Iraq

Iraq is named in the memoir’s account of the Gulf War’s outbreak, a public emergency that briefly places the narrator’s private anguish beside the prospect of mass violence. The country also forms part of the war’s geography of anticipated danger: the narrator waits for events whose consequences are forecast but still unknown, while insisting that this uncertainty cannot be transformed into romantic fantasy.

The war and its uncertain consequences

On 6 February 1991, the narrator records that the conflict between Iraq and the Western coalition has broken out. Propagandists call it a clean war, but the account immediately sets that description against reports of the scale of bombing and the effects of explosions on children in Baghdad. The contrast makes the reassuring label feel untenable without requiring the narrator to claim that she can know the full truth of events.

The narrator lists disasters still being awaited: a land offensive by the Western coalition, a chemical attack by Saddam Hussein, or a possible bombing in a Paris department store. These are possibilities, not events she says have occurred. Iraq is thus presented through an anxious interval between prediction and confirmation, in which the inability to know what comes next becomes part of the war’s experience at a distance.

Public anxiety beside private passion

The war recalls, for the narrator, the anxiety and frustrated desire for truth that accompanied her affair. She draws a firm distinction, however: the resemblance ends where fantasy begins. During the affair, uncertainty could be filled with imagined meanings; in the case of Iraq and the war, she says there is no room for fantasy or imagination. The juxtaposition links private waiting and public uncertainty while refusing to treat them as equivalent.

The passage also marks a change in the book’s frame. In February 1991, the narrator explains that although she could have ended the text and treated it as detached from time, the pages remain personal and open to events in her life and the world. The outbreak of war therefore enters not as background alone but as a reason to keep writing about the present, even when the adjective-level revision of an already finished text might otherwise seem sufficient.

A separate remembered place

Elsewhere in the memoir, the narrator returns to the Passage Cardinet in Paris, where she had undergone a clandestine abortion twenty years earlier. She hopes, vaguely, that revisiting this place and trauma might cancel her present grief. The return does not alter her grief, but she is glad to have taken the initiative and revived what she calls an act of despoilment, also caused by a man.

The remembered site has changed: the plaque naming the passage is partly erased, its façades have been restored, and the former resident who accompanied the narrator toward the nearest station is no longer there. The narrator wonders whether the difference between past reality and literature lies partly in disbelief that she herself once occupied that scene. Her questions about returning to an abortion site and about writing’s capacity to make such experiences recognizable turn this recollection into an inquiry into memory and testimony. Iraq and the abortion site are not presented as connected places; their juxtaposition in the memoir instead shows how public violence and intimate histories can enter the same unfinished act of writing.