French journalist and filmmaker Feurat Alani infuses his poignant debut novel, I Remember Fallujah, with an affecting blend of the personal and fictional, the political and historical. Prolific literary translator Adriana Hunter gracefully provides English access. Alani's narrative is tri-fold: a contemporary doubly tragic cancer/amnesia diagnosis; a father's Iraqi origins in the 1950s; his son's French coming-of-age since the 1980s. What emerges is a polyphonic reclamation of lost memories--of family, ideals, culture, homeland.
Tragedy defined Rami's Fallujah childhood growing up along the Euphrates River. His mother's death in 1952, when he was eight, precipitated years of abuse after his father married a cruel widow with abusive sons. Twenty years later, in 1972, Rami entered France as a refugee, with "an unvoiced dream: To build a successful life far away from Iraq... [without] prisons for idealists." For decades, Rami truncated his son Euphrates's questions about Rami's past with "It's too complicated." And then came August 2, 2019, "the day my father lost his memory." Before Rami succumbs to stage IV lung cancer, Euphrates hopes to "reclaim the lost memories together." Releasing his father's past will enable French-born Euphrates to understand his own multilayered legacy.
Alani is a spare, succinct writer, no doubt a result of his journalistic background. His fiction is clearly inspired by autobiographic parallels to his family's Fallujah-to-Paris journey; particularly notable is the insertion of his own name--Euphrates in Arabic is al-Furāt--with only Euphrates's chapters presented in first-person narration. That "I" resonates throughout with a palpable, empathic longing to know. --Terry Hong