Alia Mamdouh. Naphtalene: A Novel of Baghdad. Peter Theroux,
tr. Helene Cixous, foreword. F. A. Haidar, afterword. New York.
Feminist Press at CUNY. 2005. viii + 214 pages. $23.95. ISBN 1
-55861-492-3

THERE ARE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ELEMENTS in Naphtalene, which
relates the story of a nine-year-old girl named Huda growing
into early adolescence in Baghdad during the 1950s. The author,
Alia Mamdouh, was herself born in Baghdad in 1944 and witnessed
as a girl many of the public events and scenes described in the
novel, but she left her country in 1982 to escape the
intellectual restrictions imposed on her by Iraqi authorities
after publishing her first novel in 1981. She lived in Morocco,
Lebanon, and England by turns and currently resides in Paris,
where she continues to write and publish short stories and
novels.
Autobiography aside, this novel is about Huda, her family, and
their neighborhood in Baghdad under the pro-British Hashemite
monarchy of Iraq in the 1950s. Arab nationalism was growing at
the time, fanned from Egypt by Nasser’s Voice of the Arabs
radio and, in Iraq, by opposition parties and leaflets secretly
distributed to foment hostility to the monarchy and its pro-
British policy. Huda was too young to understand politics yet
perceptive enough to feel fear while reading a secret leaflet.
Her personal hostility was, rather, to the patriarchal social
milieu in which she was growing.
The novel’s setting is Baghdad’s A’dhamiyya quarter, a crowded,
poor area on the east bank of the Tigris, with many alleyways
and dirt roads, mainly inhabited by Sunni Muslims. It is the
quarter in which the author herself grew up. The focus is on
Huda’s family living in a traditional home in the vicinity of
the quarter’s beautiful and centuries-old Abu Hanifa mosque.
Huda’s father is a policeman who works as a prison guard in
faraway Karbala. He comes back home to see his family
occasionally, and when he does, everyone is subjected to his
violent temper and authoritarian behavior. He does not permit
Huda to play with the boys in the street, and when he sees her
playing with them once, he tramples their toys and they take
shelter. He makes her wear the traditional black cloak in
public in a bid to repress her and prepare her to grow up to be
an obedient wife. His wife is devastated when he announces to
her that he wants to leave her and that he has married another
wife in Karbala, who is expecting his child. Her health
deteriorates and she subsequently dies, leaving Huda and her
younger brother Adil to be cared for by their grandmother.
Huda remains a free spirit despite restrictions. She moves to
her mother’s empty room and takes a radio with her. She does
not like school and often skips classes. She is full of
mischief and annoys the women in the public bath. Conversely,
Adil is gentle and docile, and Huda’s boyfriend, Mahmoud, wants
her to remain a girl when she tells him she can be like a boy.
Even her father admits she is not afraid of him. The novel ends
when Huda is twelve, when her father is dismissed from his job
due to drunkenness, and the family is forced to leave their
home because of government plans for the area’s development.
The English translation reads well, but the words Qur’an and
Qur’anic are consistently yet wrongly spelled Qu’ran and
Qu’ranic dozens of times throughout the book.
Issa J. Boullata
McGill University

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