Letter to the aubergine republic

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Letter to the Aubergine Republic is Abbas Khider's third novel and was published in 2013 by Edition Nautilus in Hamburg. The “story of a letter” (p. 8) is told from different perspectives. The author unfolds a panorama of everyday life in three Arab countries at the end of the 20th century.

title

The “eggplant republic” refers to Iraq . According to the author, this name is used by the residents themselves, because during the time of the great famine (UN embargo 1991–2003) , aubergines were the only vegetables that were available in sufficient quantities.

content

Letter to the aubergine republic. Novel (structure)
map
Title page
Dedication (page 5)
Motto poem by Rose Ausländer , here untitled (page 6)
Fable of the Ox (Pages 7-8)
First chapter "Salih Al-Kateb
27 years old, construction worker
Friday, October 1, 1999, Benghazi, Libya"
(pp. 9–24)
second chapter "Haytham Mursi
54 years old, taxi driver
Friday, October 1, 1999, Benghazi, Libya"
(pp. 25–45)
third chapter "Majed Munir
41 years old, travel agency manager
Sunday, October 3, 1999, Cairo, Egypt"
(pp. 47–65)
Chapter Four "Latif Mohamed (Abu Samira)
52 years old, truck driver
Tuesday, October 5, 1999, Amman, Jordan"
(pp. 67–82)
Fifth chapter "Kamal Karim
31 years old, police officer
Thursday, October 7, 1999, Baghdad, Iraq"
(pp. 83–104)
Sixth chapter "Ahmed Kader
34 years old, Colonel
Friday, October 8, 1999, Baghdad, Iraq"
(pp. 105–128)
Seventh chapter "Miriam Al-Sadwun
27 years old, wife
Friday, October 8, 1999, Baghdad, Iraq"
(pp. 129–155)
map

In the front and back of the book there is a drawn map on which parts of the countries bordering the Eastern Mediterranean and other countries in the Middle East can be seen. The route of the letter begins on the left in Benghazi (Libya) and ends on the right in Baghdad (Iraq). In between, the means of transport car, bus, ship and truck are shown. The stations Benghazi, Imsaad / As-Sallum , Cairo , Nuwaiba , Aqaba , Amman , Al-Karama / Tripil and Baghdad are marked with dots and connected by lines .

In the dedication, which is just under 6 lines, it is regretted that no letter has been received from each other for almost a decade. The book is "for you and for the other waiting, sad and yet hopeful souls."

Rose Ausländer chose “Nothing Remains” as the motto poem . Its title is omitted. The quote begins with the first line, “Days come and go”. Among other things, you can read the statements that everything stays as it is and nothing stays as it is. The point is that someone tries to glue broken pieces of porcelain back together in a vessel and cries because it does not succeed.

A fable serves as the opening credits , which is invented and commented on in the voice of a first-person narrator . The fable illuminates the subsequent "story of a letter" (p. 8): The world ox , which has its legs in different areas of space , is no longer moving. He seems frozen, so that whoever is on the dark side of the world has to stay there, "while the others continue to stand in full light and splendor" (p. 8). Reference is made to Nietzsche's eternal return of the same thing .

The sender of a letter, Salim, has fled Iraq and is sending a letter to Baghdad from Benghazi. Within a week at the beginning of October 1999 six men and one woman talked about their lives one after the other. The occasion is the love letter from Salim to Samia, which in the course of the story is illegally transported by private companies via a few stations on the route between Benghazi and Baghdad for 200 US dollars. For the safety of the recipient, whose name was not revealed even under torture, official snoopers should be bypassed. In Baghdad, after six days, the letter finally encounters unauthorized readers, namely three people in different positions and with diverging intentions. The contents of the letter can be read in chapter 5, when the letter got into the hands of a police officer who is making a career in the Baghdad security agency. The last reader sets out to find the addressee. When she learns that she has left the country, she sets the letter on fire to destroy it. A snippet of the love letter is spared from the fire and the book ends with the quotation of the lines that have been preserved on this piece of paper.

style

Natalia Shchyhlevska observes that Khider lets the longing and sadness of his characters be felt in simple sentences and in a few words, without speaking directly about their feelings: what you get to feel arises between the lines.

Interpretations

Similar to his debut, The False Inder (2008), Khider plays with the motif of writing as an ambassador of consolation and redemption, but also of despair and death, said Hubert Spiegel in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . “The novel tells the story of a letter that passes through many hands but never reaches its addressee. It is a love letter. "For Salim, writing to the beloved is not least a letter" to yourself and to nothing that can only be endured as long as we meet it with words. "

Khider presented a new variant of the genre of the letter novel in which the "main character" was also a letter, according to Carsten Hueck in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung , who described the idea as idiosyncratic and called this variant "Mesopotamian".

Natalia Shchyhlevska believes that it is not just about one letter, but two: the second is written by a so-called martyr widow named Najat to Miriam, the last reader of the letter named in the title, and the lines are shocking and outrageous. They showed a "system of corrupt henchmen, in a society with double standards and in a country in which the oppression of women often begins in one's own family."

expenditure

Reviews and interviews

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Hubert Spiegel: "Khider, Abbas: Letter to the Aubergine Republic", Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , March 9, 2013 (pdf)
  2. ↑ Andreas Fanizadeh (interview with Abbas Khider): "My literature is also a kind of revenge" , taz , April 6, 2013; accessed on December 29, 2015.
  3. ↑ "Nothing remains" ( Memento of the original from December 4, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , from: Rose foreigner, I hear the heart of the oleander. Poems 1977–1979 , S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-10-001-517-7  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de
  4. ↑ Abbas Khider: Letter to the Aubergine Republic , 1st edition, Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 2013, p. 5.
  5. ↑ a b Natalia Shchyhlevska: Mesopotamian fates. On the novel “Letter to the Aubergine Republic” by Abbas Khider , literaturkritik.de , March 18, 2013 / October 28, 2013
  6. ↑ Carsten Hueck: A novel by the German-Iraqi Abbas Khider. A letter on the move , Neue Zürcher Zeitung , June 1, 2013