"Waters Under Baghdad" by Zaid Brifkani

On December 5 our Book Club discussed Waters Under Baghdad by Zaid Brifkani. The author was present at our meeting.

Zaid Brifkani, born in Başur, moved to United States at 16. He studied microbiology, went to medical school, and became a practicing nephrologist in Nashville, Tennessee.  Waters Under Baghdad is his second novel. This summary of the discussion has been edited for clarity and length.

Your first novel, The Mountains We Carry, was about Kurds in Iraq, about the turbulence in late 1980s and early ’90s and their forced migration to the Turkish border. This one is about an Arab family living in and around Baghdad, and the various regime changes in Iraq over the 20th century, and how they affected the lives of this family. Why the change in perspective?

If somebody with little knowledge of Kurds were to read my first book, they might ask, why did all this happen? They might want to dig back into history and find out the historical background. That’s what I intended. In this part of the world, multiple civilizations have come and gone. How did that contribute to the condition we are in now?

As a Kurdish teen in Duhok, I know I tried to figure out it all happened. My family lived with Arabs all around us, Muslims, Christians, Yezidis, with no problems. So why were we being killed? I wanted to look into 100 years of Iraq’s modern history and find whatever had been overlooked.

Now I have a question for you. Waters Under Baghdad has two parallel stories, one the historical story, and one a story at the Belarus-Polish border in 2019-20. As readers, what was your impression of the two parallel stories?

The two stories are very different. One is fast-paced and historical; the other is slower-moving, dealing much more with emotions. They have a different texture. But we know the two narratives will inevitably converge somehow, but I kept wondering how.  

I appreciated the character of Sami, who was present during the US-led invasion of Iraq after 9/11, then ended up joining Al Qaeda. I’d read about Al Qaeda coming out of the 2003 invasion, but Sami’s character brings it to life.

I think the change of events from 2003 to 2006 is the most dramatic thing that happened in Iraq in 100 years. It affected the entire foundation of Iraqi society.  And I struggled the most with Sami’s character. It was difficult to capture his transition.

De-Baathfication was a major mistake. The U.S. decided that everyone who had belonged to Ba’ath could no longer serve.  That meant 1.5 million armed people were sitting at home. I know indirectly of a lot of people like Sami and have read about those who went through that experience. It was hard to write.

How people respond to the trauma of war depends in part on their background. In the novel, Sami’s twin brother goes a different route. They’re twins, but they turn out totally different.  One stands aside, the other wants payback.

We conveniently judge how people behave during wars, but during wartime people often don’t have good alternatives. Sometimes the presence or absence of a role model determines how people respond. Sometimes in a vacuum people go from one extreme to another.

In Iraqi society now, people are very concerned about its ethical direction. The baseline of society has undergone a major shift.

What kind of shift?

The army was a unique institution in Iraq, in that for a long time people looked at serving in it as a big honor, as a way to build their belonging to society. But as society went downhill, the military lost its ethical roots in the society. It went from protecting people to attacking other countries—it became a violent force in the society.

If you were in the military, you suddenly found yourself in another country taking someone else’s land. You went from the hero to being a disgusted person in the society for no reason.  That created a sense of confusion. Mustafa lost his legs serving this country, but what for? He rejects belonging to the military anymore. 

From generation to generation, your story follows is male characters. Was that a deliberate decision?

Not by choice, but my focus was on the military, which pretty much every Iraqi family was involved with. And when war came, the men had to fight because they belonged to the military.

Women didn’t, so their involvement in the military was minimal. Their problem was that they were left behind to take care of the mess. People don’t understand how important it was for these mothers to keep a psychological balance in the households during war while men were traumatized.  For example, Mustafa’s mother had a big involvement in not allowing further violence to come out of their family. 

I didn’t understand the relationship between Faisal and the sister.

The younger sister had little control over what happened. Her choice was to throw herself into getting an education. Faisal could not fully absorb that, and Sami had more trouble. I wanted to highlight how unpredictable it is, how people behave in trauma. Even when people choose to continue their lives, it can be a way of masking their trauma.

My wife and I were in school around same time. I went to medical school, and she went to pharmacy school. We responded to stress very differently. When I had a problem, I could not open my book—I had to solve it first. But she would sit down in a corner and study the heck out of her book. 

They’re a middle-class family. The father Faisal works for military intel, but the family doesn’t know what’s happening in other parts of Iraq. A whole rebellion of Kurds, led by Barzani, is going on, but the family seems oblivious to it.

ZB: When you live under a government that controls the media, that’s a reality. We lived in Duhok. The Anfal was less than 20 miles away, but we knew nothing about it. We knew nothing about which villages were targeted.  When you were in the military, even in Baghdad, the narrative was controlled to the point that people didn’t know what was happening in other parts of the country. 

When one government came in and replaced another, people were told the previous government was bad. That was the reality. Especially in Baghdad, information was poor.

You could lose your life or your entire family over one spoken word. So people kept their mouths shut.

In the first novel, you nicely showed the dependencies of the different ethnic groups. The Bedouin family helps the Kurdish family.

That interconnectedness is a reality, there are hundreds of examples. When it’s left to people to decide nature of relationships, their natural peaceful mind takes over. People don’t hate unless they’re taught to. Duhok, which is mostly Kurdish, is near Mosul, which is majority Arab. There’s a lot of cultural interaction

What does the title of the book mean?

For any Iraqi, the Tigris is what has defined Baghdad, over many civilizations. My intention was that people look at Tigris as source of life. I concluded that a majority of what has happened in Iraq lies in the making of the people. There have been external influences, but the people were killing each other.  Whatever seeds you put in this water, they will grow and come out, whether they are seeds of hatred or of love.

The character of Amani, and her relationship with Faisal, seem a little underwritten. Faisal asks her to share his life, but when he decides to leave, he doesn’t even tell her until he’s made all the arrangements.

Amani for me is an important character. She is opinionated, but her choices are limited by flow of events around her. Like many young Iraqi women, she is pushed to the side, having to find her voice in the background.  I intentionally gave her no say in Faisal’s decision to leave. At that time many Iraqi men felt the weight of generational trauma, and that they were at a breaking point.

Did Faisal go back because of Amani  or because of the Kurdish situation?

Faisal’s return may have been beyond his control. It felt like he went back because he no longer thought what was to come would be better than what he left behind. He didn’t know what he wanted anymore.  He had decided to swim against the current, but even those who make it to the other side of the world have problems with relationships. They never really leave the trauma behind.

You talk about your characters as if they are people you don’t understand. Are your characters based on real-life figures?

I draw on personal experiences, and it’s important to put aspects of real people into historical fiction. But you don’t want them to be too identifiable. A writer has to find a balance between fiction and reality.

Have you had any proposals to turn your books into films?

Kurdish people in KRG have not done enough to bring projects like this to the visual field. I’m always open to it. For my first novel, multiple producers reached out to me. A couple were close to starting the project, but a financial issue always came up. For this second novel, so far one person has reached out. I want to work with someone who believes in my message. 

Thank you for your work and for visiting our Book Club, Dr. Brifkani.