The Flavors of Iraq
Impressions of My Vanished Homeland
Feurat Alani, Illustrated by Léonard Cohen, Foreword by Ross Caputi, and translated by Kendra Boileau
The Western media largely glossed over the immense human suffering that occurred in Iraq during the embargo of the 1990s and the Iraq War. With this innovative and award-winning graphic novel, French-Iraqi journalist Feurat Alani sets that record straight.
The Flavors of Iraq unfolds as a series of one thousand tweets. In them, Alani describes his experiences in Iraq, starting in 1989—the first time he traveled from France to meet his family in Iraq—to 2011, when the last Americans pulled out of the country. Alani recounts the vivid impressions this place made on him as a child—its wondrous colors, tastes, and smells. After training as a journalist, he documents the sounds, silences, and smells of a war in which hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians lost their lives.
Illustrated by the striking art of Léonard Cohen and with a foreword by Ross Caputi, a former US Marine who served in Iraq from 2003 to 2006, The Flavors of Iraq tells a poetic and powerful story of an oppressed population, an illegal war, and a country that no longer exists.
Born in France to Iraqi parents, Feurat Alani is a French-Iraqi journalist and author. He was a news correspondent in Baghdad from 2003 to 2008 for I Télé, Ouest France, La Croix, and Le Point. In 2008, Alani returned to Paris to work on the television newsmagazine L’Effet papillon. He is the cofounder of the production companies Baozi Prod and In Sight Films. Alani collaborates regularly with the newspaper Le Monde diplomatique, the website Orient XXI, the magazine Géo, and as a reporter and producer with Art, France 24, and Canal+. His award-winning graphic novel Le Parfum d’Irak was published in 2018 and later became a web series.
Léonard Cohen is a French animator based in Oakland, California. He earned his master’s degree in animation at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris in 2009. His film Plato was selected in many festivals and won multiple awards. Cohen designed the TV series Le Chiffroscope, which ran weekly for three seasons (2012–15) on L’Effet papillon.