Book Reviews

Romance of Ambiguity

Leilah Nadir (Author)
The Orange Trees of Baghdad: In Search of My Lost Family. Key Porter Books
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Reviewed by Therí Alyce Pickens

When Leilah Nadir’s cousin-in-law Karim says that he prefers she “choose to write romantic stories [and] not sad ones,” he voices the desire that many readers have about memoirs: that they resolve themselves neatly (if not happily) and that they provide some adventurous romance. Fortunately, Nadir does not obey her cousin. The Orange Trees of Baghdad rests in a state of ambiguity and remains decidedly unresolved. The only romance present is the rapturous love between Nadir and her family. These characteristics give the text its buoyancy and its poignancy.

Nadir’s memoir explores the lives of her paternal family members over the course of the latter half 20th century including Saddam Hussein’s government, the 1991 Gulf War and the current “War on Terror.” She oscillates between their memories, her memories and her own journalistic commentary as she delineates their daily lives as shaped by power and politics. Her memoir also charts the frequent excursions of photographer Farah Nosh into Baghdad and her ability and sometimes inability to document Iraqi perspectives. Because of this oscillation into and out of her family, into and out of the West and into and out of memory, the text retains a multiplicity that makes it difficult to pin down one specific Iraqi perspective and, instead, forces an engagement with the complexity of politics and the tragedy it creates and often ignores.

Certainly, Nadir relies on her background as a political commentator for the CBC to tell her family’s (and Nosh’s) stories. Though it can border on feeling like a detached article rather than a personal narrative, Nadir’s prose remains quite powerful. She retells the news stories with which most consider themselves familiar—the capture of Saddam Hussein, the protests of George W. Bush’s decisions—with a sense of the uncanny. Her cousin, Maha, says, “No, we didn’t know it was going to be war, invasion and occupation. We knew nothing about what was coming”; the statements feel eerie given Nadir’s delineation, and, presumably, her Western audience’s familiarity, with the events leading up to the USA’s current occupation of Iraq. These moments recur in abundance throughout the text, most notably at the beginning of each chapter. Nadir quotes various political pundits and commentators before delving into birthdays, meals, and other facets of daily life. The result of this juxtaposition is a halted familiarity. That is, Nadir’s text forces us to relive these moments in her family’s shoes.

As Nadir narrates her family’s experience, she gains the momentum of their voices without sacrificing their anger, angst, or ambiguity. When discussing her father’s reaction to Bush’s foreign policy, Nadir quotes his sarcasm—“I’m sure Bush is going to be really scared by all this peaceful protest”—and she writes, “he marched anyway.” Her prose does not distill his reaction into simple indignation, nor resignation. In other words, the text rests in the complication. Because there is no simple resolution, this memoir disrupts the collective memories and perceptions of this event (and many others), depriving the text of being wholly melancholy or wholly triumphant. Herein lies the poignancy: Nadir’s text renders multidimensional that which so many others have insisted be monolithic. The endings, indeed there are multiple endings within the text, rest on similar moments of ambiguity as well. The multiple deaths and Nadir’s last few musings do not miraculously find the “lost family” in the title. Instead, the text reflects on itself and the memories therein. It creates fecund moments so similar to everyday life in their uncertainty, frustration, and hope.

Nadir’s work is stunning in its brilliance and poignant in its elegance. The text does not provide the kind of satisfaction readers may hope for in terms of easy resolution, but The Orange Trees of Baghdad is a compelling memoir, worthy of every reader’s time, precisely because it eschews a simplistic understanding of all the issues it discusses.

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #198 (Autumn 2008), Canada and Its Discontents. (pg. 153 - 154)

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