Translator and writer, Basim Mardan, was a young librarian at the university in Mosul when the Americans invaded Iraq. A former student of English and linguistics, he was one of the first to celebrate the end of Saddam Hussein's psychopathic regime. He took a job as a translator for the US Marines, full of hope that he and his friends could help to construct a free and democratic Iraq.
Hope was quickly extinguished. The library at Mosul University was torched. He was branded a traitor. His family was terrorised. The CD of a friend being decapitated was left on his doorstep and he received death threats every day. Every household in Iraq was invaded by fear and Mardan went into hiding. His wife gave birth to a son and he returned to Mosul to work for a students' rights organization, until a close colleague was murdered. This time he left Iraq, finding safety for his wife and his child through Kjell Olaf Jensen, President of International PEN in Norway.
Basim Mardan speaks to Shahrazad as guest writer of Skien, a member of the International Cities of Refuge Network (see ICORN).
-Can you tell us something about your earliest influences and why you chose to study English and linguistics at university?
I grew up in a family in which it is very normal to be able to speak and understand a second language. The dialogue was very vivid and interesting for me as I sat there listening to my uncles and aunts discussing almost all the aspects of life, philosophy, and literature. I grew up in Saddam's version of Iraq, where a single thought can lead to the death of the thinker, so I realized the need to learn another language, at least to be able to find other sources of information and knowledge. We were totally separated from whatever was happening outside the borders of Iraq, and because of extreme censorship, we were losing our confidence and faith in all the Iraqi and Arab writers and thinkers because of their unshaken support for the tyrant. The first poet I read was Badir Shakir al Sayab then I discovered Hussien Mardan, Muthafar al Nawab and Baland al Haidari, though it was quite dangerous to be caught reading some of those names under the dictatorship. I was really fascinated with the translated works of writers from South America like Marquez, Astoryas and Juan Rolfo.
Studying linguistics at the university gave me the chance to be introduced to many other names and different styles of writing. Reading those great writers changed my understanding of the world and opened my mind to unlimited horizons; an opportunity not available to me if I were unable to understand English.
-You seem to have lost all hope for your country. Yet the world's earliest civilization - the first writing - emerged from the region of Iraq, where writers and artists - especially poets - have been revered for 7,000 years. Do you really think this has changed?
Yes, all that is changed, especially after the massacre of our heritage and our culture; the radical cultural changes witnessed in my country over the last 1,400 years. My country has witnessed increasing resentment towards its own ancient culture, civilizations, and literature. Our poetry was severely cut from its natural roots by ideology and the chain of its normal development was badly damaged. The madness of clashing ideologies has not only led us to lose our poetical identity, but also our national identity. They replaced our heritage by accusing it of being primitive and pagan. And today in the midst of all the political, scientific, artistic, and most importantly, moral changes, we find ourselves lost, without real identity, a real sense of belonging. Our intellectuals, philosophers, and poets are facing the bitter reality that we as a nation have to start searching for our real identity again, in the midst of the bloody, brutal, and constant clash of foreign ideologies. The bad effect of loudly declared mottos like The Islamic Nation or The Arabic Nation has led to confusion amongst our intellectuals and poets. Even their beautiful poetical texts were brutally slaughtered by these ideologies, which made those texts lose their beautiful Iraqi uniqueness, and we woke up to find that even our literature has became somehow an Arabic-Islamic literature.
The worst thing that can ever happen in a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society is when one racist culture prevails by imposing its own set of ethics and values on the others. It severely affects the intellectuals of that society. They lose both their right and ability to look back at their culture's literary past with pride. And then they lose their right and ability to see the present and the future forms of their culture without intermixing it with foreign, imported, ready-to-use sets of identities. I accept that if this may happen as a normal result of normal interaction between neighboring cultures. But, due to the painful fact that those imported thoughts, ideologies, and ethics are associated with the holiness of religion in one case and with Arabic nationalism in the other, we ended up having our culture and literature being catastrophically affected by generation upon generation of Iraqis who simply believe in the superiority of those foreign ideologies, morals, life and writing styles over and above Iraq's original, deep rooted culture.
-The Iraqi poet and translator, Saadi Youssef - who lives in London - says that you can't sacrifice art to politics, though writing "is a way of maintaining hope at a time of great horror." How has your writing developed in Norway?
Yes, it is not right to sacrifice Art for politics, but unfortunately that was exactly what happened and what is happening now. And since we belong to an afflicted nation, then I guess it is not a totally bad idea to deal with some of those ideological texts and sincerely try to find the bright artistic sides in them; to study them and identify the changeable political values and the aesthetic values.
In the midst of the struggle between the poetical and political, many Iraqi poets tried to play it the right way, take a step in the right direction, at least according to my humble opinion as a reader. They tried to write the political history, poetically, by trying to keep some kind of hidden balance between the aesthetic values of poetry and their historical responsibility as witnesses of their times. They attempted to use (the changeable politics) to serve (the static poetics). They somehow followed the steps of Gilgamesh, a figure of our Iraqi heritage, whom history had forgotten, was a king, and the only version that had remained of him was as the hero, the poet, and the dreamer of eternal life.
I do believe that a generation of Iraqi poets who are fully aware of this hard equation really exists. They openly called for it and they were able to ride on, and tame the (changeable politics) through the use of highly intense poetical verses, with very unique, distinctive and original Iraqi fingerprints.
For me, all I am trying to do in exile is to give my record, my humanitarian testimony of what is happening in my country: I am trying to write texts with general values, trying to say that what is happening in Iraq can happen anywhere else and in the triangle of a crime (the criminal, the contingencies, the victim) I am mostly concerned with the victim.
-In addition to the horrors of Saddam's regime and the catastrophic intervention by the Americans, you have had two headline identities forced upon you: "a persecuted translator"; "an Iraqi translator in exile". How do you resist these impositions and retain your own sense of authenticity? Remain free?
A translator is the one to build a bridge between two languages, two texts, two cultures or more. And when the bridge falls down in the process of building, the builder is the first one to fall with it. And since there is a shadow, a thought of flying within each and every falling into the static, frozen titles or into the ugly political changes, so derive my freedom and liberty as a free human being from those short, but meaningful, moments of flying, before the painful crash!
Other than that, the experience of living in a new and different society has given me the chance to be introduced to the human; the human who does not have any title inside me. The one and only title that I can sometimes use to find the meaning of my existence is the one given to me by belonging to my country. I can roughly say that the concept of exile, in spite of all the negative connotations of it, has helped me to find my favourite title and in the times when I need one, other than being a human being, it is my citizenship of my country - Iraq.
-When you found work as a translator for the US Marines in Mosul, were you aware that you were placing yourself in jeopardy?
I was actually aware of the dangers, but for the sake of the truth, I did not expect this level of violence. At that point, I could not see - and no one could actually - that there are thousands of terrorists ready to enter Iraq from neighboring countries, after receiving special training on beheading Iraqis. I was not able to foresee that clergymen living in American colonies like Qatar and Saudi Arabia would issue their infamous fatwas to legitimize the killing of all Iraqis.
In the very beginning, the work was humanitarian. I felt like many others that someone should step forward for this duty. The fatal mutual misunderstanding between normal Iraqi people and US soldiers had resulted in many catastrophic and tragic situations which were completely uncalled for and could be avoided simply by the help of a bilingual Iraqi, a translator. When judges, policemen, and even normal government employees were too scared to go back to their jobs and perform their duty on behalf of 28 million people in Iraq, who preferred to hide in their houses, while the robbing and looting resulted in the loss of millions of documents, and the administrative system in Iraq completely collapsed, and thousands of patients in Iraqi hospitals were left without food or medicine or even a doctor or a nurse to do the daily check-up, that was the only time that I felt I was obliged to serve my country and my people in anyway possible. The US army was the only source of order at that time - there was nobody else - and I do not know if the Saudi religious men were aware of this, but for me still, I couldn't care less about what might be the religious opinion in this case. I had to make a choice between getting involved to do whatever I could for my country, or to passively surrender to chaos and violence. I chose order.
-What is it like, living in a third language (assuming English is the second)?
The Norwegian language is no less beautiful than Norway itself. Learning the language is very tempting and an interesting process. To be frank, it was not easy in the very beginning, but now it is getting easier by the day. Now that I am able to fully understand almost everything that is said to me in Norwegian, I am really hoping to reach a level where I will really be able to fully understand and enjoy Norwegian literature.
-Speaking to Norwegian PEN, you described the conflict in Iraq as "a war within the personality". Could you explain this further?
Yes, actually it is a war and a clash within the Iraqi personality. Today, the normal Iraqi individual is very much disturbed and confused. He or she doesn't know which is the winning card, the best bet, to secure their lives, dignity, and the unity of their country. After thirty years of a brutal dictatorship, the Iraqis today are open to an enormous number of new thoughts, but still the Iraqi common sense is governed and widely influenced by the old rotten ideologies and some of those ideologies have gone too deep into the Iraqi personality. It's our bad luck that those ideologies are opposed to each other in their goals and mottos and in the same manner they are opposed to any new thoughts and life styles.
The moral and political crisis in Iraq today cannot in any way be separated from Iraq's regional environment. Political Islam is producing new fatwas each and every day. These fatwas do not unify and harmonise Iraq: they only help to tear the social constituents apart by promoting animosity and hatred amongst the religious and ethnic groups of the country. On the other side, we have the agonized Arabic nationalist mentality, which is trying to impose itself on Iraq in any possible way. Those two ideologies do not hesitate to utilize violence and to target innocent lives, just to prove that they still exist and can function in the Iraqi arena.
At the same time, democracy, secularity and the acceptance of the other, seem to be the weakest thoughts, ideas and trends that actually function in real life situations in the country. Yet, the slogans of democracy, freedom and acceptance of the other are the most used by all the political parties, the religious and ethnic leaders, some of whom, in reality, are very much involved in the armed conflict in Iraq.
In a situation like this, I think that each and every Iraqi citizen will get to the point when he or she is morally obliged to take a stand. Negative neutrality is not going to be a choice any more and the silent majority will have to have a voice in the end.
-What do you wish for your son?
I wish for him to grow up to achieve a moral, intellectual and humanitarian balance: a balance that my generation was somehow unable to achieve. And since he is living today between two cultures, which look so different from the outside, so I wish for him that he can perceive and experience the similarities, the universality of the human condition. I wish for him that he should not only be bi-lingual but bi-cultural also. The chance of living in a multicultural society, like the Norwegians, should allow him to grow up open-minded to the world: able to accept the differences, without forgetting his biological roots and his pride in being the descendant of the great Babylon, Assyria and Akkad.
