tunisians, Palestinians, French, Swedes, etc. The French feminist critic and playwright named Tessa Hayden in the novel seems patterned after Hélène Cixous, to whom the novel is dedicated. The novel also refers indirectly to Cixous when referring to the Théâtre du Soleil, where Cixous worked closely as a playwright with director Adriane Mnouchkine. Dozens of characters in The Loved Ones, some of them less known than Cixous, can easily be identified by those who know Mamdouh’s milieu in Paris. The list of characters may seem endless and at times confusing to the inattentive reader. Their mode of articulating and their ways of behaving identify them ethnically and psychologically. We get to distinguish the specificity of each while we go on reading snippets of their conversations.

  The first part of the novel, made up of nineteen chapters, presents the encounter of Nader with his mother’s friends at the hospital where they gather during visiting hours. Having received an e-mail message from his mother’s friend Caroline, he arrives anxious, jet-lagged, and distraught. We perceive the rest of the characters through the eyes of Nader, intertwined with memories of his childhood, adolescence, parents, and his own wife and son. The second part of the novel is narrated by Suhaila, through the format of diaries and correspondence, which occur chronologically before the first part. Thus the novel unfolds with two points of view, that of the son and that of the mother. Most of the other characters are seen through two lenses, portrayed by both mother and son, albeit somewhat differently.

  The part narrated by Suhaila is subdivided, in turn, into two sections; her diaries in Paris are followed by her diaries in Canada where she has gone to visit her son and to be present for the birth of her grandson. Suhaila’s diaries introduce various characters one by one as she inscribes her thoughts on paper. It would have been easier for the reader to enter into the fictional world of the novel if Mamdouh had begun with the diaries that neatly expose characters, and then moved to Nader’s visit and his involvement in the dynamics of group conversations and interactions. Mamdouh seems to have opted for reversing the order of time to enmesh the reader in the complex scenes first, before moving to unravel the ambiguities. This playing back rather than playing forward—as in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, though far more complex than his drama—challenges readers and invites them to draw a human map and a human archive in otherwise fragmented and ruptured lives.

  There is a closure of sorts in the novel that takes place at the end of Nader’s narration. Surrounded by genuine friends who care, this bonding seems to help Suhaila to recover little by little and to overcome her death-in-life state. She opens her eyes and regains consciousness slowly but surely. Her women friends celebrate this recovery by dying her hair and applying makeup in steps that are depicted in minute detail. Unlike Gustave Aschenbach’s grooming in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, which disguises old age in a pathetic way, here the grooming is a celebration of survival, more reminiscent of collective rites to cleanse and get rid of bad spirits as we see, for example, at the finale of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

  Since the novel presents a multitude of figures often encountered in a group setting, Mamdouh uses stylistic registers to differentiate them. Not only does she use dialects, but also ideological orientations and lifestyles that are contrasted and juxtaposed through dialogue and the correspondence. Different religious and linguistic affiliations do not prevent the group from converging. In many ways, and oddly enough, Mamdouh does not celebrate the commonly accepted concept of friendship, as understood by the Arab medieval writer, Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi, who defined it as “the self reflected in the other.” Rather, for Mamdouh, a friend is someone who complements the self and thus is necessarily different from the self. Rarely
has difference and heterogeneity been celebrated in a novel and portrayed so sympathetically. The group of friends depicted by Mamdouh constitutes a dazzling kaleidoscope by their very differences—religious, ethnic, generational, national, etc. Mamdouh seems to be offering intuitively in her novel a contrapuntal model to the current view of friendship as fraternal, based on similarity and identity, and thus based on exclusion of the other. Mamdouh’s model is that of friendship as sororal bonding based on difference, otherness, and inclusion. This sisterly circle does not exclude men; the circle of friends, though primarily made up of women, included men as well. It is that spark associated with “compassionate feminism” that can be associated with anyone, male or female. At one point in the novel Suhaila addresses her son Nader, saying: “inside of you I see a mother, a sister, some kind of soothing feminine touch” (25). Perhaps unwittingly, Mamdouh converges with Jacques Derrida’s radically new idea of friendship as inclusive democracy, which he developed in his book, Politics of Friendship (1997).

  It is tempting to see in Suhaila a metaphor for Iraq. Her survival, as suggested in the novel, is not a matter of medical treatment or a surgical operation, but a question of collective bonding, of bringing the polyphonic and the heterogeneous together. But the novel, in my reading, is not only about Iraq, though Iraq is ever present in it. It is more about survival in a horrific world; it is about light at the end of a tunnel, about the possibility of overcoming the most harrowing of experiences, and about the significance of human bonding and moral support, not withstanding identity-based and sectarian politics.

  The style of Alia Mamdouh is unique and does not belong to any school of feminist or non-feminist writing. It belongs to her and is hers alone. She moves from depicting crisp details—that only an observant eye can detect—to lyrical flares, with incredible ease and aesthetic coherence. In doing so, she reveals the inner core of being and writes de profundis.

  Suhaila, herself, is an actress and a dancer. Ironically, she finds her true self when she is on stage, when she is impersonating an Other. This has created problems for her in a patriarchal society but also offered her moments of bliss, as when she performed with Faw, a younger male dancer, whom Mamdouh describes as having “the crudeness of Enkidu and the divinity of Gilgamesh”—the two protagonists of the ancient Mesopotamian epic and the earliest extant literary text in the world. She admits her need for love: “I would love to love; I would love to be loved. I would love to be a beloved woman, a loved one. . . . I love that hand that moves across my body without any regulation or command or target, with the excess that did not overflow and with the scarcity that did spill over” (220). Suhaila’s own son says of her: “She was immoderate in her love” (141). She admits to her friend Blanche that the seven-minute dance with Faw in the Théâtre du Soleil, directed by Tessa Hayden and her colleague Maria, is worth her entire life. Passion, pain, fear, failure, and excess are the motivating forces in Suhaila’s psyche. The prime mover of her creator, Alia Mamdouh, enjoys a certain joie de vivre and joie d’écrire, a zest for life and a zest for writing. She captivates readers with her exuberance, making us tolerant of her unstructured plot. Hers is a text that disarms one’s habitual resistance to complex works and opens up rich interior landscapes to ponder and explore.

  If The Loved Ones pays homage to Hélène Cixous, it is not only because Cixous is playwright, professor, theorist, critic, founder member of the experimental Université de Paris VIII, and creator of the first and only French doctoral program in women’s studies. It is essentially because the author Mamdouh found in her a personal friend. I asked her how a friendship could develop between them; Cixous, though Algerian born and brought up, hardly spoke Arabic, and Mamdouh herself, though residing in Paris for more than a decade, hardly spoke French. Her unforgettable response was that it was precisely the silence, the laconic way of communicating, that created their special friendship.

  In 2004, Al-Mahbubat (The Loved Ones) received the annual Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, an award presented by the American University in Cairo for the best novel in Arabic in honor of the Egyptian Nobel Laureate of Literature (Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988). The Committee of Judges in their citation referred to Al-Mahbubat as a “hymn of friendship to boundless giving that ultimately restores life. Written in exile, it invents a language of exile with which to resist dispossession. It is a story about memory and history, a story against forgetting, a desperate attempt to defy obliteration through narrative, even if in fragments, even if discontinuous” (American University in Cairo Press 2004). But Alia Mamdouh has rejected the notion of her exile as she has rejected being classified as a feminist in her pronouncements and interviews. What she rejects is being put in a preconceived category with its popular stereotypes. Still, Al-Mahbubat has been written away from her country Iraq and it is equally a hymn to women. In her address at the Mahfouz Medal Award Ceremony, Mamdouh specifically mentioned Iraq and her grief over it:

  I am here for the sake of Iraq—Iraq that is disappearing before our very eyes. It is as if the American Administration has come to clean Iraq from Iraqis. . . . Iraq has disappeared in a blink of the eye, as if by a thunderbolt, so that we had neither the time to see it nor the courage to speak it. What are the contours of freedom that has transformed Iraq into a black hole that blinds the gaze of the onlooker? (Mamdouh 2004)

  One of the best analyses of the novel was written by a University of London Egyptian critic, Sabry Hafez, who used principles of écriture féminine as put forth by Hélène Cixous, in dissecting Al-Mahbubat (2004, 8–9). He points out, among other things, how Suhaila and her daughter-in-law, Sonia, represent both the woman repressed by patriarchy (exemplified in Suhaila through repression by her father and husband) and the woman who appropriates the patriarchal role of repression (exemplified by Sonia’s treatment of Nader). These modalities of failure to grasp and appreciate the Other are subtly contrasted to the collective effort of different women who get together to take care of their stricken and unconscious friend. Another reading of The Loved Ones by Rania Al-Malky—an educated reader, but not an academic—finds the novel speaking to her and echoing her heritage. In her article, she quotes the opening of Al-Mahbubat (The Loved Ones): “In airports we are born and to airports we return” as “deftly evoking the Qur’anic verse: To Allah we belong and to Him we shall return. The analogy pits life against death, the ephemeral against the eternal, the static against the dynamic” (Al-Malky 2005, 93).

  But the work of Mamdouh has not only appealed to critics but also to writers. Renowned novelists such as the Egyptian Edwar al-Kharrat, the Moroccan Mohammed Berrada, the Saudi Arabian Raja’ al-‘Alim, and the Iraqi Inaam Kachachi have written on Mamdouh’s fiction. The Iraqi weekly Al-Adib has devoted a special issue to the work of Alia Mamdouh. Mamdouh is a writer’s writer, a critic’s writer, but also a people’s writer. What she touches on appeals to a multitude of readers as she presents the pains and joys of life.

  Last, but not least, a word is necessary about the magnificent work of Marilyn Booth, the translator of the novel. One cannot overestimate the difficulties this book poses for the translator. It includes songs and poems, idioms and locutions, Iraqi dialect and other Arab dialects, plays on words and lyrical prose. Above all, the discursive enunciations—thoughts, letters, or dialogue—are interwoven. The first sentence in the novel, for example, is articulated by Nader, but he is reproducing what his mother, Suhaila, has said. If we extend the metaphor of raining used by Cixous to depict the flow of narrative in Mamdouh’s Al-Wala‘, then The Loved Ones is a flood. Booth has not only a rare command of Arabic—both written and spoken—but she has also an academic specialization in Arabic literature as well as in women’s studies and writing. She has translated, among others, Latifa al-Zayyat (The Open Door) and Somaya Ramadan (Leaves of Narcissus)—both Mahfouz laureates like Alia Mamdouh. She is particularly sensitive to the nuances of female discourse and distinguishes in her subtle translations their
varied tones.

  In The Loved Ones, however, Booth reproduces not only the polyphony of the original and the richness of local expressions, but also the stylistics and the poetics of the Arabic. She boldly incorporates transliterated Arabic words and phrases that give the texture of the narrative a foreign touch, yet at the same time she cleverly indicates their significance. She opts not to italicize Arabic words and not to provide a glossary of their meaning. She treats her readers the way Mamdouh does, appealing to their intelligence and counting on their grasp of the beautiful even when it runs against the grain, against their reading habits. “Layal,” for example, is the name of one of the characters in the novel; and it also means “nights.” Mamdouh plays at one point on the associated meaning of the name saying, “Layal, ana allayali, kull al-liyali,” which has a lyrical resonance as well as a semantic playfulness in Arabic. Booth renders it in English in an equally playful and lyrical tone: “Layal. Nights. I am the nights, al-Layal, I am all the nights and all of the Layals.” Booth attains in this interlocking and interpenetration of two linguistic mediums the very spirit of the novel—a bonding despite differences and a community without borders. Booth’s translation is a labor of love and talent, of skill coupled with devotion.

  Notes

  1. See Inaam Kachachi’s documentary on Naziha al-Dulaimi, in which other prominent Iraqi women appear, including Victoria al-Numa‘n, Mubajal Baban, and Bushra Berto (2006).

  2. Mamdouh was formally engaged to her future husband when he had to leave Iraq as a political refugee in 1963. She then joined him in Beirut, and they got married in 1964. In 1967, the couple went back to Iraq, where Mamdouh finished her secondary schooling and enrolled in university, graduating in 1971.