I Read Saddam Hussein's Romance Novel So You Don't Have To

being meguca is suffering

From Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, a TV show you should consume instead of reading Zabiba and the King.

[content note: rape, abuse, rape apologism, sexism]

Saddam Hussein wrote a romance novel.

You, like me, might be suspicious that this is a hoax. But if it is, it fooled Wikipedia (which in turn has credible cites like the New York Times).

Let me begin by providing some context. I like bad fiction. I used to go to weekly MST3K night at my college. I’ve seen The Room multiple times. I read and enjoyed the entire Divergent series. I read the Eye of Argon. I have read a third of My Immortal. For the love of God, I have seen the Star Wars Holiday Special. Please take me seriously when I say:

Do not read Zabiba and the King. It is not good. It is not so bad it’s good. It is not “well, if I salvage two and a half characters and some of the worldbuilding, there’s something there” good. It is not a wild expression of someone’s id, unfettered by the bounds of plausibility or good taste. It does not provide glimpses into a worldview so utterly bizarre that you want to spend hours poking it with a stick. By God, it is not even poorly spelled.

I misspent my teenage years in fanfiction sporking communities, so I know that at this point I’m supposed to come up with some kind of long, elaborate metaphor about exactly how torturously awful the experience of reading Zabiba and the King is. But I’ve also been in fanfiction sporking communities long enough to know that a metaphor like that is advertising. You see the half-dead twitching mouse and you say “guys! Look at this mouse! Isn’t this disgusting? I think I can see its spleen!” And I cannot in good conscience do anything that might cause someone to buy Zabiba and the King.

Friend of the Blog Yafah gave Zabiba and the King to me as a present for Christmas. The book is not even two hundred pages long. I am writing this post now, because it took me this long to finish the book, because every moment I spent reading Zabiba and the King was an effort of will akin to that required to clean my bathroom floor grout with a toothbrush while my headphones are broken.

The plot of Zabiba and the King is that the king (Saddam Hussein) falls in love with Zabiba (the Iraqi people). “Zabiba” is presumably Arabic for Mary Sue, because she is beautiful, intelligent, wise, kind to everyone, and loved by everyone except people who specifically hate her because of how good she is. Zabiba loves the king for who he is and not his crown. The king loves Zabiba for being hot, but that’s okay because men are shallow and the crown is only one part of the king’s physical form while Zabiba’s appearance is all of her form.

Saddam Hussein forgot the plot of his own book and so gave us two mutually contradictory explanations of how Zabiba and the King fell in love. In one version, the a merchant named Hiskil has a palace like the king’s and has married the king’s father’s concubines, in the hopes that if he looks like a king and lives like a king and has wives like a king he will become a king. Leaving Hiskil’s house in disgust, the king encounters Zabiba’s hut, which although small and without luxury reflected her virtue, and then they fell in love.

In the other version, the king gave some state land to a courtier, who said he was making delicious honey. Actually, the courtier was mismanaging it and the honey was bad, so the king took the land back. Zabiba’s father worked the land, so while the king was doing the entire process he ran into Zabiba a lot and they fell in love.

The book devotes more page space to various people not recognizing Zabiba when she visits the king’s palace this one time than it does to the entire process of Zabiba and the King falling in love.

We now turn to Saddam Hussein’s favorite topic, the one that takes up the vast majority of the page space of Zabiba and the King: Platonic dialogues between the king and Zabiba about political philosophy.

Saddam Hussein is, apparently, a Kantian. He believes the most important part of kinging is not treating people as things. The king should be honest and just and pure, and become one with the people with all his life and thoughts, and place a high goal of achievement before them, and then lead them to that goal without compromising his principles.

The king, Zabiba argues, is functionally under house arrest, because he’s locked up in his palace by his guards. The palace doesn’t have windows, because windows would make it harder to guard, which means that it is stuffy and never has outside air or a view of the outside. This is a METAPHOR. Saddam Hussein is VERY GOOD AT METAPHORS. The walls of the palace, which the king thinks protects him, don't let him see light or breathe fresh air and will keep the people from hearing him when he’s attacked. ALSO A METAPHOR. Appreciate the subtlety and cleverness of Saddam Hussein’s symbolism. You could write a paper about it, probably. The windowless walls make the palace so gloomy and foreboding that it breeds demons, which cause greed and jealousy and powerhungriness and betrayal. METAPHOR. Or possibly an ACTUAL RELIGIOUS BELIEF, I’m not sure.

Throughout these discussions, the king makes Socrates’s interlocutors seem positively talkative. “Yes, Zabiba,” he says. “Of course, Zabiba. That seems right to me, Zabiba. You are so wise, Zabiba.”

The king gives Zabiba a horse. Zabiba thinks that the king is generous, but then remembers that actually only The People are truly generous. If The People give away things, they will become poorer, and kings are so rich that they will not become poorer if they give gifts.

You may be wondering at this point if the king is legitimately Saddam’s self-insert, because he is a dumbass. The CIA thought he was, so it depends on how much you trust the CIA’s literary criticism skills.

The queen is jealous of Zabiba because the king loves her best and makes fun of her for being a commoner. Zabiba responds:

I am the daughter of my people, and that quality, having encompassed both my appearance and my substance, became my clear and definite quality. The customs and traditions which the people do not respect are not genuine. Though I am fortunate and proud to be loved by the king, the traditions and appearances that the people do not embrace cannot appeal to me. I have retained my substance and my external appearance, and combining these qualities I can offer my service to the ideas and traditions of the people.

The whole book is like this and this is why it took me six months to read.

Everyone claps. (I’m serious.) The queen says, “Enough of this philosophical talk! Speak in a language that we can all understand," which is the single sentiment I most agree with in Zabiba and the King.

queen: you think you’re better than everyone else
Zabiba: I never think I’m better than anyone because humility is a virtue

The queen gets outraged and kicks Zabiba out and then makes a joke about her. Everyone laughs at her for how weak-minded and inferior to Zabiba she is, but she thinks that they’re laughing at her joke, because she’s bad and way worse than Zabiba Sue.

The king shares his tragic backstory with Zabiba. His tragic backstory is that his dad had a lot of concubines. Also all of his dad’s concubines and his half-brothers hated him, and one of his dad’s concubines murdered his mom, but the king is pretty sure the bad part is that concubine thing.

Eventually, Zabiba gets depression. The king worries that this is because she is bored of their relationship.

Zabiba: the repetition of things doesn't make them boring, like, the sun rises every morning and it isn't boring
king: that is NOT the point. WHAT are you upset about

Zabiba refuses to answer. The king is like "well, a woman always hides her secrets from those closest to her and talks about them to people she's not close to. that is how women. women like telling other women's secrets but not their own" and decides to stop being worried about the depression.

Unfortunately, Zabiba’s depression comes from an actual serious problem. She’s married to a man who beats her and forces her into sex she doesn’t want. (This is a metaphor for America’s relationship with Iraq. Saddam Hussein is VERY GOOD AT METAPHORS.) Eventually she decides to test the king’s love by disclosing a little bit of what’s going on.

Zabiba: what would you do if you were forced into sex with someone and it felt like getting whipped?
king: I’m a king so that wouldn’t happen to me. The equivalent for kings of being raped is having someone invade your country. Like, hypothetically, if you had annexed a country, and a foreign country got angry and invaded you, and they kicked your ass in a couple of months and you had to give the country you annexed back, that would be like being raped, for a king. Hypothetically.

The king wonders if Zabiba’s husband has kissed her on the lips. He decides that he must not do that, because men only kiss women they love. There is also a discussion of whether spies are capable of love, in which the king opines that spies are agents of the king so they can love if the king can love.

In the midst of a Platonic dialogue about treason, one of the king’s relatives tries to kill him. Zabiba shields him with her own body. The king decides to live among the people because apparently all those demon-summoning metaphor walls aren’t even preventing assassination attempts. He immediately forgets he was going to do that three pages later but the thought was nice.

Zabiba: you should investigate the conspiracy and do a trial.
king: but then people will know that there was a conspiracy and do more conspiracies!
Zabiba: bad things don’t go away if you ignore them. also, you should arrest the queen because she ordered the assassination
king: :O women can do crimes????
Zabiba: you thought that your wife couldn’t do crimes, because you thought of her as a thing rather than a person, and this is why everyone should follow the categorical imperative

The queen, Zabiba says, should be put under house arrest and no one should say that she was involved in the crime-doing, because that would give people ideas. She should have one servant with a strict list of what actions are permitted, not a list of what actions are forbidden. If the king comes up with a list of forbidden actions then the queen will exploit it for loopholes.

With the brief excursion into having an actual plot concluded, we return to political philosophy.

king: why are you so wise, O Zabiba Sue?
Zabiba: because I’ve never fully had anything I wanted. It’s always partial and comes with a long wait. You are not wise, because you have everything you want the moment you want it, and everyone agrees with you in order to get things out of you. You are like a child whose father pretends to lose to him. Your victories have no value because they don’t result from your own work. You should live among the people so you can understand them fully
king: I’ve met commoners!
Zabiba: did you. or did you boss them around while they bowed to you
king: … the second thing.
Zabiba: you have never suffered, so how can you be expected to understand the experiences of your people, who have suffered?
king: Zabiba, what can I do to be a good king?
Zabiba: you must be honest and prioritize the people's interests over your own and learn to be the equal of your people
king: that’s too many. I wanted ONE thing
Zabiba: okay but you demand that your subjects obey you and not betray you and follow your orders and be brave in battle and not protest when you take away their land, right? so you should do the same number of things for them
king: oh Zabiba you’re so smart

Zabiba also holds that commoners and aristocrats can be wrong, but the will of the people is always right. The king can only find out the will of the people if he follows the rule of law.

Zabiba also thinks that the best person should rule, even if they are the son of a carpenter. Monarchy is like a cartel of tradespeople who keeps new people from entering a field by bribing the officials. But we can’t have a democracy. That’s going too far. Instead, there should be twenty or thirty emirs, selected from the most capable and thoughtful men, some of whom are commoners. The king should pay them so they don’t rob the people or try to get jobs (where they will always outcompete the commoners due to their status). When the king dies, the emirs will vote and select a new king.

We also learn that cooks are very important to palace intrigue, because they will make the king's favorite dish and then let you claim to have made it and then the king will love you better, or they can do that and then secretly put a rat in it or oversalt it and then the king will dislike you, or they can sneak a snake into the food your rival brought to the king and frame them for murder. The king got so tired of all this shit that he refused to see any of his concubines for longer than an hour so that they couldn’t feed him anything.

Zabiba: why do you have so many wives and concubines then. that seems like the core problem here
king: I don't have, like, that many concubines
Zabiba: the people think you have too many.
king: am I not allowed to disagree with them?
Zabiba: no, you have to agree with the people about everything if you want to be powerful
king: but I need many sons
Zabiba: sons do not compare to THE LOVE OF THE PEOPLE

Many kings have invited foreigners into their lands and served them. A king serving foreigners is shameful, because you’ve surrendered to the enemy of your people without fighting. Common people can break a contract if it’s not in their interest, but kings serving foreigners can't break the contract, so it is a worse kind of servitude. The people will be against the king if the king serves foreigners, but will forgive the king if he makes mistakes while trying to make his nation independent. Nevertheless, kings like it when the foreigners are in their land because they don’t have to serve the people because they’re busy serving the foreigners. They hope the foreigners will leave and then they can serve neither the people nor the foreigners. How does any of this follow? Your guess is as good as mine.

One of my beta readers said that this was all a METAPHOR, but I would say that it is not a METAPHOR and is just the literal political belief that Saddam Hussein actually has.

The book briefly turns into a sort of Muslim Jack Chick tract:

king: who is this Allah person? I have never heard of him
Zabiba: Allah created the entire world
king: what is Allah’s job, if he made everything? is he a blacksmith or carpenter?
Zabiba: Allah’s trade is power and majesty, which he uses to create everything
king: oh, Zabiba, you are so wise.
Zabiba: also, Allah is everywhere in the world at all times
king: that seems good. I haven’t seen my current god in a few weeks because I locked them in the hall closet and lost the keys

Briefly, there is some actual kissing in this alleged romance novel, but it immediately turns into a discussion into why the people’s needs should come before the king’s.

Zabiba doesn’t tell the king any more details of her abuse, because she’s worried the king will take it as flirting. “Aren’t they already in love and kissing?” you might ask. “What kind of person flirts by discussing how their husband beats them?” you might also ask. I do not know the answer to either of those questions.

Finally, she decides to explain to the king so that he can solve her problem. She says that her husband forces her into sex and beats her so hard that she miscarries all her children.

Zabiba: I’m glad the children stopped taking
king: But one of the purposes of life is having children!
Zabiba: not if you don’t want children

I did not leave anything out. That was the king’s first response to Zabiba telling him her husband abuses her.

We also learn in this conversation that prostitutes are no longer human and that you shouldn’t force your wife into sex because then she will stop being able to get pregnant.

Hiskil the merchant, The Only Other Person In This Book With A Name, reappears. Hiskil has extremely charming parties where they play a game where the men try to rape the women and the women fight back. Men brought their wives to those parties, which is horrible because men are gambling and drinking there and might hit on her. A properly jealous man never allows his wife to be near drunk or gambling men where she might be seduced. You would think that the horrible rape “game” would be a better reason to not take your wife to Hiskil’s rapeparties but that is not what Zabiba thinks. What’s worse, Hiskil invites fair-skinned blue-eyed people from far away to his rapeparties, instead of letting in people from his own country. If you do that, you no longer have anything sacred, anything pure, any shred of ethics, or anything at all.

Zabiba’s husband pressured her into going to Hiskil’s parties, but she refused. Instead, she decided she wanted to learn about these parties independently, so she disguised herself as a server. She didn’t gamble with the attendees or drink wine though, because it is a Sin. She also fought off all the rapists. This is how she became Wise and learned to understand the Will of the People (i.e. not rapeparties). I’m not sure if this is supposed to be an additional source of wisdom, or if Saddam Hussein forgot the explanation of Zabiba’s wisdom he provided earlier. Also, if men are being properly jealous and keeping women from rape parties, are they depriving their wives of Wisdom? Much to think about.

Eventually, the king persuades Zabiba to divorce her husband so they can marry.

king: and then once you’re divorced you can marry me!
Zabiba: no. the people might think I only talked to you to marry you. besides, as your wife I must obey you and will no longer be allowed to speak my mind or be your equal
king: but you will gain glory!
Zabiba: I prefer freedom to glory
king: you could try marrying me and see if you like it.
Zabiba: I would become corrupted by how nice it is to be queen and lose my principles. also, you can just forbid me to divorce you
king: so when you say you don’t want to marry me, what you mean is that you don’t want to be queen, not that you don’t want to live with me and love me for the rest of your life
Zabiba: that’s right.
king: SCORE!

The same day, Zabiba is kidnapped by bandits and raped. We have what is very possibly the best passage in this book:

Even an animal respects a man's desire, if it wants to copulate with him. Doesn't a female bear try to please a herdsman when she drags him into the mountains a it happens in the North of Iraq? She drags him into her den, so that he, obeying her desire, would copulate with her. Doesn't she bring him nuts, gathering them from the trees or picking them from the bushes? Doesn't she climb into the houses of farmers in order to steal some cheese, nuts, and even raisins, so that she can feed the man and awake in him the desire to have her?

A footnote informs me that this is probably a METAPHOR for Russia.

Zabiba worries that the king might think she didn’t resist to the utmost, or that she secretly wanted the rape (she doesn’t have any proof that she didn’t!), or that he will no longer love her because he loved her because she refused to surrender to him and she surrendered to her rapist. You might think that these are bizarre worries to have, given that she has been raped constantly by her husband for like a hundred pages by now, but apparently this is the first rape Zabiba has ever experienced and all the being violently forced into sex earlier was some other thing.

Zabiba concludes that she was raped because she had become the symbol of all women to the king, and someone who hates all women had raped her. She concludes that a soldier wouldn't have done it because his role is to protect his country and not to rape women, and a spy wouldn't do it because law enforcement agents respect the law and don't break it. Therefore it must be someone with a personal desire to harm her. She realizes it is… dun dun DUN… her husband!

Yeah, I don’t think that Zabiba is going to replace Sherlock Holmes any time soon.

Zabiba’s husband, it turns out, is working with Hiskil to overthrow the king. He is jealous because he hasn’t succeeded in overthrowing the king, so he decided to rape the king’s beloved! He would be like the king if he had the king’s beloved! You would think that he already had the king’s beloved, because they are married, but apparently not. Also, you would think that he could rape his wife without disguising himself as a bandit?

Original comic. Creator.

In the most based scene in the book, Zabiba goes home, pretends she had no idea who raped her, and tells the whole sad story to her husband while he squirms uncomfortably.

Zabiba: [sweetly] how did you get those injuries?
husband: um
Zabiba: let me bind them up for you, O Husband Whom I Love Who Would Definitely Not Dress Up As A Bandit And Rape Me

Then Zabiba goes back to the king, collapses on his chest, sobs, and does the one thing that can comfort her in her time of grief: a Platonic dialogue about political philosophy.

Violence always brings a horrendous amount of pain, independently of whether it is a man who rapes a woman, an army of enemies invading the nation, or a law being violated by those who spurn it. But it is even worse when one is betrayed to the point of humiliation, whether by a country or a human being.

This Is A Metaphor, In Case You Didn’t Notice.

Can a dead body be marred by the shame of rape? Can the shame of rape fall on the history of a country and its people when people are dying and there is no one in that nation with the strength to hold a weapon in his hands?

METAPHOR.

That ruler who allows 'rape' while he is still alive and his people are not destroyed by the rape, that ruler is marred by shame. His people, if they continue to submit to such a king, will be covered with shame as well. Yes, rape is unbearable for any soul, for the history of a nation, or for any free man. A betrayal of a king is bitter, but a betrayal against the people and the nation and its history is a hundredfold more bitter.

M E T A P H O R

The king wants to arrest the conspirators. Zabiba says no, because it would alert the conspirators that they’re on to them, and instead goes with the very stealthy and non-conspirator-alerting plan of arranging for hundreds of people to do a protest about the fact that she was raped.

In a completely surprising turn of events, the protest in fact does alert the conspirators that something is up. They attack the king, and the people rise up and kill all of them. The description of the battle takes about as much space in the book as it does in my summary. In the battle, Zabiba is mortally wounded. As she writes the king a letter in which she explains that marrying the king was the biggest dream of her heart. Fully half the letter is about how Zabiba wants the king to allow the people to address him by any name they like instead of with his titles.

Everyone is sad that Zabiba is dead. They dig up the body of her husband and stone it and throw garbage at it. They decide to have a new holiday, and every January 17 they will stone and throw garbage at the husband's body, and then go leave flowers at Zabiba’s grave. January 17 is when the first Gulf War started. Also, the king’s name is Arab. It turns out the real Mary Sue was the metaphors we made along the way. Or something.

The king announces that Zabiba divorced her husband before he died and they married. I’m not sure if the king is supposed to be lying here or if Saddam Hussein just forgot the plot of his own book again.

The people’s council meets to pick a new king, since the old King Arab was picked by foreign governments apparently. The first meeting involves someone saying that we should remember Zabiba, and then everyone claps and sobs. One person is not crying and everyone asks why; she says that it's because she's using all her strength remembering the goal for which Zabiba died! Mic drop! Everyone decides to bring in the portrait of Zabiba to inspire them and remind them of the main goal of the council (doing what Zabiba would have wanted).

You would think that we would be free from political philosophy, because Zabiba is dead. Unfortunately, we have about ten million billion years of council minutes to get through, which in a praiseworthy commitment to realism are exactly as dull as real-life council minutes. There’s an evil Jew who is the fourth character in the book with an actual name, everyone runs around saying shit like “I would prefer the government not be governed based on moral values because I want to bribe officials and threaten peasants to get rich,” everyone is clapping so hard that I’m looking around for Albert Einstein, it’s a bad time.

There is, however, weird sex stuff! I will tell you the weird sex stuff.

There is a man named Hunter-of-emirs, who is mute. Hunter-of-emirs used to work for an emir. The emir thought a girl was very hot, so he forced her father to make her marry him, even though the custom of the girl's people was that they married their cousins. (Cousin marriage is good because it keeps social differences to a minimum and makes family life stable.) The emir wanted to fuck her in the middle of the camp before they even had a wedding. She refused him. The emir told Hunter-of-emirs to tell her that the emir loved her and that she should have mercy on him and have sex with him, or he would murder her. Hunter-of-emirs was like "that seems like a terrible plan, dude.” The emir said that if she didn't submit to him and fuck him that night, Hunter-of-emirs should poison her, and if Hunter-of-emirs refused the emir would kill both of them. The lady told the emir that the tradition among her people is that a woman who marries an outsider stayed with him at his house as a guest for a month and he hosted her entire tribe for the whole month, before sex happens. If he didn’t do this, she would always feel like he raped her. The emir gave in, because… he was very against rape or something… which is why he previously threatened to kill her unless she had sex with him in the middle of the camp.

The emir cut out Hunter-of-emir’s tongue to keep him from telling anyone about the previous “I will murder my fiancee if she doesn’t fuck me in public” plan. Two weeks later the emir rebelled against the king. Hunter-of-emirs and the lady both fought in the battle (the lady was crossdressed). Hunter-of-emirs earned his name by murdering an enormous number of emirs in the battle, possibly the most valid decision in this entire book. And then he confirms this story is true because he has the emir, which he took prisoner, in the next room. Like, this whole time, during the extremely boring council meeting, there has just been an emir sitting tied up in the next room. I demand that this scene be rewritten from his point of view.

The lady says that she would ask that the emir be tortured to death, but she promised that Allah would reward the emir if he gave her the month before they had sex, and so she thinks he should be imprisoned for life instead. based it is not based to torture people.

We also hear about a virtuous princess. The emirs and the princesses used to play a hide-and-seek game that ended with the emirs fucking whatever princess they found, and the virtuous princess disapproved. So she fled the palace to spent time with peasants. Between this, Hiskil, and Hunter-of-emirs’s emir, Saddam Hussein is showing a bit of a fixation on public rape, often in the form of games. I feel like I know more than I’d like about Saddam Hussein’s kinks?

On the last page, it is announced that the king died of grief, and the council says “well, he was only a good guy because Zabiba fixed him, so meh. Let’s go about picking a new king.”

The only charming thing about this book is the fact that Saddam Hussein made his self-insert someone who doesn’t understand anything and then dies.