Packaged Lives Read online

  Packaged Lives

  Middle East Literature in Translation

  Michael Beard and Adnan Haydar, Series Editors

  Select Titles in Middle East Literature in Translation

  The Ant’s Gift: A Study of the Shahnameh

  Shahrokh Meskoob; Dick Davis, trans.

  The Book of Disappearance: A Novel

  Ibtisam Azem; Sinan Antoon, trans.

  Gaia, Queen of Ants

  Hamid Ismailov; Shelley Fairweather-Vega, trans.

  Hafez in Love: A Novel

  Iraj Pezeshkzad; Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi and Patricia J. Higgins, trans.

  The Heart of Lebanon

  Ameen Rihani; Roger Allen, trans.

  In the Alley of the Friend: On the Poetry of Hafez

  Shahrokh Meskoob; M. R. Ghanoonparvar, trans.

  The Slave Yards: A Novel

  Najwa Bin Shatwan; Nancy Roberts, trans.

  Turkey, Egypt, and Syria: A Travelogue

  Shiblī Nu‘mānī; Gregory Maxwell Bruce, trans.

  For a full list of titles in this series, visit https://press.syr.edu/supressbook-series/middle-east-literature-in-translation/.

  Copyright © 2021 by Wen-chin Ouyang

  Syracuse University Press

  Syracuse, New York 13244-5290

  All Rights Reserved

  First Edition 2021

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  ∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

  For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press, visit https://press.syr.edu.

  ISBN: 978-0-8156-1137-0 (paperback)

  978-0-8156-5541-1 (e-book)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Zangana, Haifa, 1950– author. | Adhami, Mundher, editor. | Ouyang, Wen-chin, translator.

  Title: Packaged lives : ten stories and a novella / Haifa Zangana ; selected by Mundher Adhami and Wen-chin Ouyang ; translated from the Arabic by Wen-chin Ouyang.

  Description: First edition. | Syracuse, New York : Syracuse University Press, 2021. | Series: Middle East literature in translation | Summary: “‘Packaged Lives’ is a collection of ten short stories and a novella, originally written in Arabic, by Iraqi-Kurdish writer Haifa Zangana”— Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021016163 (print) | LCCN 2021016164 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815611370 (paperback) | ISBN 9780815655411 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Short stories. | Novellas.

  Classification: LCC PJ7876.A647 P33 2021 (print) | LCC PJ7876.A647 (ebook) | DDC 892.7/36—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016163

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016164

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  For Lun-Yun Chang

  To Friendship

  Contents

  Introduction, Michael Beard

  Dedication, Wen-chin Ouyang

  From The House of Ants (1996)

  1. Evensong

  2. Chatter

  3. Delirium

  From Beyond Our Horizon (1997)

  4. Duck

  5. Day

  6. Refuge

  7. Turnstile

  8. Cave

  From There Is Such Other (1999)

  9. Pilgrimage

  10. Painting

  11. Packaged Life (2007)

  Episode One (Lanzarote, Canary Islands, October 1998)

  Episode Two (Saint Ives, Britain, August 1999)

  Episode Three (Sicily, Italy, November 1999)

  Episode Four (Ireland, Train from Dublin to West Point, August 2000)

  Episode Five (Álora, Spain, April 2001)

  Episode Six (Family Home, London, July 2002)

  Introduction

  Michael Beard

  We go on tours to make memories, or so we are told. It’s part of the package. Often enough the places we visit have memories of their own. At our best, we learn from the memory of the place, its history and values. In the title novella it is a hike to St. Patrick’s Grave. By implication the conflict-ridden history of Catholic Ireland is under there. In “Pilgrimages” it is a tour of the village in Wales where Dylan Thomas was born. It centers not on his house but the public space where his poem “The Hunchback in the Park” is set. The poem, one of Thomas’s most melancholy, is about the sad memory of a homeless man who is tormented and abused there. If you want to find evidence of painful memories you can find them everywhere. The experience of a tour may show you in miniature the relation between an individual and history. For some privileged people, history is seen at a distance. And some have experienced it up close.

  Most of her readers will know Haifa Zangana as one of our most astute political observers, with a formidable list of indispensable writings. (There are books, research, and opinion pieces in the Guardian and Al-Ahram Weekly and interviews in print and on the radio. She does research for the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia and is a founding member of the International Association of Contemporary Iraqi Studies.) As an Iraqi Kurd, she is a particularly keen observer of cruel fissures in her culture.

  It is terrible to say that so many of those who have read her know her first from her experience as a prisoner in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Her writings have the authority of conceptual precision and passionate commitment, but also the authority of having been there, of knowing history from the painful inside. It is possible to have seen too much history.

  She was in her teens during Saddam Hussein’s rise to power, at a time when Iraq was not on the map for the American press, unless we searched for it. Baghdad was at that time a city of over three million, with a thriving economy, a growing acceptance of women in the public sphere, and a flourishing artistic scene. (Iraq is famously a country of poets. Mahmoud Darwish attests to it in his poem “I Remember Al-Sayyâb.”) And yet this progress took place under an authoritarian and brutal government. In the complicated history of Iraqi politics there were committed oppositional groups, sometimes affiliated with the government, sometimes underground. Zangana was a member of The Central Leadership Group (an anti-Soviet branch of the Iraqi Communist Party) during a difficult time. It required bravery.

  She was also a student of pharmacy at the prestigious Bâb al-Mu’azzam campus of the University of Baghdad. Then there was her arrest and confinement in a series of prisons: Qasr al-Nihaya (for political prisoners, the cruelest of the three), Abu Ghraib (where she spent six months), and Al-Za’afaraniya (a prison for prostitutes, chosen by the government as a way to add insult to imprisonment). Qasr al-Nihaya was once a palace, retrofitted in the Baath period as a prison. (She had visited there, age seven, with her family, as a tourist, not suspecting she would be tortured there fourteen years later.) As for Abu Ghraib, she describes it with understatement as “the normal prison.” American readers will recognize the name.

  After her release she managed to reenroll at the university, graduated in 1974, and went to Syria, where she worked with Palestinian refugees in the pharmaceutical unit of the Red Crescent (sister institution of the Red Cross)—another selfless commitment, of less interest to biographers. The next step was relocation to England in 1976. Then there are the new developments that residence in England made possible.

  She became a successful painter. It was a way, she has said, to distance herself from dark memories. Five years after her arrival, however, the seemingly endless Iran-Iraq war began (it would last eight years). This is the period when conditions in Iraq became progressively worse, and her increasingly public career began. Eventually oppositional energy among the Iraqi community in England would target the 2002 invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. Earlier the target was Saddam Hussein. (She met her husband Mundher in 1988, at a political rally protesting against the Iraqi government for the murder by chemical weapons of Kurdish civilians.) It was after the invasion that she began to produce the uncompromising body of writing which has made her one of our most prominent observers of the international scene.

  Then there is her fiction. The stories of Packaged Lives offer us access to a distinctive voice. You often feel that it is grounded in her experience, but there is something else you may become aware of, gradually. You see first a persistent, radical determination to strip away illusion or ideology. Writers always say this is their goal, but Zangana’s grasp of experience goes further. She acknowledges the imperfect glimpses we have and exposes not just the event but the surface of memory, with its corrugations, pockmarks, and gaps. You feel in it the authenticity of someone refusing to claim control over what you don’t really know.

  Her first book to be translated into English, in 1990, leads the reader through details of daily life, childhood memories, and scenes of pain and dread, in hiding or in prison. It is a testimony of humiliation and torture, made more accessible and startling for its emphasis on the way we perceive them. The horrific experience has become a memory. The memory is all you have to work with. The emphasis is even visible in the title: Through the Vast Halls of Memory (translating Arabic Fī arwiqat al-dhākira), reissued in 2009 under the title Dreaming of Baghdad. In the afterword to Dreaming of Baghdad, Ferial Ghazoul has described Zangana’s style in these terms: “The brutalization of human beings is described in an almost neutral tone but with the minute details of an anatomist.” That neutral tone is a remarkable accomplishment. It is memory (fictionali
zed to avoid betraying friendships), without embellishment or elaboration. She doesn’t emphasize how the experience of violence had changed her, how she suffered or how she did or didn’t represent the oppositional values of her comrades. It’s the memory stripped bare. It is the tone of someone who utterly refuses to portray herself as a victim.

  Ghazoul adds that “Zangana’s mode of writing liberates the text from the confines of the specific and globalizes the experience.” The refusal to embellish memory makes possible a specific, precise focus. Paradoxically, it makes memory more responsible to history. Something circumscribed and contained, an honest portrayal of something near at hand, opens out on bigger issues.

  It is not always memory. Sometimes the detail available close at hand is something tangible and small. In “Packaged Life” a goldfinch in a cage is the occasion for a dialogue that explores the nature of freedom. The small thing with the big issue behind it can be a sardonic reality. It may even question the motives of those committed to social change. In “Packaged Life” a character asks, “Do you think Che Guevara would have become the universal symbol for revolution and an icon for all generations if he had not been handsome?”

  Elsewhere the way memory shapes experience amounts to a heroic act of vision. The short story called “Painting” describes the process of staging an art exhibition. The content of the paintings is specific: “He painted them in the aftermath of the US bombings of Iraq, when he was possessed by anger and impotence, so he painted his anger, impotence, love, grief, and fear.” We don’t see the violence, but in an extraordinary paragraph, we watch a viewer returning to the exhibit, beginning gradually to sense it: “In the days that followed, the painting grew, gradually but steadily, and picked up more shades. It changed . . . The polite quiet statement disappeared. A sigh, almost a scream, shot out of the grays, an open mouth the size of pain.” A single painting hanging on a wall, observed closely, contains a comment on history on an enormous, vertiginous scale.

  The period around 1990 was rich in oil spills. The spills that have taken precedence in historical memory are the Exxon-Valdez spill off the Alaskan coast (March 1989) and the Mega Borg oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (July 1990). There was also the Gulf War oil spill of January 1991, at the time of this writing the largest oil spill in history (a discharge of eight million barrels), initiated by Saddam Hussein when his invasion of Kuwait was repelled and his army was in retreat. In a way it was a military tactic, a variant of scorched earth policy, evidently designed to cover their withdrawal. It was also clearly an act of rage.

  It would be easy to answer rage with rage. You could place a character on the scene and observe the human misery. The story “Duck” describes the Gulf War oil spill only as it was seen on television, in the West, where the news zeroed in on birds covered with oil rather than the oil itself and its damage to the human world. Birds covered in oil became the icon of the disaster, the photogenic emblem of oil spills, and its effect on characters in London, faced with those oil-covered birds on television, is the focus of the story. It shows the way we learn about the disaster, how an individual experiences history, from a distance. In its way it is funny, in another it is ghastly.

  The experience of history can grow out of an amateur’s research into archeological texts. There is a character in “Packaged Life” who carries with him two lines of Akkadian, the opening phrases of the creation story referred to as the Enuma Elish, which allows a glimpse of the gods who existed before creation (Apsu and Tiamat). L. W. King’s translation reads, “When on high the heaven had not been named, / Firm ground below had not been called by name”: enūma eliš lā nabû šamāmū / šapliš ammatu šuma lā zakrat (James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, Princeton Univ. Press, 1950). It is easy to imagine that those lines are at the center of Zangana’s vison. In one way they simply express an ideology of ancient Iraq as a model. Zangana does in fact insist on the continuity of ancient Mesopotamia and the current nation of Iraq. The Enuma Elish, thought to date back to early in the second millennium BCE, is a good resource to make that argument. But it is not simply an early text. It is also an attempt to visualize existence before creation, that early moment when “neither heaven nor earth had names.” A world without names is a world stripped bare, without illusion. It is a formal way to express what a character thinks, more simply, in the short story “Cave”: “To be at one with nature is to accept her as she is.”

  The Iraqi characters of Packaged Lives carry the past inside them, invisibly, often a history of disturbing memories that most observers can only guess at. These vignettes allow us to see familiar sights, abroad or at home in London, from the point of view of people who have experienced too much history. They have roots elsewhere, but once we have glimpsed them their experiences are recognizable no matter what background the reader brings to them.

  Many years ago, when the first translation of Through the Vast Halls of Memory came out, long before I had heard of her, much less met her, I heard Haifa interviewed late at night on Canadian radio. I had no idea who she was, but her clarity and lack of pretense were easy to hear, clear enough that I knew I had to read that book. It was before the days when one could order a book online, but you could place an order by mail from a British bookstore and wait. And, for a long time after the book arrived, there were very few people to discuss it with. One of them was my friend Wen-chin Ouyang. We often discussed what made Haifa’s writing extraordinary—her distinctive ability to control a narrative, to weave vignettes, to take incendiary political issues and translate them into human terms. “You know,” she added, “she’s written a lot more since then.” I learned that she and Haifa were friends. And so it came about that Haifa was no longer just a voice on the radio.

  And now Wen-chin is the architect and carpenter of this collection, editor and translator, drawing on a deep affinity with the author to make this translation available to us in English. The two share an openness to dialogue and commitment to a straightforward style, without ornament or pretense. Packaged Lives is an introduction to a world they know well. Its existence is a testament of friendship.

  Dedication

  Wen-chin Ouyang

  I have known Haifa and Mundher for as long as I have been in London. Lun-Yun joined us much later and not very frequently. Coordinating our globetrotting schedules was never easy. Haifa, Mundher, and I live in London at different intervals dependent on our work routines and life habits. Lun-Yun had his life in Taiwan and visited when he was off and I was still working. We met perhaps no more than twice as a foursome, once at Haifa and Mundher’s for dinner and another at a Kurdish-Turkish restaurant for a lunch of kebab on Grand Parade near where I live in the Harringay Ladder. I do not remember what we talked about, but I can still feel Lun-Yun’s quiet happiness when we were together. He liked people and got on famously with everyone, especially after a few drinks. Like one of the male protagonists in “Packaged Life,” he hugged strangers in pubs, restaurants, trains, taxis, and even streets, and called them brothers when he was tipsy. But he was fastidious about his choice of friends. “The Iraqi couple I met in London,” he said to me once, and I cannot remember when, where, or why, “They are good friends.” I could always tell when he found kindred spirits, and Haifa and Mundher are kindred spirits. He would have loved the spontaneity of how we came to this project. He would have liked the stories Mundher and I selected.

  It was one of those rare beautiful sunny London summer days almost ten years ago when Haifa, Mundher, and I met for lunch on Grand Parade. We exchanged news, gossiped about politics and political leaders, talked about our life and work, and thought about friendships and relationships. I noticed that Haifa had called Mundher a girlfriend in a dedication. “He is like a girlfriend,” Haifa exclaimed, “I could tell him everything.” Mundher has, of course, read everything Haifa has written. We talked about his favorites and less favorites and one thing led to another and before I knew it, I was suggesting that he make a selection of the short stories he liked the best for me to add my own and I would translate them into English. “But you always say you don’t translate,” Haifa said in surprise. “I would do it for friends,” I answered. Lun-Yun would have done anything for friends. He was not a girlfriend and I did not tell him everything. I did not have to because he felt, knew, and understood. After all we have been friends since 1982. This volume, made up of ten stories Mundher selected and a novella I chose, is about friendship, about its centrality in our life, in our relationship with partners, family, and community. It is also about the itinerant life we live today, and how we manage the diversity of our experiences and the multiplicity of our belongings. Above all, it is about the fundamental humanity in all of us, that even as we cling to our mundane life, with all its trappings, we always find in moments of unexpected epiphany ways to transcend it.