Now living as an immigrant in France (he dislikes the term exile), he has several critically acclaimed works behind him—he was shortlisted for the International Impac Dublin Literary Award in 2006 for The Swallows of Kabul. He has also retained his nom de plume. His novels have been translated into several languages including Malayalam. And recently, after years of ignoring him, the governments of Lebanon and Algeria permitted translations of five of his books into Arabic for readers. 

The Sirens of Baghdad, Khadra’s new book that was recently launched in India, completes the trilogy that started with The Swallows of Kabul and continued with The Attack. In these books, the focus shifted from Algeria, the subject of Khadra’s earliest works, to Afghanistan under the Taliban, the Israel-Palestine conflict and the second American invasion of Iraq.

The Sirens of Baghdad follows the aftermath of the second American conquest of Baghdad, when “brutes festooned with grenades and handcuffs burst into the gardens of Babylon, come to teach poets how to be free men”. There are no-holds-barred accounts of US marines’ disregard, sometimes complete ignorance, of Iraqi customs, exacerbated by their unabashed display of gun power—shooting down a loved village idiot, bombing a wedding party. The American atrocities soon take an unforgivable turn, violating the protagonist’s sense of honour and pushing him towards revenge.

All through the pages of brittle anger is the smell of sand and echoes of the haunting music of Sabah Fakhri and Wadi es-Safi. “The fact that people want to harm one another is proof of the immaturity of humanity. I try to explain today’s world, try to save human stupidity from political manipulation and disinformation by the media,” says Khadra. “In The Attack, I wrote that there is nothing more beautiful than your life and your life is not more important than another person’s life.”

... contd.