Customer Reviews

I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody

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Antoon's novel is an incredibly well wrought study of imprisonment, empathy and the experience and power of writing; its construction is very clever indeed, and one puts it down (reluctantly) feeling shaken and bewildered, impelled to act and desirous of leading a life more immediate and brave.

I'jaam is completely different than anything I've ever read. I rarely give books, even good books such a large number of snaps. Several times throughout the book I was horrified, others I was drawn into love, and throughout the entire book a common theme of fear and terror is dreadfully looming. If I'jaam doesn't smack you in the face to say wake up! it is already too late for you, blood has left your veins cold. I had to try my hardest and not underline the entire text! It was that good.

I'jaam is a novel, but Sinan Antoon insightfully writes this masterpiece as a manuscript that was found in the an inventory of the general security headquarters located in Central Baghdad. The writings are of the life of a young man and an educated prisoner all in one. His thoughts are so segmented that you see the disjointedness he must feel, which is in every way spawned through fear, heartless acts, and a lack of freedom. He goes back and forth between what happened, what is happening and what is in every bit too horrible to ever imagine happening to any human being.The novel is set in a time where The Leader (Saddam) is in power, a time when life is full of fear and complete inconsistency. Even though suffering and fear are the themes throughout, there is also love, family, education and life to show that all dreams are not lost, even if they are extremely hidden, and held close to oneself. The will to live life is the hardest to snuff, when there is even an ounce of hope and Antoon shows hope in this novel again and again, in a real way that is never false and always just right. Feel the outcry of humanity and read this novel, I'jaam by Sinan Antoon. I am changed, and my outlook is forever different because of this one all too short novel.
Below are some quotes that were just craziness to leave off, wet your tongue on this and get your hands on the book!

" We have been taught to call these frequent events "revolutions," when they are actually scars on our history. A bunch of sadists get sunstroke and declare themselves saviors. Then they begin to torture people and ride them like mules, especially after they discover that this is easier, and perhaps more pleasurable, than fulfilling their promises. Later, another group will come along to dispose the first, brining with them longer whips and chains of a more economic metal. A sadistic circle forever strangling us" (p. 11).

"Hey! What are you doing here? It's forbidden!"
"Forbidden" was the most often-used word in the country, especially among those who enjoyed a bit of power, or imagined that they did" (p. 56).

"The family, as an institution, is stronger than all the armies of the world" (p. 57).

" A simple idea came to me at that moment: isn't freedom the most beautiful feeling in the whole world? Simple, trivial, everyday freedom. I didn't even allow the "No Walking" sign stabbing the grass to spoil my mood" (p.93).

I'jaam's lucid flashbacks and hallucinatory passages written during narrator Furat's Iraqi imprisonment reminds me of similar political or existential novels The Stranger and The Plague. There is even something about I'jaam to recall the less mature Stephen King novella, The Long Walk, and the more artificially constructed, e-less novel from Georges Perec, A Void. But while those books had much looser ties - if any - to a kind of truth, it is not difficult to find the reality that motives the surreality of I'jaam: the Orwellian-like regime of Saddam Hussein. As a novel, I'jaam is beautifully done: believable in its premise; effective as a written artifice; reluctant to use heavy-handedness and anger when its portrayal of soft tragedies, and a lost romance, bring Furat's imprisonment a readier display of human endurance, justification, and regret. This novel, like the era it captures, needs to be elevated into broader view.

It is no coincidence that the central character of this 99-page novella is a university student in Saddam Hussein's Baghdad, who wants to write a thesis on George Orwell's "I984" only to discover that the book has been banned. Though set in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War, the action of the novel takes place in a world that is notably Orwellian. Crowds are forcefully gathered to show support for the "Father-Leader" and his ongoing military efforts against "the enemy." The slightest deviations from strictly enforced rules of conduct are harshly dealt with by the police, and freedom of expression is severely limited. Meanwhile, the government spies on its own citizens, the leader's cronies are appointed to high-level positions, and his son acquires his own football team with hand-picked players from all the other teams in the country.

The central character, an aspiring young poet, finds that his efforts to write anything remotely critical of the regime land him in prison, where he is subject to physical and psychological abuse, humiliated, and dehumanized. The book is a manuscript he has left behind, recording his memories, dreams, hallucinations, and experiences as a prisoner. Among his memories is a budding love affair with a young woman. There are a few moments of pleasure seized from that relationship, but his story is that of countless young people whose hopes have been crushed by totalitarian regimes. The "rhapsody" of the title is ironic. The intense feelings portrayed are of anger, frustration, and despair.

As one other reviewer, Ronald Scheer has noted, one of the dominant themes in this novella is the Orwellian nature of life in Iraq, familiar to any reader of Orwell's classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four There is the ubiquitous Father figures of the Great Leader plastered everywhere; the compulsory attendance at political rallies where enthusiasm must be feigned; the omnipresent "secret" police sniffing for any sign of independent and/or "deviant" thought. The protagonist wanted to complete a thesis on Orwell, and perhaps it is no surprise that he finds the author's books banned in the country. And to complete the theme, and Antoon does it subtly, the year itself must be 1984 (three years into the Iranian-Iraq war of the 1980's which is another dominant theme in the book.) Readers of Kafka's The Trial or Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading will also note numerous other resonances. But Antoon's voice is amazingly authentic, and he mixes his Orwellian themes with several others.

What is truly unique about the novel are the implications of the title, and how the novella has been translated (it helps to be familiar with Arabic, and it must be a real joy to be fluent English/ Arabic to fully understand the puns, and the quality of the translation). One aspect of the Arabic alphabet is the use of "dots" above and below the lines and curves, and it is these dots that determine a difference in the letters. This mechanism is used in approximately half the letters. "I'jaam" refers to this practice, as the author explains. When the dots are omitted, obviously a given line or curve could be two or more letters, and it is this ambiguity that is delightfully played upon. It must have been a real effort for the translator, Rebecca Johnson, to determine suitable English equivalents that corresponded to the Arabic. For example, is it "revulsion" or "Revolution"; is it "National Hemorrhage," or "National Heritage"?

The protagonist is a secular Christian, and a Chaldean to boot (and I thought that term only applied to people 4,000 to 5,000 years ago.) He is also somewhat deformed, with a withered left arm which exempts him from military service, but is apparently not a liability in seeking relations with the opposite sex. Antoon authentically portrays the flirtatious interactions of two somewhat rebellious college students, which includes some first rate eroticism.

Saddam Hussein's Iraq or George Bush's America? Concerning military service, Antoon has the protagonist say: "...but I still could not imagine relatives of important officials fighting on the frontlines, even if they were found to be fit. They would most likely be assigned to an administrative unit in their hometown and struggle to show up once a month in order to avoid embarrassing their commanding officer." As we know, in America, Bush could not manage to show up for an entire year. And how about this as a poke at Western "experts" on the Middle East: "At night, footage of these crowds of students rallying around their leadership were distributed and sent out to the world, where experts and analysts would compete to explain to their honorable audiences the mystery of our love for tyranny." The scene were the Professor goes "ballistic" with a student who is wearing a red rose resonated strongly with me. The reasons were different however, between the Professor, and his fear of the meaning of the red rose, and the religious police in Riyadh, who feared the same beautiful and innocuous flower for a different reason. And there is even some very good poetry tucked into the story, that the protagonist is writing. Concerning a suicide from a high-rise building, he concludes with the line: "...the sidewalk accepted my resignation from life."

It is amazing how much Sinan Antoon has packed into a novella of under 100 pages. The author indisputably has much talent, and it is a shame that he does not publish more books. 5-stars.

I'jaam: an Iraqi Rhapsody, by Sinan Antoon, is one of the two current works of fiction set in totalitarian Islam that I recommend without qualification. The other is In the Country of Men, by Hisham Matar. Kafka and Solzhenitsyn gave us the classics of living in European Police States. Antoon and Matar give us an artistic hint of such life in two secular Arab states: Khadafi's Libya and Hussein's Iraq.

I'jaam is the most brilliantly artistic, ranking easliy with the best of Kafka and Solzhenitsyn. Set in Hussein's Bagdad in perhaps 1982,it is filled with ambiguity -- an imaginary prison memoir. Written ostensibly from a mixture of memory and nightmare, we are jerked from the prison isolation cell to the dreams of events and loves before imprisonment. In one paragraph we are with his grandmother, or his co-ed university friend, and suddenly we are back in the terror of the isolation cell. Imprisoned for who knows what? He doesn't know. His condition is not unlike the condition of hundred or thousands of Iraqi's currently incarcerated as a result of the Iraq War, and so it has real current relevance.

The central conceit of the novel is the ambiguity inherent in the written Arabic language. Certain of the letters require dots (I'jaam) or the word cannot be understood -- it may have any one of several meanings. This fictional prison document was written without the dots, which were inserted by a government functionary. Antoon has built from those beginnings a masterpiece of the imagination.

Lionel Youst