by Alia Mamdouh
Just as Naphtalene evokes Mamdouh’s childhood in Baghdad, her later novels also deal with various stages of her life. Her third novel, Passion (1995), which has been translated into French with a preface by French feminist Hélène Cixous, concentrates on Mamdouh’s experiences in the early 1990s. Set in the UK, it describes an encounter between the central character, also called Huda, her ex-husband, and their son. In her latest novel, The Loved Ones (2003), her alter ego is a middle-aged woman lying unconscious in a hospital bed in Paris. The novel is narrated by her Canadian-based son who comes to visit her. (Mamdouh’s own son lives in Canada.) In 2004, Mamdouh was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz medal for Literature for The Loved Ones. In all her works there are both female and male characters, but it is invariably the women who are at the forefront, with the men taking secondary roles, as is well illustrated in Naphtalene.
Alia Mamdouh is one of an increasing number of women writing in Arabic who are specifically concerned with women’s issues. She belongs to a generation of Iraqi women who, together with fellow writers from other Arab countries, have risen above political and social restrictions to make their voices heard throughout the Arabic-speaking world. Those whose works have been translated into Western languages are reaching an even wider readership. This has been no easy feat in a climate of social disapproval, political censorship, and chastisement. During a 1998 talk she gave at the University of London, Iraqi novelist Haifa Zangana said that Iraqi writers who remained in Iraq had three options: to write what the authorities approved of, to stop writing altogether, or to adopt an allegorical style. Zangana herself was imprisoned in the infamous Abu Ghraib jail during Saddam Hussein’s regime for not toeing the party line. After her release from prison, she left Iraq and settled in the United Kingdom.
Apart from Mamdouh and Zangana, well-known Iraqi women writers who have made an impact on the contemporary Arabic literary scene are the novelists and short story writers Lutfia al-Dilaimi, Daisy al-Amir, Samira Almana, May Muzaffar, Buthayna al-Nasiri, Betool Khedhairi, and the poets Nazik al-Mala’ika, Lamia Abbas Amara and Dunya Mikhail. These writers have chosen the route of exile to other Arab countries where the political climate is less oppressive, or have sought refuge in Europe and America. In spite of living abroad, Iraqi women writers’ works are invariably evocative of the flavor and spirit of their country.
In the Bloomsbury Guide to Women’s Literature, there are three entries on modern Iraqi literature, two on individual poets and a third on the novel Naphtalene, under its British title Mothballs, and Alia Mamdouh herself is mentioned in the introduction. The two poets in question are Nazik al-Mala’ika (born 1923) and her mother Salma al-Mala’ika (1906-1953), known by her pseudonym Umm Nizar. Educated at home, Salma al-Mala’ika’s earliest poems began to be published in the mid-1930s. In her works she champions women’s rights and rebukes passive women who accept being subservient to men. Her daughter, Nazik, is considered a pioneering voice in modern Arabic literature. She was one of two Iraqi poets who led what has become known as the Free Verse movement in Arabic poetry. Influenced by their readings of English and French poetry, and especially by the two Western literary movements, realism and symbolism, al-Mala’ika, along with other poets, developed innovative forms for writing verse. By experimenting with rhyme and meter, they succeeded in breaking free of the classical monorhymed odes that Arabs had written for centuries.
Besides being a distinguished poet, Nazik al-Malaika is also a highly respected educator and one of the founders of the University of Basra. Like many educated Iraqi women who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s, she attended the teacher-training college in Baghdad. Following her graduation in 1944, she was awarded a grant to study abroad. She attended Princeton where she studied literary criticism, and later earned a master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin. She returned to Baghdad in 1956 and was employed as a lecturer at the teacher-training college. Al-Mala’ika has taught also at the Universities of Basra and Kuwait.
When al-Mala’ika began her writing career, poetry was still the predominant literary genre in the Arab world, although the novel was beginning to make its mark. Before the novel emerged as a fully-fledged genre in the 1930s, Arabic fiction went through a period of development and transformation, beginning with narratives using Western themes in an Arab setting, translations of Western novels, and historical romances. It is generally agreed that the rise of the Arabic novel coincided with the emergence of an educated class in the Arab world that provided both the novel writers and their readers. The first generation of women writers did not attempt to broach the sensitive issues of sex and politics that have become central themes for many contemporary Arab women novelists. Even today, a few writers still avoid writing explicitly about sexual matters and criticizing the politics of their countries, while others feel that it is only through being uninhibited in their writings that their art can best be served. Creative writing has provided Arab women with the means to overcome their inhibitions and the social and political restrictions imposed on them.
Iraqi women have struggled for their emancipation and equality with men in a patriarchal society. Despite the fact that at the beginning of the twentieth century the vast majority of Iraqi women were illiterate, there was an educated minority centered mainly in Baghdad and other urban centers. Schools for girls had been built as early as 1899, and educational establishments founded by Christian and Jewish charitable organizations were attended by girls from all denominations. Iraqi women were always active in public life, even under Ottoman occupation. However, it was at the beginning of the 1920s that they became more vocal, demanding better educational opportunities and more rights for women. Some women took part in the 1920 revolution against British occupation, and the first Iraqi women’s organization was founded in 1924. In 1923 higher education became available to women when the first teacher-training college opened in Baghdad. By the 1940s there were schools for women throughout Iraq, and elementary schools were usually mixed, while the high schools were always single-sex. It was at a mixed Baghdad elementary school that Alia Mamdouh began her education, a school similar to the one attended by Huda, the central character of Naphtalene.
As education became more available to women, graduates pursued other professions besides teaching, including medicine and law. The Iraqi civil service opened its doors to women, while non-graduates found employment in offices and hospitals. With the increase in newspapers and magazines, some women found work as journalists. By the late 1930s there were four widely circulated women’s magazines published in Iraq, as well as a number of national newspapers that gave both men and women the opportunity to develop their skills as writers.
In the first half of the twentieth century, major strides made in providing education for women in Arab countries did not go unchallenged. According to Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, editors of Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing. “new educational opportunities disturbed patriarchal patterns of control over women.” Badran and Cooke go on to say that “the very issue of literacy for women was inflammatory and remained anathema to entrenched male patriarchy which linked female immorality with literacy.” While patriarchal attitudes at first discouraged literacy for men from the lower social classes, they disapproved of it categorically for women from all classes. Although Badran and Cooke are referring here to attitudes throughout the Arabic-speaking world, and to Egypt in particular, their findings accurately describe the situation in Iraq as well.
Undaunted by these obstacles, increasing numbers of Iraqi women went on to higher education. Up until the 1960s, women received their university education in Baghdad where the main faculties were. From the 1960s, universities in other cities, like Basra and Mosul, were built and available for women to study. Some families chose to send their daughters to Egypt or Lebanon, where education was considerably more advanced and women enjoyed better privileges. In Egypt, university education had become available to women as early as 1929. Some Iraqi women also went to study a
broad in England, the United States, and Canada. Because English is taught from the fifth grade, it was natural that Iraqis should go to English-speaking countries to study, as Nazik al-Mala’ika had done. According to a United Nations report, by the 1990s, Iraq had one of the highest literacy rates in the Arab world, and more professional women in positions of authority than in any other Middle Eastern country.
Naphtalene
Mamdouh belongs to a generation that grew up in a relatively stable and prosperous Iraq where education was becoming more readily available to women from all walks of life. The 1950s in particular was a time when the arts flourished, including literature, painting, sculpture, and music. Naphtalene presents different scenes from the narrator/author’s childhood. Set in the sprawling Baghdad quarter of al-A‘dhamiyya, along the east bank of the Tigris where Mamdouh grew up, the plot revolves around the day-to-day life of the main characters. It describes a world of relative peace and security where children play freely in the streets of their neighborhood, men go about their business, occupying the outer space and leaving the inner space completely to women. Whenever they appear in that inner sanctum that is the domain of women, the men seem like intruders, as can be seen from Huda’s descriptions of her father, her aunt’s suitor and the neighborhood nurse’s husband. In this novel, Mamdouh evokes the lost innocence of a bygone age. Mamdouh has often repeated in interviews that what drove her to write Naphtalene was a sudden urge to immortalize the world of her childhood and the individuals who inhabited it. Perhaps the best way she could recreate this lost innocence was by relaying events through the eyes of a young girl, her one-time alter ego.
In the first chapter, readers are given a description of Huda’s home, a traditional Iraqi house with rooms built around a courtyard, the entrance up a flight of stone steps, a walled flat roof on top of the house where the family sleeps during summer nights, and a cellar under the house where they take shelter from the oppressive midday heat when temperatures can rise up to 130 degrees in the shade. Huda calls it “the lethal heat of Baghdad.” (73) Before air conditioning was introduced, houses were always built with a cellar. A walled roof has remained a feature of Baghdad houses and in some homes, as in Naphtalene, there are one or two rooms on the roof providing attic space, where unwanted household items are stored. Huda’s house in al-A‘dhamiyya is near the centuries-old Abu Hanifa mosque, a place of worship for the mainly Sunni Muslim community, and one of the landmarks of Baghdad. The house is also close to the earth dam, built to prevent the waters of the Tigris from flooding Baghdad. The Tigris, which divides Baghdad into two, plays an important role in the life of the inhabitants, and this is brought out in the novel.
Literary critics, whether writing in Arabic, English, or any other language, label Naphtalene as an autobiographical novel. Mamdouh herself has frequently denied this, though often the early works of an author are full of autobiographical data. Firdous Azim points out that “the novel has been seen as a heterogeneous form of writing, straddling ‘fictional’ and ‘factual’ discursive terrain” and “recording real events in the lives of the characters.” Mamdouh admits that there are similarities between herself and Huda. Both had a grandmother who was the mainstay of the family and took on the role of both parents in caring for her and her much-loved younger brother. Mamdouh’s mother, like Huda’s, was Syrian and died of tuberculosis, but Mamdouh was only three at the time and does not remember her at all. She says that she wanted “to give her mother wings in the novel so she would fly in front of” her. She goes on to say: “I could only visualize her by writing about her” (Personal communication, October 4, 2004). She conjures up a vision of a beautiful, sensitive, but ailing woman:
“She was extraordinarily slender, fair-skinned and tall. Her hair was hazelnut brown, her eyes were honey-colored but showed no light. The skin of her face was dry, her cheeks hollow, her teeth crooked.” (6)
Huda’s mother is present in the early chapters of the novel. Her grandmother, however, appears almost as frequently as Huda, often towering above everyone else. Huda gives a loving description of her grandmothers’ character before moving to her physical attributes:
“When she spoke, her voice was clothed in caution and patience, and when she was silent everyone was bewildered by her unannounced plans. She was strong without showing signs of it, mighty without raising her voice, beautiful without finery. She was beautiful from her modest hem to her silver braids. She was slim, of medium height. . .” (36)
Apart from Huda, her mother and grandmother, the other main characters we meet in the novel are Huda’s younger brother, Adil, her paternal aunt Farida, who is waiting to be betrothed to her cousin Munir, and Huda’s father. Huda has little good to say about Munir. He is introduced from the first page as someone who terrifies Adil and whom her mother dislikes. Huda’s mother invariably “vanished out of his way.” “He used to show up without notice and leave without excusing himself. . . . He jumped like a field locust and scurried like the cockroaches in the cesspool.” (2) He exasperates her grandmother by using a food plate as an ashtray. Huda concludes: “there was something of an evil spirit about him.” (2) In her eyes, Munir, who is “ugly,” represents men at their worst, while Adil is gentle and loving, his “beauty” being her “greatest joy.” It is at this point, while describing Adil, that readers find out how old the children are when the novel opens: “You were nine years old. Adil was eight.” (4)
In Chapter 2, Huda and Adil visit their grandfather’s house where their great aunts live. Like children everywhere who have a favorite place they remember fondly years later, her grandfather’s house is to Huda and her brother “the house of dreams.” (11) It is there that they eat delicacies specially prepared by their aunt and wear their best clothes when they visit. Their grandfather’s house provides a welcome change and a reason for venturing out into the wider world. The local streets yield many diversions too, especially the people they encounter there who include Rasmiya, the neighborhood nurse, whose husband regularly beats her; Hobi, the butcher, on whose wall hangs a picture of the young King Faisal with his uncle, the regent; Hashim, the cross-eyed boy; Mahmoud and his lame sister Firdous; and their father, Abu Mahmoud, the cheese seller. It is common practice in a number of Arab countries to refer to a man or a woman by the name of their eldest son, and in some cases, daughter. This is considered to be a friendly and, at the same time, polite form of address. Naphtalene abounds with these forms of address: Abu Mahmoud is “Mahmoud’s father,” Umm Sattouri is “Sattouri’s mother,” Umm Jamil is “Jamil’s mother.” In Iraq, moreover, nicknames and caritative forms of address are common practice. Thus, Hobi is a shortened version of Abdul Wahhab, and Sattouri is a term of endearment for anyone called Sattar or Abdul Sattar. Huda’s brother, Adil, and her father, Jamil, are sometimes affectionately referred to as Addouli and Jammouli. Khan following a woman’s name, as Huda explains towards the end of Chapter 1, was a polite way of addressing an elderly or middle-aged urban woman. A shortened form of the Turkish hanim, meaning “lady” or “madam” (from the Persian khanum), khan was used right up to the 1960s. Effendi or “Mr.” like khan, follows a first name. A remnant of Ottoman times, it is sometimes used sarcastically, as can be seen in Naphtalene when talking about “Mr. Munir.” Educated, professional women like Rasmiya and the teachers in Huda’s school are referred to by the more modern title sitt that is translated here as “Mrs.” or “Miss” and is currently still in use.
For Huda, roaming through the neighborhood streets is a source of great entertainment. She can play freely with boys and run around with them. There was very little traffic then in the side streets, as very few people in densely populated Baghdad neighborhoods like al-A‘dhamiyya owned cars. Some roads were dirt tracks, “furrowed and muddy, not paved,” as Huda describes them. (75). Children were inventive and devised games with simple toys like tops, beads, and marbles, or even household objects, namely tin cans and discarded bicycle tires. Huda, being nine, was still young enoug
h to be allowed to play with boys. Yet that is not what her father thinks, as seen when his imminent arrival is announced at the end of Chapter 2. Their father bursts in on the children playing with Mahmoud’s top and Huda’s beads:
“The top was thrown in a ditch. My father trampled the mud houses. The beads were scattered from my waist and strewn in the ditches and corners. He trampled the rest underfoot. The girls stumbled confusedly as far as their houses. The boys took shelter behind the telegraph poles.” (33)
It is from this point that Huda’s carefree existence is curtailed. Her father forbids her from playing again in the nearby streets. By isolating her from contact with boys, he wants to repress her liveliness and vitality, characteristics to be discouraged in girls if they are to grow up to be obedient wives. She is expected to drape herself in a black cloak, worn by traditional Iraqi women in public places. She finds the cloak cumbersome and irritating, as when she visits her father at the jail in Karbala where he works as the prison governor:
“I stumbled and fell, and Adil laughed at me. After a few minutes of walking I began to scratch my head. Every time I put my cloak in order it immediately tumbled from my head.” (137)
The cloak here becomes a symbol of the restraining power of tradition on women. At one moment a little girl is free to play with boys, and at another moment she is expected to conform by wrapping herself up in unwieldy clothing. The previous year, when Huda’s father had gone to Baghdad from Karbala for a religious holiday, he had given her money and told her to take Adil to the park to play on the swings. She was still young then, not to be burdened with the attire of approaching womanhood, and could show off her new dress without being covered in a cloak from head to toe. It is customary during religious holidays for children to wear new clothes and shoes and to play on the swings, seesaws, and roundabouts that are set up in public gardens for the occasion.