Friendship - Tricky One

Over recent weeks I’ve had reason to reflect on friendship. I have very deep feelings about friends and I guess expectations around that. Sometimes I end up in a difficult position and am weighed down emotionally by the way I feel or react to what others do or how they behave towards me. Anyway maybe that’s all for another time/post.

Coincidentally, I was reading a book about friendship set amidst very challenging circumstances for the people involved. The book is called “Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad”, published by Penguin.

Bee Rowlatt works for the BBC in London and wants to interview a woman in Iraq to get a firsthand account of life in Baghdad post the US Invasion. She makes contact with May Witwit an English Literature lecturer at Baghdad University and through a series of emails over a couple of years we see how a random contact grows into a deep friendship where the two women share very private thoughts and feelings, survive challenges and the ebb and flow of their daily lives. Eventually Bee works to bring May and her partner out of the strife torn and war ravaged mire that is Iraq and into the refined atmosphere of London. This part of the journey is no less worrying than much of May’s life in Iraq.

While Bee struggles with the anxiety of her husband being off working as a correspondent for the BBC, or the decision to have another child, raising two other children, the vagaries of the weather in London or the cost of living, May has to work out how to make the weekly dash to the one shop that is open in her neighbourhood before stock runs out whilst dodging snipers or stepping around a corpse or six. Her family (apart from her mum) has disowned her because her husband is a Sunni and they are Shiites (or the other way around) and she finds she is on a ‘hit list’ of academics which sees many of her work colleagues being killed with terrifying regularity. There is a special kind of hell that has manifested since the ‘liberation’ of Iraq and the passing of the ‘old man’ (Saddam). One interesting story in the book is of her face to face meeting with Saddam (apparently you could call and speak to him directly if you had an issue to be addressed).

This is a beautiful book that takes the reader to a world we cannot imagine and one that shouldn’t be tolerated. It reminds us of the benefits of strong friendships based on caring and consideration whilst a homeland is being torn to pieces by people who think they know what is best for the people and yet everyday clearly demonstrate their ignorance.

I have to confess that at times May’s commentary about not coping or wanting to end it all made me flinch and insensitively want her whinging to stop. Shame on me, I would not be able to survive a week in what she was living through let alone day after day after day. Hers is just one story which is well told and when I think ‘we did this’ I am more ashamed.

Reading this book will reward you in many ways, I unreservedly commend it to you.