The Traveler and the Innkeeper

Fadhil Al-Azzawi, William Hutchins

Description

From the Iraqi author of Cell Block Five.
This timely, elegant novel's hero is an Iraqi secret police inspector who routinely uses enhanced interrogation techniques, which even he considers torture. Convinced that he is protecting society from anarchy, he is at peace with the world until ordered to interrogate a childhood friend, a journalist with possible links to violent subversives. Then he falls in love with his friend's wife. The plot of this novel, which was written in Iraq in 1976 and published in Arabic in Germany in 1989, is further complicated by street protests in Baghdad following the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War of June 1967. Despite the grim subject matter of this novel, it is at heart a love story, lyrically narrated.

Sujets

• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: The American University in Cairo Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781617970580
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE TRAVELER AND THE INNKEEPER
THE TRAVELER AND THE INNKEEPER
Fadhil al-Azzawi
Translated by William M. Hutchins
The American University in Cairo Press Cairo New York
First published in 2011 by The American University in Cairo Press 113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt 420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018 www.aucpress.com
Copyright 1989 by Fadhil al-Azzawi First published in Arabic in 1989 as Madina min Ramad (Ash City) by Dar Babil; revised edition 2010. This translation reflects the author s recent revisions of the first twelve chapters. Chapter One and part of Chapter Two appeared in Banipal Magazine 39 (Autumn/Winter 2010). Protected under the Berne Convention
English translation copyright 2011 by William M. Hutchins
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Dar el Kutub No. 19783/10 ISBN 978 977 416 462 0
Dar el Kutub Cataloging-in-Publication Data
al-Azzawi, Fadhil
The Traveler and the Innkeeper / Fadhil al-Azzawi; translated by William M. Hutchins.-Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2011
p. cm.
ISBN 978 977 416 462 0
1. Arabic fiction I. Hutchins, William M. (trans.) II. Title 892.73
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 14 13 12 11
Designed by Adam el Sehemy Printed in Egypt
PREFACE
The events of the novel The Traveler and the Innkeeper occur before, during, and after the June 1967 War. This was a decisive period, not only for the history of modern Iraq, but for the entire Middle East. In this period Iraq had recently emerged from the greatest disaster to occur there: the bloody military coup of February 1963. This coup had caused the deaths of thousands of people in the streets and the arrest of tens of thousands who were tortured in the most hideous and vile ways. But this revolution that the Baath Party organized to eliminate all other forces operating in the country only lasted nine months. It was succeeded by another military regime that tried to lighten the gravity of the catastrophe, releasing some political prisoners and raising the possibility of a rapprochement with Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt. When the president of Iraq, General Abd al-Salam Arif, was killed in a plane crash in 1966, his brother, General Abd al-Rahman Arif, took power. Although rule remained dictatorial and military, it became less repressive and left the door open to fence-mending and cooperation with some Nasserite and independent liberal factions-with men like Abd al-Rahman al-Bazzaz, a university professor who became prime minister and attempted to become president.
Iraq did not participate operationally in the Arab-Israeli War of June 1967, because some of its urgently dispatched military units were still en route. However, the Arab defeat created a kind of maelstrom that affected everyone. The nationalists, Nasserites, and Baathists felt especially humiliated, because Abdel Nasser-far more than any other Arab leader-was an iconic figure for them. The leftists, democrats, and liberals, who had been in a nonstop struggle with the Baathists and nationalists, considered the defeat a demonstration both of the failure of military dictatorships and of the inadequacy of nationalist ideologies propped up by repression and terror tactics.
The political climate following the war contributed to the development of a revolutionary mood that the military regime was no longer able to hold in check. Numerous street demonstrations were organized to find fault with the dictatorship and, for the first time, manifestos calling for democratic freedoms appeared in the newspapers. One famous manifesto was signed by approximately twenty well-known authors, poets, thinkers, and politicians. I had the honor of being one of these signatories. This document, which was published in a number of papers at the time, called for an end to the nation s system of military dictatorship, release of all political prisoners, the return of discharged employees to their posts, permission for exiles to return, permission for political parties to function freely, and democratic elections. Dozens of officers who had been imprisoned for years, including Air Force pilots, petitioned for their release and return to active service to allow them to take part in a war against Israel.
Similarly, many colleges of the university-including the College of Education, in which some of the events of the novel The Traveler and the Innkeeper take place-witnessed sit-ins and strikes against incursions into their campus safe havens by the security police and the arrest of some students.
With the spread of popularity of people s wars of liberation, of guerrilla warfare inspired by Che Guevara, and the rise of the Palestinian Fedayeen movement, the Iraqi Communist Party, which was one of the country s largest parties, split into two factions. The first undertook to organize an armed movement in the area of the southern marshes with the goal of overthrowing the regime in power. It also carried out terrorist acts in the cities, such as assassinating security officers and throwing bombs at the police. Nasserites and nationalists, for their part, planned more than one military operation in which they themselves participated. One of these was a failed coup led by the prime minister himself. The regime even experimented with some ill-fated democratic procedures. When the government allowed student elections to be held in universities and schools and leftist students won most of these, it annulled the results and did not try to hold student elections again. Meanwhile the Baathists were silently plotting their coup, which would bring them to power a year later.
At that time many people came to realize that the June War had been a cultural defeat more than a military one: that the Arabs had been defeated because they were unable to harness the modernity of their own times to fashion humane and democratic systems and to develop their countries and the nations productive capabilities. Many people also reached the conclusion that military dictatorships would never be able to accomplish a victory like this, or even to defend the borders of their own countries. Military dictatorships destroyed everything and failed in the end to realize any of their many promises, which they advanced in the name of patriotism and the honor of the homeland.
The novel The Traveler and the Innkeeper, which I wrote in 1976 while I was watching the rise of the Baath regime, which was in power then, and the evolution of its policies and slogans, does not address the June War directly. Instead, its subject is the malady that debilitated, and continues to debilitate, many Arab regimes and that has led them repeatedly to defeat, to comprehensive failure, to dictatorship, repression, terror, and torture. Thus the effect of the June War lingers in the background, casting its pall, both visibly and invisibly, over everything.
This novel points out that the prison interrogator and his victim destroy each other, in equal measure. So Jalil, the innocent man who has been arrested, remains in his cell until the end, while Police Inspector Qasim changes into a victim on account of his complicated tie to Jalil. Each man destroys the other, without even being aware of what they are doing.
My inspiration for this novel was a horrifying incident I experienced. I was arrested in 1963-when still a student at the university-on the third day after the military coup. Al-Haras al-Qawmi, which was composed of irregular militias affiliated with the Baath Party, swept the area where I lived and arrested me because they found English-language books in the apartment where I lived. That was enough to cause them to question my feelings about their coup, even though they knew nothing else about me. I was almost killed, but a regular army unit saved me and handed me over to the police, who in turn delivered me to the Public Security Bureau, where I was severely tortured in an attempt to force me to confess to crimes I had not committed.
I was cringing in a cell, surrounded by interrogators who had just finished torturing me, when I saw a man in a military uniform pause in front of me as I lay stretched out on the ground. He said, Ah, this is Fadhil. How are you, Fadhil? When the police inspector who had been interrogating me inquired, Do you know him, Inspector Qasim? he replied, Of course I do. He was one of my closest friends before he turned against the nationalists and Baathists and became a left-wing extremist. Didn t I tell you, Fadhil, you were heading down the wrong road? Then he left the cell and departed. I noticed, though, that their treatment of me improved a little after that.
I wondered later whether a career as a prison interrogator in the shadow of a dictatorial regime would be capable of transforming a childhood friend of mine like Qasim into a man who tortured me in the line of duty for the career he had chosen. To what extent can ideological myopia deform people s spirits and reduce them to rubble? This question was the germ of this novel.
Today, in the shadow of the disastrous conflicts that Iraq has experienced during decades of dictatorships, wars, and the destruction of the lives of millions of human beings, I realize that what happened then relates not only to the past but to the present and future as well. Until we achieve a better grasp of the age in which we live and liberate ourselves from every type of ideological, religious, and nationalist extremism, and first and foremost from dictatorship (whatever it may call itself), we will continue forever and a day trapped inside a closed circle where the interrogator destroys his victim and the victim his interrogator, with no hope of escape.
Fadhil al-Azzawi Berlin, October 29, 2010
CHAPTER 1
In the evening, Qasim Husayn, a police inspector in