Review of “Zubaida’s Window” by Iqbal Al-Qazwini (ISBN 9787774563214)
Although this book has been described (by the LA Times) as a “dirge” and as a “confusing stream of consciousness” by some Goodread-ers, I found it to be a fluid account of the days in which a woman who had seen much suffering in Iraq and lived in exile in Germany for many years is now forced to watch the final destruction of her country as the United States invades Iraq. This is a masterful account of her emotional roller-coaster ride.
Our childhoods and every state of our development are inexorably bound up with our national history. Just as we might ask: where were you when Kennedy was assassinated? Al-Qazwini recalls when young King Faisal was murdered in a coup. She recalls each member of a family that has been blown to the far corners of the earth. Her digressions into Iraqi history and all its calamity become part of Zubaida’s narrative, just as 20th Century Jewish writers have been unable to separate the Shoah from their own family stories.
One of the saddest tales in the novel is of Zubaida’s brother, who lives two hours away in Leipzig. He calls one day to tell her he is depressed and she immediately makes up an excuse to visit him. They agree to meet at the train station. However her brother never shows up and, despite going to his apartment, leaving a note and waiting weeks for a reply, Zubaida never hears from him. Perhaps he has just picked up and left Germany, she thinks. But then she reads an article about an unknown foreign man who has leapt to his death in front of a train in Leipzig. This is both the fate and the fear of the refugee: to die un-mourned either at home or in exile.
Zubaida is pulled to leave and pulled to stay in Germany. She often buys tickets to some destination, packs a suitcase and passport, but ultimately shreds the ticket and the passport remains unstamped.
But suddenly, with an empty suitcase she is in Amman, Jordan, where she is about to take the long bus ride to Baghdad. An old woman tells her how painful exile is, the cab driver inquires about her life in Europe. She recalls the sky, the warmth, radio news in Arabic, the markets, the sadness, but also the vividness of life in the Middle East. And then she closes the suitcase and is once again in her cold Berlin apartment.
Zubaida is now curled up in a ball in front of the television. The war is just a jumble of frightening images as once-powerful men take off their medals, don civilian clothes, denounce the dictator, and hop in non-military vehicles while giving CNN interviews for the last time. The dictator’s statue is destroyed at Firdaus Square, “coalition” forces have seized control, and Iraq has been subdued and destroyed.
Zubaida feels a certain kinship with her adoptive city, where dictators have fallen and the people rejoice their sudden freedom. Suddenly long-repressed memories and feelings surface and she writes non-stop for four days. But the history she has recorded feels false, manufactured, and she leaves the pages in the rain to un-write themselves, then throws all these recollections in a dustbin. As the apartment building strangely empties of its elderly residents, Zubaida is alone with her arrhythmia, having fallen into a fitful sleep.
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