Escape from baghdad
Author-Saad Z Hossain
Publisher-Aleph, Rs399
Saad Z Hossain’s book revolves around Baghdad during the US invasion and is narrated by employing humour as a literary device. The author tells ANANYA BORGOHAIN what this book means to him
Bangladesh based writer Saad Hossain’s debut novel Escape from Baghdad! brings a former economics professor and a street thug together in war-torn Baghdad. Their only way out is through the prisoner they have managed to hold captive, Captain Hamid, the star torturer of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Joining them is Private Hoffman, a US Marine.
Filled with dark humour, the novel has already been compared to Mike Nichols’s Catch-22. Hossain, interestingly, has never been to Iraq. He shares how he managed to write about the Iraqi locales, American literature’s handling of the theme of war, and the recent murders of secular Bangladeshi bloggers.
Humour had helped the Holocaust survivors and has also been consistently employed in war films such as No Man’s land, Dr Strangelove, Catch-22 (to which this book has already been compared), and many more. Would you say that humour is the most effective coping mechanism in the face of crisisIJ
Well it’s certainly the most entertaining mechanism. There’s something defiant about humour in the face of desolation which appeals to us, I think. Sometimes victory is not possible, no moral victory, no physical winning, but we still have the choice to go down in style. This is the essence of gallows humour.
From a technical point of view, I feel that humour is a natural tool when the topic is grim. It isn’t possible to show modern day war as something glorious and heroic, like the charge of the light brigade. People have seen actual footage of wars now, they’ve seen and heard the detailed accounts of civilian devastation. For a reader to plow through the reality of that without any kind of lightness would be very difficult, I think.
The first job for a writer is to entertain the reader, and if we fail in that, there is no real reason for them to continue reading. I firmly believe that if a book is too depressing, most people won’t read it, and it won’t matter how important your message or how innovative your writing.
How familiar are you with IraqIJ Have you lived thereIJ What kind of research went into writing this bookIJ
I am completely unfamiliar with Iraq, have never lived there, never been a soldier. The research was very specific to questions I wanted answered, such as the names of streets or US bases, or the details of weapons. I was lucky in that the 2nd Iraq war was very widely covered in blogs, both from the Iraqi side as well as from US soldiers. The material is available on the net.
It was never my intention to create a factual, reality based account of the war.
What about the war in Iraq struck you so strongly that you based your book on itIJ
Well, the first premise was the interesting situation where a rigid socio-political order is completely overturned. It was very likely that on the day Iraq fell, you would have in your power the very people who had once tortured you with impunity. What would you do then, when you had this powerIJ
I wanted my protagonists to be built from the dregs of the war, the forgotten, the lost, people without purpose or hope. Once these characters took on a life of their own, they began to act according to their own internal logic, and I just kind of followed along. I had initially thought they would make this journey through Iraq, from Baghdad to Mosul, but I couldn’t get them even two blocks out of Baghdad.
How do you look at post-Saddam IraqIJ
It appears that they are much worse off. I think the world might one day acknowledge what a huge mistake this was, what massive damage was ultimately inflicted on a civilian population.
Was it a conscious decision to have flawed (so to say) protagonistsIJ Be it a professor like Dagr or a US Marine like Private Hoffman, they are unlike the normative comprehension of their professions.
Flawed characters are much more interesting. Absolute heroes and villains are almost childish. To be realistic, we have to acknowledge that everyone acts according to incentives and prejudices, and in a given situation, anyone can do the right thing or the wrong thing. Even right and wrong are blurred, contextualised by whether you’re ultimately on the winning side or not.
These characters were also put in a time and place where their regular skills, even a traditional soldier’s skills, were outdated. Dagr, for example, was a teacher without a class, a father without a family, all his skills suddenly irrelevant. The war itself forced the characters to shift to a new economy.
As a writer, how has been American literature’s handling of the theme of war — the ‘oppressors’ writing about the oppressedIJ
Well first of all, it has all been from the point of view of the Americans. There is a tendency to show everything as black and white, which is limiting. There is a dehumanisation of the invaded, a disregard for collateral damage which should be acknowledged.
It’s the job of literature to handle this topic in a more nuanced way, to explore the different motivations at work, the profiteers, the political maneuvering, and finally, the devastating human cost, which is just ignored. What ideology, how much profit, what sum of money is worth killing a million people overIJ To understand the full weight of this, we must first see the victims as humans.
What kind of responses have you got for the book, particularly from Iraq (if any)IJ
I am not really aware of any response from Iraq. The response in America has been very flattering, a lot of great authors and bloggers have gone out of their way to review the book, such as in NPR, Financial Times, Kirkus Reviews, and Book Riot.
What is your opinion on the recent murders of secular Bangladeshi bloggers by fundamentalistsIJ
I think the vast majority of the country is committed to secularism, and the religious parties have had very little traction in actually winning parliamentary seats. This has forced them towards radicalisation, and I think they are picking soft targets. There is a struggle worldwide with this type of militant, very narrowly defined fundamentalism, and we have to take a hard look at who is providing the money for this, because for most countries this type of philosophy is a foreign implant.
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