Babylon, Albion by Dalia Al-Dujaili
In her memoir Babylon, Albion, Dalia Al-Dujaili examines her personal and political relationship to the landscapes of her home and adopted countries
Babylon, Albion is an essayistic meditation on what it means to be native to a land. Dalia Al-Dujaili examines her personal relationship to the physical landscapes of Iraq, the country of her parents, and Britain, where she was born and raised. She deftly traverses between memoir, history, religion and mythology to construct a work that feels at once both deeply personal and also captures the existential questions that generations of immigrant children grapple with: where is my home? Can I lay claim to an adoptive country?
Babylon, Albion is undergirded by rigorous research, personal wisdom and descriptive prose, although it does at times feel like a premature work. Al-Dujaili invokes the seasons of her personal life, from childhood into early adulthood, but there is a sense that this might have been a deeper work with the twin gifts of experience and retrospect. Yet her writing is lyrical, and she brings a variety of landscapes to life. The most poignant descriptions are the intimate moments between Al-Dujaili and her parents. Al-Dujaili describes her family’s garden as a ‘little Eden here in Surrey’s suburbia’ where her mother has miraculously nurtured an Iraqi fig tree into existence from a small cutting. She does this because it ‘reminds me of home’ in Iraq. There are, she tells us, many profound ways in which home is preserved and reconstructed in foreign lands.
