I Remember Fallujah – A Son Seeks to Reclaim His Father’s Past and His Own History
While reading Feurat Alani’s deeply emotional I Remember Fallujah, I was struck with an overwhelming desire to talk with my dad about his time in France during World War II. He never brought it up, never seemingly wanted to talk about it, so I never pressed him. Now he’s gone and so is any opportunity I had to better understand what he experienced. Alani’s novel is apparently inspired by his own family history, so perhaps he has regrets which he tries to deal with by writing about another son and his father.
Rami was a young man when he fled Fallujah to escape Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship which had made life in Iraq difficult and dangerous for so many of its citizens. In France, he married, had children, and worked hard to provide for his family, taking whatever jobs he could find, window washer, janitor, newspaper and postcard salesman. His son, Euphrates, was born in 1980, the year the Iran-Iraq War began. Named after the powerful river that flows through Iraq, Euphrates was raised in Paris and never gave much thought to his father’s time in Fallujah. But when Rami is hospitalized battling terminal cancer, and then begins the slide into dementia, Euphrates is seized with a powerful urge to learn everything he can about his father’s time in Iraq. It’s a journey that will tear the two apart before bringing them closer together.
Alani’s beautiful narrative (the novel was translated by Adrianna Hunter) shifts between Rami’s days as a young boy in Fallujah, and Euphrates’ trips there to discover the cities and country his father left behind. Rami’s mother, Muhja, was sweet and loved her son. But she was often sick and spent long periods of time in bed. She dies when Rami is eight and his father soon remarries Samiya, who has three children of her own – Saad, Ayad, and Riyad. Rami suffers abuse at his stepmother’s hands and, in one instance, is punished for something Saad did. Rami begins to spend more time at the river with his closest friend, Hatem. Even though Rami can’t swim, Hatem pushes him to dive into the river to bury a watermelon in the sand. The strong friendship between Rami and Hatem is just one of the relationships Euphrates tries to understand as he delves into his father’s past.
Although Euphrates has a good life in Paris, he feels like an outsider among his friends, many of them also immigrants, but from countries like Morocco, that had a colonial past with France. Hoping to assuage Euphrates, Rami arranges for him to go to Iraq with his mother and sister. Once there, Euphrates discovers he has a large family. Rami’s stepbrothers, the trio that once tortured him, are excited to meet their nephew. In 1989, Euphrates is impressed by the Iraq he sees. “If Baghdad was a modern city, Fallujah felt like being in the countryside, beautiful countryside.” Even Samiya is nice to Euphrates, introducing herself as his grandmother, pinching his cheek and giving him a “sloppy kiss.” And he gets to see the river he was named after.
Returning to France, Euphrates seems at peace, able to tell his friends about his trip and all the relatives he met. He even gives a report to his class and when he sits down, they clap. Yet when Euphrates gets home, he’s told that Samiya has died. “Skulking behind an impenetrable wall, my father clearly didn’t want to talk about it.” He’s alarmed by his father’s repeated words: “You’re nothing. You’re nothing to me now.” Then, “With our souls and with our blood, we’ll serve you dear comrade. And we’ll cross the bridge. And we’ll lie in wait for them. And we’ll drive them out of the country.”
Two years after Euphrates’ visit to Iraq, Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait and America responds, bombing Baghdad. With Rami worried about his relatives, there’s no peace in the household and Euphrates’ mood in school causes concern among his teachers. In 1995, when Euphrates, his mother, and sister visit again, they see firsthand the results of the sanctions. Occasional letters from relatives convey the desperation felt by people who have been abandoned by the elite and the government. “Iraq was dying, and I turned my back on it,” Euphrates says. Then in 2003, the bombing of Iraq begins in earnest, the U.S. retaliating for 9/11, which would result in the death of Saddam Hussein and begin America’s occupation of the country. Now of course we know there were no “weapons of mass destruction” and while Hussein was a brutal dictator, he wasn’t responsible for 9/11. Today, Iraq is still considered a terrorist state and Americans are advised not to travel to the country.
In 2019, Rami is in the hospital, room 219. It’s during these visits that Euphrates pushes his father to fill in the blanks about his early life in Iraq. As with so many people with dementia, Rami has good days and not so good days. Euphrates gathers what information he can, then waits for other opportunities. In the end, Euphrates has to settle for what he has learned and console himself for what secrets he kept from his father.
Many stories unfold in Alani’s novel: the relationship between a father and his son; the struggle of immigrants to assimilate; and the impact of childhood abuse. The book may be cathartic for some, a call to action for others. But its effect will be felt.
I Remember Fallujah
Feurat Alani
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