Lutfiya al‑-;-Dulaimi never belonged to the counterfeit Iraq

Lutfiya al‑-;-Dulaimi, the Lady of Saturn, was one of those rare spirits that refuse to be contained in a biography, a book´-or-even a single sentence. A woman who wrote her life the way impossible novels are written: believable only because they are honest to the point of pain. Whenever I return to her novel The Ladies of Saturn, I do not find myself before a mere work of fiction. It was never just literature-;- it was an early elegy for a country losing its face, and for women who paid the price of ruin long before the ruin was complete. It was a wide mirror we lacked the courage to look into -dir-ectly. Anyone who reads that novel does not end with Lutfiya ’s sorrow alone, but with the labyrinth into which Iraqi women were thrown the moment grave‑-;-diggers and sect‑-;-merchants seized the keys of the country and began broadcasting their signal over the frequency of an Iraq left suspended, a signal no one wished to receive.
I remember finishing the novel with a genuine fear for dear Umm Ayyar, a fear like seeing a shadow move in an empty room. I called her that day, shaken, as if the novel were a prophecy meant for her alone. She answered in her calm voice: “Don’t worry, dear Karam, I’m fine.” But the truth is that she had not been fine since the country plunged into the abyss, since American soldiers stormed her gentle home and left it as houses are left when their owners vanish. There was no longer a place for her in a homeland that had lost its features. She left occupied Iraq, lived a few years in Paris, then spent the rest of her life in Jordan. She never returned to her Baghdad, until death drew the last breath from her in Amman last week, to be buried beside her late friend Fuad al‑-;-Tikrili, as if the two had agreed to resume a conversation interrupted years ago.
Lutfiya al‑-;-Dulaimi was loyal to the essence of writing, not its surface. In her long‑-;-running weekly column in Al‑-;-Arab (London), she exposed the vulgar culture that tried to adorn itself with borrowed phrases, and she stripped bare those who sought to normalise their betrayal under the banners of sectarian “culture” in the so‑-;-called “democratic Iraq.” She knew that the real Iraq was being assassinated daily, and that a counterfeit Iraq was being imposed on us as an inescapable fate. That is why she wrote without hesitation: “I do not think of returning to my first embrace, Baghdad. How can I visit what was once my twin soul but has now become a mirror I cannot bear to look into? The Baghdad I knew is no longer ours. It has vanished beneath layers of dust, absence, and ruin, dissolved in the noise of generators and the smoke of shanty towns.”
This was not a passing line-;- it was the testament of a writer who knew that cities, too, can betray.
What kind of Iraqi era produced The Ladies of Saturn? A time when Ibtisam Abdullah cared for us like a tender mother, and when Lutfiya al‑-;-Dulaimi stood as an example we lifted our heads toward, drawing from her the bank of dreams that shaped our writing. Now death takes them one after another, without apologising to our memory, without giving us the chance to tell them that we still write by the light they left behind.
Her last messages to me were soaked in that ageless Iraqi sorrow, a sorrow like dust that cannot be wiped from memory. She spoke of everything that had become counterfeit in a country that lost its features the way a face loses its shadow. The Lady of Saturn, who taught us as children how to read and how to tremble before a sentence written with sincerity, the one we read until infatuation, until her voice became part of our earliest consciousness, departed with a quietness that felt like time’s betrayal. Death took her while she still had her back turned to a Baghdad that was no longer hers, a Baghdad that had betrayed its image in her heart.
And Lutfiya was not preoccupied with writing alone. She was a woman who understood that literature is incomplete without the wisdom of daily life. Few know her book Humanity and Living Food: A Return to Nature, which she published under her full name, Lutfiya Suhail Najm, as if she wished to place her true signature on a deeper relationship with life, one that transcended fiction into a personal philosophy: to live as we write, and to write as we breathe.
I recall a gathering more than thirty years ago with her and the late short‑-;-story writer Musa Kureidi. Abu Aws was lamenting himself that day: “How can we call ourselves storytellers when we don’t know the types of flowers´-or-distinguish the scents of herbs and perfumes?” Lutfiya laughed and replied with her familiar grace: “This reproach is yours alone, Abu Aws … for I adore everything you blame yourself for not knowing.” I did not realise then that I was sitting between two writers who would leave the world in succession, he dying under the choke-hold of the blind sanctions, and she in exile after refusing to be part of the counterfeit Iraq. They left behind something like the trace of perfume: unseen … but lingering.
“The departure of great figures is a natural part of life, but the absence of equally creative voices, as the inevitability of generations and the eternity of words would suggest, explains the dimming that devours Iraq’s memory.”
My friend, the short‑-;-story writer Mustafa Salem, was right when he commented on my elegy for Umm Ayyar. Stopping reading is a hidden form of creativity, but it is also a hidden form of death. When we stop reading, we leave texts alone in the dark, and we let writers die a second time.
Lutfiya al‑-;-Dulaimi is gone, but her language has not gone. It remains like a faint light at the end of a corridor-;- all we need is to reach out our hand to see it. It remains because she wrote with sincerity, because she refused to belong to the counterfeit Iraq, and because writing, when it is true, does not die … it merely changes its shape and continues within us.

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