Witness to Horror

Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr

By Charles Simic

Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War

by Mark Danner

Nation Books, 626 pp., $28.95

"We got no dog in this fight."

—Secretary of State James Baker after his failed mission to Yugoslavia in 1991

1.

Now that independent war correspondents are nearly an extinct species and we fight wars with fewer and fewer images of destruction and carnage shown on television or in newspapers, it's worth recalling that there was a time when this wasn't so. Before the Pentagon established the policy of embedding reporters with our armed forces—thus restricting their movement and making it harder for images and reports that do not fit the official narrative to appear—war correspondents were more or less on their own in war-torn countries, reporting what they saw and drawing their own conclusions. It was an extremely dangerous line of work. Between 1991 and 2001, forty-three journalists died in the Balkans, which is fewer than in Iraq, where between 2003 and 2009, 145 were killed in crossfire, suicide bombings, and premeditated murders by various participants in the conflict who didn't want reporters poking their noses where they shouldn't.

Beginning with the 1987 election that was supposed to bring democracy to Haiti after the bloody reign of the Duvaliers, and which resulted in another bloodbath, Mark Danner chronicles the even more violent conflicts in Bosnia and Croatia in the early 1990s, the post-invasion violence in Iraq, the torture in our secret prisons around the world, and the various policy decisions in Washington that had either a dire or beneficial impact on the people of those countries. These lengthy, well-researched, and well-written pieces, many of which appeared in these pages, combine political analysis, historical background, and Danner's eyewitness reporting to convey the vast human suffering behind events that can often seem remote.

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The title of the book comes from the former Haitian president Leslie Manigat, who took power from Duvalierist officers after they brutally aborted the 1987 election. He told Danner that political violence "strips bare the social body," allowing us to see beneath the surface to the real workings of a society. That is what makes this collection so fascinating to read. At the same time as we are being educated about these countries beset by violence, we are witnessing Danner's own education, his deepening understanding of the limits and unintended consequences of our military interventions.

Haiti was Danner's initiation. He arrived to cover the country's "transition to democracy" for The New Yorker in 1986, just after François "Papa Doc" Duvalier's son was flown to luxurious exile in France in an American military jet, courtesy of the Reagan administration. Danner naively expected, as he himself admits, that a freely held election and the popular government it would produce could break the cycle of military coups and dictators, in which a shy country doctor becomes a homicidal monster, a general with a stutter a drunken Caligula. He came to realize that

Violence is the motor of Haiti's politics, the means of regime change, the method of succession. The struggle for power is ongoing and endless, permeating all aspects of life and implicating any Haitian of wealth and reputation. "If a man does not go into politics," says the former president who gave me this book's title, "then politics itself comes to him." A professor, intellectual, and writer from an illustrious political family, he attained power thanks to the military after a bloody, aborted election, and lost it a few months later in a tumultuous coup d'etat.

History repeats itself in unhappy countries. The absence of respected institutions and well-established laws that a person can count on to protect him condemns these societies to reenact the same conflicts, make the same mistakes more than once, and bear the same horrific consequences of these acts. In Haiti, as a former finance minister told Danner, "The whole bloody business of repression, torture, and killing was developed to stay in office, in order to make money."

There are plenty of other places where this has been true and continues to be true, but such corruption is usually better concealed behind the veneer of law and order. In impoverished Haiti, with its sharp split between a small, educated ruling class that speaks French and the rest of the population who are illiterate and speak Creole (so they often do not understand what their president says to them), these harsh realities are, indeed, laid bare. The elder Duvalier, who ruled between 1957 and his death in 1971, believed there should be no boundaries in administering terror. One ought to kill not only one's enemies but also their friends, and in as spectacular and brutal a fashion as possible.

On Sunday, November 29, 1987, the day the election was aborted by General Henri Namphy, the head of the military junta that had ruled the country since the departure of the younger Duvalier, another stunning daylight massacre took place. Without a word of warning, soldiers opened fire on people waiting in line at polling places. The streets of Port-au-Prince were strewn with corpses of men, women, and children lying in pools of blood. In the countryside, it was the same. As a well-to-do woman told Danner over the phone, "'All this brings back Duvalier, the father.... You see,' she said after a pause, ' you think it was a massacre, but this was just a normal day under Duvalier.'"

American attempts to reshape politics in Haiti go back to 1915 when Marines were sent to put an end to the chaos of internal conflict. They stayed for nineteen years, declaring that the Haitian people were unfit to rule themselves. Americans seized land and created an army and police force that were supposed to prevent revolt and protect American capital. That was not the end. Papa Doc Duvalier received US military assistance during his first, bloodiest years. He got $40 million from Washington and the help of Marines to protect his regime from any popular movement that might threaten his rule.

In 1994, President Clinton ordered American forces to intervene to restore the elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to power after he was overthrown, protect American interests, and stop the atrocities. "Even sending twenty thousand US troops," as Danner writes, "failed to alter the fundamental dynamic." US soldiers did not confront the militiamen who kept their weapons since they did not want to risk American casualties. As for Aristide, he was flown by US helicopter back to the Presidential Palace, from which he ruled erratically, only to be flown a decade later into exile again.

2.

The pros and cons of American intervention were to become a pressing issue once more during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, which Danner reported on a few years after his visit to Haiti. The Dayton agreement brought peace to Bosnia and Herzegovina in November 1995, and almost four years later the NATO intervention in Kosovo and the bombing of Serbia took place. Danner, who spent time in Bosnia during the war, was pondering not just his own experience there, but looking back at the events that led to the secession and recognition of various republics as independent nations, the wars that ensued, and the dissolution of a country that had been known as Yugoslavia since 1918.

What concerns him, as it does almost everyone who has written about these wars, is how it was possible for the international community, and in particular the United States, to do nothing in the face of the shelling of Sarajevo and the murder of unarmed people by the Serbian forces, which the whole world saw on TV. Why wasn't there a military intervention to counter Serbian ethnic cleansing? Why wasn't air cover provided to escort the surrounded and defenseless Bosnians in Srebrenica to safety? Some of the dithering by the United States and the European Union about what to do can be understood and even forgiven in retrospect, but not this atrocity for which there was plenty of advanced warning given to people who could do something about it and who then procrastinated until it was too late.

Danner chronicles the involvement of the United States, beginning with the first President Bush and the failed visit of Secretary Baker to Belgrade in June 1991. Baker tried to hold Yugoslavia together despite a recent CIA National Intelligence Estimate that, according to an unnamed source quoted in The New York Times, said prophetically that the old Yugoslav experiment had failed, that the country would break up, and that this likely would be accompanied by ethnic violence and unrest leading to civil war. "No one can prove that 'concrete threats' or even 'actions' (and one can conceive of many, short of all-out war) could have prevented the conflicts to come," Danner writes. Military intervention, however, was not considered, since the United States was busy elsewhere with the turmoil in the Soviet Union and the Middle East, and with the approaching presidential election.

Danner claims that with Slovenia and Croatia about to secede, Baker's warnings against a unilateral declaration of independence and against the use of force to hold the federation together seemed to sanction force by the Serbs. Still, it wasn't the Serbs but the Yugoslav army and the Yugoslav government—still in place—that naturally would have had some interest in preserving the union.

The situation, at least before the hostilities started, was not as clear-cut as Danner leads us to believe. Yugoslavia was a country that, despite what the ethnic nationalists trumpeted, was not an awful place to live for most of its population and especially for the people who were intermarried or lived as minorities in republics where another ethnic group dominated. They and many other Yugoslavs hoped for reason to prevail and some sort of looser confederation between the republics to emerge gradually. The European Community, however, put a stop to that by going on record to declare in March 1991 that the Yugoslav republics had the right to freely determine their own future. Germany pushed for Slovenia and Croatia to secede immediately, as did the United States a few months later with Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Without a thought for the consequences, they encouraged nationalist leaders and ethnic groups they found congenial to break up a multiethnic country at the expense of those who had no clear ethnic loyalties and those like the Serbs who, although the largest ethnic group in Yugoslavia, found themselves a large minority in Croatia and almost half the population in Bosnia-Herzegovina. None of the nationalist parties favored by the US, including the Slovenes, had any use for multicultural identity. The openly fascist features of Croatia's ruling HDZ party, with its anti-Serb rhetoric, were passed over as a matter of little importance. So was the Muslim triumphalism in Bosnia. Slobodan Milo evic would not have had such a free rein if Yugoslavia and its last government, including its multiethnic army, were not so precipitously forced out of existence.

In view of all that, it was understandable that Serbs would feel threatened when the entire international community not only sided with the secessionists, but instantly rewrote the history of Yugoslavia, making them the oppressors and everyone else victims despite the fact that the absolute ruler of Yugoslavia from 1945 till his death in 1980, Marshal Tito, was partly a Croat and that Slovenia and Croatia were the two most prosperous republics in the federation. The European Community also declared that the borders of republics could not be changed, so that, for instance, Croatia could secede, but not the Serbs in the region called Krajina who wanted to separate from Croatia, or, for that matter, the Albanians in Kosovo who wanted to secede from Serbia.

Of course, when in the autumn of 1991 Serb artillery and infantry encircled the Croatian city of Vukovar and Milo evic first revealed to the world his plan for defending Serbian national interests by destroying cities and shooting unarmed civilians, nobody cared to remember what led to the war or had any sympathy for the already demonized Serbs. Danner thinks force should have been used immediately, quoting with approval a US Army military planner who felt that a concentrated air attack on Serbian forces surrounding Vukovar would have halted the siege; but Danner also grudgingly admits the unlikelihood of any nation using its military at a moment's notice to break up a foreign conflict.

I'm surprised that Danner doesn't mention several early attempts to broker peace between the warring sides. In particular José Cutileiro, a Portuguese diplomat, in February and March 1992 tried to preclude civil war by bringing the leaders of the three ethnic groups to Lisbon to reach a constitutional agreement well before the republics declared independence. The arrangement he proposed would have divided Bosnia into three separate regions with a high level of autonomy and a weak central government, with Muslims getting 45 percent of the land, the Serbs 42.5 percent, and the Croats 12.5 percent.

In his memoirs, the former US ambassador Walter Zimmerman, who encouraged the Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic to reject the plan at the time, states that Cutileiro's proposal would have probably worked out better for the Muslims than any subsequent plan, including the Dayton formula that ended the fighting in 1995. So why did the United States sabotage the Lisbon accord and then go on to recognize Bosnia and Herzegovina the very next day, when its intelligence agencies were unanimous in saying that after such recognition the place would blow up?

David N. Gibbs, in his excellent book about the destruction of Yugoslavia, First Do No Harm,^[1] offers a credible explanation. The US was worried about European efforts to create an independent European foreign policy. In recognizing Bosnia, the US reaffirmed its leadership position and corrected its early lack of clear policy. In other words, considerations of realpolitik were behind the US decision.

Whatever the full story of that decision may be, what happened next was hell on earth. Approximately 100,000 people died in the next three years, both soldiers and civilians, with twice as many Muslims killed as Serbs. Danner's detailed account of the atrocities that culminated with Srebrenica makes a powerful indictment of the indecision of the international community and the savagery of the Serbs, who set out to slaughter and ethnically cleanse Muslims in a manner nearly identical to that used by Croatian fascists in eliminating Serbs fifty years earlier. Not that the Muslim and Croats were entirely blameless. John Deutch, then a Defense Department official, said, "One of the reasons it was so hard to have a good policy is how terrible all the sides were." In any case, the Bush White House and the generals were against intervention. Of the two tragedies going on in the world, they chose to intervene in Somalia over Bosnia, regarding the former as a low-risk, high-payoff operation.

Danner asks the hard question: What accounts for the extraordinary cruelty of the Serbs? He attributes it to the ideology connected with a belief in Greater Serbia (of which, by the way, I never heard a word before the fall of Yugoslavia), the near-hysterical sense of historical grievance, and the heightened rhetoric and paranoia about a coming genocide of Serbs (forgetting that the bloodbath carried out by Croatian fascists in World War II was still fresh in many minds).

Danner is closer to the truth when he lays the blame on ambitious and ruthless politicians; nevertheless, his portrait of Milo evic, whom he calls a dictator despite his having to deal with opposition parties and frequent demonstrators in the streets, is unconvincing. As is often the case with men who bring disaster to their own people, Milo evic was an opportunist and a manipulator without an ounce of common sense. His nationalist policy was not meant to solve any problems for his fellow Serbs, but existed solely to increase his personal power and to enrich his associates. Instead of protecting legitimate national interests, he behaved like a thug and managed to squander whatever international sympathy Serbs might have had.

As for his followers—80,000 of whom came out in Belgrade in 2006 to pay him their last respects, many of them ethnically cleansed from Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo—they clearly made no connection between his policies and their plight. What they remembered about him and what they still admired was his pigheadedness. He kept saying no to everybody even when it was against his own interests. Danner gives the impression that he was a kind of evil genius who had everything planned ahead. I don't see it that way. It was the Croatian leader General Franjo Tudjman who knew how to plan. He knew you needed to have powerful allies if you wanted to get away with ethnic cleansing.

In both Croatia and Bosnia a lot of what happened was about revenge. As Danner documents in his articles, the massacre in Srebrenica was revenge for the killings of Serbs by the Muslims who used the "safe area" to make nightly raids on the surrounding villages. In General Ratko Mladic's unforgiving, brutal mind, this gave him the right to massacre two to three times as many Muslims regardless of their individual responsibility for what happened to the Serbs. It's no wonder it took the international community almost four years to fully grasp what kind of demons Milo evic had let loose.

I share Danner's outrage that something was not done to halt the siege of Sarajevo and to prevent the mass killing in Srebrenica, but Europe and the United States were caught between two morally and practically contradictory policies: either deploy peacekeeping forces to stop the killing—which would have favored the Serbs, who by mid-1995 held almost 70 percent of Bosnian territory—or seek to reverse ethnic cleansing by bombing Serbs and letting Muslims and Croats, who were regarded as victims, ethnically cleanse them in turn.

Danner acknowledges that the latter course would have meant hundreds of thousands of additional Serb refugees. But he thinks it would have been preferable: instead of ethnic partition, it might have led, if the US had been willing to take on "the task and responsibility of building a new state," to "the reconstruction of some sort of integral Bosnia." This, he says, "might have brought to Bosnia a very different future from the grim 'cold peace'" of the Dayton accord, however idealistic and unlikely, in my view, that may have been. Also, I don't think he grasps the full implication of what he is suggesting. In order to restore justice we would have committed another monstrous injustice by treating all Bosnian Serbs as guilty. In the end, neither the United States nor the European Union could bring themselves to do that.

3.

Danner's pieces on Iraq, published in these pages between September 2003 and April 2009, and written after visits to witness key political events in the country, which I read and admired as they came out, seem even stronger now that they are collected together. With all the disadvantages of making political analysis and predictions on the spot, this is reporting at its best. His pictures of Baghdad torn by ethnic strife and hundreds of suicide bombings, its streets lined with twelve- or fifteen-foot-high blast barriers, and of Fallujah with its buildings reduced to near rubble by Marine artillery are terrifyingly vivid. As an opponent of the war, Danner is more skeptical of US government claims and more appreciative of the immense complexity of the situation on the ground than he was in Yugoslavia. He is good at showing the distance between a bleak reality—a country devastated by our occupation, civil war, huge political problems, and terrorism—and Bush administration officials with their confident view that truth is subservient to power and that they had the ability to make reality appear to be whatever they wanted it to be. The toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue, the waving of purple fingers after the first election, and other such carefully managed images are what they wanted us to see, and not the rest, which they believed ought to remain hidden from the eyes of Americans.

Both Danner and Ron Suskind, whose book The One Percent Doctrine he quotes from at length,^[2] believe the invasion of Iraq was meant to make an example of Hussein in order to demonstrate what anyone with the temerity to acquire weapons of mass destruction—which in fact they did not possess—or in any way to flout the authority of the United States could expect from us. Henry Kissinger concurred; he supported the war, Danner quotes him as saying, "'Because Afghanistan was not enough.' The radical Islamists, he said, want to humiliate us. 'And we need to humiliate them.'" For the sake of American prestige and the credibility of American power, Danner writes, the image of "the burning, smoking towers collapsing into rubble" had to be supplanted by the scenes of "American tanks rumbling proudly down the streets of a vanquished Arab capital." This was to be a grand display of "shock and awe" unrestrained by the so-called weapons of the weak: the United Nations, the international laws and courts that the rest of the world uses to hobble American power.

In actual practice, what Danner describes in Iraq resembles what Barbara W. Tuchman called "the march of folly" far more than a demonstration of invincibility. In her famous book,^[3] she studied historical figures who made catastrophic decisions contrary to the self-interest of their countries, decisions that were perceived as counter-productive even in their time and for which an alternative course of action was readily available.

To reread Danner's pieces today is to realize that there was nothing remotely resembling sober reflection prior to our invasion of Iraq. Our leaders were sure of themselves and refused to allow UN inspections to continue; they believed that weighing and calculating the risk would only inhibit action. What could careful deliberation, based on cause and effect, matter when one has the most powerful military, spending more on defense than the rest of the world combined? When, following the invasion of Iraq, looting broke out in government ministries in Baghdad, universities, hospitals, power stations, and factories, virtually destroying the country's infrastructure and with it whatever respect Iraqis might have had for our competence, the 140,000 American troops did nothing but watch the growing anarchy.

Similarly, when L. Paul Bremer, the US administrator of Iraq charged with overseeing the reconstruction of the country, made the decision to fire all Baathists from the government and disband the army—thus making 350,000 humiliated and suddenly unemployed people into enemies, and transforming what had been the Pentagon's plan for a quick victory and quick departure into a long-running occupation—no one on the National Security Council or in the State Department was warned beforehand. The systematic failure in Iraq, Danner makes clear in his book, resulted in large part from an almost willful determination of those who made decisions to cut themselves off from those in government who knew anything. As a historian remarked regarding the extraordinarily imprudent Philip II of Spain, "No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence."

The two most disturbing pieces in the book deal with torture and were published last April after Danner got hold of a secret report by the officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). In order to monitor compliance with the Geneva Conventions and to supervise the treatment of prisoners, they traveled to Guantánamo and interviewed in private a number of inmates who divulged what kind of interrogations they'd been subjected to both at Guantánamo and in our secret global network of prisons where they had been held. They describe in detail, and independently of each other, what President Bush called the "alternative set of procedures" that indisputably, despite his vehement denials, are torture.

Borrowed from Soviet and Chinese Communists and other repressive regimes, both ancient and modern, these "techniques" were fine-tuned with the assistance of lawyers in the Department of Justice working with CIA officials, doctors, and psychologists. They not only revived the long-outlawed practices of inflicting pain and terror on human beings from the most shameful chapters of human history, but did so with the active participation of senior officials in government who insisted on being informed on an hourly basis about the progress of these "interrogations," and who micromanaged the application of waterboarding, sleep and sensory deprivation, and other barbaric methods on some of the more well-known prisoners.

Since international law (to which the United States is a signatory) prohibits cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, our practice of torture was obfuscated, excused, and pretty much dismissed, not only by the Bush administration and its apologists, but equally by Congress and now even by many Americans, more than half of whom support it according to the latest polls. What makes reading Danner's pieces on the ICRC report even more chilling is that they were written when we still had a reasonable hope that there would be some type of serious investigation and possibly eventual prosecution by the new administration.

That is not likely to happen. The Obama administration has taken steps to end torture and released documents showing official complicity in carrying it out, but it appears to have no interest in any kind of truth commission that would fully investigate what crimes our past leaders and high officials have committed. This is where Danner's book becomes so valuable. It ought to be read by those who still see our wars as moral crusades. They may learn from its pages why so many ungrateful beneficiaries of our largesse are willing to blow themselves up in order to do us harm, and why wars based on delusions only lead to more delusions and more wars.

Notes

^[1]First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Vanderbilt University Press, 2009).

^[2]The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 (Simon and Schuster, 2006).

^[3]The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (Knopf, 1984).

Found in Translation

The contemporary Arabic novel.

by Claudia Roth Pierpont January 18, 2010

Arabic novels offer a marvellous array of answers to questions we did not know we wanted to ask.

Related Links

Audio: Claudia Roth Pierpont on the Arabic novel in translation.

Keywords

Arabic Novels;

Arabs;

Alaa Al Aswany;

“Yacoubian Building” (Harper Perennial; $13.95);

Humphrey Davies;

Mahmoud Saeed;

“Saddam City” (Saqi Books; $12.95)

Image via Wikipedia

What do you know about how people live in Cairo or Beirut or Riyadh? What bearing does such information have upon your life? There are, of course, newspapers to keep responsible Americans up to date when trouble looms, and public television or even the History Channel to inform us about the occasional historic battle or archeological discovery or civil war. What else do we need? The ways that people think and work and suffer and fall in love and make enemies and sometimes make revolutions is the stuff of novels, and Arabic novels, while not yet lining the shelves of the local bookstore, have been increasingly available in English translation, offering a marvellous array of answers to questions we did not know we wanted to ask. On such subjects as: the nature of the clientele of the elegantly crumbling pre-Islamist bars in downtown Cairo, straight and gay (“The Yacoubian Building,” by Alaa Al Aswany); what it felt like to live through the massacre in the Shatila refugee camp, in 1982, and how some of the people who still live there have been managing since (“Gate of the Sun,” by Elias Khoury); the optimal tactics that a good Saudi girl should use to avoid being married off, which appear to require that she study either medicine or dentistry (“Girls of Riyadh,” by the twenty-something Rajaa Alsanea, who has herself completed an advanced degree in endodontics). There is clearly insight as well as information in these books. And then, considering the reduced size and the volatility of the world we share, we might recall the essential lesson of a very old Arabic book that everyone knows, “The Thousand and One Nights”—that stories can have the power to save your life.

Cover of Girls of Riyadh

Our long history of indifference has made it difficult, down the years, to come by stories of Arab life that do not involve genies or magic lamps. True, the novel is a comparatively recent phenomenon in Arabic literature; poetry, an ancient art, has traditionally held wider prestige. The exciting new storytelling form, barely a century old, was adapted from the European novels that European armies brought in their wake: Napoleon’s troops were in Cairo for three years, but, thanks to Egypt’s Paris-worshipping nineteenth-century khedives, Balzac and Zola stayed for good. The form developed sporadically in the first half of the last century, and no more than three or four Arabic novels appeared in English before the mid-fifties. After the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize, in 1988, there was a significant surge of interest—Mahfouz himself finally got an American commercial publisher—but the burden of bringing Arabic books to English readers still falls mainly on devoted translators, and on the small and heroic presses that have performed this service from the start. Their joint efforts have rarely mattered more. The Arab reading public, although avid for all sorts of fiction, in a plethora of newspapers and cheap feuilletons, has (for evident economic reasons) not fully embraced the novel as a published book. Few Arabic novels sell enough copies to earn their authors anything like a living income; even Mahfouz kept a civil-service job until he was sixty. Today, the most sophisticated literary public is under siege. “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads” is a saying that prevailed in what now seems a dream of literary possibility, free of stifling fundamentalism, civic chaos, and bombs.

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Lately, there has been a concerted effort by forces of intercultural good will, Arab and otherwise, to bring newer Arabic literary works to our attention, with annual prizes—culminating in the so-called Arabic Booker Prize, established in 2007, in Abu Dhabi—whose principal aim is to secure international (but primarily English-language) publication. From the fifties through the seventies, the United States pursued a far more extensive project: the Franklin Book Programs translated and distributed American books in the Arabic-speaking Middle East, and not only textbooks and dictionaries but “Little Women,” “Ethan Frome,” and “The Bridge of San Luis Rey”—books meant to promote “the Western ideals of the dignity and freedom of individual men” and to “minimize the difficulty of Arab-Western collaboration.” These days, the privately sponsored Global Americana Institute is attempting to renew this sort of literary diplomacy, starting with the publication of selected essays by Thomas Jefferson in Arabic. Yet, if the goal is collaboration, isn’t it as important to listen as to speak? There is little danger of encountering anything like official propaganda, since the Arab novelist stands, almost by definition—as a thinker, as a conduit of intellectual life—in opposition to the retrogressive forces in the modern Arab state.

Six years after winning the Nobel Prize, Mahfouz, aged eighty-two, was knifed in the neck by a religious zealot carrying out a fatwa issued by an Islamic cleric outraged by one of the books the Nobel committee had cited. (Mahfouz survived, and lived for two more years, although he temporarily lost the use of his right hand and had to relearn how to write. The cleric is currently serving a life sentence in the United States, for his part in a conspiracy to bomb the United Nations and other New York monuments.) Nothing so grave has happened to Alaa Al Aswany, whose “Yacoubian Building,” a skillful page-turner with a winning cast of characters, takes on the subjects of class oppression, government corruption, torture in prison, the rise of fundamentalism, and the Egyptian state’s propensity to push even profoundly decent but poor young men to religious extremism and, ultimately, to killing.

Published in 2002, by a private Cairo firm—there being no way to get such a manuscript through the state’s official publishing house—“The Yacoubian Building” quickly became one of the biggest best-sellers that the Arab world has ever seen. In Humphrey Davies’s smooth English translation (Harper Perennial; $13.95), it has been an astonishingly big seller here, too, and the book has appeared in more than twenty other languages around the globe. Al Aswany believes that his international fame has kept him safe, although he has frequently been accused in the state-run media of the crime of “tarnishing Egypt’s image abroad,” and the public discussions that he used to host at a Cairo café were shut down by the police. (He quickly relocated the discussions elsewhere.)

Even Rajaa Alsanea’s breezy “Sex and the City” takeoff, “Girls of Riyadh,” was initially banned in the author’s native Saudi Arabia, apparently for suggesting that upper-class Saudi girls might wish to escape their luxurious designer cages. The details of life within the cage have riveted non-Saudi readers, and have made the suitably hip and chirpy English translation—by the estimable Marilyn Booth, in conjunction with the author—another rare example of the Arabic novel as American best-seller. In this tight-locked cultural milieu, college girls who defy the Religious Police by wearing red on Valentine’s Day take on the sheen of political subversives.

But what about literature? Is it possible for anything like the grandly traditional novel of character development and moral nuance to emerge from societies in extremis, from writers routinely constrained or assailed? A critic reviewing Orwell’s “1984” complained that it might be truth, but it wasn’t fiction. We have, of course, come to see the novel as a form with many variant possibilities. Mahfouz, who spun complex social tales out of the apparently unquenchable vivacity of Cairo life, was able to reanimate the models of Balzac and Zola, but more recent Arab writers tend, understandably, toward Kafka or García Márquez. It should be no surprise that the prison novel has become a major Arabic genre; the icy emptiness of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag has been replaced, in the literature of duress, with Arab writers’ crowded and sweltering cells. How could traditional fiction comprehend this reality? Whether any book will outlast its moment is impossible to say, but what follows is an account of some novels that are worth reading now, and that may prove to be worth reading even when newspapers divert our attention to wars and prisons somewhere else.

Iraq is clearly not an easy place to write a novel these days. Even the brave young blogger known as Riverbend, the author of two published collections titled “Baghdad Burning,” fled with her family to Syria in the fall of 2007, and was last heard from as she rediscovered the pleasures of walking without continuously looking behind her. The American occupation has been the subject of a number of documentary films—more documentaries have been made about Iraq than about any other active conflict, thanks to the light weight and low cost of video cameras—but the care and cogitation required for a novel (never mind the publishers and bookstores) appear to have been most obtainable among members of the far-flung Iraqi diaspora, free in foreign lands to publish works that have often been simmering for years.

Mahmoud Saeed’s “Saddam City” (translated by Ahmad Sadri; Saqi Books; $12.95) was written in the early nineteen-eighties, soon after the author was released from the last of six terms of incarceration under Saddam Hussein. Saeed left Iraq in 1985, and managed to publish his book in Syria, albeit with two chapters destroyed, in the mid-nineties. Since 1999, he has lived in the United States, and for the past few years has taught Arabic literature and calligraphy in Chicago. He is in his seventies now, with a substantial and award-winning body of work in Arabic behind him. “Saddam City,” published at last in English in 2004, is based on what he saw in jail—the original Arabic title is literally “I Am the One Who Saw”—which he recorded, he says, “so that it would remain for future generations.”

For all the horror it details, this is a startlingly warm and humane book. Saeed, despite the incitements of his subject, does not aspire to the Kafkaesque—Kafka, it must be admitted, is among the most impossible of authors to emulate, along with García Márquez—but maintains a specificity of place and history (this happened in Basra, that happened in Mosul) and of the individuals who inhabit them. Set mostly in the run-up to the Iran-Iraq War, in the late nineteen-seventies, this slender novel tells of a mild-mannered Basra schoolteacher who, although cautiously apolitical, is whisked off one day for “a simple interrogation.” His subsequent experience in six levels of hell—six prisons in all—is exactingly described, but the long ordeal is mitigated, both for him and for the reader, by a dose of bitter humor, a share of personal good will, and the mutual trust that he discovers among the prisoners, a trust long since forfeited in the larger prison of the informer-ridden society outside.

Saeed’s style is plain and direct, without literary pretensions, but with a tone of emotional delicacy that is as odd in the circumstances as it is touching: treated with courtesy by a single officer, after much cruelty, the prisoner refrains from asking questions about his arrest, because “I did not want to appear to be exploiting his kindness.” Some references to unfamiliar figures and events benefit from the book’s tidy footnotes. And although Sadri’s rendering begins stiffly, it soon becomes rhythmically fluent, and one’s sense of reading a translation fades away.

Resilience against all odds appears to be characteristic of Saeed: the same force rises to a point of madcap buoyancy in “The Soldier and the Pigs,” one of four Saeed stories available from Amazon.com, in uneven English, for forty-nine cents each. (A writer new to the country must try to make his work known any way he can.) In this riotously original little tale of a soldier’s plight among not only pigs but many, many frogs, also set during the Iran-Iraq War, we catch another glimpse of a writer with the power to translate foreign histories into stories that we can make our own.

Sinan Antoon’s “I’jaam” (City Lights; $11.95) is in many ways about translation, and although it is also an Iraqi prison novel set in the era of Saddam, it is hard to imagine a treatment of that terrible subject more different from Saeed’s. Antoon is Baghdad-born, in his early forties, and he left Iraq after the first Gulf War, in 1991; he has a doctorate in Arabic literature from Harvard. “I’jaam,” his first novel, was published in Beirut in 2004, and, impeccably translated by the author and Rebecca C. Johnson, appeared in English in 2007. Antoon, who currently teaches at New York University, has never been in prison. His brief novel is a self-consciously literary work, complete with references to Orwell and an epigraph from Akhmatova, and is alert to the uses of language, in a closed political society, for both indoctrination and rebellion.

The title refers to the practice of adding dots—diacritical marks—to various letters of the Arabic alphabet, some of which are indistinguishable without these marks in place. An undotted sequence of letters may signify a number of different words; the correct translation can be determined only by context. The story’s intriguing premise is that a handwritten, undotted manuscript has been found in a file in Baghdad’s Interior Ministry, and a functionary assigned to add the necessary dots and make a transcription: the resulting manuscript forms the body of the book. The text turns out to be the work of a university student whose gift for political mockery got him sent to prison, where he wrote the manuscript—leaving out the dots to avoid further incrimination. Its uncertain readings cause the scribe to offer footnotes to such perplexing references as “the Ministry of Rupture and Inflammation” (“Could this be the Ministry of Culture and Information?”) and to such obvious errors as occur in the well-known song lyric that details how the nation’s leader moves from house to house and “fucks us into bed.” (“Note: the original lyrics read ‘tucks.’ ”)

The student’s (and the author’s) delight in word games brightens the narrative but does not overwhelm it. At times, the prison almost disappears, as the student seeks refuge in his memories of soccer games, of campus romance, even of the mandatory political demonstrations in support of the person identified only as the Leader. Nevertheless, darkness closes in: the formerly dauntless young man, an aspiring poet, is raped by a prison guard and increasingly breaks down. In his delirium, his fantasies are alluringly, if postmodernly, alphabetical:

The laughter rose and the dots fell, one after the other. The letters that take no dots began to pick them up from the ground and put them in their buttonholes or on their heads, or to stand on them and look at themselves in the mirror. One began to fight with the others, and stole their dots. The sin stole shin’s dots and then raised its fingers to its lips, with a loud “Shhhh!” The mim lay down on his stomach and raised his head to swallow the two dots he had picked up off the ground. A lustful laughter swelled up, and the letters danced together, coupling in forbidden positions.

Still, the core of the experience is meant to be horribly real. Antoon has said that he required years to approach the harsher aspects of the story, implying that he feared seeming presumptuous in claiming experience not his own. What, after all, is the relevance of fact to fiction in a book like this? Should it be different from any other type of novel? There is surely a relationship between the density of detail in Saeed’s book and his experience, as against Antoon’s more formally focussed, internally preoccupied tone. Or is this to confound truth with style? When reality is framed and shaped by imagination—in novels, as opposed to memoirs or histories—all the truth that we can vouch for is emotional and intellectual, and on the page.

“Politics and the novel are an indivisible case,” the Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani wrote. But even Kanafani, who also worked as a newspaperman and a spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, expressed the modern writer’s absolute faith in the primacy of art. “My political position springs from my being a novelist,” he explained. “I started writing the story of my Palestinian life before I found a clear political position or joined any organization.” Born under the British Mandate, in Acre, in 1936, he was initially educated in French missionary schools, and—a fitting irony for a writer who all but invented a new national literature—he had to improve his Arabic later on. He was twelve years old when Israel was founded, in 1948, and he and his family ended up in a refugee camp in Damascus. He worked as a teacher, first in the camp and then in Kuwait for several years, before moving to Beirut to begin his association with a new political magazine and a newly stirring Palestinian consciousness. There, in 1962, aged twenty-six and in hiding for want of a passport, he wrote “Men in the Sun” (Lynne Rienner; $12.95), a novella about three Palestinian refugees who pay a smuggler to take them across a swath of the Iraqi desert to Kuwait: a work as searing as the relentless desert sun that blinds and burns the men, a work in which politics and art cannot be told apart.

“Men in the Sun” is a classic of Palestinian writing, and mentioning it among recent Arabic books is a bit like mentioning a work by Hemingway in a discussion of up-and-coming Americans, except that Kanafani remains almost entirely unknown to English readers. A few of the stories that round out the present volume are polemical and coarsely melodramatic; Kanafani was nothing if not a man with a mission. But “Men in the Sun” is, on the simplest level, a gripping tale that unfolds with Hitchcockian suspense as the reader is reduced to fearfully counting the minutes on the smuggler’s wristwatch. The prose is lean, swift, and—in Hilary Kilpatrick’s translation—filled with phrases of startling rightness: “The lorry, a small world, black as night, made its way across the desert like a heavy drop of oil on a burning sheet of tin”; or, even better, “The speedometer leapt forward like a white dog tied to a tent peg.” The realistic intensity of Kanafani’s world tends to conceal his stylistic ambitions: the intricacy with which he weaves together past and present, fact and delusion, and the alternating voices of his characters, each of whom is drawn with the rapid assurance of a charcoal sketch. But on a deeper level Kanafani’s work is about the desperation that drove these men to such lengths to regain work and dignity; it is about the longing—just emerging in the Palestinian public voice—for the moist earth and the olive trees of the villages left behind in 1948. Most painfully, it is about the awakening of self-recrimination for acquiescence in the loss, as in the thoughts of an old man who has been living “like a beggar” and decides to risk the journey:

In the last ten years you have done nothing but wait. You have needed ten big hungry years to be convinced that you have lost your trees, your house, your youth, and your whole village. . . . What do you think you were waiting for?

More than one of Kanafani’s stories depict Israeli soldiers as bloodthirsty villains. Yet he also portrays Israeli settlers sympathetically—perhaps for the first time in modern Arabic literature—in the novella “Returning to Haifa,” written after the 1967 war and available in another collection of his work, titled “Palestine’s Children” (translated by Barbara Harlow and Karen E. Riley; Lynne Rienner; $14.95). This novella is less formally daring than “Men in the Sun”; stylistic experiment may have seemed irrelevant in the wake of the Arab defeat. But it is no less gripping, as it traces the daylong trip of a middle-aged Arab couple from their West Bank home, in 1967. The border has been newly opened, and, with much trepidation, they are travelling to see their old house in Haifa for the first time since they fled, nearly twenty years before. The elderly Jewish woman who comes to the door is anything but a stereotype: a Holocaust survivor and a widow, she is a complex and poignant figure, whose moral politics turn out to be not so far from those of her visitors. Her husband had been seduced by reading a pro-Zionist novel—“Thieves in the Night,” by Arthur Koestler—into half believing that the land itself was waiting for them. She had wanted to leave almost as soon as she arrived, in 1948, upon seeing the mistreatment of an Arab child, and after realizing the cultural cost of the victory. This realization came to her the very first Saturday that she and her husband walked through newly captured Haifa: He was immediately struck by the fact that he didn’t see any cars. It was a true Jewish Sabbath! This brought tears to his eyes for reasons he couldn’t explain. When his wife saw this, she too was surprised and said to him with tears in her own eyes: “I’m crying for another reason. Yes, this is a true Sabbath. But there is no longer a true Sabbath on Friday, nor a true one on Sunday.”

Yet she stayed, mostly because along with the house the childless couple were given a baby: the baby that the Arab couple left behind when the wildly fleeing Palestinian population swept them along to the port and the waiting boats. The confrontation between the now grown son, brought up by the Jewish family, and his Arab parents is the climax of the story, and what it loses in parablelike neatness it repays in emotional force. The message of generational failure and the new imperative of resistance is not so different from the message of the author’s earlier work, but it is more urgent, hectoring, and stark.

This may have seemed the only possible message at the time. It is also the message of Kanafani’s opposite number and comic doppelgänger, Emile Habiby. A Palestinian Christian who refused to leave Haifa after 1948, Habiby eventually served as a member of the Israeli Knesset. His own post-1967 novel, “The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist” (translated by Salma K. Jayyusi and Trevor LeGassick; Interlink; $12.95), is an excruciatingly funny tour de force about “an Arab who had remained, by some magic, in Israel.” Habiby’s antihero, an informer for the Israeli state, is a guileless fool (the book pays tribute to “Candide”) whose spinelessness is matched by his ineptitude, and who is as much a victim as a rogue. Then, one day in 1967, hearing a radio report that all defeated Arabs must surrender, he flies a white flag from his Haifa house as an “extravagant symbol of my loyalty,” and is thrown in jail for insinuating that Haifa is on occupied land. Beaten and left in a cell, too ashamed to admit his identity or even where he lives, he is transformed when he is mistaken for a resistance fighter: “A fierce desire gripped me to clap my hands, to sing, to ululate and scream until the layers of necessity, silence, humiliation, and submission were all gone. It had always been ‘Yes, sir!’; ‘At your command, sir!’ But now my spirit would fly free.”

For Kanafani, there was no significant later work: he was killed in 1972, aged thirty-six, when his car was booby-trapped, apparently by Israeli security forces, in reprisal for the Popular Front’s attack on an Israeli airport. Habiby died at seventy-four, in 1996, after a lifetime of arguing for the rights of Israeli Arabs; the only writer to win (and accept) important literary awards from both the P.L.O. and Israel, he chose an inscription for his tombstone that reads, whether in pride or in shame, “Remained in Haifa.” Both these works by pillars of Palestinian literature, so dissimilar in every way, are at once cries from the heart and calls to arms.

Kanafani plays a recurring role in Elias Khoury’s novel “Gate of the Sun” (Picador; $15), published in Arabic in 1998, to enormous acclaim, and in Humphrey Davies’s award-winning English translation eight years later (thanks to the tiny, not-for-profit Archipelago Books). A tremendously ambitious work, covering half a century of Palestinian history, it begins with maps of the region dotted with the names of old Palestinian villages, the way big Russian novels begin with family trees: here, through all the narrative advance and obliteration, is what you must keep steady in your mind. Set in a dilapidated hospital in the Shatila refugee camp, in Beirut, in the mid-nineties, the book’s many winding stories are told by a male Scheherazade, a fortyish Palestinian medic whose unceasing talk is intended to rouse a comatose old man, a resistance hero who spent decades sneaking over the Lebanese border into Israel, to carry out attacks that earned him the title the Wolf of Galilee. We do not see much of the attacks; instead, we see the warrior as a lover—not as the Wolf but simply as a man—paying secret visits to his wife, left behind on what has become Israeli land. As a result of these conjugal visits, the hero plants his children in Galilee, before going away again to fight to liberate them.

The medic, Khalil—an intellectual and a bit of a coward, who once memorized all of “Men in the Sun”—reports that Kanafani came to interview the old fighter once, during the nineteen-fifties, but did not find the mythic figure that he needed for his writing. It is Khoury’s intent to see through an earlier age’s myths, to expose the flawed and merely human at their core; this attitude lends his historical saga a contemporary feel, even while the debunking of heroism allows him to rescue, for a more cynical era, whatever sorely tested scraps of heroism remain. In true Scheherazade story-within-a-story fashion, the novel itself is foretold, in Khalil’s tale of a Palestinian fighter who had planned “a book without a beginning or an end . . . an epic of the Palestinian people, which he’d start by recounting the details of the great expulsion of ’48.” That fighter, however, died during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, reportedly of shock—“but I’m not convinced that is the reason,” Khalil confides. “I mean, after all those who were killed in fighting and in massacres, along comes someone who dies of sentiment!” It is just one of many, many signs that people dramatize, or lie, or remember things that never happened, and that stories are not to be trusted.

Elias Khoury is a Lebanese Christian who was born in Beirut in 1948, and whose sympathy for Palestinian refugees sent him to Amman to join the P.L.O.’s military unit, Fatah, in 1967, when he was nineteen. Unlike the would-be author in his book, Khoury was more a literary man than a fighter, and in the mid-seventies, back in Beirut, he took up work for the Palestine Research Center and began writing novels; during the next decade he collected thousands of stories from refugees about the “great expulsion of ’48,” an oral history that he felt required an “Arab Tolstoy” to wield into fiction. (“Everybody laughed,” he says.) “Gate of the Sun” is indeed Tolstoyan in scope: the expulsion stories are woven through a long first section, while the second focusses on the later lives of those who fled to Lebanon only to spend whole generations in the camps. “Over there you’d become the Jews’ Jews,” one character observes, “and over here you were the Arabs’ Arabs.”

But the book is far from Tolstoyan in the telling. Its difficulties are many: the loquacious storyteller’s voice at times becomes so irritating that one longs for the sick man to rise from his bed simply to make him stop talking; a strong gust of hot air blows about some truly ghastly phrases (“A woman only dies if her man stops loving her”); and the later pages (even a book without an ending must come to an end) lack energy. Moreover, Khoury’s structure is a patchwork, an assembly of fragments that intersect and repeat or simply disappear. Khoury has said that this approach most accurately captures the history he writes about; it is not postmodern literary affect but the plain reality where he comes from.

As a matter of style, the point is worth debating. The Palestinian writer Sahar Khalifeh has written several novels about the conflict in a purely traditional form. Her finest work, “Wild Thorns” (translated by Trevor LeGassick and Elizabeth Fernea; Interlink; $12.95), about two Palestinian cousins who take opposing sides—one shoots an Israeli officer, the other comes to the aid of the officer’s terrified wife and child—conveys the moral complexity of West Bank family life, and street life, with detailed conviction. The book is neatly plotted and easily read; it leaves us in no doubt about its characters’ desperate choices and inner lives. Khalifeh, who was born in Nablus in 1941 (and continues to live there, at least for part of the year), clearly understands her subject, and knows how to tell a story. But, then, she does not attempt to trace the surging history that has led to the daily turmoil she describes.

Khoury, by contrast, is working on a grand scale, and—even while one is chafing at his methods—his repetitions and dislocations become, in an almost visceral way, part of the reader’s sense of exile and, ultimately, part of the book’s rewards. If few of the characters are sufficiently sustained to carry our emotions over the long haul, there are many passing characters whose stories come to unforgettable life. I threw this book aside several times on first reading, but the power of these stories drew me back. “Gate of the Sun” is, as it turns out, worth reading twice—because it is so hard to see whole the first time, and because it is so insidiously rich.

There is Salim, who was five years old when, as he recalls, his mother carried him through the fire at the siege of Shatila (“ ‘There wasn’t a fire,’ I said”) and is now learning English so that he can follow her to America, although everyone knows that she died in the siege. There is Abu Aref, a Bedouin who went off one day with his family’s herd of buffalo and returned saying that the Israelis had killed them, but whose wife knew that they had really been stolen by his cousin, and that he’d invented the buffalo massacre to cover his shame. (“Everything foolish we do,” she says, “we blame on the Jews.”)

And there are the human massacres, in Palestinian villages, in 1948, by Israeli troops: in Ain al-Zaitoun, forty young men were slaughtered; in al-Safsaf, sixty men were executed wearing the white sheets they had worn to surrender; in Sha’ab, twenty old men were forced to march in the mud and nineteen died. The list goes on. The villages are real, the dates are real, and while some of the wildest embellishments are shown to be false—a crucifixion, most notably—the stories are told in the voices of those who were there, or those who heard the stories from them. The Israeli historians Ilan Pappé and Benny Morris have presented irrefutable evidence that atrocities occurred during the founding of the Israeli state, although arguments persist about the accuracy of reports, responsibility for actions, and degrees of brutality. When “Gate of the Sun” was published in Hebrew, in 2002, it won critical praise but was also severely criticized for mixing fact with incendiary fiction—because such stories, even in a novel that insists on the unreliability of stories, have the sound of reality and bear its charge. Khoury has countered that his book presents the truth, wholly inarguable, of Palestinian memory and belief.

Khoury was attacked in the Egyptian press for allowing his book to be published in Israel, although this seems to have been one of his goals: he has said that, in a metaphorical sense, he wrote the book not only in Arabic but in Hebrew. A self-confessed secular democrat, Khoury is one of the few Arab writers to recognize the Holocaust as part of the moral equation in the Middle East. Khalil, when talking about the Palestinian revolts of the late nineteen-thirties, demands of his ever-silent foil, “What did the nationalist movement posted in the cities do apart from demonstrate against Jewish immigration? . . . Tell me, in the faces of people being driven to slaughter, don’t you see something resembling your own?” In 2001, Khoury signed a statement opposing the holding of a Holocaust-denial conference in Beirut. Both the author and his character make their arguments in terms of keeping Arab culture free of soul-destroying European-style racism, and of preserving a larger moral dignity. It is crucial to have stood up to such a terrible history, and to face it in the present, “not because the victims were Jews,” Khalil says, “but because their death meant the death of humanity within us.”

For all its large ideas and its high-flown rhetoric, the novel’s most substantial character is the hero’s pragmatic wife, who turns both the nationalist epic and the great love story upside down when, after years of lightning visits by her husband, she makes it clear just who the true Palestinian hero is. It was she who fed and brought up their children, she who was in charge of the “ordinary and meaningless” details that allowed them all to survive. Now she has decided that the children will not spend their lives waiting for their lives to begin, as she has done: “I want the illusions to end.” She has become an Israeli citizen. She votes for the Arab Communist Party in the Knesset, “and I attend the meetings and demonstrations, in an attempt to preserve what’s left of our land.” She will raise the money for one of their sons to open a garage in the village. A daughter will get the wedding that she wants. Another son will receive his master’s degree, in Arabic literature, from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and begin his doctoral thesis on the works of Ghassan Kanafani.

Seven children in all. And, eventually, twenty-five grandchildren, about whom the Wolf of Galilee, giving the story one more twist, has the final word:

Here we are, thrown out of our country in ’48, and with only a hundred thousand of us left over there. The hundred thousand have become a million, and the eight hundred thousand who were thrown out have become five million. They bring in immigrants and we have children, and we’ll see who wins in the end.

George Orwell claimed that in a peaceful age he would have been not a political writer but, rather, an author of “ornate or merely descriptive books” (which lets us know what he really thought of nonpolitical writing). In America, where authors enjoy the right to be as ornate or descriptive as they wish, the political necessity that drives so many Arab writers may seem like a literary ball and chain. It is, of course, possible to find Arabic works about other subjects. Curiously, both of the Arabic Bookers awarded so far have gone to Egyptian historical novels: Bahaa Taher’s “Sunset Oasis” (translated by Humphrey Davies; McClelland & Stewart; $34.99), a solid, if stolid, piece of work that gains its interest mostly from being set in Egypt’s Siwa Oasis, during the late nineteenth century, and ends—just when we thought we were getting away from such things—with someone blowing something up; and Yusuf Zeydan’s “Beelzebub,” not yet translated, which is set in the relative safety of the fifth century A.D. But it isn’t necessary to escape our time in order to be free of politics; geographic distance can have the same effect, particularly in lands so vast and thinly populated. Go far enough and you can escape the entire modern world, as in the Libyan Tuareg writer Ibrahim al-Koni’s desert fable “Gold Dust” (translated by Elliott Colla; American University in Cairo; $17.95), in which a man trades his wife and son for a beloved camel, and the engrossed reader feels no doubt that he has chosen well.

Despite the continued existence of such pristine literary realms, there is some fear that the lure of English translation and American publication is a corrupting force—that Arab novelists, consciously or not, will begin to court the larger market, and leave their own audiences behind. As for us, we would end up reading only versions of what we want to hear. There is not much evidence that anything like this has happened yet, and the benefits for all seem to outweigh the risks. Alaa Al Aswany’s second novel, “Chicago” (translated by Farouk Abdel Wahab; Harper Perennial; $14.99), set amid Egyptian émigrés in that city, where the author went to graduate school, attempts to deal with both worlds, and comes down as hard on America for sustaining Egyptian tyranny as on Egyptian tyranny itself. It is, frankly, a disappointing book, in that the author’s typically ambitious reach proves beyond his grasp. Nevertheless, Al Aswany’s reputation and his undeniable storytelling ease have made “Chicago” the biggest Arabic best-seller since his first novel, and have won it many readers—frustrated, thinking, caught up—in the West as well.

Certainly, not every part of this literary exchange will be ideal. There will be good books and not so good ones, just as with American fiction. Still, it is unquestionably good to have stories that we hold in common. And it would be better to have more. Nobody is under the illusion that literature can change the world. But, as Al Aswany has pointed out, “literature does something much more important—it changes us.” Contemporary Arabic literature—which is not a monolithic literature but a series of imaginative works by individuals who happen to be Egyptian, Libyan, Syrian, Moroccan, Lebanese, and so on, twenty-two nations strong—is one of the few reliable forces working to impel these varied countries toward a cultural (and perhaps even a political) openness, in which Arab writers will one day be able to write about anything at all.

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Zorba’s Guide to Free Ebooks

By Paul Biba

Zorba Press has published the most comprehensive guide to free ebooks that I’ve seen so far. It is actually Chapter 3 from Michael Pastore’s 50 Benefits of Ebooks.

The Guide covers search engines, RSS feeds, public and university libraries and:

A. Free Ebook Websites
B. Ebook Directories: Sites That List Free Ebook Websites
C. Ebook Search Sites and Ebook Search Engines
D. Audiobooks
E. Ebooks About Aspects of Writing, Publishing, Internet, and Epublishing
F. Literature, Classic Books, Biographies
G. Nonfiction Ebooks (including Science, Technology and Computer Ebooks)
H. Scholarly Offerings
I. Children’s Literature
J. Pastore’s Picks: 1,001 Noteworthy Ebooks to Read Before You Diet

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In Evin Prison

Image by Sylvia Westenbroek via Flickr

By Claire Messud

My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran

by Haleh Esfandiari

Ecco, 230 pp., $25.99

Extraordinary events in Iran over the past six months have brought us images, voices, and narratives until recently unimaginable; they reveal, among other things, how little we understand about quotidian life in that country since the revolution. In the United States, we are nevertheless aware, with a dark tremor, of Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, the black hole of the hard-liners' repressive system. Emblematic of the regime, it is a site of torture and interrogation, of isolation, and of emotional as well as physical violence. It is a prison for the breaking of souls.

Prominent intellectuals, politicians, activists, and journalists have vanished into its maw. Many, like the Canadian-Iranian photographer Zahra Kazemi, who died in 2003 after being brutally beaten, or the twenty-nine Iranian prisoners executed in July 2008, have not survived to speak of their ordeals there. Many others remain incarcerated, among them scores of reformists arrested during the summer's demonstrations and, in particular, the Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, originally arrested in 2007 at the same time as Haleh Esfandiari, and recently shockingly condemned, at a show trial, to at least twelve years in prison.

In this company, Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian-American director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., is one of the lucky ones. An apparently unlikely candidate for arrest—a sixty-seven-year-old grandmother at the time of her imprisonment in 2007, Esfandiari was in Iran to visit her ninety-three-year-old mother—she was sucked into the surreal vortex of the nation's Intelligence Ministry, interrogated for months, and held in solitary confinement for four months. Her release was apparently the direct result of an exchange of letters between Lee Hamilton, her employer and the director of the Wilson Center, and the office of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei; although Esfandiari's husband, the historian Shaul Bakhash, along with many others (including the editors of The New York Review) campaigned tirelessly for her freedom, both in the United States and around the world. As she makes clear, it is impossible to know exactly what confluence of events led her captors to set her free: so much of their understanding of the world and of her role in it remained opaque to the last.

---

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In the wake of her experience, Esfandiari has written a memoir of considerable delicacy and sophistication. My Prison, My Home is, primarily, an account of her annus horribilis, from the initial staged "robbery" when she was on her way to Tehran airport on December 30, 2006, that left her conveniently without a passport and unable to leave the country, through her lockup and eventual liberation almost eight months later. But Esfandiari also provides us with a lucid, concise history of Iran through the twentieth century and into the first years of the twenty-first, and with it an outline of her own remarkable life across continents and cultures. She is restrained in her telling—the book is filled with vivid details and facts, rather than emotional outpouring—a decision for which her narrative is only the more powerful; but her position as someone who fully understands both America and Iran affords her the opportunity to elucidate, for American readers, some of the apparent mysteries of her native culture.

In order for us to make sense of her imprisonment, we need to grasp both its historical background and Esfandiari's own particular life story. (This assertion may seem painfully rudimentary, but facts that are common knowledge to any Iranian, such as the people's abiding resentment of the 1953 CIA-backed coup that restored the Shah to power, seem frequently to have eluded our nation's policymakers.)

Cosmopolitan and intellectual, Esfandiari's own upbringing reminds the reader of Iran as the West once knew it. She is the older child of an Iranian botanist, himself the descendant of regional governors and politicians from the eastern city of Kerman, and of an Austrian mother. Her parents met at university in Vienna before the war. Raised between her mother's German-style home and her grandmother's traditional Iranian household, Esfandiari, like her parents, attended university in Vienna:

While I stayed clear of the student movement,...my time in Vienna had a huge hand in shaping my intellectual development and my love for Western culture.

Having completed her doctorate, she returned to Iran in 1964 at the age of twenty-four.

Esfandiari lays out the vital information of her nation's history alongside her own. The pivotal power struggle in the early 1950s between the Shah and his prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who sought to nationalize the Iranian oil industry, took place when Haleh was only a child, but

even as an eleven-year-old I was caught up in these currents, as were the rest of the students at the normally staid Jeanne d'Arc [a Catholic girls' school run by French nuns]. We had all become politicized and wanted the British out.

Unfortunately, the CIA did not agree with the schoolgirls. (The importance of the Jeanne d'Arc school in educating the young women of Iran's future elite in pre-revolutionary times is evident: a quick glance at contact information for alumnae shows them to be predominantly working professionals, with most of them living in the diaspora.) The Esfandiari household's relation to the Mossadegh uprising was complicated, moreover, because "the family was divided.... Mossadegh, the aristocrat who had emerged as a defender of the masses, was a close relative."

Esfandiari explains the increasing difficulties of the Shah's regime during the course of the 1960s and 1970s—although she does not provide the sort of lavish detail about his infamous material excesses that can be found in Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski's Shah of Shahs (1985) or Christopher de Bellaigue's riveting In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs (2005)—and she makes these problems concrete in relation to her own life. Her first career upon returning to Iran was as a journalist. She translated and wrote for the nation's largest daily newspaper, Kayhan, where she met her future husband, Shaul Bakhash, while they were both covering a visit to Iran by the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie. (That Bakhash is Jewish and she a Muslim was, at the time of their marriage in 1965, "highly unusual," but by no means scandalous: her conservative Muslim grandmother blessed their union.) After leaving Tehran for several years so that Bakhash could pursue his academic career at Harvard and Oxford, the couple returned in 1972.

Although she went back to Kayhan, Esfandiari found that she could not stay there long: "Increasingly the shah and the government showed less tolerance for even the mildest criticism, and the grip on the media of the emboldened Information Ministry grew tighter." When Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda's protégé, Amir Taheri, was appointed editor of the paper, Esfandiari quit, and went to work for the Women's Organization of Iran (WOI), a women's rights group founded in 1966.

In a moving aside—and one that feels particularly significant, given the growing influence of women in the current Iranian reform movement and their heightened presence on the streets during last summer's demonstrations, as was noted in the anonymous "Letter from Tehran" published in The New Yorker in early October—Esfandiari comments on her work with WOI, which lasted until 1975:

After the revolution, the clerics sought to undo as many of our accomplishments as they could.... But I believe the WOI played a role in making a new generation of women conscious of their rights, and these women were determined not to be relegated to second-class status again. For these reasons, my three years at the WOI remain among the most rewarding of my working life. I became, and remain, an unrepentant feminist.

From there, Esfandiari went on to the Shahbanou Farah Foundation, a cultural organization set up by and named after the Shah's third wife (herself a graduate of the Jeanne d'Arc school), through which she oversaw museums and cultural centers. From this vantage, she watched the Shah's Iran crumbling around her:

By 1977, for example, Tehran's "poetry nights" at the German-sponsored Goethe Institute had taken on a decidedly political color. Large gatherings listened while poets read from works praising liberty and criticizing oppression. Lawyers and intellectuals addressed open letters to the prime minister and the shah calling for the reinstitution of basic freedoms and the release of political prisoners.

In this setting, Esfandiari explains, the popular appeal of Khomeini—who had publicly and volubly denounced the Shah since the early 1960s, and had lived in exile in Turkey, Iraq, and France—gained inexorable momentum. While the Shah's opponents were politically diverse, ranging from Communists to intellectuals to civil servants, "Khomeini's clerical lieutenants came to dominate the movement, and Khomeini emerged as its undisputed leader." During 1978, demonstrations grew exponentially in size and force, and Esfandiari writes that "the regime, hammered by strikes, shutdowns, demonstrations, and violence on the streets, was in a hopeless situation."

While Esfandiari is clear about some sources of the unrest, she does not dwell on the people's grievances against the Shah. It is enlightening to read Kapus´cin´ski's account of life in the Shah's last years of rule, written at the time of the revolution, and to note how familiar the Pahlavi regime's methods sound to any of us reading the newspapers today:

More than a hundred thousand young Iranians were studying in Europe and America.... Today more Iranian doctors practice in San Francisco or Hamburg than in Tebriz or Meshed. They did not return even for the generous salaries the Shah offered. They feared Savak [the Shah's secret police, comparable to the contemporary Intelligence Ministry].... An Iranian at home could not read the books of the country's best writers (because they came out only abroad), could not see the films of its outstanding directors (because they were not allowed to be shown in Iran), could not listen to the voices of its intellectuals (because they were condemned to silence).

For Esfandiari and Bakhash, with a small daughter at the time, the upheaval of the revolution was too uncertain: Esfandiari took their daughter to London in early December 1978 for two weeks, to "wait things out."

In fact, however, she would not return home for many years. Khomeini returned to Iran in February 1979 and within ten days the Shah's monarchy collapsed. Now "armed revolutionary committees roamed the streets. Every day, grisly pictures appeared in the Tehran papers of executed members of the old regime—many I had known personally or had covered as a journalist." Bakhash had been offered a visiting professorship at Princeton, and the family moved to the United States, where they have lived since. Esfandiari taught Persian at Princeton until 1992. She then wrote her first book, Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution (1997), with the support of fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Center, and was asked by Robert Litwak, then the Wilson Center's director of the Division for International Studies, to start a Middle East program there, where she still works.

Esfandiari first returned to Iran in 1992, encouraged by the more liberal climate fostered by the relatively pragmatic President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and his then minister of culture, Mohammad Khatami. After her father's death in 1995, she visited more frequently, to help care for her aging mother. She says of the late 1990s and early 2000s:

These were years when the possibility of fundamental change seemed real and when Iranians believed, for a brief moment, that they could take charge of their own lives and government. It was not to be, and it was heartbreaking to me to witness the snuffing out of so much promise and hope.

Following the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, however, the tenor of society changed so much that "I made it a point on these trips to stay away from even mildly 'political' people." Unfortunately, her efforts were insufficient to protect her from the roving eye of the Intelligence Ministry, "heir to the Shah's secret police, SAVAK," although far more murderous even than they, and responsible for the deaths of thousands of dissenters.

This institution defined Esfandiari's existence from December 30, 2006, when she was to have returned home to Washington, D.C., until September 2007, when she finally did; and her interactions with its emissaries make for astounding reading. The experience was absurd, horrendous, and disturbingly banal: in a final, blackly comic flourish, her principal interrogator, Mr. Ja'fari, presented her, on the eve of her departure, with a gift: "a large, beautiful inlaid box" containing a leather-bound volume of the poetry of Hafez, Iran's famed fourteenth-century poet: "I examined this curious gift, turning over and over in my mind its intended meaning. It was truly bizarre. The Intelligence Ministry was sending a message: 'No hard feelings. Let's be friends.'" As she says of them, "It's the way we play the game," and there is, about the surreal dance of her eight months in their hands, the quality of a game—destructive, potentially lethal, but a game nevertheless.

The Intelligence Ministry existed for Esfandiari primarily in the form of two men: her chief interrogator, Ja'fari, and his superior, Hajj Agha. Ja'fari she first met in early January 2007 at an interrogation center in a "house...modeled after the Petit Trianon," where he questioned her for long hours at a time, over a fortnight:

He was in his mid-thirties, of medium height, with a bit of stubble on his face. He wore an open-necked shirt beneath a modified safari jacket. A smirk never left his face. His manner alternated between solicitous official...and faceless bureaucrat.

Hajj Agha, the more gracious and apparently accommodating of the two men, with whom she had more dealings once she was imprisoned in early May 2007, emerges in spite of his urbanity as the more sinister: his name is honorific rather than personal ("Hajj" refers to one who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca; "Agha" is a title for a military officer), so he is, in fact, nameless; and as Esfandiari was not permitted to see his face, and forced to face the wall, he remains, hideously, a cipher.

Ja'fari's line of questioning was, from the outset, clear: "He imagined that the Wilson Center was an agency of the American government, that we were implicated in some nefarious plot against the Islamic Republic, and that we routinely held secret meetings to plan strategy to this end." Esfandiari marvels, "How does one persuade a man with Ja'fari's mind-set that the Ford Foundation...is not part of a 'Zionist conspiracy'? How could I convince him that my husband was not an Israeli agent?"

More specifically, Esfandiari came to realize that Ja'fari and the Intelligence Ministry feared "that the Wilson Center was part of a conspiracy to bring about a velvet revolution...in Iran":

It was the National Endowment for Democracy and the Open Society Institute (OSI) that earned Ja'fari's most intense scrutiny. The OSI was part of the Soros Foundations.... [It] had been active in newly independent countries of the former Soviet Union.... In these countries, mass popular movements led by intellectuals and opposition parties had succeeded in bringing down Soviet-style governments. These movements became known as "velvet revolutions" or "rainbow revolutions" because of their peaceful, nonviolent nature and because protesters had adopted a particular identifying color—orange in the Ukraine, rose in Georgia, for example. In the twisted mind of Ja'fari and his colleagues, the Soros Foundations had caused these velvet revolutions, and since George Soros was a Jew, a shadowy, Jewish conspiracy hovered in the wings.

The wildness of this paranoia is of course all the more intriguing because it is not, in some details, so very far from reality: orange in the Ukraine, rose in Georgia, and green in Iran? This year's thwarted presidential candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi may not have sought to provoke a "velvet revolution," but in their passionate cries for democratic reform, his supporters were not far from doing so, and their resistance, albeit less visibly, continues. While it is madness to blame the United States and Britain for supposedly coordinating and manipulating this discontent, Ja'fari is not wrong to be alarmed, or wrong to imagine that the West would wish for the reformists' success.

Nevertheless, to appreciate that a faction of the Iranian Intelligence Ministry (because it becomes clear, during Esfandiari's ordeal, that there are bickering factions behind the scrim: "one ready to let me go, the other determined to hold on to me") would seriously believe that the OSI was responsible for the revolutions in former Soviet countries, and intent on a similar strategy in Iran, is already to grasp the strange, novelistic, mutual incomprehensions that exist between Iran and the United States: we could not have imagined that they could genuinely imagine that. Suddenly, with Esfandiari's explanation, Tehran's apparently lunatic assertions about Western involvement in the events of June of this year take on a new tenor: it is vital that we understand that this is not mere rhetorical flourish. At least some portion of the Iranian establishment may believe, or believe they have to believe, these statements to be true.

Esfandiari's interrogations changed in nature, intensity, and locale. She was called upon to answer questions in writing, to provide documents and information pertaining to her work and life, and to speak on camera in a filmed "interview" that was broadcast nationally, along with those of two other prisoners: the political philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo (who had already been released, and who described the broadcast as "a page out of Stalinist Russia and George Orwell's 1984 ") and the social scientist and urban planner Kian Tajbakhsh. But the focus of the discussions never changed.

The questioning did, however, cease for a time: after the "Petit Trianon" interrogations and before Esfandiari's arrest, there were "eleven weeks of silence. It was a period of anxious waiting, which I tried to fill in various ways.... I spent my days in a figurative crouch...waiting for the blow to fall." This hiatus, during which she did not know what her fate might be, was nothing short of psychological torture:

My entanglement with the Intelligence Ministry meant I would never again feel safe in Iran, even at home. I could no longer carry out an unguarded conversation over the telephone. I believed the intelligence people were reading my e-mail. My nerves were always on edge.... I hated being cooped up in the apartment, but I was uncomfortable going out....

Mutti and I became increasingly isolated. The small group of academic "insiders" who had generously tried to help me began to disappear from my life....

I could no longer see the beauty of the landscape I had always loved. I saw only the gray ugliness of the streets, the piles of uncollected garbage, the potholes, the dirty water in the canals, the smog and the snarled traffic.

In this period, Esfandiari came to realize that while she "had always thought of my dual Iranian-American nationality as an accurate reflection of the two worlds and two cultures between which I shuttled," the reality was different: "My adopted country and the country of my birth were engaged in a dangerous, undeclared war; and I, and many others like me, were caught in their cross fire." The Americans' support for Saddam Hussein during the eight-year Iran–Iraq war; the Iranian funding of Hezbollah; the bombings in Lebanon in 1983 and the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996; the George W. Bush administration's "democracy promotion" program, "a policy of promoting regime change by trying to give money to dissidents"—all of this history played into the fate of a single woman on a visit to her aged, widowed mother in Tehran.

Finally, on May 2, 2007, Ja'fari announced that Esfandiari was being arrested and taken to Evin, to solitary confinement, where she would spend the next four months. Her vivid account of this experience, from her initial blindfolding upon entering the prison, provides us with a wholly unsensational picture both of her treatment and of her own psychological resistance. We learn what her cell looked like, how she slept and washed, what she ate, how she did her laundry, how the interrogations were conducted, what the guards were like—in short, all the details that enable us to imagine the imprisonment clearly. Esfandiari tells of her considerable weight loss, of her resistance to the prison doctors, and of the skin complaint that she worried might be cancer.

Inevitably, the mental toll of her incarceration is less readily communicable, but here, too, Esfandiari provides pragmatic explanations of her decisions and thoughts: "From the first day, I decided that if I were to avoid succumbing to despair, I had to impose a strict discipline on myself.... I knew I had to be mentally strong, keep my wits about me, remain focused on the interrogations," a decision that meant she would not dwell on her family and friends, and would instead devote much of her time to doing exercises to remain physically strong and fit. "While I exercised, I composed two books—not on paper but in my head. One was a biography of my paternal grandmother.... The other book was a children's story for my granddaughters." Eventually, she was allowed to borrow books from Kian Tajbakhsh, also in Evin at the time (although she did not meet him: "I never once spoke to another inmate").

Only once does Esfandiari speak of breaking down, following her one visit from her mother: not wanting her captors to see her vulnerability, she asked to take a shower: "In the shower, I let go of myself and cried copiously. I cried for what I had done to my mother. Instead of the calm, happy old age she deserved, she was experiencing a living hell." Even small moments of kindness in the prison proved hard to bear: when one of the guards, Hajj Khanum, brought her a flower, "a tiny rose, the size of my middle finger," or when another she had nicknamed Sunny Face brought in a rice dish that Esfandiari had taught her to cook, she was all but overcome.

Through these women guards, a number of whom were distinctly sympathetic to her plight, Esfandiari brings us a portrait of women's lives in contemporary Iran rather different from that of Azar Nafisi's lively literature students in her memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003):

They seemed all to come from the same working-class or lower-middle-class background. They were all religious, prayed regularly, and observed a strict form of the hijab. They were raised in traditional homes, but their lives were in flux. All had finished secondary school; one had been to university; one had trained at a seminary and another aspired to do so. They had learned to care about their looks, their clothes, their weight, and their health. At least one aspired to go to America.

In her isolation, Esfandiari was almost wholly unaware of the extensive efforts underway to secure her release, including interventions from European governments. She did not know how long she might remain in isolation and was leery of all promising indications—such as Hajj Agha's question in June: "How do you know Obama?"

She fought back with rage and defiance—"I knew I must not let them break me"—and with her insistence, even when it was most difficult, on retaining perspective:

Outside prison, Ja'fari's and Hajj Agha's repeated references to "the triangle," "plots," and "conspiracies" seemed outlandish, even amusing. In solitary confinement, under interrogation, cut off from the outside world, accused of the most serious crimes against the state, I found these endlessly repeated assertions sin- ister: part of a world of secret cabals, plotters, and conspiracies in which I was supposedly involved without being aware of it. I had to be careful not to lose my grip on reality or to succumb to Hajj Agha's deceptive view of the world.

This, of course, is the struggle for any prisoner in such a situation; but it is also the struggle for the Iranian people at large: How not to succumb to the regime's view of the world? Theirs is a society of constant contradictions, of mirrors and masks, of both authority and a theater of authority, to which they must subscribe. They, too, are terrorized by prolonged uncertainty, never knowing the limits of what is allowed—can women show their hair in public this month without fear of arrest? Can weddings allow dancing in private homes this year, or will the morals police break down the door? Can the press question the regime this week, or will the newspapers be shut down? Can you demonstrate freely today, or might you be arrested, tortured, and killed?

For Esfandiari, even in her darkest hour, there was always the American knowledge of the actuality of "reality as it might be": it hovered almost in sight, a passport and a plane journey away. Whether, before Lee Hamilton's letter to Khamenei apparently led to her release, this knowledge made the ordeal more or less endurable is hard to say. But as an Iranian, she was also always aware of the ironies of her native society; she could be at once fully in the world and yet not of it, and this may have been her salvation. She knew that her guards, for the most part, were not her enemies; and while shocked, she was perhaps not surprised when Ja'fari and "the boys," his colleagues at the Intelligence Ministry, presented her with the gift of a book of poetry at the end of her time in Evin. Perhaps they thought that, in spite of the horrors they had inflicted upon her, the greatness of the poet Hafez was something on which they could all agree.

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Wikipedia article 'Haleh Esfandiari' with many additional resources

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