For most Americans, Fallujah conjures up images of dead Americans, their bodies burned in the street—images upon which the liberatory dreams of even the most starry-eyed were shattered. The name of the city is synonymous with—indeed, it is a metonym for—violent ruin.

But Fallujah is more than a figure of speech. It is a city—one that existed long before invasion and occupation, with its own history and loves and complications, births and deaths, and which will exist in some form or the other long after the memory of America. I Remember Fallujah, the first novel by the French-Iraqi journalist Feurat Alani, reminds us that Fallujah is not only a city where Americans died, but also one where Iraqis lived. 

Both elegant and wounded, Alani’s novel could be described as a multi-generational saga set against a backdrop of political turmoil. But while it is multi-generational, and while the politics of Iraq, and the disorientation and alienation of emigration, do form the backdrop against which its characters live, the novel is more intimate than that—and more sharply observed. It is not grand, and it is more honest for being so. When lives are chewed up without meaning, Alani is sensitive enough to let us know that means something. 

The novel is one of memory, and the search for memories. Its primary narrator, Euphrates Ahmed, born and raised in France, is tending to his cancer-ridden father, Rami. Born in Fallujah, where he lived before emigrating to Paris, Rami also suffers from an amnesia so deep he can no longer recognize his son. It is this loss that allows him to open up, to tell his son his own life’s story, which he had always kept quiet, apart from wine-drunk moans and hidden sobs. 

As the novel unfolds, the perspective rotates between father and son. Half the book is dedicated to Euphrates, who is trying to understand his relationship with his father, a loving and challenging one in which his father was a quiet and broken man who never talked about his past. In the other half of the book, the amnesiac tells his story in crystalline detail. 

Rami grew up in Iraq during the monarchy and British occupation, after WWII. Fallujah at the time was poor but self-sufficient, a relative backwater compared to Baghdad, and not much of a political hotspot. His childhood was marked by his mother’s early death, his father’s remarriage, and the cruelty of his stepmother and brutal new brothers. This is not cheerful, but it is also not unheard of. These things happen. 

In one of his most vivid memories, Rami is awakened on the day of his mother’s death by black-clad wailers, screaming professional mourners, and without yet knowing or letting himself think of his loss, he leaves the house, wanders, and ends up near the Euphrates, the great river that defines his town. One common rite of passage into manhood is to jump off the bridge and dive into the dangerous, whirlpool-ridden river chasing thrown watermelons. His older friend, Hatem, encourages Rami to jump for the first time, to become a man. While doing so, Rami nearly drowns. 

Suddenly, alone in the silence of the depths, Rami wondered whether he’d found the exact locus of the strange attraction the exercised over him, the ideal place to stop hearing those shrill voices […] Submerged in terror, sucked back into the river’s belly, he paddled with all his might, using his arms, his legs, and his despair. With every breath interrupted by water, Rami took in mouthfuls of the Euphrates, aware of his heart racing and his lungs screaming. He could no longer hear Hatem’s cries nor the litany of the black she-wolves. Where was courage? Had he finally become a man?

This quest for courage, for manhood, defines the early part of Rami’s life. He and Hatem grow up and get involved in leftist revolutionary politics, which is also a way for Rami to leave the abusive household where he can’t escape his stepmother’s cruelty. The young men are overjoyed when the monarchy crumbles. But as they continue their political actions, a black cloud overtakes them. 

That cloud, that pestilence, that all-erasing storm, is Saddam Hussein, who consolidates control and remakes Iraq in his own cruel image. Hussein looms large in Alani’s novel as a reminder that the book takes place in the real world. It is no allegory or fable. And while the insane and bloody chaos of the American occupation may have overshadowed Ba’athist depredations, it did not erase them. 

In this context, friends disappear. Secret police are everywhere. A knock on the door could mean the end of your life. Hussein hunted leftists, seeing any revolutionary as a threat against his new monarchy. Rami fears ending up in “the last room,” where he may never again glimpse the sun. 

But he somehow makes it out, and has a son who has only glimpsed his father’s life. Euphrates, named after the beloved river that nearly killed his father, has a complicated relationship with Iraq. It is his heritage, but it was never discussed, although throughout his childhood he picked up hints. A briefcase containing different identity cards is the enigma of his childhood, its old smell the madeleine of his life’s mysteries. 

Euphrates’s father lives in a minor key, remaining emotionally shut down. Euphrates’s life seems more straightforward, familiar. He is an outsider, French by birth but marked different by race. He makes friends in the Arab community, gets in some trouble, has difficulties during the 1991 War, wonders about his father. A pre-2003 visit to Iraq, where he sees his family, is memorable and important to his sense of self as well as to his understanding of Iraq, but gets him no closer to understanding his father. A later trip, to Fallujah after the chaos but before peace, is more searing, showing the violence that marks everyday life there. 

Euphrates’ story is keenly observed and well told, but there is nothing that makes the reader bolt up. This is, as it should be, a faithful reflection of ordinary life—and it is one of the key insights of I Remember Fallujah. Paris is a city where people, for the most part, live and die in ordinary ways. Fallujah once was that kind of place too. But the machinations of Saddam Hussein and the violent imperial imagination of America turned the city into a place where cruelty is currency, where life can be erased by a bomb or a whisper overheard by a snitch—where life, if it didn’t end, could be muted. 

For Rami, life has been muted in Paris as well. The novel opens with a brief chapter of Rami talking to French policeman who wanted him to snitch on other leftists and promises to make his life easy if he does. But he won’t, even though they tell him, chillingly, “If you won’t collaborate, don’t dream, sir.”

Rami didn’t collaborate, an act of extreme courage. And so he had to forget his vision for a better Iraq, a free country for free people, and a better life for his family. He also had to forget his life in a city that was a real place, not just material for headlines and talking points, the backdrop of images of charred corpses and distant horror. He had to forget what he fought for. His life was amnesia, until, at the end, he lost his ability to forget. 

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Feurat Alani is a French journalist and documentary filmmaker who has spent more than seventeen years reporting across the Middle East. He is the author of two graphic novels, and his work has appeared in a variety of international outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Le Monde Diplomatique, France 24, Mediapart, Al Jazeera, Arte, Canal Plus, and Radio Canada. His debut novel, I Remember Fallujah, won the Arab Literature Prize and the Senghor First Novel Prize, and was a finalist for the Goncourt First Novel Prize. He lives in France and Dubai.

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Adriana Hunter studied French and Drama at the University of London. She has translated more than ninety books, including Marc Petitjean’s The Heart: Frida Kahlo in Paris and Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly and Eléctrico W, winner of the French-American Foundation’s 2013 Translation Prize in Fiction. She lives in Kent, England.

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Brian O’Neill is a freelance writer in Chicago. He is a reviewer specializing in small presses, novels in translation, foreign policy, the Midwest, and regional histories, and he also writes about baseball. Follow him @oneillofchicago on Twitter and Bluesky.