“Seattle runs faster than a river and inevitably changes”
Mortada Gzar moved from Iraq to Seattle – via the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa – in search of lost love. His new memoir traces this journey circuitously. To quote Paul Constant’s Seattle Times interview, “As a five-year Capitol Hill resident, Gzar writes beautifully about Seattle at a pre-pandemic moment in which it was growing at a quicker rate than almost any other American city. ‘Seattle runs faster than a river and inevitably changes,’ he writes, adding, ‘there are millions of Seattles that take turns here. I feel this while I walk the amazing streets in the heart of the city or its outskirts. I sense its skin corroding and another skin growing, only to be shed and replaced again.’”
Addressed to unlikely audiences from new roommates to Heraclitus the three-legged dog and Richard Beyers’s clothing-covered statue People Waiting for the Interurban in Fremont, Gzar tells his story to his new city as a means of understanding it himself. From idylls like the brief days he spent falling in love with Morise in Basra to the horrific abuses he suffered as a young gay man growing up in Iraq, the story surprises at every turn, wrenching the heart and delighting the imagination in equal measure.
Seeing Seattle through the eyes of a newly arrived immigrant, I fell in love with it anew – and also cringed with shame about the injustices that prevail here. Leaving Iraq offered freedom of expression, but our wild income inequality, racism, and xenophobia is no utopia. As an author writing from two cultures at once, Mortada Gzar is a human embodiment of UNESCO’s vision of cultural exchange. I’m in Seattle, Where Are You? is an Iraqi memoir – translated from Arabic by award-winner William M. Hutchins – and it is also an American one. From the relative safety of his home in Capitol Hill, Gzar can reveal truths impossible to publish in Iraq, as well as those he faces seeking permanent employment, kinship, and stability here in the Emerald City.
Join Seattle City of Literature on Tuesday, June 22, at 6pm Pacific, for a conversation between Mortada Gzar, translator William Hutchins, and moderator Christopher Merrill director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa . More information and tickets for this free event here.
Gabriella Page-Fort is co-owner and book buyer at Hex Enduction Records & Books in Lake City, Seattle, and Editorial Director of Amazon Crossing, an imprint publishing international writers and the publisher of ’m in Seattle, Where Are You. She is editor-in-chief of the Hex Enduction Quarterly and plays in local bands Dragon, Tissue and Stickers. Gabi is a board member on the Seattle City of Literature board.
Disclosure: Seattle City of Literature is a recipient of an Amazon Literary Partnership grant.
