Escaping the leash and the ball

Iraqi poet and novelist Rodaan Al Galidi spent almost a decade in the Dutch asylum system having fled Saddam's regime; now his experiences have become a deftly crafted series of tragicomic novels.

Rodaan Al Galidi. Photo: Harry Pierik

Living close to death

When Rodaan Al Galidi was a child, he lived next to the world’s biggest graveyard.

Wadi al Salaam, or the Valley of Peace, near Najaf in Southern Iraq, is the resting place of somewhere between five and six million Shiite muslims; 50,000 people are buried there each year, because it’s the burial place of the son-in-law of the prophet Mohammad.

“You can drive your car two hours between the graves because of how big it is,” Al Galidi tells me. “It’s very wonderful to see, but scary also.”

“My father didn’t have a driving licence so he used to drive to Najaf between the graves, and in the light of the car headlights, you must imagine something like a scene from the film The Shining: a six-year-old in the car with his father, and all you can see is graves. He would say to me, ‘Rodaan, can you tell me a story?’ And I’d tell him very nice stories because when I looked at him, I didn’t see the graves and I didn’t get scared.”

He smiles into his laptop; our interview is over Zoom. “I would like to drive there now. Because it also has beauty, that the dead aren’t gone, that they’re there. That made me very close to life: I like to live my life, because I was born in the death.”

In Al Galidi’s latest book, The Leash and the Ball, there is a wryly observed juxtaposition between Dutch people’s infrequent encounters with death and the unceasing proximity of death in Iraq.

The protagonist, Samir, discovers his Dutch host family absolutely distraught by what he presumes is the death of a beloved relative, Edward: later, he discovers it’s the family’s pet rabbit. He thinks back over his own very many losses, of siblings, relatives and friends.

The character of Samir is essentially Al Galidi himself, and The Leash and the Ball a second thinly veiled autobiography, a sequel to 2019’s Two Blankets, Three Sheets, which was an account of nine years spent in the Dutch asylum system. Samir’s losses are his own.

“My big discovery is that real experience with death makes you strong, and false experience with death makes you psychologically scared,” he says. “If you experience real death and real loss, you will get stronger.”

“With the rabbit in the family, they experienced death, but not because someone had died. They were scared of themselves. It’s not the rabbit that made them sad, but death was visiting the house without someone dying and this is really very scary, harder than even the real death, the real war: the war in the mind.”

“In the last five years, I lost my bigger brother and my sister saw him die; he was burned,” he says. “After he died, she told me she didn’t want to live any more.”

“I called her and said, ‘why do you want to die?’ She was laughing. She said, ‘I don’t want to live anymore, I think I’ve had enough,’ but she said it like someone who has gone to a movie and halfway through has decided that it’s not interesting anymore and wants to go out. They whisper in the ear of the person beside them: ‘you know, I want to go outside, I want a smoke, I’ll see you at eight o’clock in the bar.’ She was talking like that about death. These people are wonderful, really strong. They have the experience. I wish I had something of them here now, because I have begun to be western,” he says with a scowl.

Doesn’t he want to live life as a westerner? He is, after all, a Dutch citizen now, and splits his time between Tarifa in Southern Spain and The Netherlands.

“No, because as a westerner, you don’t live your life, you think your life. You must be scared of life to live life here, and I don’t want it. You’re scared of freedom, scared of taxes, scared of love, scared that you’ll lose somebody, scared you won’t find somebody, scared that the dog, after eight years, will die. Fuck off, this is not life.”

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but 24/7 for nine years

Al Galidi left Iraq in the nineties, but he’s hazy about the timeline: biographies say he arrived in The Netherlands in 1998, the year of the Clinton administration’s first bombing campaign in Baghdad, but he tells me it was earlier, maybe 1994, when he first fled conscription.

What followed was nine years and nine months in the Dutch asylum system, which sounds similar to, and perhaps even more regimented than, the much-criticised Irish Direct Provision system.

“You know the film One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest?” he says. “Well, imagine that, but not for one hour and forty minutes, but for 24 hours a day for nine years and nine months. There were eight suicides while I was there. You sleep five men in one room. You are not allowed to work or travel and you must sign with the immigration organisation every day.”

“They discovered another kind of building, not a hotel, not a waiting room, not a house: a place to wait to see if ‘the system’ answered you. They say, ‘it’s not me, it’s the system,’ and it’s the most Kafkaesque place. You’re not waiting for Godot, you’re waiting for ‘the system.’”

Didn’t he go crazy? “A lot of people went crazy. But me, not, because I must think positively. I learned from Iraq that if you think positive, the place you are is heaven and the people are angels. It doesn’t matter where you are. If you think negatively, the place is hell and the people around you are devils, even if you are in the most beautiful place on earth.”

So Al Galidi treated his experience as “the most beautiful university in the world,” a place to deepen his knowledge of others and hone his writing skills through observation.

“For me, someone who wanted to write, I told myself, ‘now I am in the cheapest place to study life and humanity from every country.’ For a writer, even Shakespeare, even Tolstoy needed that.”

That nine year dance with human nature was not even his first experience of being a refugee. When Saddam Hussein came to power in 1979, his family, fearful of the persecution being meted out against the Shiite majority, fled to Baghdad.

“We were refugees in our own country,” he says. “We changed everything, even our names: I wasn’t Rodaan, I was Riad. My father paid to change everything. In the time of Saddam Hussein, you could change everything if you paid.”

Al Galidi, despite a deep love of literature, trained as a civil engineer to follow his father into construction.

“My father worked in construction and only went to school for six years in his life. He said to me, Rodaan, you are very good at words and very good with numbers. My father was a very smart and very funny man and he said, you know what, let the words be your hobby and the numbers be for earning money. He told me to study to be a civil engineer and I could take over his business. ‘Then you will never need money and you will have all the time to write,’ he said.”

The Leash and the Ball is peppered with memories of Iraq’s villages and people, but they are not viewed through the lens of rose-tinted nostalgia goggles. Al Galidi is direct in his criticism of what he sees as Iraqi indolence, fatalism and love of being the victim.

“I’m scared of the sadness there.”

Will he ever go back to Iraq? “No. I would be scared to, because a lot of the people who I love have died. Iraq is very safe one second and in the next second is very not safe. I’m not scared to get killed, but I’m scared of the sadness there.”

“When I left Iraq, I said, ‘byebye Iraq. I will never go back to you.’ I lost so much. Even the river that I learned to swim in, on the Euphrates, Turkey dammed the river and now there’s no water. If even the river is gone, I am scared that if I go there I will discover that I am also gone. Maybe I’m scared I’ll go back and find a grave with my name on it: here rests Rodaan Al Galidi,” he chuckles.

The Leash and the Ball is very much a book about The Netherlands: with the eyes of an outsider, Al Galidi holds a mirror up to Dutch society and culture. The reflection is not always flattering. He seems to perceive Dutch ways as cold.

“If I had the possibility, I would get 10,000 Dutch people and give them the power over the economy in Iraq, and in ten years we’d have a great country. They are very honest, they respect time, they work hard. On another side, they’re not easy to live with.”

He recounts a tale from a recent train trip where he witnessed a small, frightened recent immigrant being caught without a ticket. Al Galidi wanted to step in and buy a ticket, but six burly security guards wouldn’t permit him to, and locked the little man in the train toilet. When Al Galidi protested and tried to film the scene, he was fined for not having his correct paperwork with him, despite having a valid ticket.

From the outside, The Netherlands looks very much like a cosmopolitan, liberal place, not particularly prone to racism. But the experience of having been a refugee from a non-European country has given Al Galidi a very different perspective.

“They need us, but we are the problem,” he says. “I worked years in stupid jobs. There is no one Dutch person cleaning the toilets, catching the chickens, cleaning the streets in Holland. I never saw one Dutch person, only the boss.”

“In Europe now, you are welcome if you are of European colour, like Ukrainians, or if you’re a student or a tourist or a millionaire. This is the four ways to be in Europe. Don’t try being a refugee.”

Rodaan Al Galidi in Tarifa in Spain, where he spends half his time. Photo via the author.

Al Galidi laughs a lot when he talks, even when speaking about the serious or the tragic. “I’m not a serious person,” he tells me. “I can see that,” I answer.

Apart from a desire to tread lightly on life, this seems a defence mechanism, a clever way of defusing his otherness in The Netherlands and giving him permission to critique the culture he has found himself in through humour.

“If you are in a very intellectual country and you have come from a very stupid country, you must keep your mouth closed, or else be funny,” he says. “If you are very funny, European people will listen to anything you say. Even if you criticise their country, they will say, ‘oh, that’s the truth.’”

His books are laced with humour, too; he says he wants his readers to take his work lightly: “I want them to laugh, relax and get some pleasure. Because I believe that readers now don’t need to have more ideas from writers. We know now. Even a normal person knows more than Milton or Walt Whitman. We know a lot. We need someone to write about reality in a soft way, that we can laugh about it.”

Following concerns for human rights in the Dutch asylum system, there was an amnesty in 2007 that saw 26,000 asylum seekers given paperwork and leave to remain in The Netherlands. Rodaan Al Galidi was amongst their number.

It hasn’t been plain sailing ever since - he failed a citizenship exam in 2011 and had to reapply, but now he’s a citizen and free to travel. And, despite given his father’s words about numbers being for money and words being a hobby, it’s his words which now provide him with an enviable and peripatetic quality of life.

“If I have good money, I go to support the economy of Spain until the last €100, and then I come back and do readings in Holland,” he says. “If I make good money, I go to Bali to support the economy there. When I have money, I live as a king, no, better than a king. I sometimes stay five months. I relax, I don’t write, I play very bad guitar, I walk. It’s wonderful, and I feel so thankful for all the books I wrote. It’s because of all the books I wrote that I am here. I am not an engineer in an office, or a criminal in a jail.”

Al Galidi is the author of numerous novels and works of prose; The Autist and the Carrier Pigeon won the EU Literature Prize, and he has books that are not available in English translation, including The Unknown Experiences of Prince Wilhelm-Alexander.

Both The Leash and the Ball, which will be on sale from August 2022, and its predecessor, Two Blankets, Three Sheets have been translated by US-born, Amsterdam-living Jonathan Reeder.

Poems are a massage; prose is a visit to the dentist

He’s also written two books of poetry, The Autumn of Zorro  (2007) and  Fridge Light  (2016). Poetry and prose fulfil, he says, two very different functions for him.

“I write poems when I want to run away from myself: from my loneliness, from my mistakes, from my regrets,” he says. “Poems are like a massage after a marathon. But I write stories when I want to discover myself. It’s not a massage, it’s more like a visit to the dentist for a filling.”

This will be Al Galidi’s first visit to Ireland. I ask him what he’s expecting. He laughs heartily.

And then, as seems to be his way, he says something that is couched in humour but which comes with a sudden glimmer of lyricism and insight, a knack for constructing jewel-like metaphors that glitter in his speech as well as in his books.

“I’ve been to Irish pubs in Holland and so I have an idea that Ireland is dark, and with a lot of beer,” he says with a laugh. “So that’s my picture: very big men live in Ireland, who drink a lot of beer but never get drunk and are very funny. And the sun never shines because the Irish pubs, even when the sun is shining in Holland, are always dark.”

“The light is not in your heart, but in your glass.” 

With the agreement of the interviewee, some of the quotes contained in this interview have been minimally edited for grammar.

Rodaan Al Galidi will be reading from his latest novel, The Leash and the Ball, at West Cork Literary Festival on July 14 at 6.30pm in the Maritime Hotel, Bantry. Pre-release copies of the book, published by World Editions, will also be available to purchase. More information and tickets here.