Renowned Iraqi author Mahdi Issa Al-Saqr explores themes of race, inequality and post-colonialism in “East Winds, West Winds,” an account of stark contrasts and divisions at a British-run oil well near the Southern Iraqi city of Basra in the 1950s. Originally published in Arabic in 1998, the novel was translated by Paul Starkey and published in English earlier this year.
The novel recounts a series of personal and political incidents from two perspectives, or “faces.” One is economically privileged, well-educated, and predominantly British, the other is composed primarily of working class Iraqis whose rough, spartan living conditions appear particularly stark in light of the luxury afforded to their managers.
In vivid and painstaking prose, two narrators chronicle the same time period through parallel — though at times mutually unintelligible — perspectives. Mohamed, the well manager’s personal translator, chronicles life on the oil well from a workers’ perspective in the novel’s first “face,” while Hussam, a young British-educated Iraqi engineer, narrates events from the standpoint of management in the second.
Al-Saqr wields this dual perspective with skill and subtlety, artfully revealing to the reader two communities that work side-by-side but live worlds apart from each other.
Equipped with these two vantage points, the reader observes the two distinct worlds inhabited by the oil well’s employees from a bird’s eye view. “On one side, next to the desert, lives a group of workmen, while the manager’s quarter nestles on the other side, between the palm groves near the banks of Shatt Al-Arab,” Al-Saqr explains. “On that side the bird can see the work area, the place where the inhabitants of the two sides (the bosses and the underlings) meet, when they undertake their shared tasks.”
From this privileged position, the reader is able to “tear down barriers” and “uncover secrets woven and hatched behind walls, and in wives’ bedrooms,” gaining an understanding unavailable to either party separately.
The story’s two “faces” reflect not only deep disparities in living conditions and professional treatment, but also a resulting divergence in priorities and preoccupations. In the novel’s first half, Al-Saqr focuses on political activism and “the people being trampled underfoot.” The second half is dominated by the interpersonal relationships and sexual intrigues of the well’s management and their wives. (All of the employees portrayed in the book, blue collar and white collar alike, are male).
Both Mohamed and Hussam are able to transcend — if only briefly and partially — their own station and steal brief glances into the other’s world, helping the reader to connect the dots between the two story lines. Through his friendship with Hussam, Mohamed is introduced to the managers’ quarters, whose green grass, flowers, picket fences, swimming pool and tennis court is worlds away from the “tent on the edge of the desert” in which the workers are housed. As an Iraqi, Hussam dwells in the management’s foreign world but is afforded easier access the Iraqi world of the workers than his British colleagues. Able to access the two worlds, Hussam — and through him, the reader — is able to identify the depth and breadth of the gulf between them.
Through this blending of local and foreign Al-Saqr illustrates that cultural as well as socio-economic factors are responsible for stratification and inequality. While western-educated Iraqis employed as project management move in the same social and professional circles as their British colleagues, stubborn disparities in status and influence remain. Ultimately, Hussam determines that he and the other Iraqis in management are “like aliens, who don’t belong in either camp.”
In an after-hours visit to the police station, Hussam witnesses how Iraqi managers are held in lower esteem than their British counterparts by fellow Iraqis. There, his Iraqi companion advises him not to speak so that the guards will assume that he is European due to his light coloring. “If you speak,” reasons his colleague, “they’ll know that you’re Iraqi, and will no longer take any notice of you.”
Having glimpsed the workers’ lives that night, with all of its oppressive uncertainty and darkness, Hussam contrasts this with his own comfortable existence and asks which is the true reality: that of the workers or that of the management.
By repeatedly juxtaposing these two realities Al-Saqr plants lingering questions about the inequalities manifested in the reader’s mind. With skillful and engaging storytelling, he succeeds in his aim to reveal the “true essence" of events, the reality hidden beneath the surface, and the reality which will strike the reader, as it does the narrator, “with a hideousness that will rock your being.”
