Saloua Ben ZahraSPEAKING VOLUMES: THE BOND IN DEAFNESS OF AN IRAQI FATHER AND SONSamuel Shimon's autobiographical fiction Iraqi in Paris is the fantastic tale of Christian Iraqi Samuel/Joey, the native of multi-confessional and multi-ethnic Al-Habbaniyeh in a rapidly changing Iraq. Growing up on American cinema into a Hollywood aficionado and intending to become a film-maker, Joey sets out to write a scenario which he tentatively titles as "Nostalgia for the time of the British." He embarks on a journey from exile to exile in a dramatic trajectory wandering through Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Tunisia before arriving to Paris and finally becoming able to complete his narrative. He ends up producing a novel out of his complex experiences and including the creative text of a script about his special father's life. In the context of the historical and political junctures determining the experiential outcomes of the characters, the novel highlights the resourceful inter-personal connections the imaginative individuals forge as they negotiate a solid yet fragile menaced communication and cohabitation. The personal is threatened by the political in the vulnerable co-existence between individuals of different cultural and religious affiliations, languages and abilities, including physical abilities. The narrative is largely about the protagonist's disabled father, the "deaf-mute" baker, breadsmith (in other words), and his role in the constitution of Joey's masculinity and identity revolving around cinematic figures and images. Samuel's novel is to a major extent about his loving understanding and translation of his father's natural signing. His father was a man with a simple abundance of images and imagination which Joey tries to capture and voice in a narrative script about the Assyrian Iraqi baker's "obsession by the British." The novel invites further and deeper studies and connections across cultures and disciplines while raising questions about its representations of issues of disability. Given the recurrence of disability figures and the deployment of common strategies in their representation and treatment throughout the novel, an examination of certain ambivalent competing scenarios in the narrative rendering of the predicament of such figures is warranted. A close-reading of the disabled characters' personal histories within the narrative reveals common strategies in the elaboration of changing versions when it comes to reconstructing the accounts of their disability acquisition. The causes of their differences and impairments are contested and disputed in various imaginative ways that provoke the reader's thoughts as to the reasons behind the change in scenarios and the possible interpretations that may be gleaned from the common references to the larger political context in the characters' personal histories and narratives. Regarding the state of Joey's deaf-mute father, which constitutes a major motive behind the son's project to write a scenario, the following mother-child exchange related in his words offers us a double account including two versions as to how the baker had lost his senses of hearing and speech: We often used to wonder about the strangeness of the relationship between my mother and father. Once, Samson had asked: "Mum, how did Dad become deaf-dumb?" That day my mother seemed happy so she answered proudly: "Oh, children. Your father was a pilot. His plane was hit by a missile and he became deaf and dumb." We would have believed those words of hers had she not said other things when she was angry. "Oh, God curse the day I was married off to this deaf mute." We would say: "But he was a pilot, Mum." My mother would respond: "What kind of pilot can come out of the belly of his mother deaf and dumb?" (229-230) The protagonist fondly recalls this conversation in humorous, yet nevertheless thought-provoking terms. The mother's selective dual versions are imaginative and creative. They are suggestive of certain complex resistant and wishful patterns of thought at play in her scenarios about how her husband has acquired his present state as a deaf-mute fellow countryman. Her apparently simple words recreate an intersection of disability and foreign colonial presence. Her account reenacts an ambivalent structure of mixed feelings where expressions of wishful nostalgia and post-aggression trauma alternate. Her choice of missiles and planes in her personal narrative about her husband, the Iraqi baker, is evocative of political British connections. Envisioning him as a pilot flying a plane expresses her wishful desire for him to have the possibility, ability and power to resist and escape his present state and pursue his dreams of flight, travel, adventure and advancement for himself and his family. At the same time, she seems to carry a secret fear from her colonial experience of the disabling consequences of missile attacks. Deeply attached to his deaf-mute father who instilled in him the wanderlust, love of adventure and ambition that would sustain him through his travels, Joey sets out to write a scenario about his father. The following excerpt demonstrates the son's haunting concern about his father's predicament and its impact on the relations and mutual perceptions between their fellow community members. As if to foreshadow his later attempts at movie-making; long before writing this novel/scenario Iraqi in Paris, Joey made a shadow film as a child thanks to the early cinematic formation imparted to him by his self-appointed teacher and mentor Kiryakos, which became a basis for a powerful and lasting bond between them. Joey relates his experience in the following passage:
I was five when Kiryakos taught me how to make shadow cinema. I lit two candles positioned at each end of a sheet of
paper that was propped up straight. I started to move cardboard cut-outs of characters. I used to move the cut-outs
towards or away from the paper (the screen) to make the characters bigger or smaller and for each character I changed
my voice. This passage reflects Joey's perspective regarding his father's extraordinary abilities since he was a child. It is expressed in the child's voice responding in a defensive and creative manner to the misconceptions and prejudices with which another character seems to be taunting him for being the son of a deaf-mute man. Joey's interlocutor in this shadow scenario reveals a deep-seated prejudice when he pronounces his first sentence "You can't hear, he can't speak", symptomatic of his own misguided assumption that the mute cannot be heard. Joey's imaginative and defiant response proves the contrary as he sets out to voice his father's thoughts and visions which he could "hear" and "read" through their loving communication in an improvised sign language. Thanks to his experience with his disabled father and his exposure to movies from his early age, Joey seems to have started as of then to develop an open sense and positive view of other persons. His response to the second character's statement that his own father could not see is far from the first one's judgmental sentence. Inspired by his father's perceptiveness, Joey affirms that a blind man would be able to see in a different way, by imagining things, like in the movies. A close-reading of the passage quoted above indicates as well a possible metaphorical dimension to the statements of the characters within the shadow scenario. The exchange between the protagonist as a child and his fellows represents also a reality where incidents of internal oppression occur occasionally and tend to be aggravated by any additional imposed division through the establishment of power structures privileging certain members over others in the community. That may be symbolized by the figure of the policeman who fares better than the rest of the population thanks to his work as an agent of surveillance and discipline against other members of the community. The son of the policeman seems to have internalized a judgmental point of view that lies behind the harsh sentence he pronounced against Joey to the effect that his deaf-mute father could not be heard and that Joey himself may have symbolically inherited his father's deafness since he preferred silent movies as a consequence of being the son of a mute father. Such an incident has made Joey all the more determined to continue voicing his father's sign language with a vengeance and in fond nostalgic remembrance of his father and childhood. As Joey interprets for us the thoughts and images that his father draws with his highly eloquent hands, we learn about the life experiences, concerns and dreams of the Iraqi breadsmith. The Assyrian Christian Iraqi baker's sign language statements revolved around expressions of his nostalgia for the British or "his obsession by the British" according to his family members within the narrative. He was marked for life by his experience of working as a cook for the English during thirty years at a British military base in al-Habbaniyah. He kept a tattoo on his left arm of the lion and the unicorn protecting the British crown and would remain deeply attached to a small silver box bearing his name which the English commander of the air base offered him before leaving the country as a gift (201). As a consequence to this experience and gesture, Joey's father would vow a lifelong gratitude and loyalty to the English after their departure. He continued to work in a bakery according to what he perceived to be the highest British standards of efficiency. After work and to his wife's exasperation, he would waste a part of his hard-won pay in excessive drinking while entertaining his nostalgic escapist recollections of the "English Era" (162) and his past experience of working for the British. The breadsmith father with a speech and hearing disabilities was not the only disabled or physically different character in the popular lore circulating among the Al Habbaniyah community members. The larger narrative consists of a collection of stories within stories featuring marks of physical differences on several occasions. Alongside the scenario about Joey's father run common threads in the following story of Nasrat Shah, a neighbor of Iranian origin from the protagonist's early life in his native community. Nasrat Shah was known among the other characters as the man with the eight fingers or with the "three-fingered hand" (157). We read next in the following account about the various disputed versions of the story concerning the incident which caused the apparent malformation in one of his hands:
Nsrat Shah tells his story as follows: "You all know that I used to be a merchant once, and I used to go to
night clubs. One day, I fell in love with a woman called Ma'souma, who was breathtakingly beautiful. She was a real
artist, who could sing in Arabic, English and Persian very fluently and without an accent. No one knew anything
about her. For a while, an English officer competed with me for Ma'asouma's affections, but I quickly challenged
him. I brought a sharp knife and placed it on the table in front of everyone at the nightclub, I shouted in his face:
'Look here English officer, I will not allow anyone whatsoever to share the love of this beautiful woman with me. I
shall cut this finger off my left hand in front of you. If you really love her, do as I do.' Then I cut off the
little finger of my left hand. The English officer took the knife and in a second, threw his little finger in front
of me. Without thinking for a moment, I put my ring finger under the knife, which I pressed hard down with my right
hand, and the ring finger snapped off. The English officer's face turned pale. He was smart enough to know that if
he sat there for long enough, he would lose all his fingers. So he put on his hat and left the nightclub in defeat.
That day, Ma'assouma fell in love with me and her bed was mine." In his personal account, Nasrat Shah seems to choose the denial of his disability as an accidental injury related to his work for the British. Instead, he imagines a different version and tells a story that allows him to express more deeply, although indirectly and creatively, his feelings and thoughts concerning the presence of the British in his adopted country. A wishful scenario unfolds through his narrative where he gives vent to his wishful thinking by claiming to himself the negotiating abilities of a merchant and the power to defeat the violent colonial occupation as represented in his duel with the English officer over the heart and life of the native woman. The character of Ma'asouma, the object of Nasrat Chah's affections, presents us to a certain extent with a scenario of conflation between native woman and mother land. We can read in Nasrat Chah's account a colonial victim-impact statement that voices his deep sense of threat from his experienced unequal competition against English men over the land of his culture and his wish for their defeat and departure at his hands alongside other community members. His story expresses most intimately his readiness to sacrifice his life to protect his rich and diverse culture from foreign occupation. His narrative suggests that he dreams of further enrichment and diversity for his culture as represented in the talented independent native woman, but without any missile attacks or imposed violent foreign presence.
*All quotes above are from Samuel Shimon's An Iraqi in Paris: An autobiographical Novel (London: Banipal Books, 2005) Translated by Samira Kawar. This essay was originally presented as a paper at a 2009 Villanova University Conference on the theme "Mirror Images: Challenges for Arab and Islamic Studies".
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