Hoping to bring in much-needed cash by selling honey, Dalal’s uncle becomes a beekeeper, enlisting Dalal’s help in the care of these temperamental creatures. Meanwhile, Dalal falls in love for the first time–against a background of surprise arrests, personal betrayals, and a crumbling social fabric that turns neighbors into informants.
Tightly crafted and full of vivid, unforgettable characters, Absent is a haunting portrait of life under restrictions, the fragile emotional ties among family and friends, and the resilience of the human spirit.
Hoping to bring in much-needed cash by selling honey, Dalal’s uncle becomes a beekeeper, enlisting Dalal’s help in the care of these temperamental creatures. Meanwhile, Dalal falls in love for the first time–against a background of surprise arrests, personal betrayals, and a crumbling social fabric that turns neighbors into informants.
Tightly crafted and full of vivid, unforgettable characters, Absent is a haunting portrait of life under restrictions, the fragile emotional ties among family and friends, and the resilience of the human spirit.
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Overview
Hoping to bring in much-needed cash by selling honey, Dalal’s uncle becomes a beekeeper, enlisting Dalal’s help in the care of these temperamental creatures. Meanwhile, Dalal falls in love for the first time–against a background of surprise arrests, personal betrayals, and a crumbling social fabric that turns neighbors into informants.
Tightly crafted and full of vivid, unforgettable characters, Absent is a haunting portrait of life under restrictions, the fragile emotional ties among family and friends, and the resilience of the human spirit.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781588366368 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 07/10/2007 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 337 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
ACCORDING TO THE medical report and the police statement, my father, an oil refinery engineer, died half an hour before my mother, a housewife. It happened as we were traveling by car from Baghdad to his new job in the Sinai desert. Witnesses confirmed that a small bundle was ejected from the front-seat window; the cause: an exploding landmine left over from the 1967 War. The bundle settled in the sand; it was me.
A police officer said, “Praise to God; the baby doesn’t have a scratch on her.” He handed me over to my aunt. I was four months old. Her bedroom is next to mine. She still has the swaddles in which I was bundled and the eagle-crested death certificate in her bottom drawer.
Her husband is infertile yet he refused to change his name. He didn’t follow the custom that dictates parents be named after their firstborn child. He didn’t wish to be referred to as the father of his deceased sister-in-law’s child. Instead, he insisted that he should be called Abu Ghayeb, the father of the absent one. My aunt conceded and accepted that she would be known as Umm Ghayeb, mother of the unborn child. It was her way of returning the favor—she would be labeled a barren woman in exchange for his consent to raise me. Growing up, I could never understand this arrangement, so against tradition, I decided to call him “my aunt’s husband” instead of amou—uncle.
Sometimes, when we’re alone, he calls to me in a soft voice, “Babati”—my little daughter. He sounds like someone who’s lost his voice, and is trying out his vocal cords by calling me.
She makes her way toward him, with the broom in her hand. She is silent this time. She brushes the warm tiles around his bare feet. She clutches the wooden handle firmly as she sucks in her lower lip. She tries as hard as she can to control her tongue.
He makes no movement as she sweeps the thin white scales from around him. Some cling to the bristles of the broom. Some of yesterday’s fall away. Last week’s scales now lie on the soil, nurturing the vine as it attempts to reach new heights. The plant ascends laboriously from the mustard-colored pot sitting beside the sofa. Its wilted leaves lift up their greenery lazily toward the fingers of sunlight that tickle playfully at the sides of a restless curtain.
When my aunt’s husband throws himself exhausted onto the sofa, its seams gape, like little mouths saying “boo” in slow motion. The color of the fabric has recently started to resemble the color of his skin. She will annoy him by taking her time sweeping up. Before he loses his temper, he inserts his finger into the slit sides of the middle cushion, and starts picking at what remains of its sponge filling. A few soft tufts gently drift onto the floor.
My aunt continues to sweep.
He bought her the sofa in the Days of Plenty. She wanted an onion-colored sofa. Instead of paying for it in installments, he deferred our trip to Moscow till the following summer so that she could plunge into a leather sofa the color and texture of pine. He ran his hand up and down my aunt’s thigh, patted the treasured new item of furniture, proud to have acquired them both. His salary then allowed him to do that. For her birthday, he brought her the vine. Its pot was bright yellow. She sang to the plant and to him.
After blowing out the candles on her cake she went to the cloth market in Naher Street. She chose a cream-colored French curtain. It was embellished with soft brown knots made out of shiny nylon threads. It looked as though the tailor had scattered raw sugar cane crystals onto the fabric, and the crystals had dissolved, clinging to the cloth wherever they’d landed. She said, “I’ve got good taste, haven’t I?”
The problem with the scales hadn’t yet started.
Many years have passed by this big window. Today, my aunt draws back the curtains. The knots no longer sparkle, and the edges are now frayed.
She shrieks, “My God, what’s this black grime?”
Black lines trickle down the sides of buildings, walls, and houses. Stripes of varying thickness dribble down from top to bottom. The city is wearing a jailbird’s pajamas, like a scene in a Disney cartoon from the days of black-and-white television.
Her husband says, “It’s the black rain. I didn’t want to worry you. They’re saying that Baghdad is wearing eyeliner today. Eyeliner provided by the Allied forces.”
She replies with a drawn-out wail, “What eyeliner is this? We’re all going to die!”
I join her at the window to share her amazement. The smoke from the bombing over the past few weeks has combined with the rain from last night, painting bars of loathsome solution everywhere. The local weather forecasters failed to predict the sudden downpour. Its smell is like a mixture of burnt engine oil and the stench of a rat that had died a while ago. Its death had gone unnoticed until the smell of putrefaction began to emanate from a remote cupboard. I said to myself, “Waterproof Lancôme!”
He says, “If the birds are still alive, then we too will survive.”
With a movement of her hand she grumbles, “You and your birds! Who’s going to clean up all this filth?”
“You.” Then he adds, “And the Baghdad City Council, obviously.”
I walk away from my aunt and her husband. Every window I look through mocks me, singing out, “Black, black, made of tar; this jumping pig, near and far.”
I prepare the hot water for him to soak in. He has to follow the instructions. He must mix one cupful of ground oats with warm water. The solution helps to loosen his flaking skin. He must also remember not to rub too vigorously, as that can worsen the inflammation.
While waiting for the water to bubble up in the big pot, I decide to boil an egg for myself. I peel it quickly before they finish arguing. Ouch! A small splinter of the hard shell gets embedded underneath my fingernail. I pull it out quickly and place the shiny beautiful hard-boiled egg on the plate. Its thin skin is perspiring.
The pregnant cat wanders back in. I trip over her. The smooth egg slides off the plate and lands on the floor. It breaks open and the yellow yolk falls, disintegrates as it rolls, then collides with the foot of a nearby chair. It reposes there, releasing its steam.
I lash out at the cat, hitting her head. I could cry. It is the last egg we have in the house today. I yell at her, “You horrid little animal!”
I pick up the dusty yolk. I try to squash it back into its rubbery white socket. I shove it into my mouth and it quivers with no salt.
I take a sip of water to get rid of this feeling that I’ve swallowed a mouthful of doughy straw that tasted like a boiled egg.
The electricity is due to be cut off at any moment for the next three hours. My aunt’s husband refuses to buy amperes from those who have generators. The current price is two thousand dinars for an ampere. Ten amperes is just enough for the fans; forty amperes will operate the fridge, the television, and possibly a fan as well.
Whenever my aunt uses her hair dryer, the lift stops between the floors and one of the people trapped in the lift calls out, “Abu Ghayeb’s family, for God’s sake, switch off your hair dryer, we’re stuck!”
This time it’s the thin teacher from the first floor. I leave the heat of the kitchen behind me. The wire netting on the window no longer lets the air in. My aunt often used to douse it with water to cool the breeze as it came through. Eventually the tiny squares became clogged up with a soft filling of rust. The teacher is lucky; the lift stops at our floor.
I open the metal grille for him. He breathes in deeply from the corridor air. His work is very demanding and he’s developed high blood pressure. When his car stopped working he started giving private lessons in social studies to secondary school students in his flat. Every time he bends forward to tie his shoelaces he gets dizzy and starts to sway. To save his eyesight from the effects of the high blood pressure, he resorted to selling all his shoes with laces, replacing them with ones he could slip on. Eventually, he sold all his other shoes as well.
He says to me, “Thank you, Dalal.”
Before she became a seamstress, my aunt taught arts and crafts at a primary school. Abu Ghayeb used to be an employee at the Ministry of Tourism and an amateur artist. He is now, like all his colleagues, professionally retired. In his youth he wanted to become a painter. He enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts. Two years later, his teachers called him in and advised him not to waste any more of his time. They told him, “Your eyes can see the beauty of true art, but unfortunately, the lines that your hand draws are flawed.” His dreams went up in flames. He’d hoped to become one of the artists that made up the “Group of Pioneers” who led the Iraqi art movement in the 1940s. That was when the failed student had to accept the offer of a job as a tourist guide after he’d been sent to London on a course to improve his English-language skills.
My aunt continues to pursue him relentlessly. “You wouldn’t listen to me, refused to become a trader, and look at the state we’re in now!”
He answers from his bath, where he’s having his soak, “It was I who asked you for your advice in those Days of Plenty. I wanted to invest our salaries abroad. You were the one who was adamant that we shouldn’t. You were the one who said, ‘Darling, how could we possibly send our money away?’ Wasn’t it you who accused me of smuggling our dinars out to foreign banks? And all I was doing was saving up to buy a small property abroad that we could go to for the summer holidays.”
Whenever they start this argument, I’m reminded of my first-ever reading book at school. The Khaldouniya reading book started with the words, “One house, two houses, many houses. One fire, many fires. One dinar, two dinars, many dinars….”
My aunt’s anger is reaching a crescendo, “You’re talking about dinars when the official exchange rate was three dollars to one dinar, and now when the rate is nearly three thousand dinars to one dollar, you’re blaming me?”
“Yes, because all you wanted to do was keep the money there, in front of you. Accessible, in your hands! It’s true that I was never a trader, but still I sought out other people’s advice. But you, you were never convinced.”
“And so, in order to punish me, you started buying a painting every month. Or were you just doing that to compensate for your feelings of inadequacy because you could never become an artist yourself?”
“I agree, I’m not a painter, but these artists have been my companions for so many years. I immerse myself in each painting in order to forget. Can you understand that? To forget.”
“And what benefit have we gained from these splashes of color on our walls, huh?”
“You wanted to keep the money from our salaries in your hands, isn’t that right? So I converted it into paintings. In this way, I’ve accommodated both your wishes and mine. I enjoy my paintings during my lifetime, and when I die, you can do with them what you will.”
He then added with a heavy breath, “How could I ever predict this damn blockade?”
Reading Group Guide
What's In A Name?
In the Iraqi society of my childhood, there was a wide variety of interesting, beautiful and musical names and nearly all of them had a meaning or a special significance. My neighbour was called the beautiful one, my sister’s name means the ringing of a bell, a male friend is named after lightning and another is the servant of God. Kurdish girls’ names are often a type of flower. My Scottish mother whom I always thought of as the eternal tourist would often ask me the meanings of my friend’s names. The names ranged from Jewish families who called their daughters Iris, Valernine and Gilda to Christian families who would call a son Omar - a Muslim name- without hesitation. My name has several meanings. It means the virgin, and the encyclopedia lists Saint Mary the Betool. It also means the believer in God. It is a name often attributed to the daughter of the prophet Mohamed. She went by Fatima Al Zahraa Al Betool.
Many of us at school ended up in the wrong religion class simply because our parents had not told us which religion we had been born into, and therefore which classes we belonged in! I remember carrying the Koran and wandering into the church in my Armenian school. One of my friends asked her father if she was SHIU’E (meaning a communist in Arabic) thinking that this was the word for SHE’IE (Shiite) because they sounded similar to her. He scolded her for being interested in differentiating between Shies and Sunnis insisting “We’re all the same.”
When I started primary school in Baghdad, my mother took me to the Jewellery Market in River Street. She asked a bearded old man to carve out my name in gold. She was doing what most Iraqi mothers did: cherish the name of her child. This was normally done in English letters but my foreign mother, to be different, had my name written out in Arabic. So for my seventh birthday, I got a necklace with my name dangling down from it, read from right to left.
Iraqi fathers take their names more seriously. They are traditionally named after their first-born son. After the child is born, they take great pride in being called, for example, Abu Hassan (the father of Hassan). If they aren’t lucky enough to have a son, they will then be named after their eldest daughter. It would be quite odd not to be named after a son, or failing that, a daughter. So, if they have no children, they have to create one. Somehow, everyone agreed to call this child: The Absent One. So childless men automatically become “the father of the Absent one” and this makes them fit in socially and psychologically.
What my mother could never understand was why men would want to be called after a human being who had not yet been born. This lingered with me for many years until I embarked on my second novel. I named it Absent to symbolise the dilemma of the Iraqi people. They had been excluded, and were “absent” from the international scene for decades. The civilization that had invented writing was now slipping into darkness as a result of wars, sanctions and dictatorship. For 35 years Saddam remained the father of the absent Iraqi people. I needed to give birth to their story.
Though I was born in Baghdad, I have lived in Amman, Jordan for a number of years, and have travelled quite a bit. And during my travels, in getting to know more Westerners, I realized that they knew little about Iraqis as human beings. Understandably, they were taking their impressions from the Iraq of the headlines. This was another important reason to write my second novel, not to criticize the media, but rather to play the role of a diplomatic host in order to invite readers to share my seven thousand year old culture that was being destroyed by deprivation. Throughout history, Iraqis have been under the stronghold of the Ottomans, the British, a local dictator, and now the Americans. Sometimes I can’t believe that in one lifetime I have witnessed three bloody crises: the Iraq-Iran war 1980-1988, the Invasion of Kuwait in 1990-1991 and the US lead Occupation in 2003. This has included battlefield and civilian killings, children’s malnutrition, diseases, starvation, mass graves, embargo, a forced diaspora, arrests, rape, torture, brain drain, continuous bombings, the list just goes on. Between the exported nightmare fantasy of weapons of mass destruction and the imported dream of democracy I concluded that black comedy was the best style for my new novel, and I took it on as a new challenge.
Absent is about Iraqi families struggling to survive during the sanctions in Baghdad. The events take place in one building; the floors represent the diverse layers of Iraqi society. As so many men died due to war and unstable circumstances, most of the characters are women, who unveil the story through dialogue, chitchat and gossip. It shows the effects of the economic and infrastructure collapse on the social and moral structure of day-to-day Iraqi lives. I felt that when all goes wrong on earth, human beings start searching the sky for solutions, and sometimes they get lost in the labyrinth of creating their own answers. This drew me into researching the hocus pocus underworld of the coffee cup reader, Umm Mazin (mother of Mazin). Everybody is searching to make sense amidst the chaos. The fortune reader takes over the destiny of the inhabitants, becoming a sort of psychoanalist for the distressed women. This novel portrays the less privileged people struggling in the back lines, suffering the toll of the political decisions made in the front lines, yet they are absent. This is a story that talks about an “old Iraq”, known to Iraqis but unknown to the West, and it ends with a “new Iraq” known to the West but unknown to Iraqis.
Yes, Saddam, the father is finally gone, but now we have many fathers. Since the Liberation/Occupation so much has changed, and things are going from bad to worse. My country is actually rocking between a pre-industrial stage and the threat of an impending vicious civil war. In the past few months, I have received calls from distressed friends in Baghdad: “Help, some groups are threatening me because my name is Sunni,” and on the other line a friend pleads: “Please find me a job; I’m being harassed because I have a Shiite name.” No wonder people are lining up to change their names and have started carrying more than one identity card to avoid being a target.
Occasionally, in Amman where I now live, I order a takeaway dinner from an Iraqi cook who sells meals from her home. To book the order she asks for my name by saying: “And you are the mother of?” I don’t know whether to answer with a smile or a tear: ‘’the mother of the Absent One.’
This brings me back to my late mother who ended up having three names. Sophia; her registered Christian name when she was baptised. Hazel; her domestic name when she lived in her country, and a Muslim name when she converted to Islam to marry my father. On her wedding day, her friend suggested that she adopt an Arabic name with as many letters close to her English name. She came up with Hadeel meaning cooing of the Dove. My mother said: “I like it, it’s peaceful.”
1. On the first page of Absent we learn that Dalal’s uncle “didn’t follow the custom that dictates parents be named after their first-born child….Instead, he insisted that he should be called Abu Ghayeb, the father of the absent one.” What motivates this unusual choice, and how does it affect his adopted ‘daughter’ Dalal? What examples of “absence” and “the absent one” can you find in the novel and what is their significance?
2. Aspects of Absent are profoundly universal, such as the depiction of the fractious marriage between Dalal’s aunt and uncle, Dalal’s uncertainty as she ponders what to do with her life, and the resilience of her friends and neighbors who manage to stay hopeful and make a living under dire circumstances. What other aspects of the story and the characters did you find yourself identifying with?
3. Absent is set in the 1990’s, after the Gulf War, but the exact time period and conflicts are ambiguous. Why do you think that Betool Khedairi chooses to do this, rather than setting it during the war itself, or choosing a particular post-war event?
4. How would you characterize Dalal and Abu Ghayeb’s relationship and how does it evolve over the course of the novel?
5. What role does the fortune teller Umm Mazim serve in the novel, is she there for comic relief, or what else might she represent? Why do so many people take comfort in visiting her? What would you ask her, if you had a chance to visit her?
6. Dalal’s uncle, a former artist, places a high value on aestheticism. When he asks Dalal how she would measure beauty, she responds: “If things aren’t distorted, they may be more beautiful” (64). What does this tell you about Dalal’s feelings towards her facial disfiguration? How do you think her physical appearance shapes her as a character? How does it affect her romantic relationship with Adel?
7. Unlike many of her friends and neighbors, Dalal and her uncle have spent time in Western countries. How does Dalal’s family feel about the West, and the Allied nations in particular? How does this compare with the impressions of other characters? Were you surprised about their reactions?
8. Why does Dalal choose to study French literature and is there a special significance in the fact that Dalal is reading Flaubert when she first meets Adel?
9. The characters in Absent spend a lot of time reminiscing about the Days of Plenty. In what ways are the clashes between the new and old Iraq apparent in the novel?
10. Abu Ghayeb tells Dalal that there is much to learn from the bees that he keeps, a lesson that she passes along to Adel and Saad. How does this wisdom become particularly profound? How might the bees serve as a metaphor for life in Baghdad during the 1990s?
11. Three of Dalal’s most intimate relationships in the novel are with Ilham the nurse, Saad the hairdresser and his exciting friend Adel. What does Dalal gain from each of these three people, and what does she lose, in getting close to them?
12. Do you think the novel ends on an optimistic note? How, if at all, do you think Dalal will be able to play a role in the reshaping of her home city?