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WHEN
THE GREY BEETLES TOOK OVER BAGHDAD – MONA YAHIA
WHEN THE GREY BEETLES TOOK OVER BAGHDAD
Mona Yahia
Paperback, June 2003
£7.99, 416pp, 1 870015 85 1
Winner of the  -Wingate
Prize for Fiction 2001
In
Baghdad
,
Lina is trying to lead a normal life, but politics keep intruding. Violent
government coups are almost annual events and it’s difficult for a child
to understand what’s going on or who to believe. The need for secrecy
means Lina cannot tell her best friend that they are just waiting for the
right moment to flee. It is the 1960s and Lina is part of the dwindling
Jewish community…
Mona Yahia was born in
Baghdad
in 1954 and
escaped with her family to
Israel
in 1970. In 1985
she moved to
Germany
to study fine arts
and has remained there ever since.
‘Yahia rolls
Baghdad
around
her tongue, savouring its suks, smells, and sweetmeats (reading her makes
one hungry). This is a truly exotic novel, but it’s also a coming-of-age
work in which the almost imperceptible transformation from childhood to
adolescence is saltily observed and never sentimentalised. Yahia’s prose courses with insight and wit.
Her deftness of touch means that, despite its subject-matter, this novel
never becomes a bleak tale of religious persecution, but remains a fresh
story about adolescent experience in adversity – with parallels in the
most unlikely places.’
Anne Karpf,
The Guardian
‘The novel powerfully conveys the author’s outrage, as well as her
nostalgia for her native land.’
The
Times
‘Yahia’s writing evokes both the sensuality of domestic
intimacy…alongside the horror of public hangings…When the Grey
Beetles Took Over Baghdad is
most politically sophisticated, and also most poignant, when it explores
questions of language and identity.’
Alev Adil, Times
Literary Supplement
WHEN THE GREY BEETLES TOOK OVER BAGHDAD
Mona Yahia
Hardback, September 2000
£15.99, 416pp, 1 870015 74 6
“
—Drop
your voice, Lina, we’re in the street!
—But that’s precisely what I'm talking about Arabic has been silencing
us for the last fifteen years! It’s my turn to silence it. I’m
disowning it, it’s as simple as that…
—You’re talking nonsense, crap, from beginning end… Your
language’s not piece of clothing you can just shed! Arabic’s in your
tongue and in your ears, p-h-y-s-i-c-a-l-l-y! Can you laugh at English
jokes do you understand French puns? It’s as if… as if your whole life
is stored in your mother tongue.
—Including fear. If I forget Arabic, I might forget what fear is…
—You’ll always live in translation, forever a foreigner in your own
mind.
—Better a foreigner in a free mind than a prisoner at home.
”
Set
in
Baghdad
in the
1960s, When the Grey Beetles Took Over Baghdad is about the vulnerable
Jewish community in the revolutionary modern capital. The story is told by
Lina – he youngest daughter in a middle-class Jewish family. Unlike her
friends, Lina is not eager to grow up, at least not before she has left
Baghdad
for a
better world, where girls wear trousers in the street and boys their hair
shoulder-length. Yet Lina’s dreams are far from being realised. Shortly
after the Six Day War Laurence, the English boy next door whom she
worships, leaves the country for good. Her father is sacked. Shuli, her
elder brother, is arrested. Dudi, her wayward classmate, talks her into a
futile search for Kurdish smugglers by the
Tigris
, while grey Volkswagen Beetles, allegedly driven by the security police,
roam the city.
Overwhelmed by fear and despair, Lina resolves to unlearn her mother
tongue – her only way of striking back. She works out a plan by which
she gradually omits words from her vocabulary, thus distancing herself –
word by word – from her native land.
This is an ambitious novel in which fear and oppression
co-exist with the smells and tastes of the
Middle East
.
Superstition and social niceties live side by side with public hangings
and disappearances. Private and political tensions fuse – the rise of
the Ba’ath party and its regime of terror coincide with Lina’s
adolescence. After years of inaction and secrecy the family’s departure
at the end proves perilous.
Mona
Yahia was born in
Baghdad
in 1954, and escaped
with her family to
Israel
in 1970. She
studied Psychology at
Tel
Aviv
University
and
worked as a trainer in the School for Army Commanders. In 1985, she moved
to Germany
to study fine arts.
She has published short stories in London Magazine and The Jewish
Quarterly, as well as in German anthologies. This is her first novel.
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