Absent

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Absent by Betool Khedairi

First, there are the dramas of everyday life: new neighbors in the apartment building, a relative’s ongoing struggle with a chronic skin condition, the purchases and research necessary to undertake a new trade. Then, there are the seismic trembles from dramas far larger: shortages in the grocery store, a missile blast which shatters the wall of a flat upstairs, the soldier who becomes a constant presence in the field of the old Alwiya Club. In her 2005 novel Absent, Betool Khedairi crystallizes events on both of these scales as she tells the story of life for a young woman in post-Gulf War Baghdad.

Protagonist Dalal lives with her aunt and uncle in a city weakened and exhausted by years of war. Even as daily life grinds on, the stresses of the UN sanctions that are deployed against Sadam Hussein (and borne by Iraqi citizens) make their mark. Evidence of war, austerity, authoritarian rule, and trauma on a massive scale are threaded throughout the novel in ways that often seem almost whimsical: limited dyes are making their way into the country, for example, and the only toilet paper still available in the store is dyed a glittery silver. The novel is full of such details, and feels so episodic and evocative on a page-by-page basis that one is almost surprised to realize that major plot developments are being skillfully and simultaneously woven in with the images and philosophical conversations.

Perhaps in response to the authoritarian State, the characters of Absent rarely discuss matters in plain speech, preferring allegory and metaphor instead, even as they proceed forward in their lives with resourcefulness, practicality, and a determined normalcy: Dalal’s uncle takes up bee-keeping in the tennis court of the abandoned social club when his former trade no longer proves lucrative; the seductive medic Adel, with whom Dalal is so beguiled, sources dyes for the prosthetic limbs he makes from Saad, the hairdresser; when her apartment is cast into disarray by the force of the missile blast, Umm Mazdi, the fortune teller, gets quickly back to her old ways as she bullies her servant throughout the process of cleaning up.

The novel is certainly about perseverance and community, but it’s also about chance, injustice, and power. The residents of Dalal’s apartment building, people with passions, hopes, griefs, petty tendencies, sicknesses, and talents, should never have been so affected by the 13 years of sanctions leveraged by the powerful nations of the UN Security Council against Iraq. While the significance of the novel’s title is never made explicitly clear, and may have lost specificity in translation, I imagine it signifying not only the absence of the apartment’s residents as, one by one, they are forced or elect to depart, but also the conspicuous absence of the very forces that have wrought such upheaval in Baghdad. The UN Security Council, its member countries, and representatives, only appear in rare and oblique references. They are absent. It’s Dalal and her fellow citizens who are present, day after day, to live in the aftermath of their faraway decisions.

Subjects this book contains which some readers may be sensitive to: bombing, imprisonment.