The Woman of the Flask

By Selim Matar

Trans. Peter Clark

The American University in Cairo Press, 2005

BY LYNNE ROGERS

In “The Woman of the Flask,” Adam attempts to escape the horrors of his enforced inscription six times before successfully immigrating to Switzerland with his friend and a flask, a memento from his father. In Switzerland, the forgotten flask catches his attention, and releases a voluptuous genie, Hajir, his paternal legacy of pleasure. Having been passed down from one forefather to the next, she leads him on a pilgrimage of stories from the Arab world and North Africa, offering him in his exile a connection to his Iraqi heritage. The descriptions of her traditional Arab beauty provide a sharp contrast to his graphic accounts of soldiering and her list of lovers who, like Adam, procreate with their wives but find solace and inspiration in her arms. As she weaves her stories of ancient wars and interbreeding, she dismantles the notion of ethnic purity and the East/West divide. Simultaneously, Adam introduces her to European modernity, causing Hajir to dream of shedding her own immortality.

Hajir’s ephemeral presence inspires metaphysical dreams in both Adam and the friend who had accompanied him from Iraq. In one dream, the friend wonders, “Was Man, with all the confidence in his own intelligence, maturity, and superiority over the rest of creation, nothing more than a cell of imagination in my own brain?” Hajir brings to her lovers history, physical pleasure and unanswered philosophical questions. Predictably, as she regains her own mortality, her generous spirit diminishes. While the blatant and shameless male chauvinism might annoy some readers, the poetic attempt to wrestle with issues larger than the personal pain of exile ought to be appreciated. As a literary experiment, the fluid narrative reflects the novel’s synthesis of chronology and geography.

Unlike Adam and his friend, the hero of Mahmoud Saeed’s novel never finds the luxury of metaphysical musings. The title of Saeed’s gripping and relentless novel, “Saddam City,” refers to the over-crowded Iraqi prisons. Imprisoned himself six times, Saeed’s narrative follows the incarceration of Mustafa Ali Noman, an aging professor and non-practicing Muslim who suffers from chronic dysentery and who has recently arranged to purchase a house for his family. As his car stalls on his way to work on an otherwise ordinary day, security officials arrive, escorting this benign hero to an interrogation, thus setting off an odyssey of hunger, beatings, dislocation, blindfolds, handcuffs, hoods and various other forms of torture.