This is copied from THE NATIONAL
An Iraqi in Paris: a lifetime of movement, forced and long-dreamt
Iraq in the early
months of 1979. Saddam Hussein is circling endlessly around Baghdad,
building his influence, tightening his grip on the mechanisms of power,
ready to seize complete control of the country within a matter of
months. Indeed, tomorrow (July 16), marks the 32nd unhappy anniversary
of the occasion when he became the nation's leader.
Meanwhile,
in Al-Habbaniyah, a short distance west of Baghdad, Samuel Shimon is
dreaming of Hollywood. Shimon is in his early twenties, a frustrated
filmmaker desperate to escape the prospect of life under Saddam. To do
so, he has a breathtakingly simple plan. He will make his way to the US,
where he will carve out his fortune as a movie director.
Three decades later, he has yet to make good on that plan.
Instead,
his flight from Iraq took him first to Damascus, then onwards to Amman,
Beirut, Nicosia, Cairo and Tunis before, in 1985, he found himself as a
refugee in Paris. He would stay there for more than a decade, before
upping sticks once again, this time to London in 1996, where he has
since settled.
What he experienced in the French capital would provide all the material Shimon needed to write and later publish
An Iraqi in Paris, his somewhat autobiographical novel.
It
is a work that was almost overwhelmingly well-received when first
published six years ago in both Arabic and English and was later
nominated for the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Literary Reportage
in 2006 and longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award the following
year. It is also a funny, charming, episodic work that has recently been
repackaged and republished in English by Bloomsbury Qatar.
Shimon,
who I meet in an Abu Dhabi hotel, says this new edition is far more
faithful to the Arabic original than the previous English-language
version, which had been the handiwork of six different translators.
"It
is only one now and I am very happy," he says, referring to the
collaborative efforts of Piers Amodia and Christina Phillips, who share
translation credits on the Bloomsbury Qatar version.
"I used to
write chapters for the book and then would publish them periodically in
newspapers. These were printed over a period of 10 years and,
consequently, there were many different translators. This new
translation is exactly like the Arabic. It is more consistent."
He
is an engaging and charismatic figure, a natural if rapid-fire
raconteur. A conversation with Shimon moves quickly from place to place,
zigzagging in an instant from Iraq to Beirut to London to Hollywood.
His mind brimming with ideas, his speech ready to break off at a
tangent, as another thought springs up almost magically in front of him.
You struggle to keep up with him, but regardless, you have fun trying
to hang onto his coat-tails.
He is many things then, but not remotely sentimental - at least not for the country he left behind all those years ago.
When
I ask him if he would like to go back to Iraq, he says, without pause,
that "I've never been back. I don't have nostalgia. I don't feel like I
need to go back. Many people want to go home, but I don't. The Iraq I
left is not the same country that it is today." This is the romantic
turned realist.
But where is home? He does not answer. In a sense
he doesn't need to, home is London and has been since the mid-Nineties.
Instead, his imagination is moving again, his words heading west to the
land of opportunity.