Beyond Love

Foreword

ix foreword m i r i a m c o o k e Long the capital of Arab culture, Iraq is a country that has been wracked by wars for more than a half century. However , coups, military dictatorships, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, and the American invasion have not succeeded in destroying the spirit and creativity of a people that has survived millennial violence. Women have contributed in important and distinctive ways to the construction of a vibrant and resilient culture, and Hadiya Hussein’s Beyond Love is a noteworthy example. It is part of a genre of war literature that Arab women have been creating for the past thirty years. The novel is set in the post-1991 period when the Shiites in southern Iraq were under surveillance and in danger of death for having participated in the uprising against Saddam Hussein shortly after the Gulf War. It tells of the price people paid for opposing the dictator or even only exercising their right not to vote for the president “who stole our lives and destroyed our hopes.” Not to be a Baath member and to be generally disengaged from politics is to be under suspicion: “all citizens are guilty until they are proven innocent.” The terror of the system is revealed in the assurance that “the voter’s name and address are secretly printed on the voting cards. Electronic machines will find the traitors. The punishment x | f o r e w o r d will be stronger than they imagine.” The only solution is to change identity and leave Iraq. The novel bridges Basra/Baghdad and Amman, war and exile. Intermixing flashback, memoir, intertextual references to other Iraqi war writers, and first-person narration of exilic life in Amman, the narrator interweaves her experiences with those of Nadia, a friend who died before the novel’s beginning. They are writers forced into demeaning factory work in the time of the international embargo and then into exile in Jordan after the Gulf War. They are creators whose survival challenges the destructiveness of war. In Amman the narrator runs across Nadia’s autobiographical notebook that forms a thread throughout the novel. It is a pastiche of memories strung together randomly from the story of her birth to her university years to a “hundred anxious and horrifying hours under the most violent bombing by the militaries of thirty countries” to the twenty-hour car ride to Jordan across the Iraqi desert made famous in 1963 by Ghassan Kanafani’s classic story of Palestinian escape Men in the Sun. The narrative moves between Nadia’s notebook and the narrator’s deadly days in Amman. The hardship of life in Amman is evoked through descriptions of small dirty rooms, stinking sheets, respected professionals who are lucky if they can scrape together a meager subsistence, and the enervating tedium that strips the individual of all desire to act. Dreams of home and of beautiful places far from the present hell punctuate the endless wait for work or for notification of asylum that is often refused. The depression is etched in stories of mothers who have lost contact with their sons f o r e w o r d | xi and who are eventually sent to a place where they know nobody. While writing about a very particular case, Hadiya Hussein takes her reader into the universal anxiety of those who have left loved ones behind, who are obsessed with the need to be in touch with them, and who are confused by the possibility of falling in love again. The fleeting promise of love for those who have been through the horrors of war and the phone that rings without answer in the far-away home vividly convey the despair of the alienated exile who no longer belongs anywhere. ...