Living through war is an experience of surreal dissonance. War ruptures reality and destroys its continuity, so there’s no bridge between life before and after. This is more than just the normal passage of time. War breaks reality, exchanging your normal life for one battered and bloodied by trauma. Bachtyar Ali, a Kurdish novelist, poet, and intellectual from Iraq, explores how war has ruptured his homeland in The Last Pomegranate Tree. Translated by Kareem Abdulrahman, the novel offers a part-surreal, part-grittily realistic history of violence in Iraqi Kurdistan and the lives this violence has upended. 

What is this history? Briefly: Iraqi Kurdistan was a minority ethnic region in Iraq where, as with every Kurdish area in the Near East, ethnic Kurds had their rights circumscribed and were oppressed. In 1988, after Kurdish peshmerga fighters revolted against him, Saddam Hussein began a genocidal campaign of retribution. During the Anfal, villages were destroyed across the Kurdish countryside, and bombs and chemical warfare left hundreds of thousands dead. In 1991, following the first Gulf War, the Kurds rose up and gained uneasy autonomy. Then, in the early 1990s, a civil war broke out, creating thousands more casualties. 

It’s in this world, after the genocide and the uprising, during the civil war, that Ali’s novel begins. The novel’s narrator, Muzufar-i Subhdam, is a peshmerga fighter who has been jailed for twenty-one years in a remote desert prison where, he says, “year by year, all my memories turned to sand.” 

Not all his memories, however. He knows he has a son, Saryas-i Subdham, and he has spent the past twenty-one years wondering about the boy’s life. When Muzufar is released, it is to the home of his friend, one of the Kurdish leaders of the uprisings. Although this friend is a fictional character, here is where the line between fiction and reality begins to blur. Saddam appears in the book, and the Anfal happened, but Ali’s Kurdistan is fictionalized, made more mythical — barely. For reasons that make sense as the book goes on, Ali plays with magical realism while keeping the region’s grinding poverty and violence front and center.  

Muzufar wants to find his son, and in doing so he leaves the house; he’s out in the world for the first time in decades. Finding his son involves unraveling other mysteries and telling other stories. Indeed, the whole book consists of Muzufar recounting his story with recursive flashbacks to the stories of others. 

One of those stories centers on Muhammed the Glass-Hearted, who has a literal glass heart and is searching the mysteries of his friendship with Saryas-i Subhdam — mysteries that drive the story but only become clear as the book moves on. A powerful flood, which drowns many in the unnamed city, whisks him away. He arrives at a house inhabited by two sisters clad in white who have pledged never to marry. He falls in love with one of them, essentially with a coin flip, they say no as a pair, and his heart shatters. 

The menacing whimsy of the flood and the otherworldly glass heart are out of the magical realism playbook. But this episode is more or less the only instance of the fantastic in the book. Even the sisters, for all their strangeness, are ordinary people; even though some think they are witches, they do nothing more mysterious than bind themselves in shared loneliness. 

The story of Muhammed the Glass-Hearted backs up, and we see how it intersects with Saryas, the lost son, whose village is razed in the chaos of the Anfal. On the road, while fleeing, the novel’s main characters meet as children of the war:

And so Saryas-i Subhdam and Muhammed the Glass-Hearted meet each other in a torrential downpour, among hundreds of broken-down lorries and trucks, amid the shrieking of women and girls and the screaming of men, all terrified of daybreak and the soldiers it will bring.

A third member of their party, a blind beggar boy, convinces them to help him find the eponymous last pomegranate tree. It’s atop a cliff. He believes that if he sleeps in front of it, his sight will return—another hint of magic. It’s no spoiler to reveal that he remains blind, but the friends find magic of a different sort. The boys go on their quest because their souls are “rich in imagination on a night when reality was sinking its ugly teeth into people’s bodies.” And the tree, located on a clifftop where the sky seems close enough to touch, is almost otherworldly, “a place where one feels the strange sense both of the world’s limits and of infinity. The pomegranate tree has grown on the border of two kingdoms, the realm of reality and the realm of dreams.”

Here, I think, is this book’s heart. There are mysteries, there are motivations, there are things that happen, but they all do so somewhere in the historic rupture created by war, which Ali presents as somewhere between reality and dream. It’s not an exercise in fablemaking, really, but an evocation of how war splits life into something before and something after.  

War mutates and disfigures. Violence and death, the destruction of towns, the demolition of families—these things sink claws into people, barbing and binding them. One of the most horrifying passages in the book comes in a long, Stygian journey through a hospital where young burn victims are housed in the Children of the Embers ward. These are deep horrors of war, as Saryas describes children whose “bodies had melted like candle wax” and “spilled over beds like rubber that had cooled but never placed into a mold.” With their eyes “filled with embers” and their breath “like the heat from a blazing furnace,” they carry the war within them. 

And yet there is life. Of one of the children, a boy named Black Star, who served as a guide, Saryas says:

I couldn’t tell from his face if Black Star was happy. In burning his skin, the fire had removed his capacity to show his emotions, but in his voice I could detect the secret and profound contentment of his soul, which the fire couldn’t reach. 

Hidden away in the hospital ward, these children have been diverted from the paths they might have followed, the lives they might have lived. What life might have been and what war leaves it as are two different worlds. 

With charm and grace, with anger and imagination, Ali explores these worlds. He shows what decades of violence have done to Kurdistan—the depredations of Saddam, the corruption of politicians, the brutalization of the population. The book is unflinching: violence and cruelty really are everywhere. But life also contains the sublime beauty of the last pomegranate tree. It’s not magical. It’s not outside this world. It’s just hard to find through the chaos. 

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The author of more than 40 volumes of fiction, poetry, and criticism, Bachtyar Ali is widely considered one of the most prominent Kurdish writers by readers in Kurdistan as well as in the Kurdish diaspora, and he is one of the few Kurdish writers whose work has been widely translated. In 2017, he was the first writer in a non-European language to win the Nelly Sachs Prize, joining past recipients Milan Kundera, Margaret Atwood and Javier Marías. In 2009, Ali received the first HARDI Literature Prize, part of the largest cultural festival in the Kurdish part of Iraq. In 2014, he was awarded the Sherko Bekas Literature Prize.

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Kareem Abdulrahman is a translator who has worked as a Kurdish media and political analyst for the BBC. He is also the translator of Ali’s I Stared at the Night of the City (Periscope, 2017), the first Kurdish novel to appear in English. He lives in London.

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Brian O’Neill is an independent writer out of Chicago focusing on books, international politics, and the Great Lakes. He blogs infrequently at shootingirrelevance.com, and can be found tweeting on books, politics, and baseball @oneillofchicago.