Stories of women during wars and sieges in the novel “My Romantic Aunt” by Najm Wali

Iraqi novelist Najm Wali (Al Jazeera)

Recently, the Iraqi-German novelist, journalist, and translator, Najm Wali, has been living the life of two writers, each of whom belongs to the culture of a different country, or, so to speak, he has been living two lives, each of which belongs to a different culture.

It is not easy for an Arab writer, who has lived in a Western country for decades, and writes in the language of the country in which he resides, to belong to the literature of the country in which he was born and educated and which formed the repertoire of most, if not all, of his creative works.

It is not an easy issue for the writer; To write a novel, for example, about the country of his birth and in a language other than the language of that country, and to belong to the literature of the foreign country. This is what applies to many Arab writers who lived and are living in the West, and write in the language of that country, and their literature has become part of the literature of the country of the language and the reading public, and not to the country that they left voluntarily or by force. We can mention many names that have come to belong to the country of the language in which it was written, including, for example, Al-Taher bin Jalloun, Abbas Khidr, Rafiq Shami, and Laila Soleimani.

Najm Wali's novel "My Romantic Aunt" will not be the last by its author about Iraq, as he says (Al Jazeera)

Two languages, two lives

Najm Wali found a solution in not separating from belonging to the worlds of Arabic literature by continuing to write in the Arabic language. As for his novels that will belong to German literature, he will write them directly in German, such as the novel “The City of Nassals,” which was published a few days ago by the Swiss publishing house Sission.

In his most recent work, “My Romantic Aunt,” Najm Wali (born in 1956) continues his endless stories about Iraq, about Iraqi women, and about the endless pain in Iraq. Although more than 40 years have passed since he fled Iraq, the narrative reserve about his birthplace has not dried up. Those who follow his works thought that he no longer knew anything more about Iraq after the publication of his novels “Sarah’s Sin,” the main events of which take place in Saudi Arabia, and “Souad and the Military,” which followed the life and suicide of the famous Egyptian actress Souad Hosni in Cairo and London. But Najm Wali returned with this novel to Iraq again.

In the novel “Souad and the Military,” Wali introduces two main characters: the late Egyptian artist Souad Hosni and the officer in charge of her (Al Jazeera)

And again about a main character called Souad, who is the narrator’s aunt, who called her a romantic, just as her mother and her friends called her. This is a characteristic that the aunt established on herself through the thoughts that she used to write in her diary.

Women and lovers

This novel is woven by Najm Wali not only from the story of the heroine of the novel and her male lovers, but also from the stories of her friends and their lovers, but he collects these threads to create a public space about women, as well as about men, who lived through a period of continuous wars in Iraq, since the arrival of President Saddam Hussein. To power, by which he meant the war with Iran, or the First Gulf War, which extended from 1980 until 1988, then the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and the Second Gulf War, or the Mother of Battles or Operation Desert Shield, which extended from 1990 until 1991. And then the severe siege on the people of Iraq, starving them and emptying them of life itself, until the writer reaches the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the disintegration of everything in it.

Although politics is the main driver in these catastrophic events, Najm Wali went to the simple details of life, analyzing them and narrating them through many stories, away from slogans that might take the novel in the direction of directness and stereotyping.

Najm Wali also remained faithful to presenting the marginal and the marginal, as the main characters in the novel are ordinary characters, not influential in either public life, politics, or the party, but they were exposed to unusual fates, especially the characters of Souad, Manar, Ibrahim, and the narrator’s father, which led them to prison, torture, and oppression. .

It is true that the main place is Baghdad, and Najm Wali presented non-central places in his previous novels, such as the capital, so the characters seem to be from a marginal place that does not concern Baghdad. In wars and sieges, Iraq itself turned into a marginal place devoid of the simplest things that would allow the establishment of a central place.

Psychoanalysis and anecdotes

In 18 chapters and 323 pages, Najm Wali presented more than 20 female and male characters, through their stories, insides, tenderness, violence, and violent destinies, through one narrator, who is the nephew of the main character Souad. He used several narrative solutions in the architecture of this work, through dialogue and memoirs. Psychological analysis of the characters, even of the fascist military authoritarian Farouk and his nephew, the helpless officer Ibrahim, seemed to always accompany the stories that moved between one character and another smoothly, to the point that the narrator always seemed to be a narrator and not the author of all of it.

When asked about the continued reliance on female characters in his novels, the author of “Angels of the South” told Al Jazeera Net that the reason for this may be because he “grew up and was raised among women.” This is the case with almost all children in the East, because “the father goes to work and after the end of work he goes to the café, and the mothers stay at home, while the children play in the street.”

Then he says that the women used to sit in circles in front of the door of the house, or tell their worries to each other, and “how I loved their stories. I used to sit next to my mother and listen to the stories, even if I did not understand some of them.” He finds that these stories constitute a "large reserve, which appears from time to time and in various locations in my novels."

This is because he may have felt sympathy for them at the time, saying, “Why do men go to the café and women stay sitting at home? Perhaps I felt marginalized at the time, despite simple awareness. As I grew up and matured, this solidarity turned into a basic principle for me.”

Regarding the marginal, Najm Wali says that from the beginning, “I expressed interest in my novels and stories in the marginal, whether in terms of place or in terms of people, and usually - until the publication of my first novel, “The War in the Tarab Neighborhood” in 1989, Iraqi novels as a whole were set in the capital, Baghdad. Its hero is always an intellectual who projects his inner monologue on others, and what interested me most was talking about those small places, but they are big with the lives they are crowded with.”

The novel “My Romantic Aunt” will not be Najm Wali’s last work about Iraq, as he has finished a new novel of his that takes place in Iraq, and he will review it before submitting it for publication, to form a new episode in a long series in Najm Wali’s writings about his hometown, which, despite the passage of 4 years. Decades, never forgotten.

Najm Wali had fled Iraq on October 28, 1980, and at that time he had not published any narrative work, whether in a novel or a story, as he continued his university studies in German literature (University of Hamburg) and Spanish literature (Madrid). ), before his first novel, “The War in the Tarab Neighborhood,” was published in 1989, which he wrote in Arabic. Then, a year later, he published a collection of short stories entitled “Here in That Distant City,” which he wrote in German (Im Galgenberg Publishing House - Hamburg, 1990).

In 1994, he will publish the short story collection “Mary’s Last Night” in the Arabic language, after which he will publish more than one literary work in the Arabic language, preserving that connection between him and literature written in the Arabic language. He will publish the novel “A Place Called Dead” (1997), and then his collection of short stories. “Waltz with Matilda” (1999), which will be his last collection of short stories, so far, after which he published only novels, such as “Flesh Hill” (2001), “The Portrait of Joseph” (2005), and “Angels of the South” (2009), which reached To the longlist for the Jan Michalski Prize in 2014, “Baghdad Marlborough” (2012), which won the Bruno Krajewski Prize in 2014, “Sarah’s Sin” (2019), and “Souad and the Military” (2020), which won the German Publishing Prize. Until the publication of his new novel, “My Romantic Aunt,” by Dar Rawayat (2024). Najm Wali currently lives and works in the German capital, Berlin. He is vice president of the German PEN Center for Persecuted Writers Affairs, and supervisor of the “Literary Peace Talks” project, which is held annually in Germany.

Source: Al Jazeera