This short novel by one of the leading experimental writers in the Arab world, shows how quickly a man’s life can change forever and how inhuman and selfish men can be to each other. Aziz Mahmud Sa’id is abducted from a café in Baghdad and thrown into prison for no apparent reason. Aziz protests his innocence but soon finds out that if he is not charged, he will remain behind bars forever. In one of the funniest dialogues of the novel, the police supervisor informs Aziz that his case is raising doubts because he has been jailed without committing an offense. Aziz is explicitly warned that his presence in prison has to be justified:
“What would you think about our devising a minor crime for you, some time in the past? Then we’ll quickly release you. That would make everything much simpler for you and for us,” he asks Aziz.
In a humorous exchange, Aziz refuses to commit the crimes suggested by the police supervisor: “What would you think, for example, of cursing the head of state in a café before a crowd of people? We’ll persuade the café’s owner and waiter, along with some policemen, to testify against you.”
Aziz answers disapprovingly, “No, no, I don’t want that. It’s a serious charge.”
Laughing, the supervisor replies, “It’s not at all serious. It won’t get you more than six months, whereas you’ve already spent more than 20 months in the penitentiary. So...what do you say?”
Aziz ends up by refusing to commit the crimes suggested to him by the supervisor who agrees in the end to “think up a beautiful offense.”
“Cell Block Five,” the first Iraqi prison novel, was written in 1971 and published outside Iraq in 1972. It was later made into a film in Syria. The novel is based on the author’s three years in an Iraqi jail.
Born in Kirkuk in 1940, Fadhil Al-Azzawi has published seven volumes of poetry, six novels, three books of criticism and several translations of German literary works. He began writing poetry in his youth. Azzawi acknowledges a profound admiration for the perfect rhythms of the Qu’ran and the mystical tales of A Thousand and One Nights. He embraced enthusiastically modern poetry and became an active member of the Kirkuk Group of poets of the avant-garde Sixties Generation. He composed his first poems at the age of 15 and his poetry was subsequently published in leading Arabic magazines whose editors ignored that the author was a mere schoolboy.
In 1976, when the Baathist party tightened its grip on power, Al-Azzawi left Iraq to earn a doctorate in communications studies from Leipzig University. He never left Germany and is currently a full-time writer living in Berlin.
“Cell Block Five” is one of Azzawi’s best literary works. This realistic story, written in a wonderfully concise manner, is imbued with philosophical and poetic undertones. The author’s love of poetry is felt throughout the novel. In chapter six, while looking at the rain, the hero shares his feelings: “I felt sorrowful. Nothing had happened to justify my sorrow, but I was so happy I felt sad”. This reminds me of Paul Verlaine (one of France’s best poets) who wrote in a famous poem how he felt sad for no apparent reason while watching the rain falling over the city.
The hero’s deep sense of poetry helps him transcend his grim life to reach new heights:
“My heart was suddenly filled with such delight that its black night turned to brightest day. Walls inside me collapsed and my body vibrated with peace like a springtime tree blooming on a sandy hill where the dew-laden breeze and the thick fog intoxicated me.”
At the end of the novel, Aziz admits that he has found freedom and happiness in prison. He no longer thinks about his release. He is more concerned with the philosophical meaning of time. He acknowledges that while time destroys a man, it also helps him grow in wisdom.
When Aziz becomes the longest serving inmate in Cell Block Five he is asked to become in charge of the detention facility for political prisoners. He greets the new arrivals “encouraging them to believe in themselves, telling them of the new world that would be born from their suffering”.
One of the new prisoners happens to be a young man who has just been arrested in a café. He cries out his innocence and Aziz tries to comfort him but he is already looking at the rays of sun splashed on the wall. History repeats itself and the novel ends the same way it started.
Poetry offers the hero, Aziz, and the newly arrived prisoner a mental and spiritual escape. “Cell Block Five” is a wonderfully well-written novel; it is permeated with poetic feelings which convey something inimitable, musical, impalpable, and always unmistakably human. The story of the hero’s unjust incarceration draws us at the heart of a human tragedy and gives us the opportunity to share a unique emotional experience.
