Who still remembers that Iraq did not exist before 1921? Who remembers that, like Lebanon, Iraq is a country made up of disparate regions, ethnicities and religions? Who remembers that it was a woman, a British woman, an imperialist, an anti-feminist, an adventurous virgin, a frustrated lover, who drew the map of Iraq? Who remembers Gertrude Bell behind the very romantic figure of Lawrence of Arabia? Who remembers that “on the lands of the moribund Ottoman Empire, which everyone is working to finish off, the 20th century is being played out; the future of the world”? Olivier Guez refreshes our failing memory and mixes in a high-flying literary exercise, the essential history of a region and the destiny of a woman, in a thrilling novel, Mesopotamia (to be published on August 14 by Grasset).
First there is a young woman, a more or less unhappy single woman, who, three times, is eluded by three chosen, loved and even adored men, and who will have drawn the map of the Middle East, holding her own against the military, intelligence chiefs, politicians, diplomats, descendants of prophets: “She feels like the ‘Creator in the middle of the week’, and the ‘midwife’ of the country about to hatch. ‘There has never been anything like this, you must understand: it is exceptional. We are building a new world!’ – Gertrude’s repertoire does not know half measures, notes her colleague Philby” – the father of the other Philby, the famous Soviet spy.
They are all there, the brilliant ambitious Churchill and the incandescent Lawrence of Arabia, who, while peace was being negotiated in 1919, was already full of bitterness: he had failed to impose Faisal, his Sunni prince, nor on the English who did not keep the promise to give him Syria in addition to Mesopotamia, promised to the French by the Sykes-Picot agreements, nor on the French, who disdained Arab nationalism, nor on the Americans who only had the word “independence” on their lips but were above all moralistic and calculating missionaries who refused the game of influence in the Old Continent. All these people hated each other and Gertrude Bell only loved the Empire and the Bedouins.
Gertrude Bell, a heroine as ambiguous as she is sublime
There is a country born of a fantasy, of a desire to draw the future of the East, of the world, like a projection of oneself. This country is impossible, Bell knows it: “The three provinces have been riveted to rival civilizations, divergent cosmoses, since the dawn of time. Basra is turned towards the south, the Persian Gulf and India, Baghdad is linked to the Persian world, Mosul to Turkey and Syria. They are religiously and ethnically discordant.” It’s like the 21st century after the fall of the Islamic State. It’s the end of the First World War. But Gertrude Bell believes it, she who hates the Shiites, who nevertheless form the majority of the Mesopotamian population: “The Shiites,” she writes, “are ‘false, violent and sordid’. Their spirituality and their dogmas, decreed by fanatical, ignorant old men, are repugnant to her.”
She ended up betting on the Sunni prince, Faisal. She installed him, with a lot of PR, in the three disunited provinces, refusing to see the quagmire, bringing down British administrators who opposed them, manipulating her world with the dexterity of the enlightened, carried by someone greater than them, until this Tuesday, August 23, 1921 in Baghdad when “the youngest son of Hussein, still supervised by his British guardians, climbed onto the dais in the center of the courtyard. His throne made of Asahi beer crates had been assembled and painted gold a few hours earlier. It was out of proportion for the little prince”. From that day on, until her fall, into solitude and oblivion, Gertrude Bell would be nicknamed by the Arabs, the mumineenthe Queen, while the foreign press refers to her as the most influential woman in the British Empire.
In 2003, the bronze bust of Gertrude Bell was stolen during the looting of the Iraqi National Museum. No one then remembers the woman who “transformed romantic fiction into geopolitical reality and created a small empire whose strings she pulls”. Except Olivier Guez who signs a novel worthy of a heroine as ambiguous as she is sublime in her heady ambition.
Abnousse Shalmani, committed to fighting against identity obsession, is a writer and journalist
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