June 26-July 2, 2003

Middle East Memoirs

Two writers struggle with the realities of Middle Eastern life.

by Sara Marcus

The pressure of being a Middle Eastern memoirist, of attempting to convey one’s existence to an oblivious and hostile West, must be immense. In these two slim books, one writer reacts to war and devastation by striving to speak for her whole people, while another resolves not to be roped into speaking for anyone but himself.

I Saw Ramallah’s Mourid Barghouti, a Palestinian poet returning to the West Bank after nearly three decades of exile following the 1967 war, processes his homecoming and lifetime of family tragedies by asserting self-expression and individual experience above any other political objective. In his eyes, one of the greatest losses of the Occupation in the West Bank is that people there lack the luxury of complex relationships to place and history. "Perhaps the worst thing about occupied cities," he writes, "is that their children cannot make fun of them." Returning to the land of his youth after 30 years of memories, the deeply thoughtful Barghouti has little patience for romanticized notions of homeland, viewing such concepts as intellectually dishonest.

Not that politics are meaningless to Barghouti. He only seeks to re-center political thinking on the level of concrete, personal details: "Politics is the family at breakfast. Who is there and who is absent and why," he writes. And indeed, the slowly unfolding stories of his own family’s multiple separations and deaths form a more powerful document of occupation than any polemical speech. Striking, too, is his insistence that collective suffering can qualify as comic. "I do not believe an eye that ignores the comedy within the tragedy," he writes. "The situation is tragic but the tragedy is always tinged with comedy because it is without majesty."

A robust sense of comedy defines much of Nuha al-Radi’s Baghdad Diaries, a memoir of war and embargo. Al-Radi, an Iraqi artist, began her diary as the first Gulf War broke out in 1991 and wrote in it sporadically over a dozen years. With a painter’s eye for detail and an eccentric’s relish for the absurd, she conjures hilarious images: Baghdadis rushing to devour hundreds of once-frozen chickens before they spoil ("I wish our stock of food would finish so we could eat less," she writes); a failed and smelly attempt at sausage-making with nylon stockings for casings; a neighbor who, during lulls in the air raids, bikes around wearing a white linen suit with a bottle of lemon juice in one pocket, a bottle of vodka and a glass in the other.

As the sanctions drag on, the quality of Iraqi life plummets. Runaway inflation places ordinary groceries out of many families’ reach; desperate people steal anything that isn’t nailed down; hospitals run out of supplies while cancer and leukemia multiply. Al-Radi transforms these tragedies from abstract newspaper dispatches to vivid, accessible anecdotes. Unfortunately, the more al-Radi takes on the role of spokeswoman for the Iraqi people, the less she trusts her own experiences and vision. Where her earlier takes on world events are catty and clever ("They were supposed to be freeing Kuwait. Maybe they need a map?"), her later ones are pallid retreadings of paths that Chomsky and Counterpunch have blazed with greater erudition and analysis.

"Our presence at the event, important as it is," Barghouti writes, "is not enough to create art." If his memoir strives to resist the romance of living in world-historical moments, then al-Radi’s diary is an example of what happens when a writer believes these moments when they promise, falsely, that the stories will tell themselves. Al-Radi’s memoir, while falling short of literature, succeeds at its (not necessarily lesser) goal of putting an individual, quirky, creative face on the Iraqi people. Her story may lag in the department of "piercing insight and the special sensitivity with which we receive experience" that Barghouti posits as essential characteristics of reality-based art, but her memoir will change the way we read the morning newspaper.

I Saw Ramallah

By Mourid Barghouti Vintage, 208 pp., $12

Baghdad Diaries: A Woman’s Chronicle of War and Exile

By Nuha al-Radi Vintage, 224 pp., $12

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