A reception was recently held at the Café Riche, a famous literary café in Cairo, to celebrate the publication of Betool Khedairi’s latest novel, “Absent.” The Iraqi-born author, currently living in Jordan, was in the Egyptian capital for the event. Her novel, first published in Arabic as “Ghayib” in 2004, has now been translated into English and marketed by the American University Press in Cairo. Khedairi explains that the title accounts for the absence of an Iraqi voice on the world scene and that the novel is her response to all the people who have asked her to speak about Iraq.
Born in Baghdad in 1965 of an Iraqi father and a Scottish mother, she left Iraq in 1990 after her father’s death and lived for a while in London where her mother was treated for cancer. She has now, however, established herself in Jordan. She enjoys living in the Arab world and moreover, she acknowledges her strong need to be immersed in an Arab culture: “I dream and I feel in Arabic but when I have to solve problems, I think in English.”
“Absent” is a tale of the occupants of a building in Central Baghdad, narrated by Dalal, one of the novel’s principal characters. In the novel, Khedairi attempted to show the consequences of the economic blockade on the country’s social structure: “It’s a kind of psychological study of an ordinary citizen — where he came from and what became of him over a period of ten or twelve years. I wouldn’t say it is controversial but rather experimental.”
She compares the novel to a collage or a puzzle whose loose pieces need to be assembled but she readily acknowledges that she first imagined it as a film. This explains the cinematic style of her writing; the story has been conceived as a film script. Betool Khedairi has written the script for a film based on it. She also co-authored, along with award-winning Denmark-based Iraqi director, Tariq Hashim, a documentary entitled “Sixteen Hours in Baghdad.” It received the Golden Hawk Award at the Arabic Film Festival in 2004 in Rotterdam.
Despite the tragic situation in Iraq, the author writes with both humor and sensitivity in “Absent” about the daily lives of the inhabitants of an apartment block known, because everyone helps one another, as “the building of self-sufficiency.” The majority of the characters are women; the men are in the army, in prison or dead which is a direct consequence of the terrible economic and political conditions which have so altered the country’s social fabric.
The women give us an accurate picture of the way the Iraqi people lived under the UN-imposed sanctions. As the economic situation steadily worsened, both men and women spent more time at home. Despite the lack of work, of money and even of food, people did the best they could. Young spirited and full of hope and humor, Dalal tells us how she deals with boredom and hunger: “I make friends with the sound of our refrigerator: Tchik it switches itself off, tchok it switches itself back on again. As for the little light that’s supposed to go on when the fridge door opens, it no longer works. At night, I sometimes have to use a candle to identify its meager contents. I no longer watch the tennis courts from the kitchen at night, and we no longer eat a heavy meal after sundown the way we used to. My aunt justifies this by saying that a light supper promotes calm, light sleep during the night and a feeling of lightness the next day. She says nothing of the long hours in between! The fridge has become just another item of furniture rarely used but still a source of tedious noises.”
One of the most moving passages in the novel refers to the suffering of a widow, remembering her husband: “When she feels lonely, she likes to listen to her bedroom curtain, billowing in a gentle breeze as it makes a soft rustling sound. She closes her eyes and imagines it’s the sound of her husband’s dishdasha as he approaches her bed in the darkened room; her husband, however, died a few years ago.”
