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Perspective
The Fictionalization of Iraq
by
Rajesh Talwar
 Why have there been so few literary or fictional representations of what
has been happening in Iraq – in comparison with Vietnam?
Certainly there have been quite a few documentaries on the subject,
prominent amongst them being Fahrenheit Nine Eleven by Roger
Moore, The Road to Guantanamo a Channel 4 presentation or even
The World According to Bush, by William Karel but the fictional
treatment has been missing to the extent it could have been expected.
It cannot have been for lack of interest amongst publishers for they are
well aware that global events do influence literary success. Perhaps ‘The
Kite Runner’ or ‘The Bookseller of Kabul’ may have been
literary successes even without the recent events in Afghanistan, but
the ongoing war there certainly gave an added impetus to the sale of
these books. And this is something, which publishers (who are not in the
book business to make losses) could have clearly anticipated.
It will be argued that there are some obvious reasons for this. The war
in Iraq is only three and a half years old (though it is likely to
continue for the rest of the Bush presidency). At the same time there
has been fiction on Afghanistan even though there is not that much of a
time gap between the two conflicts.
Secondly, it will be argued that Vietnam and Iraq are not comparable,
even though the avowed mission of the Americans in Vietnam too was a
promotion of democracy and freedom. Vietnam was extraordinary in terms
of the sheer quantity and range of fiction (and cinema) that it spawned.
Its not as yet clear how different the war in Vietnam is from the
present one in Iraq. We have to observe however that lamentably little
of the fiction that was produced was ever written from the point of view
of the Vietnamese.
And this brings us to the reason why perhaps it is more difficult for
either Western publishers or Hollywood to take interest in the fictional
depiction of current events in Iraq. Unlike what happened with Vietnam,
in today’s world it is difficult to convince anyone, including the
average American that the American soldier in Iraq is a ‘hero’.
With respect to Afghanistan this is still possible. An American soldier
fighting the Taliban in the rugged Afghan terrain still has some glamour
attached to him. Not so the American soldier fighting in Iraq. The
profiteering by American companies, the large-scale killing of innocent
civilians, the civil war that has been unleashed, the torture of
ordinary prisoners and the revelations of misdeeds committed in Abu
Gharib prison have changed all that.
The world has changed. With Iraq it will no longer be possible in the
future for American thriller writers to write of an American veteran in
the manner in which former Vietnam veterans were regarded as heroes in
hundreds of novels and dozens of movies. The other reason of course why
such novels will not be written (or will at least not be global best
sellers) is in the globalized world of today it is increasingly
difficult to sell a linear, one-dimensional, American interpretation of
events be it in the form of a play, a novel or a film.
There is another reason why it isn’t easy to write the right sort of
fiction about Iraq or I – Raq. The writer John Berger once wrote that
never again would a single story be told as though it was the only one
and he was right because there are so many ways of seeing. But there is
another development that makes it necessary perhaps to add a sequel to
his remark. It is the interconnectedness of life on the planet today.
Never again will a story be told as if its not somehow connected to
other stories that are also crying out to be told. What happens in Iraq
is related to what happens in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the US, India and
almost every place else on the earth. For a writer of fiction today to
focus on Iraq while missing the bigger picture is to create a cardboard
or plastic representation of events. If you want to write fiction about
Iraq today you need to write, or at least allude to almost everywhere
else as well. This brings me to an interesting point, which I wish to
make here.
Literary novels, by their very nature perhaps, have tended to confine
themselves to few locations and often only a single one. In comparison
the modern day thriller has the chief protagonist waking up in London,
flying to Paris in the afternoon and then again showing up in the next
chapter in far off Kawloon or Mogadishu. There is lots of action and
there are very many places where this action takes place.
The new literary novel that will emerge may also now do location
shooting in many places around the world, and it may well be that the
thrillers will confine themselves to a single location. At any rate the
earlier distinction that existed that existed between the two genres
will be increasingly blurred. New ways will have to be invented by
writers to speak of the new multicultural, globalized world we inhabit.
January
20, 2007
Image
courtesy: cbc.ca
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