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More reviews by Nigel Collett
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
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High Tea in Mosul by Lynne O'Donnell
There are three criteria, I think, which mark a good book: a story told with the simplicity which arises from a commitment to its truth; a theme that resonates because of a topical relevance or through the inclusion of information found nowhere else; and a tale well told. LYNNE O'DONNELL's HIGH TEA IN MOSUL, meets all three. O'Donnell is a journalist, at several times in her life a war correspondent, and clearly a remarkably brave woman. She is also an accomplished professional writer. This is her account of the lives of two English women, Pauline from Burnley and Margaret from Durham, who have been married for nearly thirty years to Iraqis, and whom she came upon by chance as the Iraq war ended and she found herself in Mosul, the major city of Iraq's north.
These are, in most respects, two very ordinary English women, but their circumstances have meant that they have lived and continue to live through extraordinary events in, to us, exotic and little known places. They both married Muslims and were welcomed into the tribes and the Iraqi societies of which their husbands were prominent members. They learned to speak Arabic or Kurdish, they adapted to their husbands' cultures, they were loved by their new families and they loved them in return. They had children who went to school and university. Their families back home in England took their husbands into their folds. Margaret's mother went out to Iraq to live with her and her extended family. That such ordinariness could have been possible in such places and at such times astonishes, for both women lived through the growing repression of Saddam Hussein's regime, through the Iraq-Iran war of the 80s and through both of Iraq's wars with US-led coalitions. Both saw the collapse of Saddam's regime and of the hope which emerged short-lived after its fall. Both now live with the aftermath of the conflict as Iraq's society has imploded around them. Through their lives we see the personal effect of the politics, sanctions and war of which we have all heard but which we have all too little understood. Through these English women we can see at last these effects upon the people of Iraq, a people of whom, we should, most of us, confess that we have almost no understanding at all. It is in this English-language access to the human dimension of the Iraqi tragedy that O'Donnell's book is unique.
The book is unique, too, in its prescience. O'Donnell chronicles the collapse of the middle-class lives lived by the families of her two subjects and the descent into barbarism in the city of Mosul that has by now driven both of their families to flee. Only now, in 2007, is the west becoming aware of this catastrophic denuding of Iraq's human infrastructure, of what in effect is the destruction of its civilisation. Western magazines and TV programmes are now telling us of the systematic eviction or eradication by fanatical militias of the entire Iraqi professional and commercial middle class; of murders, kidnapping, extortion and the deliberate putting to flight of anyone who possesses the intelligence, education and skills to hold the state together. This is truly a development which will have, in the long run, an effect on Iraq akin that which Year Zero had on Cambodia. Iraq is becoming a country bereft of its professional class, one which is rapidly reverting to the tribalism, factionalism and disrule of Afghanistan. O'Donnell saw this first, and her book explains all that is happening now.
O'Donnell's anger is palpable. It is difficult, reading her account, to feel differently. We really ought to have been able to do better in Iraq. It is not as if we had no experience of the place. The British have been involved in Iraq since the world war against Napoleon led them to force a resident upon the Turkish Governor of Baghdad in 1798. They conquered Iraq in the First World War and gained control of the vast oil fields that were by then becoming known around Basra in the south and Mosul in the north. When they arrived, the British were welcomed as liberators, particularly by the Kurds, but this welcome soon evaporated as they installed, under a League of Nations mandate, a colonial administration. The independent Kurdistan that had emerged in the north was crushed by the British in 1919 and a rebellion in the rest of the country was squashed in the decade after 1920 with the aid of the bombing of villages. The Iraqis' view of this foreign rule was shown by the pro-Nazi revolt that broke out in Baghdad in 1941, which led to a British military reoccupation which lasted until the fifties. Eventually, in 1958, the British puppet regime fell in a welter of blood. So the British had good cause to know the effects of foreign involvement in Iraq, and the propensity for violence and sectarianism in its society, even if the Americans had not. Both nations have a responsibility here they cannot walk away from. You cannot leave a desert, label it "democracy" and then complain at the chaos you have caused. O'Donnell's book, by making us face what we have unleashed, reminds us of our responsibilities to the ordinary people with whose lives the west has played.
So this is a horrible story, but it is an excellent read. O'Donnell writes directly, punchily, at times lyrically, but always with an objective and self-effacing flair. She breaks up the story by filling in the background, changing the pace, alternating the voice of the narrator. This is a harrowing story but she refuses to allow it to descend into the maudlin, preferring to impart iron to the soul rather than to extract cheaply spent tears. She lets her two women speak for themselves. Their voices come across clear, sad and amazingly hardly ever bitter. They are real, flesh and blood, women who you want to survive, to escape, to cease to suffer.
For the time being, thank God, they have, but their troubles remain far from over. Both are in exile, Margaret and her family are now in London, Pauline and hers still in Iraq, just across the frontier of the Kurdish controlled zone in the north, and so at last just free of the chaos in Mosul. In her blog (which you can read on Lynne O'Donnell's website at www.highteainmosul.com) Pauline writes of the anxiety with which she is forced still to live:
- 25 April 2007 - On Sunday after the curfew was lifted in Mosul, 23 people from a little village called Basheka -- which is very famous for their olives -- were dragged out of their mini bus and shot in front of everyone and yesterday in a small town on the way to Irbil there was an explosion. I think people here in Dohuk are a little worried and you feel a little tension in the air.
- I hope nothing starts here I don't think I could take any more of the violence.
We owe it to Pauline, Margaret and their families, and all with them in Iraq, to read this book.
Nigel Collett
15/05/2007
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