BOOK OF THE DAY: Talking About Jane Austen in BaghdadBy Bee Rowlatt, May Witwit, Penguin, 371pp £8.99
ONE OF the great privileges of being a journalist is the entrée it gives you into lives completely unlike your own.
If you’re doing it right it should change you, broaden you or, at least, make you a wiser person – most particularly if you’re covering stories involving hardship and tragedy.
However, through repeated exposure to tragic situations, the journalistic heart hardens, and it becomes easier to close the door or put down the phone and return to your life of relative ease without a second thought.
And yet, and yet, some stories, some people, just stay with you, become part of you – it’s kismet – a real connection and a knot that refuses to be untied.
In 2005, BBC World Service producer Bee Rowlatt was trawling for Iraqi citizens to interview in the lead-up to the first assembly elections under the new post-Saddam constitution. When her efforts led her to Iraqi academic May Witwit, she must have felt as if she'd fallen across the ideal interviewee, because May had grown up partly in the UK before returning to live in Iraq. This meant an interviewee with fluent English who understood both the situation on the ground in Iraq andthe audience to whom the interview would be transmitted. But May turned out to be much more than that, and soon Bee Rowlatt found her life inextricably linked to the Kafkaesque existence of a woman trying to hold on to her sanity as Baghdad erupted all around her.
The poorly titled Talking about Jane Austen in Baghdad(it's only vaguely like Reading Lolita in Tehran) is the thoroughly absorbing account of the e-epistolary relationship that developed between Rowlatt and Witwit, a woman she'd never met.
While hardly touching at all on May’s academic speciality, English literature, the book is still all about writing – how May describes her life to Bee, how Bee describes her life to May – and one is struck by how much better this is than any transcribed conversation or mediated interview. Driven by her loneliness and need to connect, May’s warm and direct style tells us more about the barbarity of daily life in Baghdad than any emissary from the Green Zone could. “The other day two more professors were killed. More shopkeepers in our area have been slain – and I mean that .”
Through her words, a vivid, often funny, May emerges and she is at once a traditionalist (wishing for Bee to have a son or abiding by some loopy rule set down by her husband) and a rebel who has married outside her own tribe, fallen out with her family, argued in person with Saddam, and is disdainful of the patriarchal Arab world. Of extremists in her area, she writes: “They have banned putting cucumbers near tomatoes. They say there is a sexual implication in these vegetables and it is wrong and sinful.”
Soon May discovers that her name is on a death list and it becomes clear to Bee that she must gather all her resources to help May escape Baghdad, where she is virtually a prisoner in her own home. There are plenty of setbacks along the way, from a spelling error that scuppers a visa to a double-dealing passport fixer, but Bee Rowlatt makes a moral decision that plenty of journalists would have bypassed: to attempt to save one life in the face of being unable to save the many. It was the right thing to do, not out of do-goodism alone but out of that other much-maligned idea – sisterhood.
Yvonne Nolan is an independent TV and radio producer
