Bandar Fayli

Author's name: Bakhtiar Ali

Through the life story of the young Fayli boy, Bandar, this novel explores a fascinating and eventful chapter in Iraq's modern history. It begins in 1988, which can be considered the height of Kurdish oppression in the modern era, with the infamous Halabja massacre, which claimed the lives of thousands of defenseless civilians. It ends in 2003 with the entry of international coalition forces into Baghdad and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime. Between the two dates, rivers of blood, tears, and sweat flowed due to the tyranny of the police state and the humiliation and weakness of society, to the point that it can be said that not a single Iraqi, outside the circle of the regime, was spared from oppression and injustice in one way or another, whether Sunni or Shiite, Arab or Kurd, Christian, Mandaean, or Yazidi. Choosing a Kurdish and Shiite character, at the same time, as the hero of the novel not only reflects novelistic foresight, paving the way for presenting a hero who stands apart from the stereotypical sharp divisions prevalent in Iraqi society, but also human and national foresight—if that is the right expression—for the injustice that these two sects were subjected to in particular, during the era of Baath Party rule, is greater than can be passed over in passing or be reduced by a historian to a few pages. But there is no doubt that the art of the novel - as the history of the common people in the face of the history of kings - is capable of achieving this difficult equation and encompassing the greatest possible amount not only of the absent truth, but also that which is hidden within souls and consciences, on the basis that the novel is authorized to oscillate freely between the poles of the duality of truth and falsehood, and to operate within wide spaces that allow it to build an edifice of imagination on a brick of reality, on the condition that that brick cannot be seen in a real and clear way except after entering that edifice, examining its details and wandering within its wings.