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A review by clairewords
The Baghdad Clock by Shahad Al Rawi
4.0
Slightly surreal, nostalgic portrayal of a neighbourhood in Baghdad, of a childhood and early youth lived under the shadow of war, shared by a girl of that neighbourhood who refuses to depict her childhood through the lens of suffering and devastation and thus shares their humanity, their connections, their relations and when she comes close to anything that might be traumatic, lifts off into dreams and the imagination, into other realms, soothed by the souls of the departed, the wisdom of her intuition creating metaphors in her sleep.
Her resilience isn't defiant, it's like a hardy shrub that wants to bloom even in the harshest environment and finds refuge in the imagination. One of her recurring dreams that she enters is the idea that they are living on a ship, one evening the Captain tries to answer her many questions.
She doesn't understand the captains words, but knew he was telling her the truth.
We get to know the families who live and have lived in this neighbourhood, watching them grow and evolve, sharing those moments when they grow out of girlhood and begin to blossom, wondering why the words that boy they'd never paid much attention to whispered in their ear, made them feel so strange inside. We are drawn into their lives until the black Chevrolet arrives and one by one they depart for elsewhere.
Initially one of the residents known as Uncle Shawkat, acts as protector of the abandoned homes, keeping away unwanted racketeers, he writes the names of the departed on the doors, the dates they lived there, and This House is Not for Sale. He too has suffered on account of his wife having left without him, so finds solace in a stray dog he rescued from one of the houses, as much a part of the neighbourhood as them all, with his uncanny way of predicting who will leave next.
Memories are narrated through her friendship with Nadia, who she meets and sleeps next to in the air raid shelter in 1991, they tell each other stories and comfort each other in what becomes the beginning of a long and deep friendship that sustains them through the things that bring discontent, the sanctions, another war, the threat of separation.
It's an unusual novel in it's determination not to resort to pessimism, despite the suffering and loss that is around them, instead it recalls memories of childhood and growing up, of friendship and budding love, of mother's sitting around listening to the predictions and advice of the soothsayer.
It is a lament for days gone by, remembered by the young not the old, who know their children will grow up in other lands, other cultures, with little knowledge of their forebears, of their ways, their neighbourhood, the friendships that shaped them.
Her resilience isn't defiant, it's like a hardy shrub that wants to bloom even in the harshest environment and finds refuge in the imagination. One of her recurring dreams that she enters is the idea that they are living on a ship, one evening the Captain tries to answer her many questions.
Listen my dear. The ship is an idea in your head and I am an idea in the head of the ship. Small ideas usually have delicate wings and when they lose their value on the earth, they fly up into space. The world we live in is just an idea made by the imagination of an inventive creator, and when he found it to be complicated, he began explaining it by means of other, smaller ideas...
We are prisoners of our imaginations, and our experiences in the world of reality consist only of ideas.
And don't tell anyone, because people only believe things that come independently to their minds. Yet they don't know where the mind is to be found.
She doesn't understand the captains words, but knew he was telling her the truth.
Sometimes there are things we do not understand, and we know their meaning, not through words but rather, the meaning is already inside us before others talk to us about it. Some meanings exist inside us but are sleeping. Then words that we understand come and wake us up.
We get to know the families who live and have lived in this neighbourhood, watching them grow and evolve, sharing those moments when they grow out of girlhood and begin to blossom, wondering why the words that boy they'd never paid much attention to whispered in their ear, made them feel so strange inside. We are drawn into their lives until the black Chevrolet arrives and one by one they depart for elsewhere.
Initially one of the residents known as Uncle Shawkat, acts as protector of the abandoned homes, keeping away unwanted racketeers, he writes the names of the departed on the doors, the dates they lived there, and This House is Not for Sale. He too has suffered on account of his wife having left without him, so finds solace in a stray dog he rescued from one of the houses, as much a part of the neighbourhood as them all, with his uncanny way of predicting who will leave next.
Memories are narrated through her friendship with Nadia, who she meets and sleeps next to in the air raid shelter in 1991, they tell each other stories and comfort each other in what becomes the beginning of a long and deep friendship that sustains them through the things that bring discontent, the sanctions, another war, the threat of separation.
It's an unusual novel in it's determination not to resort to pessimism, despite the suffering and loss that is around them, instead it recalls memories of childhood and growing up, of friendship and budding love, of mother's sitting around listening to the predictions and advice of the soothsayer.
Nadia and I were born during the war with Iran. We got to know each other during Desert Storm. We grew up in the years of the sanctions and the second Gulf War. George Bush and his son George W. Bush, took turns firing missiles and illegal weapons at our childhood, while Bill Clinton and that old woman Madeleine Albright were satisfied with starving us. And when we grew up, hell sat in wait for us.
It is a lament for days gone by, remembered by the young not the old, who know their children will grow up in other lands, other cultures, with little knowledge of their forebears, of their ways, their neighbourhood, the friendships that shaped them.
We are the last teardrop aboard the ship, the last smile, the last sigh, the last footstep on its ageing pavement. We are the last people to line their eyes with its dust. We are the ones who will tell its full story. We will tell it to neighbours' children born in foreign countries, to their grandchildren not yet born - we, the witnesses of everything that happened.