THE BOOKS IN IRAQ

[jimmoyer]

June 27, 2005
Amid the Turmoil, Iraqis Who Seek Historical Perspective, Skills and Solace Turn to Books

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 26 - In a narrow alley off Mutanabi Street, Baghdad's main book market, the Dar al-Bayan bookshop is full of dust and classics. Old men sip tea in the back and talk of times past, before dictatorship, when poets and intellectuals made life here bright.

On the street outside, the new Iraq presses in. Card tables covered with computer manuals, cellphone booklets and how-to guides compete for space on the sidewalk. A vast array of religious books, banned under Saddam Hussein, pack the stalls.

As Iraqis struggle to make sense of the chaos and violence that have consumed their lives during the past two years, books offer some solace. "Reality now is very strange," said Mufeed Jazaery, who was Iraq's culture minister in the recently departed interim government.

"People are trying to put their feet on the ground, but they find themselves still hanging in the air," he said. "Is it quiet or will there be another storm? Is it black or is it white? Is it moving, and, if so, in which direction?"

But as well as showing a changing Iraq, books are also revealing a dividing line between those who grew up before the years of dictatorship, who are reaching for history texts to understand what has happened to their country, and younger Iraqis straining to find answers to more immediate questions about their lives in self-help and how-to books, romance and religious titles.

The Dar al-Bayan shop is steeped in the past. It opened in 1961 and used to be a salon of sorts with famous writers gathering in its few small, book-lined rooms to talk politics and literature. Its owner, Beadiee Khakhani, speaks disparagingly about the titles being sold outside.

"Now it's different," said Mr. Khakhani, 54. "It's less about culture," he said, and more about books with practical themes, like computer manuals and religious guides.

Intellectuals and writers seem particularly disoriented in the new Iraq. Many were alive in the decades before 1968, when the Baath Party took control, which was a time of cultural renaissance in Iraq. But in 1979, when Mr. Hussein became president, he began banning books, singling out writers and intellectuals, jailing them and blocking publication of their work.

The employees of the Dar al-Bayan bookstore used a small crawl space in an attic area to hide favorite books that were banned. Some writers left the country, but many stayed, surviving by meeting secretly and circulating photocopies of banned books.

Faiza Mulla, a lawyer who was educated in Cairo and lived in London for two years in the 1950's, recalled such meetings.

"To many people, it was like oxygen," she said. "This was how we survived."

When Mr. Hussein fell in 2003, Ms. Mulla was elated. She told her daughter that life would return to the way it was, when Baghdad sparkled with a lively cultural scene. Her husband, Mahmoud Uthman, kept a diary, taking down the hopes of neighbors and relatives.

Now, two years later, the entries seem naïve, Mr. Uthman said. Several of the couple's friends have been kidnapped. Some have left the country. Many who stayed have withdrawn from life outside their homes. Ms. Mulla and Mr. Uthman's daughter, who just graduated from college in Iraq with a computer science degree, spends most of her days at home, her future uncertain.

"At the very beginning, everyone was so excited," said Ms. Mulla, sitting in her art-filled house near Baghdad University. "Now I just feel like staying home." Intellectuals interviewed for this article said books about history, in particular the period from the 1920's to the present, when the Iraq state was being formed, were popular, as is a provocative critique of Islam written in the 1930's by an Iraqi nationalist poet, Marouf al-Rasafi, but available in Iraq only recently.

As far as reading about the ousted government itself, the period is still too raw for most. However, Mr. Khakhani said a book by Mr. Hussein's former doctor, Ala Bashir, called "In the Name of Terror," had been selling well.

Some abandon modern history and escape to ancient times. Suha Turaihi, an intellectual in Baghdad, said she was reading a book about Sabians, an ancient religion of Mesopotamia that dates to hundreds of years before Christ and still exists.

"I am just trying to get out of this bitter reality," she said. "To have an exit."

Homegrown novels and nonfiction are lagging. The main publishing house printed 100 titles last year, more than in past years, but nothing really resonated, said Mr. Jazaery, the former culture minister.

The violence has not helped. Beyond the daily car bombs and kidnappings, insurgents have singled out intellectuals, killing 73 professors in 2004, said Dr. Esam al-Rawi the leader of the science college in Baghdad University, according to an Iraqi media report. In April, a professor of German was gunned down in Baghdad, and in May, a bomb damaged several of the bookstores outside of the market at Mutanabi Street.

"Now there is a sleepy state in culture," said Lutfia al-Dulaimy, a writer and novelist. "People are hungry for electricity and security."

Asked who were the most interesting contemporary Iraqi writers, Ms. Dulaimy replied sardonically: "The dead ones."

Young Iraqis are making different choices. At a bookstore in Mustansiriyah University, a large public university here, students flipped through romance novels and books on astrology.

Religious books, mostly on Shiite themes, which were banned under Mr. Hussein but have streamed into Iraq since his fall, were also in abundant supply.

Though college students remain relatively secular, said Zaid Hadithy, the shop owner, young people in the broader population "are going in a religious direction" as they search for a structure for their lives in an environment where the rules have fallen away.

One student browsing in Mr. Hadithy's shop, Ragad Raisan, 19, said she was looking for a book of teachings by Imam Sadeq, a revered Shiite religious figure related to the Prophet Muhammad.

"God is the only one who guides us when we feel confused," she said.

Elsewhere on campus, a conference held by followers of the cleric Moktada al-Sadr was in progress. His pull is strong among young Shiites, who came out in the thousands last August when he called them to fight the American-led forces before he agreed to a cease-fire.

Muhammad Abdul Rudha, a student in the Arabic department, said he preferred reading religious and political books, because "the situation is critical; it requires that."

Mr. Jazaery said he worried about the power of religion among young Iraqis. Anyone who was born after 1980 grew up during Iraq's decline into war and economic sanctions. Corruption and poverty have eroded the once-strong educational system, leaving young people vulnerable to populist leaders like Mr. Sadr.

"They can read, they can write, but they can't understand," Mr. Jazaery said. "That's good for dictatorship and dangerous for democracy. It's a spare army for all hard-line elements."

Whatever the case, the generation gap seems wide. Athir Haddad, a finance professor, said he was elated when some of his students said they were skipping class to protest proposed legislation. He changed his mind when he learned that they knew little about it and were following orders from their cleric.

"For them I am from outer space," Mr. Haddad said.

Khalid al-Ansary and Zaineb Obeid contributed reporting for this article.

 

[jimmoyer]

June 29, 2005

Women Writing Novels Emerge as Stars in Iran
By NAZILA FATHI

TEHRAN, June 28 - Over the past decade, Iran's best-selling fiction lists have become dominated by women, an unprecedented development abetted by recent upheavals in Iranian society.

The number of women who have published novels has reached 370, said Hassan Mirabedini, a scholar of Iranian literature, whose findings recently appeared in the magazine Zanan (Women). That is 13 times as many as a decade ago, the research showed, and is about equal to the number for men today.

But the women's books are outselling the men's by far, thanks to simple - some critics say simplistic - language and compellingly personal narratives, often delving into once-taboo subjects like romance and sex. While the average Iranian novel is issued in print runs of 5,000 copies, some women's books have enjoyed printings exceeding 100,000.

"Women writers have not only become the avant-garde of Persian literature, but have also changed society's view of them as writers," Majid Eslami, a critic and editor of the literary and art magazine Haft (Seven), said in an interview.

"There was a time when women writers were constantly at odds with society, but now being a woman novelist is valued," he said. "They have become stars for their readers."

Though the election last week of the hard-line mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as president has raised fears of new social and cultural curbs in the Islamic Republic, some voiced doubts that such a campaign could succeed. "It is difficult to predict anything," Mr. Mirabedini said in an interview. But he added: "It is hard to undermine literary work in a short period of time. It is rooted in deep cultural layers in society."

Besides, Iranian women have become adept at maneuvering around the forbidden zones drawn by government and society.

These novelists, like Iranian women in general, have always led more restricted lives than their male counterparts. Traditionally, it was not considered appropriate for women to express their feelings and desires in writing.

From the 1930's into the 60's, there were only about a dozen women writing novels, and many used pseudonyms. The energy of literate women then was more focused on establishing basic rights, like suffrage.

By the 1970's, an increasing number of women were earning university degrees and enjoying the financial independence that came from working outside the home. The oil boom further raised incomes and encouraged travel abroad, allowing Iranian women to compare their lives with those of women in other countries.

The 1979 Islamic revolution, however, was a turning point for Iranian women across the spectrum. Better educated and Westernized women were marginalized by the new Islamic government and forced out of public sector jobs. Many turned to self-employment, often as private tutors, translators or writers.

More traditional women, on the other hand, who had been restricted by male relatives from working outside the home, were encouraged to assume public responsibilities in the new theocratic environment.

The 1980-88 war with Iraq accelerated the trend of women taking more control over their own lives, as hundreds of thousands of men left their families to fight at the front.

"With the revolution and the hardships that followed," Goli Emami, a publisher here, said, Iranian women "were compelled to put aside their passive attitude toward life and go out and earn a living. Eventually, after the war, they found the courage to write about their experiences."

The first top-selling novel by a woman was "Drunkard Morning," by Fataneh Haj Seyed Javadi, published in 1998. The novel, set in the 1940's, tells the story of a woman who defies her aristocratic family to marry a carpenter. But he turns out to be abusive; she leaves him, a radical act at the time, and marries someone else.

"Drunkard Morning" was followed by a wave of novels by other women, generating much public discussion about what the plots and characters revealed about the situation of women in Iran.

Though the pioneers of women's fiction in the early 20th century tended to be well educated and from elite families, many of today's successful novelists had a fairly traditional upbringing. They are primarily homemakers who write between their daily chores and draw heavily on their experiences.

For instance, Fariba Vafi, 43, whose novel "My Bird" won three major Iranian awards in 2002, never attended college. As a young girl, however, she traveled to Tehran from her hometown of Tabriz, 335 miles away, every two months to buy books and show her writings to a literature teacher.

Marriage and children delayed her plan to become a novelist. "I also had constant fights with my husband, who did not consider writing novels a profession," she said in her tiny apartment, where she writes when her children are at school.

Her inspirations include the year she spent in a police training course after the 1979 revolution. In "Tarlan," named for the main character, she describes women from poor families who enter the harsh environment of the police school. The book arouses readers' sympathy for policewomen who must enforce the strict social code of Islam and who are widely resented in Iran for harassing women who deviate from Muslim dress rules.

In another recent best seller, "We Get Used to It" by Zoya Pirzad, Arezou, a 41-year-old divorcée, begins running the real estate agency that once belonged to her father. In Iran, such work is dominated by men. Outside the office, Arezou struggles to satisfy her mother and daughter, shallow characters preoccupied with shopping and entertainment. Her one comfort is Shirin, a friend and colleague at the agency.

Both women are independent and wary of men. But then Arezou falls in love with a client, over the objections of her mother, daughter and even Shirin. Arezou is emblematic of middle-aged women in Iran, caught between tradition and modernity. She has rejected prejudices against a woman working in what is seen as a man's job, and left her husband. But her weaknesses become apparent when she yields to society's bias against a middle-aged woman's remarriage; she believes she has no choice but to continue caring for her daughter.

The women writing these novels must cope with two kinds of censors: the government and their families.

Censors at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, which must approve every book before it can be published, ban any explicit mention of sex. They ask for the removal of words like "nudity" and "bosom," even if these appear in metaphors and do not refer to the human body.

"Two figures were moving under the sheet," is how Ms. Haj Seyed Javadi informs readers that two characters in "Drunkard Morning" have a sexual relationship. The readers of Ms. Pirzad's "We Get Used to It" learns that Arezou and Sohrab have kissed when Arezou asks Sohrab if he prefers the taste of the toothpaste to lipstick. "All three," he says, meaning both and her lips, which are never directly mentioned.

Another constraint for writers is the potential reaction of relatives. Until recently, it was unusual for women to write about themselves, their experiences or their feelings. Now they often pattern their characters on people around them.

"In the beginning I was concerned what my sister-in-law thought about what I wrote," said Ms. Vafi, author of "My Bird." "My relatives kept calling me from Tabriz and said they knew what or who I was writing about. Gradually, I have become stronger.

"But my husband complains that I've left no untold secrets in our lives."