For years, a fearful Adil Kadhim hid the works dearest to him. But not any more.
When Saddam Hussain was in power, Adil Kadhim would rise at 6 each morning in his cramped apartment, set a pot of water on the stove for tea, and begin writing.
His work, like that of all authors, had to pass regime censors. One of his television series was an allegory about power, and made it to the screen by being set in 1950s Baghdad rather than in the later Baathist era. A TV movie sang the praises of the Iraqi army, and another script used Julius Caesar rather than Saddam to describe the life of a dictator. These innocuous and popular shows made Kadhim the best-known theatrical writer in Iraq.
But the work dearest to his heart he stuffed into drawers. Much of it drew together figures from East and West, a motif viewed with suspicion by the regime.
Occasionally, a foreign director visiting Iraq would see a draft and take it out of the country to produce. But Kadhim was careful not to seek attention from outsiders. In Saddam's Iraq, too much notice was dangerous. He had spent time in prison as a young man and his brother was kidnapped by Saddam's secret police and never seen again. For Kadhim, who has a wife and two daughters, survival trumped art.
Now, with Saddam himself in prison, Kadhim, 64, no longer needs to smuggle his writing out of the country. In the past two years he has written full-length plays on previously forbidden subjects, including the Iraq-Iran war, the repression of women in rural Arab society, and the US-led invasion and continued military presence.
Although the plays have yet to find a stage in strife-torn Baghdad, Kadhim's artistic mission offers hope for a more open Iraqi society. In his writing he seeks to confront the unhappy chapters of Iraq's past. He also links Iraqis to a time when the élite class was conversant with both Arabic and Western thought. Kadhim's belief that literature and myth speak across cultures could show the way for Iraqis once again to reach out to the world.
Mixed cultures
Kadhim makes his living writing television pieces, mostly uncontroversial narratives of Iraq's Islamic and pre-Islamic history.
He grew up in Basra, a port where cultures have mixed for centuries. His father was a teacher who also worked as a carpenter. Even before he went to university, Kadhim was thrown into prison, falsely accused of being a communist. Released after 10 months, he went on to study theatre and comparative literature at the University of Baghdad and was riveted by the similarities between the archetypal stories of the East and the West.
Soon after he graduated, he went to work for the Ministry of Youth and began writing plays. For a number of years, his life was relatively peaceful, but as for many Iraqis, the years of the Iraq-Iran war left an indelible scar.
When the first bombs dropped in Iran in 1980, his younger brother, Maher, was studying theatre in Paris. The war meant Kadhim's family could no longer support him abroad and Maher returned. Because all able-bodied men had to do military service and he was afraid of being punished for returning late, Kadhim's brother hid at relatives' houses and in the homes of friends, trying to avoid the Mukhabarat - Iraq's secret police. One night in 1983 they caught up with him, taking him away.
A betrayal
"Five years after he was captured they brought us a death certificate saying that he was judged and executed. I was in great grief, but we could not show it because Hussain's spies considered it a betrayal."
Kadhim's own work came under increased scrutiny. Often in his small first-floor apartment, he turned to his books. In Western literature, he read those authors who wrote about the voiceless, the silenced and the martyred, and about the devastation of war.
Now, Kadhim has turned to inventing his own heroic figures. The play he has just finished writing, one that he started years ago and stuffed into a drawer, takes a classic story and reshapes it to illuminate Iraq's latest trauma: the American invasion.
The play adapts the legend of Don Juan, bringing him together with three other characters from East and West, past and present: Abu Nuwas, a Muslim poet of the 8th and 9th century, known for his romantic writing; a present day Iraqi soldier; and the ancient Greek mythological figure Pygmalion, who fell in love with a statue he carved of a beautiful woman and wished it would come to life.
In Kadhim's play, the four men fall in love with the same woman. In the second act the beautiful woman is pregnant and about to deliver a child.
"But to what does she give birth? She gives birth to soldiers' helmets: first a German soldier's helmet with a swastika, the second helmet is British with a British flag from the time that they ruled Iraq and then the old helmet of the Roman empire, and then another helmet with an American flag and then one with the Iraqi flag," Kadhim said.
"She is giving birth to helmets which are symbols of war, as if this beautiful woman was not there for love, but to create war.
"In all my recent stories, both the attacker and the people attacked are living the tragedy of war and are trapped. The American soldier is here for months, he dreams of going back to his family. And also the Iraqi people wish the Americans would leave them - so in a way they are dreaming the same dream," Kadhim said.
