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6. Childhood and Home in Iraq: Narratives in Arabic
- State University of New York Press
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6 Childhood and Home in Iraq: Narratives in Arabic I The past is not just people and events, it is childhood too. -Samir Naqqlish Not only the past and the world of childhood are in a timeless world-but also the path to them, the path of writing and the story belong to the same current that continues within a timeless frozen structure of the creative act. -Ehud Ben Ezer WHAT IS HOME? FOR THE EXILE, IN PARTICULAR, HOME IS LOCATED IN a specific time and place: childhood in one's motherland. Home is the house in which one grew up, the members of the household, and the different routines, customs, and traditions of the household. Home serves to give one a sense of identity, of history, and of belonging. The state of exile causes a loss of these senses and leads to efforts to recover all of them. Writers often attempt to do so through their writing. "How do you find your way back to the past," it has been asked, "when the past is discontinuous?'" By the very nature of exile, the actual physical place is lost to the individual forever. Those in exile cannot return home except through memory. Memory mediates between past and present, recalling and often distorting. It brings the past to the present, viewing this past through the perspective of the present. 107 108 EXILE FROM EXILE: ISRAELI WRITERS FROM IRAQ When we look back, we always discover that things we didn't understand then, we can understand now-possibly another trick of memory .2 Nostalgia lurks around the corner of every memoir, ready to reclaim positive events and to ignore or recast in rosy hues those that are negative. One Ira.qi Jewish immigrant recalls: I was seven when we came to Israel. Life in Baghdad is preserved in my memory like reality from another world. If not all of it is happy, a magic aura of (:hildhood is still poured over it, something that makes it unique, that, arrow-like, separates the event from reality like the mythical river of Sambatyon.3 Eva Hoffman begins her memoirs in a similar vein: "[T]he wonder is what you can make your paradise out of ... happy, safe enclosures of Eden."4 Nostalgia is recognized as the most subjective of all forms of memory ;5 in it even sadness is bittersweet, and time bears no relation to the clock.6 It evokes a past based on personal experiences that is remembered as superior to the present. The sharp contrast between the past and the present suggests a condition of discontinuity such as that caused by leaving one's home. While nostalgia uses the past as its source material, it is a construction of the present. Conditions of the present determine the materials and moods of this construction. In his sociological study of the nostalgic mood, Fred Davis describes it as "a distinctive aesthetic modality in its own right, a kind of code or patterning of symbolic dements, which by some obscure mimetic isomorphism comes much as language itself, to serve as a substitute for the feeling or mood it aims to arouse."7 He concludes: As one of art's more enduring resources nostalgia need not merely feed upon or revel in the past; it can become the means for creatively using the past as well.8 Memory can thus be manipulated by selection and coloration: what is remembered and how it is remembered. Yet, just as importantly, the ordering of the fragments of memory is also subject to interpretation. Narration, in particular, orders events, and, in so doing, asserts control over them. [107.23.156.199] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:01 GMT) CHILDHOOD AND HOME IN IRAQ: NARRATIVES IN ARABIC Looking back sometimes I can gather all the details, sometimes I can't. Sometimes I don't get a logical chain [of events]. Doubt tortures me whether the chain of events is right. Aren't the events more important and not their order? (Bayt Fz Baghdad, p. 23) 109 The two Iraqi authors under discussion who continue to write in Arabic have both revisited the places of their memories in narrative. Through narrative, Yi~!:tak Bar-Moshe and Sam!r Naqqash present an ordering of place in a linear representation of three-dimensional space through the fourth dimension, time. Bayt PI Baghdad [A house in Baghdad] is the second volume of Yi=?!:tak Bar-Moshe's memoirs to be published, yet it...