An interview with Sami Michael on AIDA
by Arianna Melamed, Yedioth Aharonoth newspaper, June 2008
In the morning of our conversation in a bright residential apartment, full of light and books, overlooking Haifa Bay in all its serene grandeur; Sami Michael serves surprisingly mild, velvety black coffee.
"This is how it's drunk in Baghdad", he says. "Actually", he adds "well, to be accurate, more or less, like that." Sixty-one years have passed since he was there last, since he escaped to Iran, with an arrest warrant hanging over his head that would have led him to the gallows. And no, he does not intend to return soon, in spite of the great longing, and perhaps a little because of it.
He is already eighty-two years old and, in his eyes, he still has the joy and creativity of a child. With the release of his new novel he couldn't return to see with his own eyes the city that he writes about with love and with pain. "I fled from Iraq on foot. I have never given up my Iraqi citizenship, but I have no idea about its validity, I certainly wouldn't go back there at this moment in time, under the occupation of the American army".
Baghdad is one of the most dangerous cities in the world – here is a reason not to return.
"I do not think that I have a fear of Iraq itself. I am not a person to sit in shelters, not even in the last Gulf War when missiles were flying over my house. It's obvious that I would want to return to visit Iraq, and also Kurdistan. However, under the present conditions, only if I am invited, not by Americans and not their yes men, but by the Iraqis and the Kurds. Just as I am not prepared to travel to the Occupied Territories here, unless invited by the Palestinians. There isn't, in my view, a big difference between one occupation and another."
One of Michael's talents is the ability to say very harsh things to the ears of many listeners in soft tones without any shouting. He talks like this as the president of ACRI- the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, this is how he preaches the end of the occupation, the end of the injustices that his chosen homeland commits against the Palestinians - without standing in public squares making speeches. He simply can not, "be part of the flock, not even as the leading lamb. That is one of the things that frighten me. I do not think that an author needs to look for glory from the masses in the public squares using catchphrases, that he thinks match the opinions of the crowd," Sami Michael would say when asked why he harnessed his energies to ACRI. He would also say it without adding a single word of criticism of any Israeli author. Sami Michael knows how to express himself sharply and bluntly, uncompromising on political issues, but he is careful not to hurt people. He would like to relate this quality to his mother who told him: "If you are not fearful of God, at least be ashamed of your deeds in front of people".
People who love Michael know his mother and her ways a little, or at least snippets of her biography that served as a basis to his novel "Victoria". His mother died at the age of 103. He was 78, and the prolonged parting - of her years in a geriatric department, when he could not bear to see what was happening to her spirit and her body – was not easy for him. "When I was 70 my mother would still cover me with a blanket, so as not feel cold", he tells. A man at the age of 82, misses his mother, but knows to be embarrassed a little by the strong yearning.
In his study, amongst books in Hebrew, Arabic and English – novels, poetry, politics, history and science – lies on the table a student's folder and inside it neatly arranged pages of his next novel – all handwritten in exemplary fashion on white paper; rows of sentences in perfectly straight lines, that later he will cross out again and again until he decides that this is it, it can be typed. Not by himself. "At my age you want me to write on a computer? I belong to the generation that does not press buttons, but rather turn them," he explains, "I could not do otherwise. I need the contact of the pen where the words flow from the hand on to the page."
In the same way he needs contact with people at the time of writing: "At home I am the one who does the shopping and cooking, and Rachel (his wife) has the job of the taster", he says.
At the end of the process – approximately three years from the beginning of a book, it will be typed. He does not show his unfinished handwriting, not even to his editor. Here is the place where stubbornness and the joy of creating join to become one determined decision, with the last word left to Michael at all times.
Just a while after publication of his novel 'Pigeons at Trafalgar Square' (Hebrew) /Nabila (English), Michael, a talented author, made a profitable move from 'Am-Oved Publishers' to a new home. He now enjoys the embrace of 'Kinneret, Zmora-Bitan Publishers'.
On the way back to the living room from the study he breathes in a little sea air and his thoughts wander back to Baghdad. "It is a very dangerous place today for the Iraqi people. A number of Iraqis inside Iraq helped me collect information that I needed for this book - AIDA, as it has changed its face immensely since I was there: at the end of the book I thank them, I am indeed most grateful, but it is forbidden to reveal their names. Even a newspaper photographer that we found somehow, in order to document some new images of the Baghdad that I no longer know, found himself in an Iraqi prison, only for a short time, thankfully - but in the Iraq of today it could so easily have ended differently."
So the only thing remaining is the journey of my imagination. "The whole novel is an emotional journey back. Not to my homeland, since as far as I am concerned my homeland is the homeland of my children and grandchildren which is here – and I am an Israeli patriot, but not a Zionist."
Wait. Let's put politics aside for a moment longer. Let's talk about longings
"This is not politics, this is a matter of being, exactly like the longings, rage and pain for the beautiful city {Baghdad} that I may never see again, and of what has happened to the people throughout years of madness. It is also of how it is possible, at all, to live as a moral person and still survive in these times. It is also of the joy of memories of my childhood and youth, a pure pleasure that will not be experienced by the children of the Iraq of today – from all these things combined, I think, Zaki, the character was born, a man that simply does everything that he can in order to stay alive".
Is this book also an exercise in what would have been if…? 'Would Sami Michael have turned into Zaki Dali if he had remained in Iraq'?
"I have thought about this quite a bit… Like Zaki, if I had remained in Iraq, I would not have married, nor established a family. It is too dangerous to raise children there, if you do not want them to lose limbs or be led forcibly to fight in an unnecessary war."
And it is also impossible to write there as you write. "Aida" is a wonderful novel that takes place in Iraq and exposes all the moral dilemmas and the horror in which its people live, but if the novel had been written by an Iraqi author, the author would be dead. And you, Sami, if you had remained there- how would you write?
"I wouldn't give up on writing, but like Zaki, from having no choice, I may have turned into an intellectual prostitute; but I think that with my nature it is more likely that I would have ended up on the gallows, like Sasson Dallal, my soul twin, who was the general secretary of the Iraqi Communistic party, and in 1949 was raised to the gallows after being tortured."
He looks out to the azure bay, extended like fan below him, but this also does not calm another memory of youth that comes to him: "Shaul Tweig. Together we went arm in arm, engagé - as is common in the Middle East – to a protest and suddenly there was gunfire. I had never heard a gunshot before, then another came. They were shooting at us, and I was hit by a rifle butt and Shaul was hit by a bullet in the stomach. My clothes were soaked by his blood. No, it was not politics. It was and is still existential for me, for my generation. I couldn't have chosen to be Zaki in my time in Iraq, when Nazi Germany marched from victory to victory while the West did not say a word against anti-Semitism, except the U.S.S.R, and the first place where Hitler's forces were stopped was at the approach to Moscow, and since I was a Jewish youth I became a communist. It was a moral patriotic act, and as usual, good people paid for it with their lives."
The thing that Sami Michael calls his "nature" prevented him from becoming a typical communist, i.e. obedient and loyal to the doctrine. "Also in the party, I was always brought to trial for what they called 'political aberrations'. Actually, throughout my life - there is not a chance of finding me toeing the line. So the speculation: what would have been if I had remained in Iraq, we can say I would have been liquidated".
Or like Zaki, find yourself a friend in the secret service, and a few hungry female students, who agree to sell themselves cheap.
-I do not think that I could have been able to live with Zaki's degree of moral corruption. I really love women, but as free unexploited people. I know that women are the ultimate victims of wars and religious conflicts, and it is women who are the real heroines of "Aida". As a son of Iraqi Jews, I also know that the essence of survival is a fruit of delicate, compound and complex negotiation with its surroundings, in order to find a modest home which is relatively safe, to keep body and soul together, and to have the knowledge, although uncertain, that also tomorrow we will live".
Zaki soon discovers how much the remnants of his conscience endanger him, and how those who instill terror are indeed themselves victims. "Iraq is not a slice of nostalgia colored in pink for me, says Michael, "Iraq is also a part of the Third World with all its problems, and it is a part of the violent Middle East in all its complexity – But it is my home, and I do not turn my back on it nor try to change it into a nicer place than it is in reality".
Is there any chance of a better reality?
"Not in our lifetime, and not, taking into consideration, the fact that this long conflict in the Middle-East is a clash between two Islamic cultures, and not when the West stirs it with such crude hands and with such misunderstanding. The late Emil Khabibi, not only shared the same viewpoint but was also a friend, once said that maybe, in another three hundred years or so, we will find a solution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. So, perhaps for Iraq too".
And till then, what will a man like Sami Michael do?
"I am one of the lucky ones since I have the freedom to say the things that I think, the freedom that most of the people in the Middle East do not yet have. Until then I have to make my voice heard, not as part of a chorus of popular opinion, but as one man watching in the wings, who does not want the embrace of the establishment and I am prepared to pay the price for my right to say: this is wrong. I do not toe the line. If I do, I know that I have strayed from my way."
Sami Michael is the leading Israeli author, and still insists on saying that he is not a Zionist and separates between his great love of the country, its landscapes and its people and his vehement abhorrence with regard to its governments and their actions. He insists on saying these things and writing them even if it costs him the love of readers. Despite this, from book to book, his unique voice strengthens and the endeavors of the establishment to embrace him intensify: Three Honorary Doctorates and there is more on the way, the EMET Prize and the Brenner Prize – but the Israel Prize still not, and he says that he is not preoccupied with it.
Now and for many years, there have been persistent whispers of his candidacy for the Nobel Prize for literature. And if he wins?
"I do not know; one mustn't think about these things. It disturbs writing
Finally, we return to the excitement of the new book. Who is the reader you are aiming at when you write? Without hesitation, as if sixty years had not passed, he says – "there is one - Sasson Dallal".