Site: words without borders - Essay Example

Writing from Iraq The latest April issue of the e-Magazine, wordswithoutborders.org is dedicated to “Writing from Iraq” – one of the three countries constituting the “Axis of Evil”, the other two being Iran and North Korea. The edition features translated versions of original contributions made by eminent Arabic authors of fiction, and poetry; and, of non-fiction by French, Arabic and Polish writers.Luay Hamza Abbas narrates the poignant story of the hole man, who time and again keeps disappearing and re-appearing in dirt from a grave-like dug up hole, as if to relieve the boredom of the people struggling with their own lives to indulge in merriment in the story captioned Merrymaking.

Abd al-Khaliq al-Rikabi in his short story, The Arab Altar succinctly brings out the mental upheaval in the minds of its principal characters, in the backdrop of the Iran-Iraq war. The impact of national Iraqi television showing loss of lives and gory images of the battle scarred victims working on the mind of Maryam as the main protagonist, depicts the torment suffered by a newly married bride wary of motherhood. Hassan Blasim’s The Green Zone Rabbit is an absorbing short story of a war battered survivor of Iraq war, Hajjar who loses his mother and brothers to war crimes and is given refuge for medical attention by his tech-savvy uncle Salsal, supposedly living under state protection, but eventually double crossed by the state to his death in a car bomb explosion; the subtle characterization of Salsal as the rabbit and the state as the Green Zone, and the “rabbit with the egg” signifying the theme of the state’s assassination plot makes interesting reading.

Salman and the Mule Suicides by Najem Ali is yet another brilliant narrative of warn torn Iraq, utilizing the grand strategy of initially using donkeys as guinea pigs for dealing with the problems of transporting weapons in heavily mined battle zones of Kurdistan, and later substituting them with mules for hilly terrains, in particular, when and until the former were virtually not left any more to be available for use – perpetrating gross mule suicides, in effect. The poetic similarities of life and death of the mules with those of the soldiers trapped in the war zone is philosophically brought out through the sensitive interaction of the chance meeting of the two principal characters of the story – an officer in the Military Veterinary Affairs Division, tasked to restore life to the mules driven on virtual suicide missions; and, a soldier by name Salman, whose fully laden mule had slipped and fallen down the slope needing veterinary intervention.

The Imam of a mosque damning the “Television” in his Friday sermons as, the fake “giver-of-vision” exhorting his audience: “It is the giver-of-blindness that has blinded you from seeing one another, from seeing yourselves, the truth, the righteous path! How do you accept being guided by a one-eyed thing, you who see with two eyes?” forms the theme of the story, in the backdrop of the Iraqi President Saddam’s media blitzkrieg against his own masses, in Muhsin al-Ramli’s touching story, The One-Eyed TV.

Mahmoud Saeed’s depiction of subtle family humor of dreaming for A Portal in Space even in the tension filled surcharged atmosphere of aerial bombing of Iraqi residential areas by Iran is a captivating narrative. The extraordinary stoic attitude of the Iraqis, despite their struggle during the period of war is vividly captured by Mustafa Benfodil in his piece, The Last Six Days of Baghdad.Reference: © 2003-2013 Words Without Borders” website, ISSN: 19361459, Site by Sonnet Media, http://wordswithoutborders.

org / Web. 8 April. 2013