When the Apricots Bloom

Author Gina Wilkinson was formerly a foreign correspondent who spent more than a year in Baghdad during Saddam Hussein’s rule. One of her close friends at the time was an informant for the mukhabarat, much like Huda, but Wilkinson says that neither Huda nor Ally are accurate representations of her friend or herself. In 2007, Wilkinson published her memoir, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sky, which details the troubles she faced as a foreign correspondent.

When the Apricots Bloom is Gina Wilkinson’s second book and her first fiction novel. In her Author’s Note, Wilkinson explains that, while she shared some experiences similar to those that Ally, Huda, and Rania experience in the novel, Ally does not represent her, and Huda and Rania are not based entirely on any of her real-life friends. However, When the Apricots Bloom is nonetheless based on Wilkinson’s time in Baghdad in 2002 when she traveled with her husband, who was working with the humanitarian aid organization UNICEF. Like Ally, Wilkinson kept her status as a journalist hidden to avoid Iraq’s ban on foreign journalists.

In addition to sharing Ally’s profession, Wilkinson also had a close Iraqi friend who, like Huda, was an informant for the mukhabarat. Although Huda is not meant to be a specific recreation of this friend, Wilkinson experienced the same doubts and paranoia that Ally does in the novel, wondering to what extent her friendships were real and what information might be reported to her friend’s handlers. Thus, the tone of repression and danger that permeates the entirety of the novel is not entirely fictitious, for Wilkinson herself lost a friend, survived a sexual assault, and lost some faith in humanity during her time in Baghdad. Likewise, when Ally is harassed and threatened with sexual assault, and when the characters of the novel are either threatened by violence or become survivors of it, it is important to note that those experiences are drawn from actual events in Wilkinson’s life, even if the specific details and characters are fictitious.

In her Author’s Note, Wilkinson acknowledges the difficulties of her status as a white author who is writing primarily from perspectives of characters of color, but she emphasizes the importance of telling stories that focus on such perspectives. To further boost her own credibility as a viable source of realistic portrayals of these characters, Wilkinson also draws on her extensive travels in countries like Iraq, Sri Lanka, the United States, Thailand, Canada, and Brazil. The depth of her travels provides her with insights that delve beneath the surface-level culture of any given location, and her expertise as a foreign correspondent (a journalist that reports from and on different countries) also adds a sense of credibility to the novel. However, it is still valuable to note that Wilkinson writes from a foreigner’s perspective, not a native Iraqi’s, and this cultural disconnect complicates analyses of the characters’ perspectives in the novel by calling into question the validity of the underlying rationale for those characters’ decisions.