Between Two Rivers - Book Fundraiser

After a few years of caring for my dearly departed mum and recovering from several car accidents, I’m moving forward with my goal of completing my research and chapter writing for my book in progress Between Two Rivers. Your kind donations will help fund subsistence and travel costs.

My latest book, a follow-up to Dancing in the No-Fly Zone http://www.hadaniditmars.com/books/index.html that chronicled pre and post invasion culture in Iraq, employs heritage as a narrative device to tell the story of present-day Iraq. It will be a travelogue juxtaposing ancient sites and contemporary culture. As my mother’s diagnosis of ALS bisected my research, my narratives fused. My research trips to Iraq became simultaneous quests to save ancient and sacred sites and my own mother. Sufis, priests, imams, Yezidi elders all gave me special amulets and prayers written on paper and meant to be swallowed with water- but by the time I returned, my mother could no longer swallow – so she slept with the prayers under her pillow.

When I last returned to Iraq for a reading, I told the audience, “When your mother dies, strangers offer their condolences. ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ they say. But when Iraq was bombed and looted and its treasures stolen, did anyone say they were sorry? Well I send you my condolences Iraq. I am sorry for your loss. For Iraq is like my mother. She is the cradle of civilization where language, law, and architecture were born. Iraq is everyone’s mother.”

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SYNOPSIS

Two decades after the invasion of Iraq, Hadani Ditmars returns to the troubled land to chronicle its beauty and fragility via world heritage sites on the brink of disappearing. Through the lens of Noor, a young Iraqi Christian translator she befriends in Erbil, who saved his family from ISIS by escaping in the local church's hearse, and then seeks asylum like so many young Iraqis - in Europe, she discovers how sacred and historic sites have become touchstones for a whole new generation of refugees, as climate change and corruption rival extremism in the nation’s demise.

Evoking the memory of her Orthodox Christian great-grandparents, who fled Ottoman purges in Syria for a village near Haida Gwai in 1906, her travelogue of sacred sites becomes a personal quest to save her mother, dying in Canada of ALS, and with her the matrilineal line that connects her ancestrally to the lands of Bilad al Shams. The prognosis is rather grim, but she persists, guidebook in hand, as both her mother and the region, as she had once known them, begin to vanish.

In the face of every displaced Iraqi woman she meets, she sees the face of her mother and her grandmothers. She realizes that Noor, a young Orthodox Christian fleeing brand new pogroms, bears an uncanny resemblance to her great-grandfather Najeeb, who also fled the region as a young man over a century ago and shares a name with the new Archbishop of Mosul who hosted the Pope. Grasping at relics, often tilting at windmills but hoping for renewal, she and her Iraqi travel companions embark on often dangerous but necessary journeys that reveal both the ancient heart of a long-suffering land, as well as the author's and the world's connection to its heritage.