Zubaida's Window, Iqbal Al-Qazwini, trans. Azza El-Kholy & Amira Nowaira, New York: Feminist Press, 2008. Iqbal Al-Qazwini's novel Mamarat al-Sekoun (Passages of Silence), an English translation of which has recently appeared under the title Zubaida's Window, gives a rare, if uncompromising, glimpse into the mind of an Iraqi woman living in exile. Set against a background of recent events in Iraq, including the US-led invasion of the country and the fall of Saddam Hussein, the novel spans the last 50 years of turmoil and political upheaval that have afflicted the country. The novel's main character, in fact its only character, is Zubaida, an Iraqi woman who has fled the atrocities of the Saddam regime to live in the once- divided, now reunited, city of Berlin. Weighed down by personal memories, as well as by the past of her homeland, she is overwhelmed by the bleakness of the present and the dismal uncertainties held out by the future. In Berlin, Zubaida watches the destruction of her country on television. The novel's opening sentence sets the tone for the narrative that follows. "At dawn," the novel reads, "fighter planes coming from their bases in the warm Arabian Gulf discharge their first hot and heavy loads." Zubaida watches as images of death unfold on the screen in front of her, and she feels caught between a past she cannot and does not want to forget and a present she cannot tolerate in a foreign city that has no sympathy for her. Images from the past continually appear before her. There is her kindly father, who always insisted that people call him Abu Zubaida (father of Zubaida), rather than the more usual Abu Ahmed (father of Ahmed), thereby acknowledging his daughter's precedence as first born. Equally vivid is the image of her grandmother, who used to keep a box of possessions for a former Jewish neighbour who had been forced to abandon it in Iraq. There are also memories of an affair with an Iraqi Air Force pilot who died in combat in one of the many wars. The novel creates a space of utter loneliness for Zubaida, a solitude that is both physical and spiritual. She lives in a city in which she communicates with no one. Her German neighbours are either hostile or apathetic, and although she carries a German passport she remains divorced from her adopted homeland. Unemployed, she does not have the kind of superficial human contacts that are required in everyday life. Instead, she is utterly alone with her memories, her fears and her TV screen, which brings her images of her distant homeland as it is being destroyed. Zubaida is also deprived of the support of her family, since most family members have either died, disappeared, or moved to distant lands. Her younger brother, whom she remembers as a young child playing on the street when she left the country, has disappeared from the army and she has not heard from him since, and her only remaining relative is a brother who lives in Tunis. However, she cannot find comfort among other Iraqi expatriates living in Berlin either, since those she communicates with seem to disappear one after the other without leaving a trace behind them. One apparent exception to this rule is Tahseen, a man labouring under the burden of personal loss, who phones her after hearing of Saddam's downfall. He wants to commit suicide, he says. Zubaida tries to reason with him, saying that while "the dictator has been defeated as expected, hope itself seems to have been defeated, but we need to behave with wisdom." Tahseen's response is to say that "it's hard for a person to live without a homeland [...] But for that homeland to vanish altogether is beyond endurance." Zubaida and Tahseen agree to meet, but he does not show up at the station where they were supposed to see each other, and later she reads in the newspaper of an unidentified "Eastern-looking" man throwing himself in front of a train. Another Iraqi acquaintance, a painter also living in Berlin, vanishes in mysterious circumstances. He calls Zubaida and asks her to look at his paintings. As she sits in his studio looking at the red canvases that express the bloodshed that is taking place in Iraq, he disappears from the studio and probably also from life. Zubaida's Window tries to establish historical parallels between the situation of the divided city of Berlin and an Iraq that has long been dominated by homegrown, bloodthirsty dictators who have paved the way for the country's defeat at the hands of foreign soldiers. Zubaida seems to believe that all the catastrophes that have befallen her country can be attributed to events during the July 1958 revolution, when the Iraqi king Faisal II (1935-1958) was killed at the hands of the revolutionaries who took power after the overthrow of the monarchy. From that point onwards, Zubaida believes, Iraq has been plagued by a series of dictators and power-hungry individuals, ending with Saddam Hussein, whose statue in Baghdad was toppled by an angry mob aided by American tanks after the US-led invasion. Nowhere in the novel is Saddam's name mentioned. Instead, he is referred to simply as "the dictator." Reading Zubaida's Window, the reader might feel the lack of a centre to the narrative. As one reads, one keeps expecting, or at least hoping for, a turn in events, or some reassertion of the power of the human spirit to triumph despite adversities. However, no such change occurs. When Zubaida leaves Berlin for Amman, the stage seems set for some redemptive act, yet she is unable to establish human contacts in Jordan either, and as she stands watching the buses leaving for Iraq a woman advises her against going back. Zubaida returns to Berlin, as friendless as when she left. If there is one problem with Al-Qazwini's novel it is not a lack of veracity. It has plenty of that. Rather, the novel paints a picture of Zubaida's existence that is so utterly bleak that it runs the risk of losing the reader's interest, almost like the "compassion fatigue" one experiences after viewing too many images of misery and grief. It is true that there are several optimistic touches in the novel, such as the loyalty of the grandmother to her departing Jewish friend, or the generosity of a young waiter in Amman, a university graduate, who tries to decline Zubaida's payment. However, the general feeling left by the novel is one of despair, the despair of people who have lost their homes but have not succeeded in rooting themselves elsewhere. The novel does not offer a new reading of Iraqi history, nor does it cast new light on the events leading up to the invasion of the country in 2003. However, it does provide a rare glimpse into an Iraqi woman's state of mind as her life becomes embroiled in events that are not of her own making. Is the author inviting us to read Zubaida's descent into despair and eventual death as representing, or auguring, the demise of the Iraqi nation? Is she intimating that Iraq has arrived at the point of no return? One sincerely hopes not. Reviewed by Amira Nowaira
