20. Whatever Else it Was, Saddam’s Novel Was Not Subtle
Although Saddam had his maudlin side, it wasn’t a subtle kind of maudlin. The plot of Zabibah and the King is as unsubtle an allegory as it is possible to cram into a novel. Zabibah represents the Iraqi people. The rapist husband represents America. The crime represents the United States’ ousting of Iraq from Kuwait in 1991 and is dated January 17th – the same date as the commencement of Operation Desert Storm. The heroic King Hussein is Saddam Hussein.
To nobody’s surprise, the Iraqi dictator’s novel did extremely well in Iraq. Knowing that they had better, Iraqi critics praised Zabibah as a literary masterpiece. It became a domestic best-seller, with over a million copies flying off the shelves, and a musical appeared in Iraqi theaters. Saddam’s sycophants in the Iraqi Ministry of Information turned the novel into a twenty-part television series, which aired on and was frequently rerun on Iraqi TV.