Which character in your novel The Last of the Angels do you relate to the most?
It is without a doubt Burhan Abdallah, the young boy, who finds himself in a world full of wonders and tries to grasp the meaning of everything around him. He resembles me in many aspects of his life: His father is a worker in the same oil company that employed my father, he lives in the place I did, and he goes to the same school I attended. Also, his life in exile reflects somewhat my own experiences in exile: He lives in Berlin and sits, as I often do, in a café in Alexanderplatz and talks with his Iraqi friends about the war in his homeland. He dreams of returning someday to his lost paradise. He sits and waits, day after day, year after year, for a miracle: the end of the hell raging in his country.
You left Iraq for Germany in 1977, after being jailed for three years for your political activities. What do you miss most about your homeland?
To be sure, I miss a lot of things, but they are things that no longer exist. The land now is not the same land that I left behind in 1977. Everything there is changed. The long nightmare of the dictatorship and the subsequent successive and bloody wars have blinded the people to reality. The greatest dream of everyone in Iraq now is only survival. Iraqis from different parts of the country tell me that each time they dare to go to work or to step outside their doors, they do not know if they will be able to come back home at all. I miss of course my mother; my friends; the cafés, bars, and nightlife of Abu Nuwas in Baghdad, but I know that my mother has already died without ever seeing her prodigal son again; many of my friends have been killed in the battlefields, jailed, or obliged to flee the country; and the cafés and bars in Abu Nuwas are closed.
The last section of my novel The Ancestors (2002) is entitled “Returning to No Return to It.” The main character returns from exile to Baghdad to find that “his” Baghdad exists only in the dreams he had during the long nights of his exile. I have received many invitations in recent years to visit Iraq, but I have found myself unable to accept them. For thirty long years I waited day after day for paradise, so what can I look for now in hell?
Were you surprised when the book was banned after its initial publication in 1992?
Not at all, because all of my works were already banned in Iraq under Saddam’s regime. In 1979, this regime began a campaign of terror targeting specifically intellectuals and writers who supported democracy and were not ready to accept the regime’s nationalist and ideological guidelines on culture and literature.
In 1980, I founded, with some other Iraqi writers, a group called The Union of Iraqi Writers for Democracy in Exile. In response, the regime withdrew my passport and later confiscated my family’s house in Baghdad. These measures failed to prevent the Iraqi people from reading my books. Most of the books, which I had published abroad, were smuggled into the country, copied, and sold in secret. I have met people who have been arrested simply for possession of my books. This shows not only how vulnerable and ridiculous the dictatorship was, but also the real nature of the conflict.
The whole struggle in Iraq, but also in the rest of the Arabic and Islamic world, was and is a struggle between two choices: to live in the past or in the present. To carry the heavy burden of ancient history on our shoulders, or to liberate ourselves from our own demons and promote creativity and craft in this modern age. All the nationalist and religious movements preach about a certain “Golden Peak,” on a “Sacred Mountain,” that gleams and shimmers somewhere in the remote past and should be attained at any price, in their opinion. For me, my ascents lie only in my own lifetime.
What would you want first-time readers of Arabic literature to understand about Iraq and its people?
Iraq is more than the journalists’ reports of daily explosions, acts of terrorism, and sectarian violence against innocent people. It’s a land with more than five thousand years of civilization and one of the leading cultural centers of the Arab world. It is rich not only in its natural resources, but also in its thousands and thousands of well-educated people. The bloody daily picture doesn’t reflect Iraq’s real human and modern spirit. Saddam’s regime destroyed all the democratic and progressive parties and forced a great part of the intelligentsia to flee the country. The current struggle in Iraq is not taking place among ordinary people—who are eager to live like everyone else in the world. It’s a struggle between certain religious groups with their maniac and terrorist ideologies, who are trying to control the country in the political vacuum following the fall of the dictatorship. The American administration has committed a big mistake in allowing these religious groups to rule the country in a very primitive way. It is very important now for Iraq and America to put an end to this war together and give the Iraqi people the chance to live in peace and dignity.
This edition of The Last of the Angels was translated by William M. Hutchins. How closely do you work with the translator?
William M. Hutchins is one of the most important translators of modern Arabic literature. To work with him is a real pleasure for me. When he finishes translating a chapter, he emails it to me and asks me to read it to check the language. And each time I do this I discover how accurate, wonderful, and astonishing his translation is. He divines the deepest spirit of the text and creates it anew in the English language.
The novel ends with Burhan’s hands changing into wings as he lifts himself “higher…higher…higher…until he soared into the sky, and disappeared.” What do you intend for the reader to take away from this statement?
I usually do not like to give the reader my own interpretation of specific situations in my novels. I leave them open, preferring to give the reader the chance to derive his or her own conclusions and enjoy these discoveries. Anyhow, as Burhan decides at the last moment not to run away from the soldiers of destruction, to face them and accept even his own death if necessary, he liberates himself from his chains and discovers his own craft. The soldiers fail to kill or arrest him. With his wings soaring into the sky, he gives us new hope and lets us know that the story is not yet finished and it will, in fact, go on without end.
What writers would you say influenced you?
I have read countless Eastern and Western writers and have learned from them. The first, most important book in my life was A Thousand and One Nights. I read it as a child many times, and each time I found more pleasure in its stories. I was taken, not only by its magical world, but also by the eroticism of its language. I read also as a schoolboy, besides the Arabic literary canon, The Odyssey by Homer, The Divine Comedy by Dante, most of Shakespeare’s plays, and the work of many other writers and poets.
The writers who have influenced me most are Kafka, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, Sartre, Camus, T. S. Eliot, and Rilke.
Because I speak four languages (Arabic, Turkish, English, and German), I carry within me something from the literary and cultural values of all these languages and their great writers. I consider my writings as a kind of unifying bridge between different cultures.
You’ve written several volumes of poetry, six novels, and three books of criticism. Have any of your other works been translated into English?
Yes. In 1997, the Quarterly Review of Literature (Vol. 36) published my poetry collection In Every Well a Joseph Is Weeping, translated by Khaled Mattawa, and in 2003, BOA Editions published my second poetry book, Miracle Maker: The Selected Poems of Fadhil Al-Azzawi, also translated by Khaled Mattawa. My second novel, Cell Block Five, translated by William M. Hutchins, published by American University of Cairo Press, is to be released in April 2008.
What is the most important thing you’d like readers to take away from this novel?
I’d like my readers first of all to read this novel as a literary work. The Last of the Angels is a journey inside Arabic and Islamic culture, mythology, and religion not only as it exists in Iraq, but also in the entire Middle East. It describes the different forms of struggle between traditional beliefs and the reality of the modern world, with all its ideological illusions and dreams. All his life Burhan Abdallah follows the advice of three old angels who carry the spring to his city. But at the end he discovers that they are not more than disguised devils. The truth alone liberates him from the temptation of his false angels (symbolizing the ideological prophets of our modern times) and enables him to find his own human strength.
What’s next for you?
I am writing now a novel about Iraq under the occupation, which follows the tragic destinies of several different Iraqi and American characters who find themselves standing on different fronts in a war not of their own waging. I hope to finish it within months.
My novel Cell Block Five will be available in English in April 2008 from the American University in Cairo Press. I hope also to see my novels The Ancestors and City of Ashes translated into English. The first one tells the story of four dictators in Iraq and the rise of each from the dead, while the second is about the complicated relationship between the executioner and his victim: a novel about love, friendship, betrayal, and loyalty.
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