In a recent interview, we asked Iraqi writer Duna Ghali which Iraqi writers she recommends; she pointed us to Falah Raheem, whose Hedgehogs on a Hot Day was published to great acclaim in Arabic in 2012. The novel is available now in a translation to English by the author himself. Although independent, it is part of a hexalogy of novels, five of which are already complete. They aim at a fictional depiction of the Iraqi contemporary scene between 1970 and 2007. The other novels are: Kaleidoscope of Sand and Rain (2017), The Rumble of a Distant Drum (2020), The Last Evil in the Box (2021), and The Night of August Second (forthcoming).
Publishers interested in seeing more of his work in English translation can reach out via info@arablit.org.
From ‘Hedgehogs on a Hot Day’
By Falah Raheem
Translated by the author
1
Cities are like people: different in how they welcome strangers. Some cities respond with an odd mix of sympathy and boredom, perhaps because so many Iraqi refugees have already overwhelmed their capacity for compassion. The city of Amman, Jordan is one such place. In other cities, for unknown reasons, I’ve been received as a hero. This celebration of heroism is an odd fit for someone who, in Iraq, was a mere witness to a monstrous show in which hundreds were slaughtered daily. Tunis was one such city; a brief, bewildering stop on my way to Tripoli, Libya. As for Tripoli itself, its serene daily routines were completely disconnected from the uproar of its revolutionary media. This city expressed its sympathy gently and quietly, with something like family feeling, and without disrupting people’s peaceful lives. I won’t add more examples—exile landed me in a lot of cities before I ended up in Muscat.
My latest journey began in the Libyan desert and ended in Muscat one refreshingly clear night at the end of March, after only a brief stop in Amman. I had arranged to meet my friend Shihab there after not having seen him for a quarter of a century. He was headed to Paris from Baghdad for a UNESCO conference as a representative of the new Iraqi Ministry of Culture; the minister himself, a communist, had been in place since the American forces had occupied Iraq.
Shihab had been forced to travel overland to Amman in order to get a flight to finish his trip. I was coming from Libya’s Brega Desert to start my new job in the Sultanate of Oman. It was over email that we’d discovered the long-awaited coincidence had arrived, and our paths would cross for a single day, so we agreed to meet and talk face-to-face. Our last long talk had been in 1979, when Shihab had visited me at home in Baghdad to say goodbye before he went into exile and all communications ceased.
It occurred to me, as I was waiting for his arrival, that this encounter had been squeezed into a moment unworthy of its enormous personal significance. For weeks, I’d been busy with preparations for my latest move, which included my resignation from an onerous eight-year job with Sirte Oil Company. Moving was difficult after so long—the longer we stay in a place, the more demanding and complicated our departures become. We grow entangled, and our sparse and narrow roots embed themselves in its soil or sand. When I realized that our meeting would be further delayed, and that the time of my flight was approaching without any sign of Shihab, I started an imaginary dialogue with him. My need for this talk was pressing and urgent. Shihab had lived a quarter of a century in exile, enough to secure him Belgian citizenship, a Belgian wife, and a son who hardly spoke Arabic. I wanted to ask him about why he’d returned to Iraq and why he’d decided to stay there in spite of the considerable risks involved in his work as a director in the Ministry of Culture. Two months had passed since the bombing of the Askari imams’ shrine in Samarra, and in the aftermath it had become apparent that this wave of violence would, at any moment, escalate into a large-scale civil war. Was his return because of Shihab’s ability to stay committed to his political beliefs, or was it an acknowledgement of the unbearable hardships of exile?
I had many questions in this imaginary dialogue with Shihab, and they framed the next stage of my life in exile. I remember it clearly and, after what happened next, it took on tremendous significance.
I was met at Muscat’s Seeb Airport by a driver from the Ministry of Higher Education who brought me to the five-star Falaj Hotel. There, I had to wait for the ministry to decide my next destination. As soon as I entered the tidy hotel room, I was surprised by its complete stillness after my noisy trip, and I hurried to call my family in Baghdad. The faint and sleepy voice of my sister Ina’am reached me. When she recognized my voice, hers was buoyed by enthusiasm. I told her I’d arrived in Muscat safe and sound and that my final destination would be decided the following day. She congratulated me on my safe arrival, and we quickly exchanged news. I was careful to be brief, to avoid a costly phone bill in such a fancy hotel. I asked Ina’am if I could talk to our mother, but she said she was fast asleep. I asked about my sister Ibtesam and her family in Al-Mekanik. Last I’d heard, she’d been desperately hoping to move from the Dora neighborhood to Nader in an attempt to escape the horrifying wave of violence mounting all around her. Ina’am said that Ibtesam had finished moving the previous week and was well settled in her new home.
After a warm shower, I lay on the soft, comfortable bed with my eyes fixed on the ceiling’s milky pureness. I was in dire need of a good sleep, but countless worries crowded my thoughts. I pictured Ina’am in 2003, taking home computers from where she’d worked, at the Rafidein Bank, to protect them from possible damage by the American attack. She’d then returned them after the end of the war. I thought about that act of loyalty to the bank, which had nothing to do with the new political system, and how a loyalty to country would be meaningless without genuine efforts like that one, for the bank. Ina’am is past forty now and, for the last two decades, has never once enjoyed a real break, either to recover from her exhaustion or to review her losses. Her attitude has become entirely defensive. Widespread cruelty has denied her all her rights, all her autonomy. Her only hope is to avoid disaster, to survive.
I thought of my mother and her repeated warnings that I avoid the inflamed wound that was Baghdad on my way to my new job, because the violence and chaos had reached unprecedented levels. My mother was horrified by Iraq’s insatiable appetite for the lives of its sons—undiminished in a quarter of a century—which had led to the violent deaths of her brother and son. I couldn’t think of a way to convince her to let me come home in the near future. I was worried about the serious illness she’d developed after her last visit to my brother’s grave in Najaf. It had nearly been fatal, her symptoms a devastating weakness, an inability to eat, and a continuous weeping. We wondered why her previous visits to the grave had not led to this condition. It was a long time before we learned the reason. She said that, on the last visit, she’d seen worms wriggling out of the sand around the tomb and realized that Karim’s young and vigorous body had begun to decompose.
That first night, I went down to the hotel restaurant. I was impressed by the majesty of the place, its solemn yet relaxed hush. A funny paradox attracted my attention, although at first I’d missed its significance. There was an Asian waitress with a contented smile moving around in a sexy black miniskirt, tight enough to show her slim hips and to generously reveal her thighs. I was surprised to see such exposed legs in Muscat. My surprise increased when an Omani waitress appeared, her beautiful face lit by a similar smile. She too was serving the customers, but, in contrast to her friend, was wearing a hijab and a long, dark, loose skirt. When I finished my supper and walked up to the counter to give them my room number, I heard her chatting with her Asian colleague in perfect English. They seemed to have a complete understanding and a happy partnership. I remember that paradox now, and I wonder at its implications, which had eluded me then: the luxurious dining room overlooking a placid swimming pool, surrounded by colorful chairs that waited to support reclining bodies; the meeting of the semi-naked Asian and the covered Omani; English as a language, without its British identity, but as a global lingua franca. But it was only in light of what happened to me later that all these elements combined to form a meaningful picture.
I went back to my room and tried to concentrate on one thing: my future life in Oman. But the new catastrophe in Iraq, which had ballooned in the past month, hampered my efforts. I stood behind the balcony’s pristine glass. Beyond, there stretched whole neighborhoods of uniformly white houses, revealed only in the pools of light beneath the street lamps. It was a dreamy, quiet scene…detached from my existence in the hotel. It occurred to me, while I was looking through the window, that a feeling of stability and security could colour a person’s view of a place, making it seem happy. War battlefields, by contrast, made a person’s homeland seem bloody, furious, and destructive. The nine years I’d spent in military camps and trenches, as a confused private soldier, revealed this madness in detail. But how can we domesticate exile? How could the stability and the tranquility of home be found in the changing world of exile, a world that neglects the outsider and ignores their worries?
I remember now that Sandra once asked why I’d avoided a second marriage. She was trying to prove that my divorce was just a temporary mess, and that it shouldn’t prevent me from trying a second time. After everything that happened, I can see the irony of an invitation like that coming so particularly from Sandra. But at the time, I talked to her about the contradiction between exile and marriage. The former is a stormy place that lacks solidity and is doomed to transience and marginality. The latter is a project that seeks constancy, stability, predictability.
Under the balcony, at the hotel’s entrance, I saw an Indian couple—a plump woman in a sari walking beside a middle-aged man who was thin, but who had a small belly. Maybe this, to them, was a dreamy evening fantasy. They appeared to be floating in a lake of light, and I wondered if this Indian man living in the Sultanate saw exile as I did. I decided that the chaos in a person’s homeland was probably the reason for chaos in exile, and its animosity toward permanence. Exile itself didn’t have to be turbulent. I repeated my question again, like a mantra in search of a magic solution: If stability and security in a person’s home make the homeland peaceful, what could make exile appear so?
Back then, I couldn’t find an answer. But my first long conversation with Farhan in Muscat revealed a new frame for my exile. I remember now how I concluded, while standing there behind the balcony’s glass on my first night in Muscat, that exile is an extended deferral of real life, in which we cower and wait in isolation. Once I’d come to that conclusion, I stopped worrying. Maybe because I was tired, or maybe because, after fifty years of learning things the hard way, I was unable to come to a clear resolution. I went back to the wide empty double bed, inhaled the smell of clean sheets, and fell into a deep sleep.
Falah Raheem is an Iraqi novelist and translator who lives in Victoria BC, Canada. In addition to his five novels, he has published the translations of more than thirty philosophical and literary books into Arabic, among them are Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia and Time and Narrative, Paul B. Armstrong, Conflicting Readings, and Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself.
