Women on a Journey: Between Baghdad and London (review)

This is the story of a friendship developed between five Iraqi women living in exile in the city of London, UK. Set in the 1990s, the series of events takes place after the first Gulf War, during the Western-imposed economic sanctions and the U.S. military air strikes upon Baghdad. The author has written the Introduction herself, in which she provides historical background for the literary tradition in Iraq leading up to the post-Saddam present, and situates both her female authorial self and the novel within this tradition.

The book is comprised of 25 chapters, punctuated by segments of consecutively numbered psychiatric sessions. The novel begins with the women’s first meeting in a crowded cafe in Hampstead in the northwestern part of the city. They then agree to meet regularly on Mondays, once a month, at 2 o’clock. Their friendship is forged in the location of their dislocation, so to speak, largely nurtured by their common experience of loss and displacement. The protagonists’ various ethnic, political, and social backgrounds partially represent Iraq’s diverse human canvas. The five women are Majda, Iqbal, Um Mohammed, Sahira, and Adiba.

Adiba had been a political dissident who was tortured under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, and the effects of this trauma are both bodily and psychological. Iqbal is a divorcee raising a teenage son and she works in an Arabic-language media office. Sahira lives an isolated life with her husband ‘Abed Kadhim, once a member of the Iraqi Communist Party but now deeply disillusioned in the aftermath of the party’s decline. The Kurdish Um Mohammed was granted political asylum with her son; she is characterized by an inner quietude that stems from her deep trust and faith in God. For the fifth character, Majda, life in Baghdad had been exceptionally good, even frivolous. Her husband Said had enjoyed great favor as a minister in the Leader’s government until he was accused of betrayal and the family was banished into exile and ignominy. Zangana admits that “Majda was the most challenging character to write”; for many of the novel’s Iraqi readers she represents “the hated, feared, and despised” Ba’athist regime (xv).

The novel is largely inhabited by the five women, and only occasionally do a few family members and friends appear. Iqbal has an English boyfriend, and Adiba has a very significant relationship with her psychoanalyst Dr. Catherine Hawkins, but otherwise interactions and encounters between the protagonists and Londoners are conspicuously brief or absent. The title reveals the characters’ predominant state of existence: they live on al-at’aba (the threshold) between Baghdad and London. Asked by Dr. Hawkins in one of her sessions whether the friends talk about Iraq, Adiba exclaims, “Do we talk about anything else?” Readers get a peppering of episodes in which the five friends discuss matters of personal interest. For example, they merrily converse about women’s reasons for donning the hijab and men’s reasons for characteristically sitting with their legs so far apart, but such conversations are infrequent.

Zangana’s characters do not experience life-affirming transformations, though two of the five women become less burdened and defined by their pasts. Generally speaking, the women remain detached from their environs and spend little effort to construct new lives in this not-so-new land. The overall message seems dim: London symbolizes exile from hope, happiness, the future, from life itself. It is where these friends have come to grow old and die, a realization they are loath to admit but which nevertheless courses throughout the novel’s narrative. Indeed, the novel ends and “dies” with the newspaper report of the murder of Adiba in her Camden neighborhood, cruelly close to her apartment. Majda, the avowed Ba’athist, also meets with a metaphorical death: seized by paranoia, her mind rapidly unravels, and she retreats into the comfort of...