The Circle of Zero

On of the worst things of living in a country like mine, Iraq, is that there is no liberty of thinking. Since childhood and we were being trained about what is permitted to think about, about what is permitted to write and read. Liberty to read whatever you like was actually present since there is nothing available to read only after it passes through the filters of censorship: governmental, religious, and social.

Before 2003 I didn't know about Iraq history. And this is bad because you get hold of the continuity of what you are living in.

After 2003 every former Iraqi politician that was regarded by Saddam's regime as bad, was regarded as a hero.

With time I started to be able to differentiate between those politician from the past.

In "The Circle of Zero" which was written by Fadhil Al- Azzawi in the 70s there is a city in which lives the dead among the live. But the dead decided that they should get hold of the city. A war started. A live youth has been chased by dead militias and he finally reached a group of men with guns. He asked their help. They didn't do anything when the militias was approaching. The young lived yelled on the men with guns: "Are you with them?" and they answered: "Of course we are." One of the gunned men ordered that the youth be taken as a hostage for few hours till he become one of them, the dead.

The 70s of Iraq were not a piece of heaven as our parents told us. The communists, the ba'athis, and the nationalists were in conflict. They solve their conflicts with killing. They are all poor and they do not benefit nor from being a member of their party nor from killing the other party members.

Fadhil Al Azzawi writes in the book "The Vital Spirit: The 60th Generation in Iraq." that one day in the 60s there were writers discussing in a cafe in Baghdad and they were talking about Sartre, Beckett, and others. Security governmental men were listening and thought that these hot conversations are about political leaders like Lenin and Marx, the only two names they know. The writers were taken to a prison and spend two hours of interrogation about whether they are communists, ba'athists, or nationalists. They all answered that they are not members in any party. One of them answered that "it is better to regard them as absurdistans.

What a country? What a history!!!