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Abstract
Nzūlah u-khēṭ al-shīṭān (1986) is the great “vernacular novel” of the late Iraqi Jewish writer Samīr Naqqāsh (1938–2004). The novel, set in the 1940s–early 1950s, tells of the twilight of Jewish Baghdad. Vernacularity and hybridity are the hallmarks of the text’s difficulty, its supposed unreadability and untranslatability. Nzūlah manifests an extreme case of heteroglossia, as it is written in literary Arabic, but also in the Jewish and Muslim Baghdadi vernaculars, while also including hundreds of footnotes that affect and direct the act of reading. In this article, this seemingly inaccessible novel is analyzed through the lens of the theoretical concepts of “untranslatability” and “comprehensibility.” Besides being a lament for a lost homeland, Nzūlah calls for its readers to appropriate a seemingly dying idiom and, in so doing, perform a significant political gesture that resonates with the ways Naqqāsh’s work has been read in both Iraq and Israel since his death in 2004.
Abstract
Contemporary studies have already explored al-Risālah magazine’s (1933–1953) dynamic role in championing a far-reaching secular-grounded educational mission— which was made more urgent by the encounter with Western innovations. Still, little attention has been paid to the journal’s strong linkages with Arabic classical heritage. This article argues that al-Risālah’s writings employed concepts and terminology related to al-balāghah, or eloquence, that were by turns accurate, controversial, and innovative. These uses enriched the spectrum of al-balāghah’s applicability also to the discussion of current preoccupations with other fields like psychology. While accounting for thought-provoking works like Tāhā Ḥusayn’s al-Bayān al-ʿarabī min al-Jāḥiẓ ilā ʿAbd al-Qāhir [The Arabic Bayān, from al-Jāḥiẓ to ʿAbd al-Qāhir, 1933,] Amīn al-Khūlī’s al-Balāghah wa-ʿilm al-nafs [al-Balāghah and Psychology, 1939,] and al-Zayyāt’s Difāʿun ʿan al-balāghah [In Defense of al-Balāghah, 1945] as pioneering studies towards the new conceptualizations of the discipline up to the mid-half of the twentieth-century, this study purports to trace the presence of al-balāghah in al-Risālah’s articles in both quantitative and qualitative terms through the employment of DH tools for data mining. By mapping the ontological shifts that occurred in traditional languages and concepts’ employment as both contrastive and continuous, the present inquiries showcase modern Arab culture’s dialectics of secularism and literary revisionism as self-sufficient, culturally embedded and integrated, and not as byproducts of contact with the West.
Abstract
This article examines works of post-2003 Iraqi fiction that draw on the aesthetic and thematic conventions of the postcolonial gothic genre by centering the grotesque figure of the animated corpse. Through these figures, the texts bring the disposable victims of necropolitical violence back into view, resisting their erasure while also resurrecting the buried histories that contributed to the outbreak of ongoing conflict. As these texts foreground the victims of violence both past and present, they issue powerful critiques of neocolonial and sectarian violence, particularly through their inversion of the gothic trope of the terrifying Other. In these texts, initially frightening animated corpses are revealed to be the sympathetic victims of violence, rendering necropolitical violence, rather than the corpses, the true source of horror in the texts and issuing a call to the reader to sympathize and even empathize with the frightening Other.
Abstract
This paper examines the efforts of the early twentieth century writer Mahmud Ahmad al-Sayyid (1903–1937) to remake literary culture in Iraq. Al-Sayyid’s essays advocated abandoning what he characterized as socially disinterested and decorative prose, urging Arab writers to embrace a literature of social commitment. Al-Sayyid charted a path that sought to distance Arabic cultural production from European influence, envisioning literary rebirth through the politics of anti-colonialism and by establishing solidarity with other colonized peoples. Yet these efforts were itinerant and often contradictory. Al-Sayyid’s circuitous path toward an embrace of the realist short story embodies the complexities of cultural formation during a dramatic historical shift. Aesthetically, these complexities manifest in the syncretism of al-Sayyid’s fiction, which engaged with and reproduced extant Arabic literary forms and themes. This article historicizes the emergence of a modern prose tradition in Iraq through critical assessments of the early modern Iraqi maqāmah and the short prose form of the ruʾyā, arguing that the circulations of these local forms were critical to the making of the reformist prose of al-Sayyid. It then examines the novella Jalāl Khālid, arguing that the text’s formal indeterminacy and narration of romantic and revolutionary failure inscribes an ironic stance toward the project of the nation and its aesthetic corollary, the novel. Finally, the article analyzes al-Sayyid’s short story “Sakrān” (1929), which is emblematic of a decades-long realist trend in Iraqi prose fiction that reoriented Iraqi prose toward a global trend of literary realism in the global south.
Abstract
This article explores the relationships between humans and animals in Iraqi prose fiction from the 1940s and 1950s. It argues that Iraqi authors wrote about animals to underline not only the inhumane conditions in the nation’s rural regions but also the inhumanity of urban existence, which was associated with greed, deception, the absence of family and ethical values, and social death. More specifically, the article studies two short stories: ʿAbd al-Malik Nūrī’s (1921–1992) “The South Wind” (“Rīḥ al-janūb”), and Shalōm (Shālūm) Darwīsh’s (1913–1997) “A Convoy from the Countryside” (“Qāfilah min al-rīf”). Both stories suggest that animals have emotions, and in both, the act of urbanization involves a woman’s sacrifice of an animal. The pairing of these two stories accentuates the need for class-based, anti-sectarian and ecocritical readings of Iraqi narrative prose. Reading texts written by Iraqis of various religions liberates such texts from impositions created by nationalists and from their insistence on allegorical meanings. What determines the humans’ fate in these stories is not their religion but rather their environment, their dwelling in southern Iraq, their relation to capital (and lack thereof), their family relations, and the very meaningful roles animals play in their lives.
Abstract
This article situates the 1955 novel Abū Nuwās fī Amrīkā by Ṣafāʾ Khulūṣī as an exemplar of and commentary on the dynamics of twentieth-century Iraqi cultural production. Drawing on Margaret Litvin’s application of “travel literature readings” to modern diasporic and expatriate literatures, it analyzes the novel’s protagonist—in the form of a reincarnated, radically reformed version of the Abbasid-era poet Abū Nuwās—as engaging in a “riḥlah-road-trip,” traversing the United States alongside an anonymous narrator. Rather than fashioning a conservative extension of the pre- and early modern riḥlah genre, in view of the author’s historical moment and works, this article argues that Khulūṣī parodies this genre by constructing critical distance and building intertextuality simultaneously. Khulūṣī draws on riḥlahs of the past, in which Iraq is represented as an advanced cosmopolitan destination, to speak to Iraq’s future as a differently globalized, modernizing state that grapples with its perceived temporal and cultural regress, much like the novel’s time-traveling protagonist.
Abstract
Iraqi poet and statesman Shādhil Ṭāqah (d. 1974) published an elegy in a 1965 issue of the Beirut journal al-Ādāb for fellow poet Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb (d. 1964) titled “Intiṣār Ayyūb” (Job’s Victory). This article attends to how the elegy’s content reflects the poet’s relationship with Sayyāb as well as how it pays homage to Sayyāb’s novel approach to Arabic prosody. Outside of one book-length study of Ṭāqah’s poetry by Bushrā al-Bustānī (2010) and the comments found at the end of Ṭāqah’s collected works edited by Saʿd al-Bazzāz (1977), his poetry has remained relatively unaddressed even in Arabic scholarship. The study thus introduces a key poem from this important but mostly forgotten poet to Anglophone readers while also situating Ṭāqah as a member in the coterie of modernists who became active during and following their time at the Baghdad Teachers College in the late 1940s, a group that included Ṭāqah, Sayyāb, Nāzik al-Malāʾikah (d. 2007), ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī (d. 1999), and others. Overall, the article establishes Ṭāqah’s work within its Iraqi context as well as within the broader Arabic literary milieu of the 1960s in the Mashriq, situating Ṭāqah as an important contributor to the development of modernist Arabic poetry.