A Stranger in Baghdad: The poisoned chalice of Iraqi excess

Longlisted for the Bridport Novel Award and winning the Stroud Book Festival Fiction Competition, A Stranger in Baghdad is Elizabeth Loudon’s debut novel.

It is a delicately crafted saga of subterfuge, family, identity, and the turbulent convergence of disparate cultures. We began in 2003 in the London office of British-Iraqi psychiatrist Mona Haddad as the merciless invasion of Iraq was underway.

A clandestine visitor from her past, Duncan Claybourne, propels her into a dizzying rumination about her family and their life before escaping Iraq, sending the reader back to 1937.

"We often read the stories of those who bemoan the reverberations of Western bigotry. But through the supercilious and naive Diane, Loudon has given us a distinctive interpretation in which the self-proclaimed colonial excellence is directly challenged"

The crux of the tale focuses on her mother, the bewitching and British Diane Cutler, and her marriage to the introspective and “foreign” Iraqi Ibrahim Haddad.

Through this imagined cross-cultural marriage, Loudon ruptures and scrutinizes the imperialist British perspectives and policies of Iraq. It seems that even love and marriage could not escape the ramifications of foreign interference, resulting in qualms and suspicions among families. Thus, this dubiety ignites events that transform the legacy of generations to come.

Ibrahim Haddad was an esteemed doctor at London’s Guy Hospital in 1937. While he lived a comfortable life, the London frost and casual xenophobia kept him yearning for his historic and sultry Iraq.

One day, wrapped in the loneliness unique to ex-pats, he approaches a young nurse at his hospital, Diane Cutler. Their union stupefies both families. Diane’s British family refers to Ibrahim as her foreigner. The predictable and vitriolic remarks on Diane’s freedom and the religion of their hypothetical children are spewed out.

Once in Iraq, Diane is constantly viewed by her in-laws as an interloper in their family and country. The animosity never fizzled out as British and American interference in Iraq amplified throughout the decades. Although she settles in Baghdad, birthing three children and becoming intimate with the traditions of the East, Diane’s attitude of British superiority quietly germinates within her. 

In her first year of marriage, she is hired to be the nanny for the Iraqi Royal family. During her brief tenure as nanny and confidant to three-year-old Prince Faisal, she has a friendship with a British Embassy officer, Duncan Claybourne.

Ibrahim is dubious of this man, disapproving of any relationship with him. But the King soon dies in a car accident; rumours abound that it was an assassination attempt and that Diane and Duncan have colluded to advance British interests. Her friendship with Duncan and this speculation about her role as a British spy cling onto her for the rest of her life, marriage, and through the lives of her children like a spectral shadow.

This intergenerational drama is deftly written with graceful prose and psychological acuity. Ibrahim and his family, and later on their children, candidly make it known that British involvement is unwelcome in their country.

Diane’s British identity fails to hold the weight she thought it would. As her maternal attachment to the young prince Faisal swells, so does her reverence for the Iraqi monarchy. But in the opulent palace, she learns the open secrets of the collective Iraqi consciousness. The monarchy is considered a British institution, a puppet performing for Western avarice.

Even Ghazi, the King of Iraq, has had enough of having the heels of foreigners on their necks. His death is swathed in layers of gossip and conspiracy theories. Whether it was a simple car accident or an act of malice is not the point of concern. Instead, it exposes the modern despair of post-colonial societies, lost in the limbo of rapacious foreign interest, despotic governments, police states, and waning hope for autonomy.

"Loudon pens the history of Western involvement in Iraq, dating back to the 1930s, with stunning acumen and imagination"

We often read the stories of those who bemoan the reverberations of Western bigotry. But through the supercilious and naive Diane, Loudon has given us a distinctive interpretation in which the self-proclaimed colonial excellence is directly challenged. She fell in love with the notion of an oriental adventure that she hoped Ibrahim would offer her.

Once in Baghdad, however, her porcelain beauty and the lineage of a British Admiral father melted under the heat of Iraqi indignation. She came to represent the empire of her birth to her chosen Iraqi family and neighbours.

A tug-of-war between her loyalty to Britain and her Iraqi family interminably ensues, and this conflict transcends into her children’s lives. Mona reflects on Diane’s lack of tact as she never stops mourning the monarchy in a time and place where royalism is tantamount to an armed insurrection. 

Living in Iraq, bearing children of Iraqi blood, and witnessing the beauty of its resilience and the disrepair wrought by the West, has done little to shift Diane’s ignorance. 

So in the face of political intrigue, polemics, and violence, the Haddad family narrative is a tragic and elegant caricature of the realities of Iraq. Diane’s instance of remaining remiss to the concerns of the Iraqi people and offering absolution to the British proves caustic. She could never separate herself and Britain; coalescing herself with her country and defending her country meant protecting herself and her identity.

Her narrow, callous, and unsophisticated obstinacy threatens to tear apart her children, leaving them in a nebulous state of displacement, alienation, and profound attachment to their Iraqi roots. She wants to rip into them and drag out their Britishness to prove their superiority, intelligence, and worth in this vestige of their heritage.

Loudon pens the history of Western involvement in Iraq, dating back to the 1930s, with stunning acumen and imagination. As we are pulled into the Haddad family’s story, the novel is riddled with subtle exchanges revealing the complexities of the unrest in the region.

The extent of pillaging of nations by Western interests surpasses Iraq, devouring countries and leaving the people to salvage what remains. They grapple with the refusal of Western values to reclaim their own traditions while rejecting their own violent and autocratic leadership.

As Diane laments a time considered by Iraq as a period of rotten corruption, colonialism, and foreign rule, the world around her rises up to disentangle itself from the consequences of plunder and deceit. Her tale is a testament that people will remain steadfast in their traditions and history to heal humanity.

Noshin Bokth has over six years of experience as a freelance writer. She has covered a wide range of topics and issues including covering the implications of the Trump administration on Muslims, the Black Lives Matters Movement, travel reviews, book reviews, and op-eds. She is the former Editor in Chief of Ramadan Legacy and the former North American Regional Editor of the Muslim Vibe.

Follow her on Twitter: @BokthNoshin