The Spellbound's Inferiority

I have translated the title of the novel in a previous post as "The Passion Bearer" but while contemplating the edition I found that Al-Mada publication Company had already translated the title to "The Spellbound".

 His souvenirs from the last war were multiple small shells of a military-airplane bomb resting inside his skull that left him with frightening auditory hallucinations. That was enough for his family (mother, brother Ismail, and sister Zainab) to isolate him more than before, he, the lover of books, the detester of violence, who was called sarcastically by his brother Ismail as: Gandhi. His mother fells disgusted when find him close to his sister talking about literature. He used to talk to his sister about the books he read and advice her about reading them. His mother allured that she thinks he is a homosexual when one day she found him talking to his sister Zainab.

The protagonist is unnamed in the novel. His only friend, the psychiatrist, whose father had suicide, carries the name: Nadir Salih, an Arabic name that can be literally translated to English into: "Rare Good".

 Our protagonist is not only unnamed but his small family had bribed a lawyer and edited a death-certificate for him, so that they can take his few meters of land, left to him by his dead father, in the south of Iraq.

His friend, the psychiatrist, failed to offer him, and his auditory hallucinations, but a crazy night of binge drinking of alcohol with the strange sexually-provocative disinhibited wife of the psychiatrist who is named Niran (can be translated literally into: "Fires"), and a reckless car driving that ended in a fatal car accident.

After that accident the last chapter started and it is written by the protagonist's sister, Zainab. The chapter is actually a letter written to our protagonist reminding him, thankfully, of the time that he spent with her (his sister) and his advices. She mentions, for example, that day when he advised her to read "Les Yeux D'Elsa" by Aragon, who wrote this poem to his wife, and Zainab mentions her difficult life with her brute husband, the smuggler. She seemed to regret her marriage to that smuggler who played the role of the manhood in the eyes of her mother and brother Ismail against our protagonist's peace-loving "femininity". Zainab tells about her longing to her brother and she questions if he still.. exists!

 It is a novel about the struggle of the peace-lover, art-lover, humanistic person, in an ignorant brute society where manhood is equalized with aggression and savagery. Politeness and calmness would be seen as cowardice, and any male who would not be a beast would be regarded as a homosexual, even by his brother, or more strangely, his mother, while the father, as in another novel by Ahmed Khalaf, is absent, or dead, or even… committed suicide.

Author: Ahmad Khalaf

Title: The Spellbound

Al-Mada P.C.

First Edition: 2005

Copyright to Al- Mada

Literature, Fathers, Psychiatry, and Me

When I graduated from secondary school I proposed to my parents the college of literature as my career. My father told me that I can read literature whenever I like, and I may even practice it, while being a doctor.

In the first three years in the medical college I was among those with the highest marks. When my father left for the UAE, my marks, along with my mother's health, started to deteriorate.  

My father came back to find me interested in psychiatry, and our rapport with each other was already, pale.

 It was in Al-Hilla where I was trying to make a family of friends and I succeeded, hence, I adore Al-Hilla.

"The Death of the Father" is a novel of Ahmed Khalaf published in Baghdad by "The House of the Cultural Affairs" in 2002. In its cover there is a painting by a painter named: Salma Al-Allaq, which might symbolize Baghdad, the city that Amjad, the protagonist, adores. Amjad's father had been killed in an unclear circumstances while he was in a visit to his village of origin. Amjad was "the son who was forced to be a father" while he was only 19. He now works in a newspaper. He started also selling books in Al-Mutanabbee Street. He told us about his lost of that book entitled "The Treasure" who worth a fortune. 

 He told us about his friend's loss of his brother, Ismail. His friend also had lost his mother after his parents were divorced. His mother married his paternal uncle Noah. The story tells about a psychological instability of the father of Amjad's friend. The novel even allures to the ending of the father in a mental hospital.

Hussein Sarkam Hassan, an Iraqi doctor who is interested in literature, had written a book about Ahmad Khalaf novels. Dr. Sarmak start with the note that Ahmad Khalaf had written an article about Paolo Coelo's novel "Alchemist" which tells about the searching of a treasure, which finally appears to be in the homeland of the researcher. 

 Dr. Sarmak starts to give evidences of the recurrence of the theme of "Absenteeism" in Khalaf stories, especially "The Death of the Father". Dr. Sarmak had even entitled his book about Khalf: "The Bloody Comedy of Absenteeism: a study in the stories and novels of the Iraqi creative Ahmad Khalaf".

Amjad, in the novel, had an absent father, a lost book, and poverty. His friend got a lost mother, brother named Ismail, a paternal-uncle named Noah whom he liked and preferred to his father. 

 I didn't finish nor the novel, nor the critic about it, but I could not help not buying a newer novel by Ahmed Khalaf, entitled: "The Passion Bearer". I could not but surprise happily when read in its first chapter about the aloofness and strangeness of the protagonist, and about his memories of his lost brother: Ismail. And you know what? In the second chapter, the protagonist, who still unnamed to me, had read, while walking the streets, a name of one of his old friends in the secondary school, in a window of a private clinic of a psychiatrist. His friend had become a psychiatrist. He decided to pay him a visit in his private clinic. Not only for the memories for their comradeship, but for other reasons.

Three books rests over my laptop with Herta Muller offering a cigarette in the desktop, and Patrick Suskind' Pigeon is giving me.... an eye.