The President's oranges

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The President's Oranges is Abbas Khider's second novel. It was published in 2011 by Edition Nautilus in Hamburg.

One of the topics discussed is how one's own sovereignty, which has almost been broken under torture and hopelessness, is defended by laughing.

Content and structure

The President's oranges. Novel (structure)
Title page 1: «Abbas Khider: The President's oranges. Roman Edition Nautilus »
Opening credits 1 (approx. 4 pages)

The opening credits tell in first person the occasion on which “a new, melancholy way of laughing” was invented, which can be described as “sad laughter”, namely one day while I was being tortured in a prison: “I snorted loudly and screamed all pitches, writhed and gestured as if I had inhaled laughing gas ”(p. 6). The narrator wonders what it was and that to this day it has not found an explanation for why the others said that someone had gone crazy, but that afterwards I experienced his mind as extremely clear. In the second part of the opening credits ("Now, more than a year of horror after this unique day of laughter", p. 7), the self tries to avoid boredom in a refugee camp on the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border and begins by writing with the Try to "find out the secret of my laugh ..." (p. 8)

Title page 2: «Mahdi Hamama: The pigeon fancier. A true story »
Motto (poem "Promise to a dove" by Hilde Domin )
Opening credits 2 (approx. 4 pages)
1 Custody (1989)
2 Babylon (1980-1983)
3 Qluq (1989-1990)
4th Babylonians (1984–1987)
5 Everyday life in prison (1989–1990)
6th Farewell to Babylon (1988)
7th The President's Oranges (1990)
8th Mean Tree (1989)
9 Lanterns (1990–1991)
10 Wings (1989)
11 Liberation (1991)
12 Return (1991)
13 Letters (1991)
14th Revolutionaries (1991)
15th Escape (1991)
(139 pages)

In Hilde Domin's motto poem, a wooden pigeon is promised that if everything else is lost again, it will be taken along because of a certain aesthetic peculiarity of one of its wings.

In opening credits 2, the chapters of The Pigeon Breeder from the motto onwards . Mahdi Hamama begins a true story about the day of his last Abitur exam, when, because the exam was postponed by a few hours, he meets with his fatherly friend Sami, the pigeon fancier. The latter is threatened with death by a swearing competitor named Karim, which Sami, who is on the roof with his pigeons, doesn't seem to care. After the exam, Mahdi and his friend Ali drive to Ziggurat Ur in a borrowed car to celebrate. This opening credits ends with: "Suddenly I heard loud screams:‹ No movement! ›" (P. 16)

Three times five chapters

The 15 chapters of The Pigeon Fancier. A true story can be seen in three groups: the first ten chapters alternate according to their time level, one from the time before the arrest follows one that belongs to the time of the imprisonment.

In the middle eighth chapter, Tree of Meanness (1989) , Mahdi describes how, as a young half- orphan , after the death of his mother, he moved to live with aunt and uncle who lived in Nasrijah . There he met Sami, a friend of his father's, who he felt was his son and who soon lived in his two-room apartment full of books.

Only in the 10th chapter, wing , is the author's name discussed: Because he was only heard talking about pigeons, the people in the neighborhood gave him this new name, “which I liked a lot, even though they actually wanted to annoy me with it. Since then my name is no longer Mahdi Muhsin, but Mahdi Hamama - Mahdi Taube ”(p. 99).

From the 11th chapter, Liberation , the story is told in simple chronological order, although three of the letters addressed to Mahdi by his other fatherly friend Razaq Mustafa, which make up chapter 13, are dated January to March 1991, the fourth is undated and reported of Sami's death in February 1990, also during Mahdi's time in prison. Mahdi reads them in his aunt and uncle's house after he has been released. Chapter 15 describes the flight out of the country that Mahdi undertakes with others from different age groups.

Interior design of the chapters

There are different types of graphically marked subdivisions within the chapters. Firstly, *** occurs in all chapters, resulting in between 2 and 6 sections, secondly, the first chapter is divided into three sections with two blank lines, thirdly there are lines in italics in several chapters, some of which are framed by blank lines, and Chapter 13 consists of four letters that are internally counted. Further interior designs are created, for example, through descriptions of dreams or when stories are told that others tell.

Reading experiences

The abstract idea of ​​war, imprisonment and torture is shockingly concretized by Khider and yet, thanks to the memories of the pigeon fancier Sami and the teacher Razaq, there are islands of peace through which Mahdi as a political prisoner gets his own voice, writes Marlene Pellhammer in her review in commons . In order to be able to endure the described atrocities of sadistic prison guards, the reader would like "more the fictional character of a novel than the autobiographical analogies it contains." For Andreas Pflitsch (entry in Kindler's Literature Lexicon from May 2015) there is a strange mixture of trepidation after reading it and comfort became noticeable.

About the book

expenditure

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ines Wilke: “Time does not bury the truth”, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , November 6, 2014, p. 14
  2. ↑ The poem "Promise to a dove" by Hilde Domin is reproduced here without its title, ie it begins with: "Dove, when my house burns [...]", the text of the poem including the title line
  3. ↑ In the third chapter, Qluq , there are 3 lines of poetry (p. 43), in the seventh chapter, The President's Oranges , 8 lines of poetry (p. 75), in the ninth chapter, Lanterns , a complete poem (approx. 1 page long, pp. 90–91), in the tenth chapter, wing , italics approx. 3 pages of prose (pp. 92–94) soon afterwards approx. 2 pages of prose (pp. 95–96)
  4. ↑ Marlene Pellhammer: Abbas Khider: Die Orangen des President , in: Allmende , 87 (July 2011), p. 104
  5. ↑ Andreas Pflitsch: Khider, Abbas. The President's Oranges , KLL , May 2015