The Diplomat's Wife

The French experience of the Second Gulf War has not been a particularly edifying one in terms of its public image. While the worst that was said of French efforts to prevent the conflict from coming to pass—“cheese- eating surrender monkeys unworthy of having the noble fried potato named in their honour"—was rejected by most right-thinking people, there was nonetheless a perception that France was keeping its cultured hands clean, enjoying an innocence and morality of absolutes that could not exist in aftermath of 11 September 2001.

Running parrallel, the image many have of the diplomatic wife, bejewelled and inert, is not a charitable one, nor is it easily reconcileable with what we imagine the harsh realities of a posting to Baghdad to be. When her husband, a Swiss diplomat, was assigned to the Iraqi capital one week before hostilities began in 2003, French author Elisabeth Horem shattered both these stereotypes as thoroughly as American bombs ended the sluggish Mesopotamian peace of Saddam Hussein’s capital.

“We found out he was being posted to Baghdad while we were en route to Switzerland for a holiday. Our kids had both finished the Baccalaureate. He was told he had to leave in three days and we just turned around. Initially we were told there would be no problem with me accompanying him. But when the war properly broke out, they said no way. He fought to have me with him.”

Horem’s husband was issued a legal writ which forced him to guarantee that his wife wouldn’t cause any "mischief," which he was forced to sign. Horem herself says, "I didn't have to sign anything – I wasn’t really asked!

“Our house wasn’t in the 'zone verte', in the international zone. Thankfully. We did not want to be cut off from the Iraqis. And, of course, there is always added danger when you have to queue at a checkpoint to get into an international zone."

This put Horem in a very unusual situation: she didn't see what other diplomats saw – and they could not comprehend the situation in the way she did. In no small part, this contributed to her writing on Iraq: “We were the only foreign house in our neighbourhood. I did not have much contact with other diplomats. I was, for the most part, the only wife there, and for meetings they tolerated only useful people, not extras. Of course I sometimes saw the other diplomats, but with all the necessary additional security my presence would require it wasn’t always possible. There was zero room for spontaneity, and yet on the other hand you always needed to be careful about divulging plans, always saying you were going a different route and leaving at a different time.

“Thanks to our guards nothing ever happened. I feel awkward when people commend me for our bravery. We weren’t brave compared to the Iraqis, like our employees, who go to work every day, who go shopping and walk through the city. That’s real bravery. We were protected.”

Horem’s narratives, contained in a collection entitled Shrapnels, are neither hard-hitting exposés of anguish and injustice, nor coffee table tales or stay-at-home studies conducted through bulletproof glass. Existing somewhere between the two, they dispassionately tell what has to the best-kept secret on the planet – the story of Iraq.

“Shrapnels contains true facts taken from my diary but changed, adapted to a fictional format. There is nothing invented in there, but names have been changed, details altered. It is a writing that re-humanises something that news journalism often has the opposite effect upon through its dispassionate lists of facts and figures. It is a testament to the atmosphere that was lived, an effort to render that atmosphere sensible. It is written about one year, and its style follows a cycle of four seasons.

"While our close protection bodyguards were South African, those guarding our house were Iraqis, who all came from different parts of the city and brought us the rumours from their streets. It is alongside these renditions that I constructed my perception of the events outside my home."

She is keen to stress the difference between her writing and that which appears in the dailys across the globe: “People always expect me to talk and write in a journalistic way, to describe this situation and that person exactly, but that is not my style. I am a novelist, a fictionalist. However, writing a novel in Baghdad was impossible. I couldn’t be there and write of anything other than Baghdad. So Shrapnels is a collection of short stories, the only way I could write of Baghdad as I lived in it.

“It was such an intense situation. But my writing is not from a historian’s point of view; it is not journalism. It is personal, subjective. I was totally isolated in my home. I couldn’t leave because of security, so I can’t speak about Badghad and the news stories. I was in the eye of the storm, a false heart in the city.”

Horem’s writing is full of contrasts, with imagery that conveys a naïve sense of fantasy combined with a wide-awake awareness of politics and tragedy. The cover picture of Shrapnels echoes this distillation of truth through art: it bears her own photographs taken of the roof of her house. “The yellow light has not been adjusted,” she says; “you always saw the city through dust.

“I chose the name Shrapnels because shrapnel is everything that explodes, all the particles remaining afterwards – plural because it is a book of short stories, a collection of fragments. Some are as short as a few lines, the longest is a few pages. They are a collection of sensations, of noises. I was shut in, but you could always hear the noises of the war.”

Not everyone has met the book with critical aclaim. She explains: “Some have accused the book of being cold and distant. It is written in the third person: her/him. It does not contain many descriptions of personal circumstance or individual character, nothing to refer to my husband’s diplomatic status. It allowed me to maintain a distance, to avoid adopting that pathetic tone often found in such narratives.”

It seems an unnecessary defence of herself and her work for Horem to make, given that she never approaches an expression of her experiences in such "pathetic" terms. She is at all times wholly candid, even effusive; nothing is sugar coated.

“One day we went driving and were shot at. It was the first time someone in our party was killed. A man got into a taxi, and, revealing his belt of explosives, said he wanted to go to the best place to kill the most people. The taxi driver asked him to get out, and the suicide bomber got out of the car, morose. He had been in other taxis, had chosen that one taxi above the others because that driver was deemed worthy of sharing his fate and dignity as a martyr.”

If her stories don’t manage to break the silence of Iraq, where soldiers’ diaries and journalists’ ramblings have dominated, Elisabeth Horem will have nonetheless rehabilitated the French engagement with Iraq, as well as that of the diplomat’s wife.