A review by Courrier International, 10 April 2025
“Of loss and lavender,” a novel by Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon, was released on April 2 by Actes Sud. In this story, praised by the Arabic press, the author intertwines the painful journeys of two Iraqi exiles in the United States, Sami and Omar.
Omar deserted the army; Sami, a surgeon, is accused of being a Baathist in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. Both were punished for it. And both fled their native Iraq for the United States.
“Of loss and lavender,” tells the parallel stories of these two exiles, reflecting each other and revealing the pains of contemporary Iraq.
This fifth novel by Sinan Antoon, published in France on April 2 by Actes Sud, is “a novel of powerlessness, pain, and memories, a novel about Baghdad and the way of escaping it while remaining imprisoned forever,” summarizes the site Independent Arabia.
“It is a novel about the senses that inhabit the characters and prevent them from moving forward. Each of their senses takes them back to that distant land, both beloved and terrifying,” the London-based site continues.
To question the notions of memory, homeland, and exile, Sinan Antoon skillfully weaves together the stories of his two protagonists: Omar, whose ear was cut off for deserting Saddam Hussein’s army and who tries to rebuild himself physically and mentally across the Atlantic; and Sami, accused of being a Baath Party sympathizer, who ends up joining his son in the U.S., where he develops Alzheimer’s disease.
The novel won over many critics when it was published in Arabic in 2023. Antoon, born in Baghdad in 1967 and exiled to the United States since 1991 after fleeing the Gulf War (which followed Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and pitted the country against a U.S.-led coalition from August 1990 to February 1991), explores themes crucial to all Iraqis.
“The Iraqi pain is manifest in his novels. It’s the grief of a man who wanted to flee with his homeland, not flee from it,” says the site Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, which sees parallels between the author’s life and those of his characters. “What Iraq represents in the characters’ memories is the impossibility of escape and of recovery. It is a belonging to a country that is like a curse, a memory that can only be grasped by making it the subject of a story.”…
Sinan Antoon told Al-Jazeera’s website that it took him six years to write this novel, much of which takes place after 2003, the year of the U.S. invasion of Iraq (the start of the second Gulf War). The story is “essentially about the debates before and after 2003 and about the loss of both individual and collective memory” linked to this invasion and its consequences, the author says.
The plot “rests on numerous dualities,” notes Independent Arabia: narrative duality between the two protagonists, spatial duality between Baghdad (the homeland) and the country of emigration, temporal duality with flashbacks and leaps to the present, and finally linguistic duality, with the novelist incorporating both classical Arabic and dialectal Arabic to convey orality.
The Lebanese newspaper Al-Modon also points out the use of Iraqi Arabic, a rarity in Arabic literature where dialects are almost never used. Through this, Sinan Antoon seems to suggest that language is his homeland, “that words are justified as a substitute for the homeland, while the homeland is a huge question mark boiling with fear, terror, and death.”
