I'jam (Diacritics), Sinan Antoon, Beirut: Dar Al-Adaab, 2004. pp.136 Among the Arab literati's many barren controversies, one seems to have outlasted the others. It concerns the question of whether the novel has supplanted poetry's traditional role as the diwan of the Arabs. The debate often turns into a kind of genre contest testing relevance and popularity. That said, the novel, all agree, has become as important a genre in modern and contemporary Arabic literature as poetry, even if, more recently, it began deconstructing itself in this as well as other cultures. Notwithstanding the exclusively literary context of the debate, the Arabic novel has not been keeping up with the concerns of its people. So much so that Iraq, not only the most topical, ongoing tragedy but traditionally the heart and soul of Arab culture, has elicited nothing of significance in the way of literary creation of late, whether from within or without. It is almost as if the past quarter century in Iraqi -- and by extension Arab -- history has not been lived at all. Even despite its noisy festivals and celebrations, publications and broadcasts, the Baath era has yet to be written in Iraqi and Arabic literature. Perhaps the Iraqi writer Sinan Antoon's recent first novel, I'jam, is but the initial trickle in a flood of writing about the last two decades in Iraq. A younger intellectual who grew up under Saddam, Antoon reflects the experience of a generation that attended school while the Iran-Iraq war raged -- a generation scarred by despotism, body and soul, and brutally, oppressively stifled. Surviving both the Iran-Iraq war and the First Gulf War, Antoon moved to the United States, where he now teaches at Dartmouth College, simultaneously earning a PhD at Harvard University. He tends to identify himself as an "Iraqi poet", and his recent collection of poems Mawshur Muballal Bil-Hurub appeared recently with the Cairo-based house Miret. Yet perhaps his first-hand experience of the Baath regime, and his consequent expatriation-exile, prompted the use of a more flexible narrative form. (Both novel and poems, though written and published outside Iraq, retain a distinctly Iraqi timbre.) Written originally in 2002, by the time I'jam reached the print press the situation in Iraq had radically altered, perhaps giving it fresh significance. From the title onward, this novel is a complex creation, utilising a range of mechanisms to make its point: "I'jam" is roughly translated as "diacritics", but it also denotes pointing, dotting and vowelising words -- all in order to elucidate their meaning. Such confusion of meanings -- in which things are not what they seem, with their full significance only gradually revealed -- reflects the absurdity, one should say absurdism at the heart of both the drama played out in, and the subtext informing, the book. Even the cover shows a man stood on his head -- or perhaps falling from a height. While clearing their offices, some Iraqi state security agents discover a strange manuscript in which the words are illegible with the dots and points missing. An officer is therefore assigned the task of i'jam : he must make the words, and through them the narrative, comprehensible. But it turns out that many of the words admit of a variety of meanings depending on where the dots and points are placed. Antoon plays on this to service the satire he undertakes: Baath (the Baath Party, or else "resurrection"), for example, becomes Abath ("absurdity"); Al-Qaed (the Leader) becomes Al-Qa'id (the Sitter); in the latter exchanging a ein for the hamza insinuates paralysis, handicap. This is but one aspect of the altogether disturbed, hallucinatory reality the novel depicts, with the manuscript gradually revealing a state security prisoner's account of his incarceration and torture. A student at the Faculty of English Literature at Baghdad University, he is arrested for no apparent reason -- save perhaps his "subversive thoughts" and some satirical remarks he has made about the government. Accounts of what happened to him and others read equally convincingly as reality and hallucination, yet it remains difficult, in the end, to tell the novel's reality apart from its own reveries. The narrative shifts with frantic speed from prison to campus to home, from events supposedly happening in prison to recollections of a past life; the non- chronological structure invites the question of whether they all make up a hallucinatory document under investigation, especially since the narrative abounds in explicit references to the protagonist-narrator's confusion between Here and There, the ceaseless twists and turns of his consciousness. The resulting, surreal atmosphere is probably the author's take on the collective "reality" of the Baath regime: a senseless nightmare taking over individual lives. The work is partly autobiographical in that it benefits from Antoon's perception of life as a university student in Baghdad in the late 1980s. Even if it did not all happen the way he tells it, there is a very clear sense that it could very well have. Like Sinan Antoon, the protagonist Furat (Arabic for Euphrates -- he might as well have been named Iraq) is an Iraqi Chaldean, a member of a "minority" community within the larger nation. Like him, he is a writer, a poet, a student of literature. Nor is the book all gloom. In the midst of the dreary reality of oppression and imprisonment, somehow a love story, however ephemeral, manages to bloom. Furat's fellow student and girlfriend Arij (Arabic for scent or perfume) offers a breath of air, her role in the narrative being that of intellectual stimulant. Though a step or two higher up the social ladder than him, her family is not tainted by corruption, and the reader has the feeling that this in itself is a rare exception: an intellectual family maintaining its respectability without giving up its integrity under the Baath regime. She comes forth as independent and liberal, a strong woman, but the reader never finds out what happens to her after Furat goes to prison, for he does not know himself, and the work is conceived totally within the boundaries of his consciousness. *** The hallucinatory approach notwithstanding, much exchange of (historical) information takes place before the reader turns the last page. The extent to which fear dominated life in Baathist Baghdad, for example, perpetuated by a range of powers, both big and small. War, too: news of battles permeates Antoon's narrative. But it is the home front rather than the battlefield that remains paramount: none of the main characters go to war, yet the war -- the Iran-Iraq war -- is everywhere, in the banners and propaganda of the regime, the justification for all manner of human rights abuse, the cause by which adolescents are systematically coerced into joining the Baath Party. Indeed, the Baath Party forces itself into every aspect of the individual's life. Everything is dictated: from the uniforms of university students to the words included in a dictionary. Old newspapers with the Leader's picture on the front page cannot be thrown out, and young men who sport a beard are immediately identified with the Shia Islamist Daawa Party. Bibi, as Furat calls his grandmother, tells him of how a government representative, no older than 20, enters the house for inspection and asks why the family does not have a prominent photo of the president on the wall (they had a table-top one in the interior sitting room as a compromise). "Contributing a brick to the building of the nation" is the rhetoric he employs, Bibi goes on, expressing her fury to Furat, for she is proud of her centuries-old Chaldean heritage. Yet in this conversation one can hear Antoon's voice in Furat's as the latter argues with Bibi, claiming that, their origins notwithstanding; they are Arab or at least Arabised, Chaldean having become, where younger generations are concerned, merely a liturgical language. A passing hint at the multicultural tension suppressed within Iraq's modern nationalist discourse, the episode raises the question of whether the attitude of assimilation Furat represents will ultimately triumph. Furat, after all, presents himself as an Arab; and it is this left-wing, national sense of identity that he hopefully represents. He knows the poetry of Al-Jawahri by heart; and writes verses from "Salaman", the poem Al-Jawahri first recited on the anniversary of the Communist Party, for his girlfriend on a copy of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. Together they watch a taped interview with the poet on Abu Dhabi TV, which Arij's father managed to sneak into the country. Though never officially exiled or banned, Al- Jawahri is never mentioned in public, especially after his decision to depart from the country in protest against the war in 1980. Furat and his friends secretly share tapes of his recitations, and so Antoon makes room for an independent -- individual -- existence despite the pervasive Baath culture, imbuing the overriding absurdity with at least the possibility of hope, perhaps a necessary consolation. One must not think of Furat as a representative citizen of the period, however: the perpetrators of evil in Antoon's narrative are all Iraqis, the stool pigeons and the inquisitors, torturers and wardens all compatriots. Iraqis write reports denouncing each other to the authorities, interrogate and imprison one another, torture and rape fellow citizens. And to maintain hope Antoon must provide contrasting examples. A fellow student warns Furat of impending danger; an officer, Ahmed, smuggles pen and paper into the prison for Furat to write with. In the same way as Furat's manuscript is subversive, the narrative abounds in references to the subversion practised by ordinary Iraqis resisting oppression: how crowds at the football stadium cheer Zawraa against Al-Rashid, the latter being the government's team; how Furat uses old newspapers with the Leader's picture as toilet paper... not to mention Bibi's stance on the place the president's picture should occupy in her house (not the entrance) or the popularity of Al-Jawahri among students. In the mean time Arij and Furat roam the streets of Baghdad, restless, surveying the city and also, in a sense, bidding it farewell. At the British cemetery they stop, and looking at the tombs of those soldiers killed during the mandate and Iraq's war of independence, Furat tells her, "You know, I like the cemeteries". Arij sympathises with the soldiers as she makes out their names and ages on the tombstones, noting that they died so young. Without so much as a direct hint at the present, the scene evokes the graves dug daily in Iraq to accommodate the victims of another, perhaps even more unjust war -- and one cannot help thinking that they, too, are dying young. More intellectually pertinent, the two lovers' discussion suggests a humane disdain for war, irrespective of the nationality of its victims -- in contrast to the ardent nationalist discourse prevalent in their times. As the novel draws to a close, the reader cannot help feeling the anguish of so much remaining unresolved and such bleak prospects. The time of the narrative is the 1980s, and we know that the inmate was most probably never set free -- the liberation-revolution he will imagine at the end is but another hallucination. The manuscript is discovered in 1989, after all, right before the First Gulf War, and the state is still in power. The scene with which the novel ends nonetheless manages to evoke current realities in Iraq, a ghost country that defies definition. Furat keeps working on his manuscript; it is the survival-by-narration that Shahrazad practices with the King in Alf Layla wa Layla, with Furat staving off death by telling his story through the manuscript written on paper provided by Ahmed (Ahmed being the king's stand-in in the present case). It should be remembered that writing does keep Furat alive, however, and if Iraqis like Antoon cannot go on writing, dreaming and scheming, however much hallucination they end up conjecturing, the country might not survive. The question remains as to who will provide the ink and paper. In the light of all the reader knows by then, the note on which the novel ends sounds particularly nightmarish: The inmate is told that a revolution has erupted and that the Leader seeks asylum in Libya. Naturally, Furat is euphoric: the long awaited day has come. Granted his freedom once more, he walks out on the streets of Baghdad -- only to find himself in a ghost city: no one is there, and nothing seems to work. He does not have money to go home, but there are no taxis anyway. The bus stops stand derelict and forlorn, and when he picks up a handset on a public phone booth, Furat finds the cord disconnected. By now completely alienated from his surroundings, with no means of communicating with or reaching out to his loved ones, Furat feels totally alone in his homeland. Even liberation turns out to be something other than what it seemed... The novel ends as Furat realises he has just used up his last sheet of paper and wonders whether the officer will give him any more. "I might ask him to phone my grandmother and Arij to calm their worries and let them know I am t (here)," he writes. "They will soon put out the lights. Where are you Ahmed?" By Reviewed byAmina Elbendary
