A review for L’Orient Littéraire by Nadia Leila Aissaoui, April 3, 2025
Sinan Antoon—poet, novelist, translator, and university professor—is one of the most prominent voices in contemporary Iraqi literature. Born in Baghdad in 1967, he grew up in the city before leaving it in 1991, in the aftermath of the Gulf War. Settling in the United States, he pursued his studies there, eventually earning a PhD in literature from Harvard University. His work, both prolific and poignant, explores Iraq’s cultural and political history while preserving a memory shaped by war and exile.
His latest novel, Of Loss and Lavnder, follows in the same tradition, blending political reflection, poetic writing, and questions of identity.
A Loss of Self
At the heart of the novel, the intertwined destinies of Sami and Omar portray the pain of inescapable uprooting. Both were forced to leave Iraq under tragic circumstances that forever severed them from their homeland.
Sami, a retired doctor, emigrates to the United States to live near his only son, Saad, after losing his wife under dramatic conditions. True to his principles, he had dedicated much of his career to public service, despite the constant fear of breaking the arbitrary rules of Saddam Hussein’s regime. However, his departure does not bring him the peace he hoped for: he gradually sinks into dementia, becoming trapped between two worlds. Baghdad, the mythical city of his past, remains an unreachable anchor, while Brooklyn becomes a chaotic space where he feels lost—estranged even from himself.
Omar, on the other hand, is a former political prisoner who was mutilated for refusing to join the regime’s army. His exile marks a radical break from a homeland he now associates only with suffering. “What kind of homeland is it, where you don’t even possess the shadow of a nothing? Even the body formed in your mother’s womb doesn’t belong to you…” Disillusioned, he struggles to rebuild himself far from the memories that haunt him. After years of drifting and working odd jobs, he finds a semblance of stability on a farm where he cultivates lavender and sells products derived from it.
A Poetics of Disorientation and Nostalgia
Sami’s dementia is one of the novel’s central themes, portrayed with striking intensity as a constant struggle between the loss and preservation of memory. Fleeting moments of clarity—triggered by a scent, a melody, or a familiar face—bring forth fragments of a bygone past. This fragmentation of individual memory echoes the gradual erasure of collective history: what remains of a people when its scattered children no longer remember their own story?
In this work, Sinan Antoon powerfully conveys the fractures born of separation, war, and oblivion. With great sensitivity, he explores the deep sense of disorientation experienced by exiles, faced with a world indifferent to their wounds. Confronted with a cold bureaucracy and foreign social codes, they carry the weight of uprootedness, which alienates them and traps them in an “in-between identity.”
Two Paths of Suffering
Firmly rooted in the long tradition of exile literature, Like a Scent of Lavender sheds light on the psychological effects of being torn from one’s homeland. Sami, lost in a hostile city, seems to be desperately searching for a way back to Baghdad—a path that symbolizes less a physical return than an attempt to reclaim his fading memory. In contrast, Omar chooses the path of forgetting, burying deep within himself the experiences that led to his dehumanization.
With writing steeped in dreamlike imagery and melancholy, Sinan Antoon offers a powerful narrative on attachment to one’s homeland, human fragility, illness, and absence. A novel more relevant than ever, one that resonates far beyond the borders of Iraq and the United States.
