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.
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Introduction1
In Against World Literature (2013), Emily Apter invokes the concept of untranslatability as a tool to be used in comparative literature practices against “tendencies in World Literature toward reflexive endorsement of cultural equivalence and substitutability, or toward the celebration of nationally and ethnically branded ‘differences’ that have been niche-marketed as commercialized ‘identities.’”2 Bodin, Helgesson and Huss offer the concept of comprehensibility as an alternative to that of untranslatability as they see the former as less conducive to a reification of “language and individual words as irretrievably different”:
Comprehensibility, by contrast, will always admit the negotiability of understanding, regardless of how difficult it might be to achieve in practice. By the same token, it also enables an embodied aesthetic focus on the delicate boundary between noise and signal—between language as sheer materiality and language as a hermeneutic invitation.3
The concept of comprehensibility is especially significant when texts that include vernacular idioms are considered. The vernacular is a useful notion through which the comprehensibility of texts and their linguistic difference can be analyzed. The use of the vernacular can enable inscriptions of worldliness in literature: “vernacularity […] provides an index of the ‘worldliness’ of literature—understood both as its embeddedness in context and its orientations beyond.”4
In modern Arabic literature, whether a vernacular could or should be used in literary texts or not has always been a much-debated issue. Writers of modern fiction can be mostly divided into two camps: one that privileges the use of local dialects in dialogues, in the name of verisimilitude and expressivity; and the other that uses Modern Standard Arabic, fuṣḥā, not only in narrative passages, but also in dialogues, in the name of uniformity and comprehensibility to a wider Arabic readership.5 With the specific context of modern Arabic literature and the theoretical concepts of translatability and vernacularity in mind, we can fruitfully approach an Arabic text that represents an extreme example of vernacular literature: the novel Nzūlah u-khēṭ al-shiṭān (Tenants and Cobwebs, 2018)6 by the late Iraqi Jewish writer Samīr Naqqāsh (b. 1938, Baghdad; d. 2004, Tel Aviv), first published in Israel in 1986.7 The novel is an extreme case of heteroglossia as it is written in Jewish Baghdadi Arabic, Muslim Baghdadi Arabic and literary Arabic, fuṣḥā. If we contextualize this novel within Naqqāsh’s literary production as a whole, we can call Nzūlah and another novel that appeared a year later, Fuwwah yā dam! (Blood for Sale!, 1987) as his “vernacular novels,” because of the prominence of the Baghdadi dialects in them, as compared to his other novels which have been written almost exclusively in standard Arabic.8 Nzūlah takes its place within the rich tradition of linguistic experimentation in modern Arabic fiction. As we will see below, Naqqāsh takes his text far beyond the traditional issues of literary diglossia and the compromise that sees dialogues written in ʿāmmiyyah and narrative passages in fuṣḥā.
Especially relevant to our discussion of Nzūlah are observations made by Bodin, Helgesson and Huss on comprehensibility and the vernacular. The latter, far from being a stable signifier, “denotes a changeable relation of connotations such as ‘local,’ ‘native,’ ‘popular,’ ‘inferior’ or ‘authentic.’”9 In Arabic etymology, al-ʿāmmī (“dialectal”) shares some of the same connotations. As it is related to ʿāmmah, “the common people,” ʿāmmī means “common,” “ordinary,” “vulgar,” “popular” and indeed “inferior,” “low” especially as compared to its opposite al-faṣīḥ, meaning “eloquent” (balīgh) and “clear” (bayyin), that refers to the literary language, the “high” register of al-fuṣḥā, the status of which is derived from its connection to the language of the Qurʾān, the quintessential example of textual eloquence and, from a Muslim perspective, the language of God. Even in a secular context, fuṣḥā has been traditionally considered as the privileged literary medium of the Arabs as a medium for continuity with an illustrious literary past (turāth adabī), and for cultural unity from a pan-Arab perspective. Here, we intend to analyze Nzūlah by looking at the changeable meaning of the vernacular, with reference to the relationship a specific vernacular has with other vernaculars and with the standardized, literary idiom. This analysis takes into consideration the concept of comprehensibility and “the constantly shifting and shiftable position of the listening/speaking/reading […] person […] in the flux of linguistic signification—also, and not least, in literary practice.”10 The case of Nzūlah is all the more intriguing as this “vernacular relationality” is said never to be a closed chapter, “except perhaps for so-called dead languages.”11 We aim to test the idea of vernacular relationality in Nzūlah especially in light of the fact that Jewish Baghdadi Arabic is an idiom under existential threat. In Israel, where most members of the aging Iraqi Jewish community now live, the Jewish dialect of Baghdad has an uncertain future.12 In Nzūlah, this uprooted vernacular is resurrected and occupies a prominent space; it emerges even within the narrative passages in fuṣḥā, merging with it and with its own Muslim sister idiom from the shared urban language-scape of the Baghdad of the 1940s and early 1950s, in ways that are telling within the contemporary cultures of the Middle East. Aware of the challenges such a linguistically complex text would pose to its non-Iraqi readers, Naqqāsh decided to translate the two vernaculars into fuṣḥā in footnotes that are sometimes so long that they occupy most of the page and sometimes even entire pages. The difficulty and untranslatability of such a hybrid text fit perfectly into Apter’s discourse on untranslatability and World Literature. I will go back to Apter’s work and relate it to Nzūlah below, but here it will suffice to briefly return to the function of vernacularity as “an index of the ‘worldliness’ of literature—understood both as its embeddedness in context and its orientations beyond.”13 I will first analyze how Naqqāsh pursues the depiction of an historical, cultural and linguistic context with uncompromising zeal in Nzūlah. I will then discuss the possible orientations of Naqqāsh’s work beyond the context he so painstakingly and lovingly created.
Can this seemingly unreadable text be read fruitfully today? And if so, can this reading meaningfully direct us beyond the seemingly closed chapter of Jewish Baghdad? In the conclusive remarks, we will show that the present case study complements and expands the idea of Naqqāsh as a multilingual author of “polyglotic literature”14 that speaks eloquently and powerfully of cultural hybridity as a value to Arabs and Jews.
Nzūlah the Fictional Text: Jewish Baghdad between the Farhūd and the Tasqīṭ
ضائعة.. خائفة وحدي في بغداد لا أعرفها.. بغداد أخرى. وحدي في بلد «لفْتحتو عيني بينو»، لكني فجأة غريبة عنه.15
Lost. Afraid, on my own in a Baghdad I don’t know. Another Baghdad. On my own in a country, “where I first saw the light of day,”16 but where I’m suddenly a stranger.
Lūlū daughter of Moshyāḥ, Nzūlah
In 1951 Naqqāsh was thirteen when his family decided to leave Baghdad along with the great majority of the city’s sizable Jewish population. Thirty-five years later, his monumental novel Nzūlah u-khēṭ al-shiṭān was published in Jerusalem. Divided into eleven parts (with one short introduction to Part 11) and 74 chapters, narrated from the perspective of seventeen focal heroes, in its 2012 Manshūrāt al-Jamal edition the sprawling novel stretches for 686 pages of medium-size character in the main text and small-size character in the hundreds of footnotes.17
Unlike Naqqāsh’s other novels, Nzūlah and his other “vernacular novel,” Fuwwah, do not have a clearly autobiographical plot.18 They are born out of the writer’s memories of Baghdad’s different idioms, stories, and popular beliefs, which the thirteen-year-old Naqqāsh had apparently already stored before being forced to leave Iraq for Israel.19 Nzūlah inscribes fictional characters and events within a well-defined historical setting that is framed by the two traumatic events that marked first the crisis, and then the end of the long life of Iraqi Jewry: the 1941 Farhūd and the Tasqīṭ of 1950–1951. Farhūd (literally “looting,” “plundering” in Iraqi Arabic)20 refers to attacks by anti-Jewish mobs that took place in Baghdad following the brief power vacuum between the collapse of the short-lived nationalist government of Rashīd ʿAlī al-Kaylānī (al-Gaylānī) and the British reseizing power again on the 1st and 2nd of June 1941, and the looting of Jewish property in Basra a month earlier.21 This was a traumatic event for Iraqi Jewry and one unprecedented in its millennia-long history. Tasqīṭ refers to a law drafted by the Iraqi government that allowed Jews to renounce their Iraqi citizenship (tasqīṭ or isqāṭ al-jinsiyyah) and legally leave the country for Israel. The Tasqīṭ was the culmination of the deterioration of life for Jews in Iraq, caused by a series of factors, all referred to in the novel, and clearly exacerbated by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war in Palestine and the foundation of the state of Israel. The novel dramatizes the fact that most Iraqi Jews were practically forced by adverse circumstances to opt for Tasqīṭ and leave their homeland and did that against their will.
The phrase khēṭ al-shiṭān mentioned in the title is fraught with meaning: it is part of a title that anticipates the vernacularity of the text, as we will see below in more detail. But as an idiomatic phrase that can be translated as “cobwebs,” it comes to have different meanings to different characters, the “tenants” of the title, as they live through life-changing experiences. The cobwebs are also an appropriate symbol for the novel’s complex plot ramifications and for a map of the old Baghdad of the 1940s/1950s that the novel inscribes into our imagination. The places in old Baghdad, the narrow alleys, cafés and houses where the cobweb-like plot develops are brought to life as they are experienced by the characters. Such a place, invested with meaning and imagination, is turned into a meaningful space where the identity of Jewish Baghdad is defined.22
This space, in its connection with “the sheer materiality” of the vernaculars used in the novel, is the real protagonist of the novel. Before we summarize the plot of Nzūlah, we need to emphasize the fact that its setting, especially the old, traditional Iraqi house with an internal courtyard, but also the use of the vernacular, make it a companion text to two novels that marked the development of the Iraqi novel: Ghāʾib Ṭuʿmah Farmān’s ground-breaking first novel, al-Nakhlah wa- l- jīrān (The Palm Tree and the Neighbors, 1966) and Fuʾād al-Takarlī’s canonical novel al-Rajʿ al-baʿīd (1980; translated into English by Catherine Cobham as The Long Way Back, 2001).23 All three texts, written outside Iraq, are set in old, central Baghdad, albeit in different quarters. Whereas al-Takarlī’s novel is set in 1962– 1963 when a Baʿthist-Nasserite-Arab nationalistic coup deposed ʿAbd al-Karīm Qāsim, Nzūlah and al-Nakhlah share the same temporal framework, and also their characters are destitute or working class (the main characters in al-Rajʿ are educated middle-class).24 Farmān and al-Takarlī also used colloquial Baghdadi Arabic in the direct free speech of their novels. The close relation between characters and the space they inhabit is a key element of the characterization of characters. This intimate connection is all the more poignantly evoked in the texts because the old, traditional home at the center of the narratives is about to be abandoned by most of its dwellers, and the traditional way of intimate living connected to it is about to vanish.25
Nzūlah is set in Banī Sʿīd, an old, poor quarter of central Baghdad where Muslims and Jews live side by side. The house where the tenants (nzūlah) of the title live is a traditional Iraqi house with an internal courtyard (ḥōsh, ḥawsh in fuṣḥā). The house belongs to Lūlū, daughter of Moshyāḥ, a Jewish widow obsessed with her only child Marrūdī.26 The novel makes it clear that this is a poor, working class quarter, that is compared with other more affluent quarters mentioned in the novel, like Bistān al-Khass, beyond al-Bāb al-sharqī (the Eastern Gate), where the beautiful Ṣabriyyah comes from.27 Most of the tenants of the cramped house are Jewish except for Naʿīmah and her husband Fāyiq the barber, who are Muslim. The house is located between the Sheker household and the run-down shed where the widow ʿAṭiyyah and her son Jūdī live, and is opposite Ḥamīdah and Jaddūʿ’s house. All these neighbors are Muslim.
The next section of this article is a summary of the novel’s plot and its themes, as non-Iraqi critics have so far stayed away from this demanding text and focused on other works by Naqqāsh. One way to summarize the complex plot of the novel and its rich set of characters is to trace some of their most significant journeys within and outside Baghdad, as these movements on the city’s cobweb-map are symbolically charged. All these journeys are a prelude to the mass exodus of Iraqi Jews at the beginning of the 1950s, mirrored in the text by the fact that, at the end, everyone leaves Lūlū’s ḥōsh and most Jewish characters opt to forfeit their Iraqi citizenship and leave Iraq. We will focus on five from among the many journeys depicted in the novel.
Journey 1—Silmān in Karbala: the Shīʿī Connection
One of the rooms in Lūlū’s house is shared by two musicians, the blind qānūn player Jamīl Rabīʿ and the ʿūd player Silmān Ḥashwah, who is blind in one eye only. The former is a communist whose life’s bitter experiences have darkened his worldview and who is prone to look down on other people, not least on his roommate. Silmān is a kind-hearted but weak, religious man who is hopelessly in love with the beautiful Ṣabriyyah, who shares another room in the ḥōsh with her husband. The presence of the past in the life of several of the characters of the novel is dramatized in interior monologues and speeches, and mirrors the obsessive remembering and meticulous inscribing of voices and places that populated Naqqāsh’s own childhood. As Nzūlah can be considered the preeminent novel of the Farhūd, it is telling that Naqqāsh decides not to depict the violent event directly, but as a traumatic memory that some characters are unable to forget. Key words resurface continuously in Silmān’s consciousness. One such key word is Karbala, the holy Shīʿī city in central Iraq, which is split into two words in Silmān’s wounded mind: Karb wa-balāʾ, “agony” and “grief.”28 Silmān is in Karbala on the 1st and 2nd of May 1941 for a concert with a band that includes Jewish, Muslim and Christian musicians. The historical context is significant here as on the 1st of April of that year the Rashīd ʿAlī al-Kaylānī’s nationalist coup takes place, and on the 2nd of May the Anglo-Iraqi war begins and ends with the British regaining power a month later. A two-day power vacuum in Baghdad on the 1st and 2nd of June before the British-supported Regent ʿAbd al-Ilāh re-establishes order in the city allows the Farhūd to take place. Silmān goes through a series of ordeals in Karbala as the city is in turmoil. He is repeatedly harassed for being a Jew, who is therefore assumed to be pro-British. Upon his return to Baghdad, he passes out and gets hospitalized for a month, only to find out after recovering that his parents have been killed in the Farhūd.29 This fictional subterfuge allows Naqqāsh to drive home the cultural and religious syncretism that characterized the life of Baghdadi Jewry and the cohesion between it and the other confessions. In Silmān’s mind, his trauma is associated with the trauma of ʿAshūrāʾ, a key event in Shīʿī identity, and the martyrdom of al-Ḥusayn is appropriated within a Jewish religious consciousness. Silmān’s personal ordeal also closely recalls that of al-Ḥusayn as the days he spends in Karbala are extremely hot and after he becomes separated from his fellow musicians, he wanders the streets of Karbala overcome by thirst. Thirst is a key element in the story of the passion of al-Ḥusayn, which is so central to Shīʿa beliefs.
Silmān in Karbala
Citation: Journal of Arabic Literature 2025; 10.1163/1570064x-12341533
Technical Note: The map of Baghdad used in Figures 2–4 was created by Tomas Vancisin, who merged four maps of Baghdad made in 1958 by the U.S. army and now held in the University of Texas at Austin’s Perry-Castañeda Library (https://maps.lib.utexas.edu/maps/world_cities.html?p=print). The four original images were cropped, merged, and aligned using the vector graphics software Inkscape (https://inkscape.org/) and further color-adjusted using the raster graphics editor Adobe Photoshop (https://www.adobe.com/uk/products/photoshop.html)Journeys 2 & 3—Silmān in Camp al-Arman & Lūlū Lost on Her Way to al-Shorjah Market: City of Weapons. City of Symbols
After his ordeal in Karbala and the shock of having lost his parents during the Farhūd, Silmān reluctantly becomes involved with a group of young Jewish men who are equipping themselves with weapons so that they are ready to defend themselves should another Farhūd occur. This time Silmān is taken to the remote urban peripheries of the city, an alien space inhabited by destitute immigrants, al-Shirgāwiyyah (or al-Maʿdān, i.e., Southerners), the poor quarter of Camp al-Arman on the outskirts of al-Saddah. The depiction of this group of people in the eyes of the Jewish city dwellers functions to re-enforce the cohesion of Jews with their urban environment: they feel they belong to Baghdad, unlike the poor immigrants who live in the margins and feel alien in the capital.30 But Silmān’s journey to the outskirts of Baghdad is also another tragic journey for him as this time he ends up being the culprit of a crime and not a victim. He is forced to try his hand at shooting a rifle as part of an impromptu firearms training session and accidentally hits a boy and kills him with his one and only shot. This episode probably refers to the presence of armed Zionist groups in Baghdad, and their contribution to the Jews’ increasing estrangement from Baghdad society.31 The novel also represents the ideological debate within Baghdad’s Jewish community of the time (with characters who represent communism, Iraqi nationalism and Zionism) and participates in a discussion surrounding the exodus of the Jewish community from Iraq within the wider context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and other controversial issues, such as the causes of this exodus and the Iraqi Jews’ loyalty to the Iraqi nation. Crucially, Jamīl’s communist perspective is markedly blurred by his disillusionment and general skepticism. Similarly, the Zionist message is only reluctantly embraced by Silmān as his last hope for survival. On the other hand, the Jews’ genuine nationalist feeling and sense of belonging to Iraq is a political idea more fully articulated in the text and embodied by one of the main characters of the novel, Yaʿgūb (Yaʿqūb) son of ʿAmām, who can be seen as representing the author’s own sense of his Iraqi identity. In the first part of the novel, Yaʿgūb’s cobbler’s business is thriving and things look so rosy in his life that he even minimizes the significance of the Farhūd.
Another journey depicts the tense situation in Baghdad between the Farhūd and the Tasqīṭ. As an overprotective mother, Lūlū seldom leaves Marrūdī at home on his own, but one day she is absent for several hours as she is inexplicably lost in the maze of alleys in old Baghdad on her way to the al-Shorjah Market. Hers is a little odyssey in a quarter she does not know. When she loses her way, she is helped by an old blind Muslim (Shīʿī) beggar who mysteriously knows she is a Jewish woman even before she speaks. However, the strange men she encounters on her journey are not all as benign as the beggar. Lūlū also comes across a group of men carrying a wooden box she mistakes for a coffin that turns out to be full of hand grenades. Having read about rifles in the hands of young Jews, we now read about weapons opposite a police station in central Baghdad. The novel hints at the volatile political situation and we can indeed read the activities of the underground Zionist movement as one side of the same coin whose other side is the arming of men (organized by policemen) who could be ready to engage in anti-Jewish violence. However, the narrative focuses on how ordinary people, like Lūlū, experience their changing surroundings and an atmosphere of increasing tension. Lūlū’s journey is also symbolic of the predicament of Baghdadi Jewry. The opening quotation to this section of our article articulates the increasing feeling of alienation for Jews in their own homeland (and can be compared to Silmān’s perception of being accused by his own relatives of crimes he has never committed). Lūlū’s odyssey has further symbolic value. When one of the hand grenades that have fallen from the wooden box rolls on the ground and reaches her feet, she picks it up. Seeing it as a toy that could delight her beloved Marrūdī, she decides to keep it, then quickly realizes that this obscure object is not a benign toy but a dangerous weapon and throws it into the river Tigris from the old bridge.32 As we learn in the following chapter, this coincides with her beloved son Marrūdī diving into the river and drowning.33
Lūlū’s instinctive rejection of the weapon symbolically points at the possibility that another Farhūd be averted. However, this is not enough to guarantee a future for the Iraqi Jewish community in Baghdad as Marrūdī’s drowning in the dark waters of the Tigris symbolizes the death of the community’s future in Iraq. As if to underline the sense of powerlessness felt by the Jewish community in Baghdad to determine their own future, Silmān, the reluctant Zionist, says: “They have planned my fate for me … They have planned it in Baghdad, at the UN and in Israel. But I alone do not know what my fate will be.”34
Journey 4—Ṣabriyyah to Bistān al-Khass and Back to Banī Sʿīd: a Woman and the People in the Street
Nzūlah represents a rare text within Naqqāsh’s works in which some of the main characters are women and the representation of their consciousness is key for the development of the plot. As a novel that contains many different styles and themes, Nzūlah is a rich example of socio-political critical realism that treats topics common in the modern Iraqi (and Arab) novel, such as the condition of women in a patriarchal society. This is achieved here through the portrayal of various female characters, who have to come to terms with male characters whose attitude towards them ranges from the patronizing to the unapologetically misogynistic. Ṣabriyyah, the beautiful, lively, if snobbish, young woman from a well-off family who has accepted moving to a poor quarter out of love for her husband Efrāyem, is the catalyst for the social criticism expressed in the novel.35 An independent-minded and well-educated woman, Ṣabriyyah is doomed to spend her days confined at home, bored and disappointed, waiting for her husband to come back from his frequent train trips—Efrāyem works as a ticket controller on the Baghdad-Mosul line. Ṣabriyyah is a strong, three-dimensional character facing existential dilemmas as she decides whether she should stay with her husband or go back to her father in Bistān al-Khass and whether she should renounce her Iraqi nationality to follow her husband to Israel, or stay in Baghdad.
In Chapter 1, Part 11, (the last of the chapters focused on her) Ṣabriyyah finally arrives at the painful decision to leave her beloved city. Now that she knows she will leave Baghdad for good, even Banī Sʿīd, the place she despised, is remembered fondly as part of the space of her own identity. Here, we have a loving evocation of the space (objects, smells, flowers, food, etc.) that have made up her everyday life. It is easy to see these words as expressing Naqqāsh’s own feelings on the lost space of his childhood. The short, poetic finale of the chapter expresses powerfully the momentous passage in the life of the character, her goodbye to her home, Baghdad. It is also a representative example of Naqqāsh’s modernist style with its sudden changes in the narrative voice, even though, uncharacteristically, this passage does not include any colloquial words:
وخرجَتْ. وكانت مردودة الخطوات. تسحبها عنوة.. تبعد عن بستان الخس بأقدام ترسف بالأغلال.. ماضية لبني سعيد.. أهلي.. زوجي.. الحبّان.. وصواب العالم، في يوم ما سيعود. وكانت من دون إرادة تبكي.. لا تمسح العبرات.. مضمومة داخل محارة مغلقة ورهيبة.. حتى يعود للعالم عقله.. والناس في الشارع ترمقها شزراً.. والناس في الشارع تمط شفاه.. والناس في الشارع تنظرها وتتساءل!36
She went out. Her steps tentative, she dragged them along with difficulty. Moving away from Bistān al-Khass with shackled feet. To Banī Sʿīd. My family. My husband. Two loves. The world will return to its senses, one day. She was crying involuntarily, not wiping away the tears. Caught inside a terrible, closed shell. Until the world is in its right mind again. And the people in the street look at her askance. And the people in the street purse their lips. And the people in the street look at her and wonder.
Out of Banī Sʿīd and back
Citation: Journal of Arabic Literature 2025; 10.1163/1570064x-12341533
Technical Note: The map of Baghdad used in Figures 2–4 was created by Tomas Vancisin, who merged four maps of Baghdad made in 1958 by the U.S. army and now held in the University of Texas at Austin’s Perry-Castañeda Library (https://maps.lib.utexas.edu/maps/world_cities.html?p=print). The four original images were cropped, merged, and aligned using the vector graphics software Inkscape (https://inkscape.org/) and further color-adjusted using the raster graphics editor Adobe Photoshop (https://www.adobe.com/uk/products/photoshop.html)Journey 5—Saʿīdah Crosses the Bridge to “the Other Side”: Loss of Jewish Identity
In the final part of the novel, against the tragic backdrop of little Marrūdī’s drowning, the Jewish characters face the existential dilemma of whether to leave Baghdad or to remain. Most characters will feel forced to leave as life in Baghdad for Jews has become very hard. Saʿīdah, daughter of Farḥah Ghāwī, another tenant in the ḥōsh, falls in love with a Muslim bar owner, Karīm, and decides to marry him. She leaves the Eastern part of the city (the Ruṣāfah side) and crosses the bridge to Dhāk al-Ṣōb, “the Other Side” (the Karkh side). This also means that she has to convert to Islam to marry a Muslim. This crucial episode is mainly seen through the eyes of her mother Farḥah, and depicts her inner turmoil and doubts as to whether she, as a mother, should encourage her daughter to take this momentous step and ensure a viable future for herself. The Jewish neighbors in the house have no such doubts and for them Farḥah is guilty for having encouraged her daughter to renounce her Jewish identity. The predicament of Saʿīdah as a Jew who renounces her identity in order to remain in Iraq, is mirrored by that of her brother, the sexually frustrated, immature and silly ʿAzīz, who at the end of the novel chooses a Muslim identity and reinvents himself as a skillful calligrapher. Naqqāsh dramatizes the dilemma that Iraqi Jews suddenly had to face for the first time in their millennia-long history: the need to choose between their Jewish identity and their Iraqi identity. In fact, the one character who does not renounce her Jewish identity and does not leave Iraq is the old Lūlū. She decides to move to the synagogue of Shaykh Isḥāq where her sole reason for living is to mourn her beloved Marrūdī who is buried in its graveyard. Lūlū is left behind to mourn the loss of a future that never materialized for Iraq’s Jews.
Leaving Banī Sʿīd for good
Citation: Journal of Arabic Literature 2025; 10.1163/1570064x-12341533
Nzūlah the Vernacular Novel37
So far, we have looked at some of the main themes of Nzūlah, but it is its form, its linguistic features and hybrid nature that make this novel a unique text. It is enough to consider the title of the novel to understand we are in a vernacular world that is different from the usual linguistic environment where the vast majority of modern Arabic texts function: Nzūlah u-khēṭ al-shiṭān. The way the title is phonetically transcribed alerts us to the fact that the first two words are not in fuṣḥā. Nzūlah is the Iraqi colloquial for ‘tenants,’ ‘lodgers’ (which is similar to its standard Arabic form nuzalāʾ, pl. of nazīl) and u-khēṭ al-shiṭān literally means ‘and the thread of the devil.’ An Arabophone reader would unproblematically mentally translate this title to its correspondent in fuṣḥā: Nuzalāʾ wa-khayṭ al-shayṭān and understand its literal meaning: “Tenants and the Devil’s Thread.” In Chapter Six of Part 1, the chapter’s protagonist, the nihilistic, seemingly mad Jūdī al-Qarāwchī, son of the destitute widow ʿAṭiyyah, one of the Muslim neighbors who live next to Lūlū’s ḥōsh, refers to the fact that he is mad in the world of the sound-minded people (al-ʿuqalāʾ) as an illusion that multiplies like the spider’s cobwebs, ka-mukhāṭ al-shayṭān.38 Naqqāsh tells the reader in a footnote that in the Muslim dialect of Baghdad, cobwebs are called m[u]khāṭ al-shayṭān, literally, “the devil’s snot” (this is also the meaning of the phrase in fuṣḥā). Naqqāsh will go on building on this evocative phrase and expand on its semantic potential in the second part of the novel, when the crisis deepens for the Jewish tenants of the ḥōsh, a crisis that will lead most of them to choose Tasqīṭ and leave Baghdad for good. The mukhāṭ is then substituted with the khēṭ of the title (khayṭ in fuṣḥā) to form khēṭ al-shiṭān, literally “the thread of the devil” or with a small imaginative leap, “Satanwebs,” that is perhaps a reasonable cognate that retains some of the original phrase’s literal meaning and some of its idiomatic meaning.39 Farḥah and Ṣabriyyah are the two characters that refer to their being caught in the Satanwebs, that roughly correspond to the network of illusions that make them, at crucial moments in their life, blind to their hearts’ true inclinations.40
The vernacular soul of the novel is also joyously there to express the vividness of the local way of living and thinking in a popular quarter of old Baghdad at the time of Naqqāsh’s childhood. In this way, the novelist inscribes a quality of worldliness into his nostalgic, and at times bitter, remembrance of a time past. Naqqāsh goes to great lengths to represent very faithfully the way Baghdadis spoke and interacted in the 1940s and 1950s. We are in the realm of uncompromising linguistic authenticity at the expense of the readability of the text. This is an extreme example of heteroglossia as characters speak and think in Jewish Baghdadi and Muslim Baghdadi dialects and fuṣḥā, just to mention the three main language varieties. This extreme form of heteroglossia characterizes Nzūlah much more than any other text by Naqqāsh. As an example of how the fictional text faithfully mirrors the actual linguistically heterogenous context of the Baghdad of the time, all free direct speech is in the confessional dialect of the speaker with Muslim Baghdadi used as a lingua franca when the conversation is carried out between speakers from different confessional groups. The few exceptions to this practice that occur in the novel confirm the closeness, friendship and respect between the tenants who share their humble abode. The Muslim women Naʿīmah and Ḥamīdah decide to speak in Jewish dialect to their Jewish neighbors as an act of neighborly friendship.41 As we have mentioned above, Nzūlah is part of a long tradition of Arabic fictional works that present dialect in free direct speech: only to refer to the Iraqi context, in both Farmān’s al-Nakhlah wa-l-jīrān and al-Takarlī’s al-Rajʿ al-baʿīd the dialogues are in Baghdadi dialect. However, it is not only the diversity in the use of the confessional dialects that makes Nzūlah a unique text, but it is the fact that the vernacular is prominent even outside the boundaries of direct free speech. This is mostly due to Naqqāsh’s predilection for depicting events from the internal perspective of characters by privileging a composite form of interior monologue as his narrative technique. Passages narrated by an omniscient third person narrator are rare and the complexity of the interior monologue, given by sudden changes of narrative voices (pronouns), is meant to reproduce the obscurity and doubts that the author considers to be governing human life.42
The “unreadability” of the text, its notorious difficulty,43 is produced by the combination of the author’s deliberately defamiliarizing use of interior monologue and his uncompromising faithfulness to linguistic verisimilitude. For example, we find in stream-of-consciousness passages conversations (either taking place in the present of the narration or remembered, or even thought but not uttered) that present extreme heteroglossia whereby Jewish and Muslim vernaculars, and fuṣḥā are juxtaposed, sometimes even in the same sentence. We sometimes have an interior monologue that is mainly in fuṣḥā but with numerous words and expressions in the vernacular, and sometimes we have chapters entirely in dialect (e.g., those narrated from the perspective of ʿAṭiyyah al-Qarāwchī are entirely in Muslim dialect), and chapters almost exclusively in fuṣḥā.44
In this context, the use of fuṣḥā, obviously not an attempt at reproducing faithfully the way people speak, is particularly significant. All chapters that have Jūdī, ʿAṭiyyah’s son, as protagonist are almost entirely in fuṣḥā and denote the would-be eloquence of the nihilistic worldview of a seemingly mad individual. However, these chapters, despite their being in fuṣḥā, are hard to understand, obscure, dense with references, with no footnotes to fall back on (!), whereas those vernacular passages that are unintelligible at first reading are unproblematic once decoded in the footnotes and their meaning is usually straightforward. Jūdī, for us the readers who have access to his deranged internal world, is confirmed as a Prophet of Doom, whose sections, heavy with surreal and apocalyptic images and characters, lack the vividness of the vernacular. For the other characters in the novel (the seemingly sound-minded people), he is a half-wit whose eccentric behavior ought to be pitied or derided. The only thing they ever hear from him is his meaningless utterance (an endless “dah dah dah dah dah dah …”), but, crucially, this is the way the long novel ends, with this meaningless utterance.45 An utterance that reproduces “the sheer materiality of language” perhaps, but also a provocation from Naqqāsh that arguably signals his endorsement of this cosmic pessimism. It is as if he says that ultimately what remains in the ḥōsh, Baghdad and the world, is indeed “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
However, Nzūlah presents a hybridity and a vernacularity that, while resisting translatability, give it a more practical function and create the possibility for a less bleak reading.
The Poetics of Footnotes: Naqqāsh’s Kitāb al-hawāmish
Once Naqqāsh started publishing his first books in Arabic in Israel (in 1971), he realized his readership was dramatically curtailed by the politics of nationalism in Israel and the Arab world: he would not be read in Israel as he was a writer of Arabic, but his works would not be read by a significant Arab readership as he was an Israeli.46 It is remarkable that Naqqāsh did not respond to his isolation by following the example of fellow Iraqi Jewish writers who, once settled in Israel, gradually switched to writing in Hebrew. In fact, he never settled in Israel and kept moving from country to country in an attempt to find a new home, but he was unable to feel at home as he had done during the first thirteen years of his life in Baghdad. His reaction to this constant crisis of identity was an extreme one in Nzūlah, as he embarked on reproducing with gusto the linguistic heterogeneity of the Baghdad of his childhood. Ironically, the only compromise made by Naqqāsh to make the text understandable to a wider Arab readership, compounded its hybridity further; hundreds of footnotes ostensibly provided a translation of the vernaculars. However, Naqqāsh, the author of the footnotes assumes different roles. In most cases, he provides a straight-forward translation from the vernacular to fuṣḥā. For example, footnote n. 14 on page 18 includes the Muslim dialect sentence that occurs in the main text followed by its translation into fuṣḥā:
(١٤) فَدْ چاي سَنْگين: شاي واحد ثقيل.
One strong tea.
Often the footnote is not limited to a mere translation but includes explanatory passages. In the following example, Naqqāsh shows his knowledge as a lexicographer. The following sentence is taken from a chapter that depicts ʿAṭiyyah’s talking to ʿAmām in Muslim dialect:
كُل يوم اطْبُخلَه شطْ مِرگة وْچول پلْآوْ47
The sentence is translated into fuṣḥā in footnote n. 1 on p. 79:
وأطبخ له كُل يوم (شط مرگة وچول پلآو) أي نهر مرق وبيداء أرز
I cook for him every day a river of stew and a desert of rice.
After the translation, Naqqāsh adds an explanation on the etymology of the noun chōl:
(والچول أصلها عبرية « شئول » وتعني الجحيم ثم أطلقت على المقابر ولما كانت المقابر في الخلاء فقد اكتسبت معناها معنى الخلاء والبيداء وأخذها مسلمو بغداد عن يهودها فهي في استعمالهم أيضاً)
chōl is from the Hebrew for “hell,” shiʾūl [sheol], and came to be used for “graveyards.” When these were located in uninhabited, empty locations, it came to mean “wilderness,” “desert.” In Baghdad, the Muslims use the term too, having borrowed it from the Jews.
Naqqāsh also performs as a knowledgeable folklorist and ethnographer; for example, on p. 195, footnote 95:
(٩٥) الديوات، جمع ديو، وهو الجني بالفارسية يطلقونه على مخلوقات خرافية نصف بشرية نصف غولية تفترس الإنسان وتنام فاتحة الأعين، وإذا طعنت مرة ماتت فإذا ثنى الضارب عادت حية.
(95) Dīwāt, pl. of dīw [dīv], Persian for jinni, said of mythical half-human, half-ghoul creatures, that kill human beings and sleep with their eyes open, and if they are stabbed once, they die; if stabbed a second time, they come back to life.
In places, topographical information is added to explain an expression, e.g., on p. 98:
صوت الرجل الهمجي ما زال يطن في رأسي كَعَبَخانة (٤١)
The voice of that uncivilized man keeps on ringing in my head like an ʿabakhānah.
Footnote 41 reads:
العباخانة [كذا]، في الأصل كانت مصنعاً للنسيج أسسه الوالي التركي مدحت باشا، ثم أصبحت بعد الاحتلال البريطاني محطة لتوليد الكهرباء، وثمة لولب شاهق، تطلق منه الصفارات إيذاناً ببدء العمل وانتهائه، ومن هنا التشبيه.
ʿAbākhānah [sic]: originally a textile factory established by the Turkish governor Midḥat Pasha, which after the British occupation became a power station and there is a high spiral siren that sounds the beginning and the end of the work shift, hence the analogy.
We can learn a great deal on how Jewish and Muslim vernaculars of Baghdad work by carefully reading the passages in the main text against the backdrop of the footnote translations. However, in a few footnotes, Naqqāsh adds some explanatory notes on the grammar of the vernacular, e.g., on p. 17, on the Jewish dialect:
أكيد قَيِّشْخِر (٦) الآن في نومه.
certainly, he’s snoring now as he sleeps. [note the mixture of colloquial and fuṣḥā on the very first page of the novel]
Footnote 6 reads:
(
٦ )قيشخر: يغط والقاف علامة المضارعة في لهجة يهود بغداد
Qayyishkhir: ‘He is snoring.’ The qāf denotes the [continuous] present tense in the dialect of the Jews of Baghdad.
And on p. 73, on the Muslim dialect:
—
دِگولي عاد صبرية
—Do tell me then, Ṣabriyyah.
Footnote 17:
الدال قبل گولي (قولي) للحث. وكذلك عاد للحث أيضاً.
The dāl preceding gūlī (qūlī) is used as an exhortative, and so is ʿād.
The footnotes also provide a background to the numerous sayings, proverbs, folk beliefs and superstitions Naqqāsh enthusiastically adds to his text.48 Sometimes Naqqāsh even emerges as a sort of stage director who feels the need to explain not only the literal meaning of certain expressions but also their intended meaning and the emotional state of his “actors,” the users of the expression.49 In these cases, he emerges as a commentator on his own text, a rare example of self-exegesis: a secular type of tafsīr/midrash apparatus. Lital Levy writes about Naqqāsh’s style: “The footnotes frame the text as a ‘post-history’: as the depiction of a lost world, whose literary reconstruction necessitates extreme extradiegetic measures.”50 Levy also suggests that a possible meaning of this is a gesture to the text-commentary of the Jewish and Muslim scriptures. There are several examples of this extreme extradiegetic measure in Nzūlah when we read in footnotes about the quality of a certain expression; for example, when we read that something is said “scornfully.” Another more explicit example of Naqqāsh working as a sort of stage director seemingly instructing his characters to act their parts in a certain way is when Ḥamīdah (Muslim) narrates to ʿAmām (Jewish) the confrontation between the latter’s son Yaʿgūb (Jewish, obviously) and the tough guy Mahdī (Muslim), following Yaʿgūb’s defense of his friend ʿAlwān (Muslim).51
»
عاد مهدي صار شلونَه (١٦أ )؟ !..راح اتخبَّل.. مو آني أبو جاسم.. امْجَدّي كركوك وخَنْجَرَه بِحْزامه، مِنويِگدر يْگلُّه لَع (١٧ )؟ !
And so, how was Mahdī then(16a)?! … He went out of his mind … Aren’t I Abū Jāsim … Majdī Kirkūk, with his knife under his belt, who can say no to him?(17)
In footnote 17, p. 294, we read (note the surplus of small details besides the main indication between parentheses):
أصبح مجنوناً. أفلست (تتحدث بلسان مهدي وتعبر عن رأيه في نفسه) أبو جاسم لر، وكان من أشقياء بغداد الموصوفين ومن فتواتها المعدودين. كمجدي كركوك والخنجر بحزامه، تعبير آخر عن السطوة والجبروت، فمن ذا يجرؤ أن يقول له لا؟.!
He became mad, so am I not (she is talking from Mahdī’s perspective, expressing his own view of himself) Jāsim Lar, he was among Baghdad’s certified thugs [ashqiyāʿ] and choice tough guys [futuwwāt],52 like Majdī Kirkūk, “with his knife under his belt” is another expression of power and haughtiness, and so who [on earth] can be brave enough to say “no” to him?!53
In the “Introduction” of her Against World Literature, Apter refers to Tolstoy’s War and Peace and its multilinguistic nature as a meaningful example of a text that resists translation. Her reading of Tolstoy’s novel can be compared to our reading of Naqqāsh’s Nzūlah fruitfully. In War and Peace, the French language is said to invade the territory of the Russian language, a feature of form that mirrors the plot and theme of the novel. Levy suggests that in Naqqāsh the fact that so often the Jewish vernacular has center stage and fuṣḥā is relegated to the margins might be read as the author’s taking revenge on the upheavals of history that led to the expulsion of Jews from Iraq.54 This is a creatively suggestive claim that is perhaps relevant to Nzūlah too, but with the caveat that the same relegation of the literary language to the page margins occurs even when the Muslim dialect is used, as if to point to a promotion of the vernacular as a literary vehicle in its own right. An alternative reading that highlights integration rather than relegation is based on the fact that most passages in the lengthy novel present a mixing of idioms and language variants. The linguistic form that in Tolstoy represents crisis and instability, in Nzūlah, represents harmony, indeed, the cultural symbiosis of Baghdad’s Jewish community with its Iraqi (multi-confessional and multi-ethnic, but mainly Muslim) surroundings (e.g., see the Jewish-Shīʿī syncretic episodes mentioned above55 ). Despite the troubles and traumas that the text does not gloss over, in Nzūlah it is more of a question of different idioms of the same language merging with one another, than one of a foreign language invading a mother tongue.
Above we have hinted at some of the reasons that might be behind Naqqāsh’s uncompromising linguistic hybridity. What is unique in Nzūlah is not so much the fact that it is a lament to a lost past, an eradicated community, an urban space that is no more, but the fact that this lament is expressed through an heteroglossia that includes a language that was seemingly doomed to become extinct already by the time the novel appeared in Jerusalem in 1986. The traumatic exodus to Israel arguably started a process of gradual extinction for the Jewish Baghdadi vernacular that Naqqāsh is resurrecting in his novels. He might do this out of stubbornness, a sense of polemical provocation towards the Israeli cultural establishment or an inability to leave the world of his idealized childhood behind. Levy speaks of Naqqāsh’s obsession for recording the linguistic minutiae of a lost world as bordering on fetishization.56
Iraqi critics of Naqqāsh’s vernacular novels are sympathetic towards his choices underlying how, at a basic level, the texts fulfill the function of preserving the language of a lost community. For example, Khālidah Ḥātim ʿAlwān emphasizes Naqqāsh’s project of saving a language from oblivion and sees him as a typical Arab writer in exile who yearns for his homeland.57 But, as Hadīl ʿAbd al-Razzāq Aḥmad points out, the presence of fuṣḥā footnotes means that the text is not exclusively aimed at the restricted readership of the Iraqi Jews of Naqqāsh’s generation,58 and not even at those non-Jewish Iraqi readers who could understand both Jewish and Muslim vernaculars (neither Aḥmad nor ʿAlwān seems to find the Jewish vernacular problematic, and in both their works the passages in Jewish vernacular are quoted without their fuṣḥā translations).59 The footnotes are there to suggest a much wider intended readership, that of all readers of Arabic. The act of preservation is carried out for the benefit of all these readers, for Arab culture as a whole. The text carries within itself an apparatus that changes the position of “the reading person” towards itself and its Baghdadi vernaculars by enhancing its comprehensibility.
Naqqāsh Read Posthumously: from Satanwebs to Torch Bearer
space is a practiced place. […] In the same way, an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e., a place constituted by a system of signs.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 117
As we have seen above, War and Peace and its multilinguistic nature is discussed by Emily Apter as a meaningful example of a text that resists translation.60 In his novel, Tolstoy left some passages in French and German untranslated and some deliberately mistranslated. He also used “gallicized Russian” and Russian-inflected French. Apter claims that Tolstoy used these stratagems of untranslatability to trademark “the world novel as a chronicle of political instability and crisis.”61 The contrast with Nzūlah is clear: in the latter the great majority of the lengthy passages in the vernaculars (and the few words in Persian and English) are translated (the only few short passages left untranslated seem to have been so because of the author’s rare oversight—or his assumption a reader of Arabic would have understood the vernacular by that point in the narrative). The linguistic world of Nzūlah relies on various forms of Arabic and not on the significant inclusion of foreign idioms. Political instability and crisis are expressed thematically, and not through “stratagems of untranslatability.” In fact, everything can be, and is, translated into fuṣḥā. Naqqāsh’s choice to write in Arabic is a meaningful political statement as most of his books were first published in Israel,62 where Naqqāsh became one of the very few from among the group of Israeli writers of Iraqi descent who did not eventually embrace Hebrew as a viable literary language, which could also represent their experiences of life in Iraq.63 Naqqāsh acquired a knowledge of Hebrew that could have allowed him to follow their example, but he always saw himself as an Arab Jew and defined his identity as quintessentially Iraqi. His decision to continue to write in Arabic even as an Israeli citizen implied a rejection of Zionist forms of cultural assimilation and identity formation tendencies that marginalize the cultural identity of non-European Jews.64
On the other hand, the sheer vernacularity of Nzūlah challenges the use of a heavily standardized literary language that flattens out vernacular differences, sometimes in the name of pan-Arab unity.65 Ironically, Naqqāsh’s decision to include the vernaculars and also to translate them into fuṣḥā makes his text virtually untranslatable into a foreign language.66
Apter, referring to the observations of a recent English co-translator of War and Peace, Richard Pevear, writes: “the Untranslatable performs a metafunction in the novel, tormenting its would-be translator with the impossibility of the task at hand.”67 Nzūlah has been translated into English by Sadok Masliyah, an American-based scholar who shares the same cultural background as Naqqāsh. If we consider his English translation, we observe that different degrees of flattening the original text and enhancing its readability have been applied. The most significant difference between the two versions is the lack of linguistic heteroglossia in the English version. In the latter, the numerous footnotes that are an integral part of the original Naqqāshian page, have been exiled to the tail of the book in the form of a much more discreet glossary. This is the most understandable choice, as it would have been very hard to reproduce the same format as the original, and presumably the viability of the book as a commercial good must have been taken into consideration by the publisher. The second measure adopted to enhance readability is more questionable as it concerns the translator’s own additions and edits that are meant to soften the impact of Naqqāsh’s modernist techniques, such as the sudden changes of pronouns and narrative voices, and help the readers find their way through the maze of the text. This means, for example, that in the original often different voices emerge within the consciousness of one character and merge with one another sometimes in a surprising and deliberately disorienting fashion that is supposed to reproduce human thought processes and invites slow reading and re-readings. In the translation, on the other hand, the translator often helps the reader by clarifying who the speaker of an utterance is, unfortunately not always accurately.
To go back to Apter and Pevear’s observations on War and Peace, “a compositional heterogeneity” is seen to “repeatedly disrupt the fictional continuum:”68 there are letters, official dispatches and quotations in French, passages in German, along with “other heterogenous elements in the composition: Tolstoy’s map and commentary on the battlefield of Borodino, and his own interpolated essays.”69 This is said to be an essential part of Tolstoy’s vision of a literary form that he himself considered to be hybrid: “not a novel, still less an epic poem, still less a historical chronicle.”70 In Nzūlah we have a hyper compositional heterogeneity that is given by the ever present footnotes, rather than the use of metafictional texts within the fictional text as in War and Peace. Naqqāsh’s paratextual heterogeneity repeatedly disrupts the fictional continuum and greatly affects the reading act by turning it ideally into a performance.
The average non-Iraqi reader of Nzūlah would certainly find the Jewish vernacular, so prominent in the text of the novel, to be alien, almost intelligible, at first.71 They will read it first in the main text, then perhaps guess at the meaning thanks to the context provided by the surrounding text in fuṣḥā and/or in Muslim Baghdadi Arabic. They will then move to the footnote and absorb the information stored therein, move back up to the now more graspable passage and read it afresh. Naqqāsh could have reached a compromise and standardized the language of Nzūlah instead of offering this difficult and cumbersome reading process. Perhaps he could have collected all the contextual information on the fictional text in a separate volume, a companion to the novel, as for works of seemingly inaccessible western modernism such as Joyce’s Ulysses or Eliot’s Waste Land. However, if the readers persist and invest in their reading of Nzūlah (by exerting the same kind of effort as that demanded by Ulysses and The Waste Land), they will discover that this is a text that asks to be appropriated by its readers by virtue of its linguistic heteroglossia and style.72 Not only will they go back to read the vernacular of the main text, but they will also read it aloud. As we have seen above, some of Naqqāsh’s footnotes include instructions on how to read the text. Levy confirms that this invitation to read the passages in Jewish dialect aloud is inherent in Naqqāsh’s works where the vernacular is present. Here, she is discussing the autobiographical novella Anā, hāʾulāʾ wa-l-fiṣām (I, They and the Split), but her observations are relevant to Nzūlah too: “An incredibly literal rendition of the dialect’s idioms and cadences, [the] speech is transcribed so phonetically that it makes little sense until read aloud and, at many points, until compared with the fusha translation.”73 Almog Behar and Yuval Evri use Bakhtin and Barthes to analyze Naqqāsh’s texts as examples of “writable texts” that should be read aloud: “Naqqash restores the spoken stratum of the language, drawing attention to the multiplicity of the writing and reading processes and bringing the listener together with the reader and the speaker together with the writer.”74 Behar and Evri ascribe to Naqqāsh what Barthes says about “the musicality of the text”:
the sounds of the language, writing aloud is not phonological but phonetic […] the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat […] the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.75
Comprehensibility draws our attention to “the delicate boundary between […] language as sheer materiality and language as a hermeneutic invitation.” Once the reader of Nzūlah appropriates the sheer materiality of its vernaculars by uttering forgotten or uprooted idioms, they would have realized a significant political gesture: if only for a short moment, an almost extinct language has been brought back to life, and with it a whole lost community, a lost world has been revived. Guided by the ghost of a writer whose linguistic virtuosity has often been seen as impenetrable, the reader can indeed perform an act of defiance against history in the name of its Iraqi victims, Jewish and Muslim alike.76
The possibility of this vocalization, this uttering, is not to be dismissed as mere wishful thinking. In Israel, the poet Amira Hess (born in Baghdad in 1943) and the poet, writer and critic Almog Behar (of mixed Iraqi, Turkish and German origins, whose critical work we have mentioned above) have dramatized in some of their works, written in Hebrew, the difficulty, or even impossibility, of finding a voice that would speak of and to their Iraqi roots within the Ashkenazi-dominated cultural landscape of Israel. In her inspirational study on Hebrew and Arabic literature in Israel and Palestine, Lital Levy draws our attention to both authors. In Hess’s poem “Kentu be-ghayr deni” (“I Was in Another World”)—first recited at an Israeli poetry festival in 2007, the title and most sections are in Jewish Baghdadi Arabic, transliterated (unvocalized) in Hebrew characters and followed by a translation in Modern Hebrew (vocalized).77 The poem begins with these verses:
Citation: Journal of Arabic Literature 2025; 10.1163/1570064x-12341533
Levy sees the poet as “recovering the lost language of her childhood rather than merely lamenting its loss.”79 Hess confirms this when she writes in her poem, first in Arabic and then in Hebrew:
It is with the same yearning and resolve that Naqqāsh tries to salvage the idioms of his past “wondrous life.”
Another work written in Hebrew and published in Israel that is relevant to our evaluation of Naqqāsh is “Anā min al-Yahūd” (2005) by Almog Behar. The story which won the Haaretz Newspaper short story competition in 2005, is an imaginatively dystopian take on the Ashkenazi-dominated culture in Israel and the struggle of people who have Arab origins like the author.81 As Levy observes, Behar’s protagonist never utters the only full sentence in Arabic in the story, the titular “I am one of the Jews.” The sentence is “never sounded out loud, only internally; the narrator’s inability to articulate it locks him in silence, and alludes to the impossibility of being both Arab and Jewish in the State of Israel.”82 The following passage is a clear reference to Naqqāsh’s predicament as a Jewish writer writing Arabic in Israel, who received prizes but was largely ignored or criticized for writing unreadable texts:83
وأطلعت زوجتي على سِرِّي: “بدأت في كِتابة قِصَصي بالحُروف العربية، سيَشعُر المسئولون في الأَقْسَامِ الكُبرَى بالصَدْمة مرة أخرى”. وعادت زوجتي بعد عدة أيام إلى البيت لتحكي لي أن رُؤَساء الأَقْسام ضَحِكوا، وقالوا، فليكتب، ليكتب قصصاً، هو وحده يستطيع قِراءتها، لن يقرأها أبواه، ولا أبناؤه، وكذلك أولادنا لن يَتعرَّضوا للخَطَر. وسنَمنحه، لو أراد، جَمِيع الجَوائز الحكومية فِي الأَدَبِ العَرَبي، دون أن نَقْرَأ كَلِمَة مما كَتَبَهُ.84
I told my wife my secret: “I’ve started writing my stories in Arabic. The officials in the big government departments will be shocked once again.” A few days later my wife came home to tell me that the department heads had laughed and said: “Let him write, let him write stories that only he can read. His own parents and children won’t even read them. Likewise, our children will never be in danger. And if he wants we’ll give him all the government awards for Arabic literature without reading a word he has written.”85
Despite this disillusioned, ironic take on what the official line of the Israeli cultural institutions might have been towards Naqqāsh, Behar is certain about the value of Naqqāsh’s seemingly Quixotic quest and the potential inspiration Naqqāsh’s work can provide for the following generations of Mizraḥi writers in Israel.86 Asked by the scholar and writer Chana Morgenstern in 2011 about the role of Mizraḥim in changing Israeli culture, he replied:
In the words of Emile Habiby, translated by Anton Shammas, I am a pessoptimist. But even if you’re being pessimistic you can say that someone like Samir Naqqash, who preserved his culture by being an Israeli Jewish author who wrote in Arabic during the 1960s and 70s, carried a torch for the rest of us. He knew he lived in a dark age, that he was living in a generation in which this position and this act would not prevail or even stand out. He knew that this act would be denied, both in Israel and in the Arab world, that it would be swallowed up by all of the darkness around it. But … the simple act of holding the torch, illuminates the notion of possibility for future generations. There is a possibility; the possibility of a generation that will change and will be capable of changing society and carrying this torch forward.87
Hess and Behar clearly address an Israeli audience when they speak of alienation, loss and regret in a powerful and provocative way.88 The articulation of their Arabic voice is problematized within an Israeli context but remains central to their identity. On the other hand, Naqqāsh primarily addresses an Arab[ic] audience when he speaks of his quintessentially Baghdadi identity as an heterogenous one, within which different Arabic voices organically merge. As we have seen above, vernacularity (as “an index of worldliness”) does embed his work in a specific context. This context seems to be irremediably lost in an unretrievable past. However, the fact that since his death his work has attracted critical attention in the Arab world indicates that his past identity as a Baghdadi Jew is increasingly significant in the Arab context too. It is notable that the only critics who (to our knowledge) have explored in great detail his vernacular work (not only Nzūlah but also Fuwwah yā dam!) are Iraqi: Khālidah Ḥātim ʿAlwān and Hadīl ʿAbd al-Razzāq Aḥmad. It is also worth noting that both critics have decided to focus on the polyphonic value of this work by praising its linguistic complexity as an excellent example of heteroglossia. Theirs is an effort to canonize Naqqāsh’s vernacular works within an Iraqi national framework. Aḥmad compares them to other notable Iraqi polyphonic texts, like Fuʾād al-Takarlī’s al-Rajʿ al-baʿīd. On the other hand, ʿAlwān, who has decided to focus only on the works of Iraqi Jewish novelists, is keen to contextualize her effort within the ongoing crisis In Iraq. On the back cover of her book, she defines her work as “a fresh attempt to study Iraq’s civilization and culture” and “read its history” and adds:
لا نصبو أن تكون دراستنا دراسة أدبية صرفة، بل هي مشروع لقراءة الذات والذي نحن في أمس الحاجة إليه في عصر يموج بصراعات الهوية بين الانبعاث والتزمق والازدواج.. لتشخيص أسباب المعاناة والغموض والتدهور في بلدنا والذي لا يتحدد إلا بمعرفة موقفنا من الآخر […] أملاً في غد مشرق وإزالة للحواجز.
We do not intend our study to be a purely literary study, but rather a project for reading the self, which we are in desperate need of in an age rife with clashes of identity between revival and fragmentation, schizophrenia, etc., in order to diagnose the causes of suffering, uncertainty and decline in our country, [a project] that can only be defined through a knowledge of how we relate to others […] in the hope for a bright, inclusive tomorrow.89
Nzūlah is a hyper hybrid text. It is primarily a fictional text (a novel of Jewish Baghdad between the Farhūd and the Tasqīṭ), but it also includes a paratextual apparatus of footnotes that fulfill different functions: they translate the vernaculars into the literary language, but they also provide a compendium of a lost Baghdad. Vernacularity and hybridity are indexes of the text’s worldliness, which forcefully inscribe it in a specific spatiotemporal context in an uncompromising way that is both vivid (the text is “written aloud”) and poignant (this world has been lost). However, this discussion has also shown that this “unreadable” and “untranslatable” text has been read very fruitfully after its author’s death and has the potential to continue to be read in the future by a disparate set of readers.90 The vernaculars in Nzūlah have the power to embed the text into its context, but they also call for the readers to perform the text and direct its orientation beyond context. This reading performance is an idealistic political gesture that points at cultural hybridity as a value capable of countering narrow nationalisms, whether they be in Israel, Iraq, or the Middle Eastern region as a whole.91
I am very grateful to Catherine Cobham for her precious feedback and to Tomas Vancisin whose expertise and generosity helped me produce the figures included in this article. This article was completed long before the current devastation of Gaza. This study, on the work of an Arab Jewish writer, is dedicated to the Arab and Jewish innocent victims of violence.
Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London and New York: Verso, 2013), 2. Apter’s concern is partly informed by tendencies in American academia to propose “neoliberal ‘big tent’ syllabi taught in English” that go hand in hand with “the cutting of ‘foreign’ language instruction” (Ibid., 8).
Helena Bodin, Stefan Helgesson and Markus Huss, “Inscriptions of Worldliness: Linguistic Materiality and the Poetics of the Vernacular,” Textual Practice 34.5 (2020): 714.
Ibid., 715.
The question is made much more complex by wider political and cultural issues. For much more comprehensive and detailed discussions, see: Clive Holes, Modern Arabic: Structures, Functions, and Varieties (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004), 373–380; ‘Prolegomena’ in Sasson Somekh, Genre and Language in Modern Arabic Literature (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1991), 3–72; Reuven Snir, Modern Arabic literature: A Theoretical Framework (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 35–40; Gunvor Mejdell, “Changing Norms, Concepts and Practices of Written Arabic: A ‘Long Distance’ Perspective,” in The Politics of Written Language in the Arab World: Writing Change, eds. Jacob Høigilt and Gunvor Mejdell (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017), especially 81–82. For a discussion that focuses more specifically on Iraqi Jewish writers, see Nancy Berg, Exile from Exile: Israeli Writers from Iraq (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 53–56.
On the meanings of the title, see below. As an homage to the text’s vernacular nature, I aimed for a transliteration that reproduces the sound of the dialect even for those words and names that can be read in both dialect and standard Arabic. This means that I will refer to Silmān, and not Salmān; al-ḥōsh, and not al-ḥawsh (“courtyard,” “house”); Banī Sʿīd, and not Banī Saʿīd.
Since Naqqāsh’s death, his work has been the object of several studies that have confirmed his status as one of the most skillful Arab-Jewish writers. In addition to the critical works to which we will refer throughout this study, see Reuven Snir, Arab-Jewish Literature: The Birth and Demise of the Arabic Short Story (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019), xii–xv, 110–122; Geula Elimelekh, “Samīr Naqqāsh: Between the Sacred and the Demonic,” Studia Orientalia Electronica 3 (2015): 1–16; Geula Elimelekh, “The Search for Identity in the Works of Samīr Naqqāsh,” Middle Eastern Studies 49.1 (2013): 63–75; ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ibn Muḥammad al-Wahhābī, ‘al-Adāʾ wa-l-ruʾyah al-īdyūlūjiyyah fī khiṭāb al-sard al-riwāʾī ʿinda Samīr Naqqāsh,’ [Performance and Ideological Outlook in Samīr Naqqāsh’s Novelistic Narrative Discourse] Al-ʿUlūm al-insāniyyah 21 (2012): 50–87. Testament to the growing interest in the literature of Arab Jewish writers, a special issue of the literary magazine Banipal has recently been dedicated to Iraqi Jewish writers, offering a comprehensive survey of many writers, including Naqqāsh himself, but also the pioneers Anwar Shāʾūl (1904–1984) and Shālūm Darwīsh (1913–1997); Banipal 72 (Autumn/Winter, 2021).
The use of vernacular idioms in Nzūlah is markedly more prominent than in Fuwwah. Both novels were first published in Jerusalem by the Association of Jewish Academics from Iraq (Rābiṭat al-jāmiʿiyyīn al-yahūd al-nāziḥīn min al-ʿIrāq), Nzūlah in 1986 and Fuwwah in 1987. Both texts were then made available to a wider Arabic readership thanks to the Iraqi publisher Manshūrāt al-Jamal (initially based in Cologne, then in Baghdad, Beirut and Freiberg), Fuwwah in 2011 and Nzūlah in 2012. It is the Manshūrāt al-Jamal edition of Nzūlah we will refer to in this study. We have borrowed the American scholar Lital Levy’s inventive translation of Fuwwah’s title (which literally means “madder or blood!”) as “Blood for Sale!”; Lital Levy, Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), 319.
Bodin, Helgesson and Huss, “Inscriptions of Worldliness,” 715.
Ibid., 714.
Ibid., 715.
In her study of Judeo-Arabic, Ella Shohat concedes that ‘the Jewish generation that actually spoke Arabic at home and in the streets of Arab cities is indeed disappearing’ (Ella Shohat, “The Invention of Judeo-Arabic: Nation, Partition and the Linguistic Imaginary,” Interventions, 19.2 (2016), 185). However, she casts “doubt on the ‘endangered language’ discourse” (ibid.) stating: “Only within the nationalistic projection of ‘Judeo-Arabic’ as a kind of non-Arabic Arabic that is a priori separate from its contemporary non-Jewish speakers, would the physical disappearance of the older Arab-Jews mean a complete linguistic death sentence” (ibid., 187).
Bodin, Helgesson and Huss, “Inscriptions of Worldliness,” 715.
See Almog Behar and Yuval Evri, “Samir Naqqash and his Polyglotic Literature in the Age of National Partition,” Journal of Levantine Studies 9.2 (Winter 2019).
Samīr Naqqāsh, Nzūlah u-khēṭ al-shiṭān (Baghdad, Beirut and Freiberg: Manshūrāt al-Jamal, 2012), 558.
The sentence between quotation marks is in Jewish Baghdadi dialect and is one of the few vernacular passages left untranslated in the novel, perhaps because considered unproblematic. The translations of all quotations from the original text are mine.
In its original Jerusalem edition of 1986, the main text character size is the same as in the 2012 Manshūrāt al-Jamal edition, but in this latter, the line spacing is wider and the character size of the footnote text is bigger. The 1986 edition counts 428 pages.
Al-Rijs (Filth, 1987) is based on episodes that happened to Naqqāsh when he was a teenager: his fleeing from Israel with his cousin to Lebanon, being captured there and being returned to Israel. ʿAwrat al-malāʾikah (The Sex of Angels, 1991) is about Naqqāsh’s troubled experience with Israeli academia and his move to Britain in the 1990s. Naqqāsh’s last novel, which was published in 2004, the same year he died, is Shlūmū al-kurdī wa-anā wa-l-zaman (Shlomo the Kurd, Me and Time). The text is only very loosely autobiographical and focuses on the history of Middle Eastern Jewry through the travels and travails of the titular Shlomo who, like Naqqāsh, eventually moved to Israel and died there.
See Ammiel Alcalay (ed.), Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996): 101–102; Māzin Laṭīf, Samīr Naqqāsh: Naqsh ʿirāqī fī al-dhākirah [Samīr Naqqāsh: An Iraqi Inscription in the Memory] (Baghdad: Dār Mīzūbūtānyā, 2015), 68.
Naqqāsh, Nzūlah, 61, footnote 2; Orit Bashkin, New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 101.
For detailed accounts of the Farhūd and the Tasqīṭ, see Kāẓim Ḥabīb, Yahūd al-ʿIrāq wa-l-muwāṭanah al-muntazaʿah [The Jews of Iraq and their Divested Citizenship] (Milan: Manshūrāt al-Mutawwasiṭ, 2015), 359–392, 441–451; and Bashkin, New Babylonians, 100–140. For a succinct account of the Tasqīṭ in English, see Lital Levy, “Self and the City: Literary Representations of Jewish Baghdad,” Prooftexts 26.1–2 (2006): 167.
In her analysis of the literary representations of Baghdad by Jewish writers, Levy quotes from Michel de Certeau: “space is a practiced place. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers.” Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117; quoted in Levy, “Jewish Baghdad,” 165.
In the conclusion of this article, I will look at the very significant ways in which Naqqāsh’s work has been read across national borders, but I also firmly believe it is important to consider his work as an integral part of modern Iraqi literature, regardless of the fact that it was first published in Israel. In this way, we see this contribution as echoing an increasingly inclusive critical discourse in the Arab world, see for example Hadīl ʿAbd al-Razzāq Aḥmad, Taʿaddud al-aṣwāt fī al-riwāyah al-ʿirāqiyyah: Dirāsah naqdiyyah fī mustawayāt wujhāt al-naẓar (1985–2010) [Polyphony in the Iraqi Novel: A Critical Study of Levels of Perspective (1985–2010)] (Amman: Dār Ghaydāʾ lil-nashr wa-l-tawzīʿ, 2016).
In al-Nakhlah, the Farhūd is only mentioned in passing, Ghāʾib Ṭuʿmah Farmān, al-Nakhlah wa-l-jīrān (Beirut: Dār al-Fārābī/Dār Bābil, 1988): 94, 195.
See Fabio Caiani and Catherine Cobham, The Iraqi Novel: Key Writers, Key Texts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 87, 221–222.
In al-Nakhlah, the ḥōsh at the center of the narrative is where Salīmah the baker and her son Ḥusayn live. Their neighbors live in an old, shared accommodation (called khān in the novel) that is similar to Lūlū’s house in Nzūlah.
“Bistān al-Khass” literally means “The Lettice Orchard.” For information on the quarters of the Baghdad of the time, see Levy, “Jewish Baghdad,” 172–174. Naqqāsh himself was born in one of these more affluent neighborhoods, that of al-Battāwīn (Laṭīf, “Naqsh ʿIrāqī,” 32). With time, Baghdad expanded dramatically, and these quarters became part of the city center. Aḥmad Saʿdāwī sets part of his renowned novel Frānkishtāyn fī Baghdād (2013; translated into English by Jonathan Wright as Frankenstein in Baghdad, 2018) in al-Battāwīn. Whereas in the present of the narration, that of occupied Baghdad after 2003, the quarter, now an old quarter in central Baghdad, is inhabited by Muslims and Christians, there are still hidden remnants of the Jewish inhabitants who once lived there; see Aḥmad Saʿdāwī, Frānkishtāyn fī Baghdād, 4th ed (Baghdad, Beirut and Freiberg: Manshūrāt al-Jamal, 2014), Chapter 13, “al-Kharābah al-yahūdiyyah” and especially 240– 241; in the English translation (London: Oneworld, 2018), “The Jewish Ruin,” 197.
On the folk etymology of the name, see Samīr Naqqāsh, Tenants and Cobwebs, trans. Sadok Masliyah (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2018), 396.
After risking his life in Karbala and constantly feeling under threat throughout his journey home, the outcome of successive shocks is such that when he is welcomed home by his family, he sees them as monsters that want to harm him. Tellingly, in his mind the anti-Jewish accusations he heard in Karbala are now being uttered by his own father, who has been disfigured into a monster:
—
“You killed the saints! You’re a spy! You’re guiding the [British] plane” (Naqqāsh, Nzūlah, 197). It is clear that the animosity towards Jews is seen as all the more traumatic as it comes from within the same family, the Iraqi homeland. This is a community that also includes the young Muslim men who in Karbala defend Silmān, and Muḥsin ʿAbd al-Wāḥid who takes care of him and makes sure he reaches home safely. For Silmān, all of these are his “Muslim angels.” For Jamīl, Silmān’s Muslim saviors surely must have been communists! (see for example: ibid., 190).
The same depiction of the Camp al-Arman and al-Saddah area as a foreign space for the dwellers of the city center applies to Farmān’s al-Nakhlah (see for example Farmān, al-Nakhlah, 48–52).
In the aftermath of the Farhūd some members of the Jewish community sought to acquire weapons for self-defense (Bashkin, New Babylonians, 134–135).
Naqqāsh, Nzūlah, 563.
The only chapter in the novel narrated through the perspective of children is a narrative that depicts the pains of growing up and the boys’ wish to escape from a world of poverty and harshness, and “the silly demands of manhood,” in a perceptive and at times poetic fashion. For instance, see how Marrūdī’s friend ʿĒbah imagines he can fly over Baghdad on a bicycle (ibid., 568–569), and how the Tigris is depicted (Ibid., 583).
Ibid., 437.
لقد رسموا مصيري لي.. رسموه في بغداد، وفي الأمم المتحدة، وفي إسرائيل. لكني وحدي لا أعلم ماذا سيكون مصيري.
The Muslim lodger Naʿīmah is often lost in admiration (that at times verges on sensual attraction) for Ṣabriyyah. For Naʿīmah there is nothing wrong in living in a house that is almost entirely Jewish (shakū bīhā is the vernacular expression that punctuates her first chapter: “What’s wrong with it?”). In fact, she is determined not to wear the veil as she sees herself as muslimah ʿaṣriyyah (“a modern-day Muslim woman,” ibid., 45). She is proud of and looks up to her Jewish friends who work and live in the “good quarters” of Baghdad: Eastern Karrādah, al-ʿIlwiyyah and al-Battāwīn (Ibid., 45–46). The feminist thread of the novel is also developed around the character of the Muslim Āminah who, despite living under the dominating male gaze of her hypocritical brother Jabbār, has an affair with the Jewish tobacco vendor Khaḍḍūrī. After her affair is discovered, Āminah escapes from Jabbār’s wrath and a likely “honor killing,” by taking the train to Basra.
Ibid., 620.
On the Iraqi dialects, see the following sources: Jacob Mansour, The Jewish Baghdadi Arabic: Studies and Texts in the Judeo-Arabic Dialect of Baghdad (Or-Yehuda: The Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center, the Institute for Research on Iraqi Jewry, 1991); Clive Holes, “Confessional Varieties,” in The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Sociolinguistics, eds. Enam Al-Wer and Uri Horesh (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 63–80; Haim Blanc, Communal Dialects in Baghdad (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 1964); R.J. McCarthy and Faraj Raffouli, Spoken Arabic of Baghdad. Part 1, Grammar and Exercises (Beirut: Librairie Orientale, 1964); A Dictionary of Iraqi Arabic (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003). For a recording of a witness account of the Farhūd in Jewish Baghdadi Arabic, see http://semarch.ub.uni-heidelberg.de#id:844958. This and other recordings in Jewish Baghdadi Arabic are provided by the Semitic Audio Archive of the University of Heidelberg at https://semarch.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/en.html#archive.
Nzūlah, 56.
It is hard not to draw a parallel between Nzūlah and László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango (1985; Satantango, 2013) as both novels draw from a well-defined historical setting to seemingly arrive at a form of cosmic pessimism. Both novels are also examples of literary bravura and technical experimentations. In Satantango, set in the final part of communist rule in Hungary, the imagery of all-covering cobwebs alludes to the march of time that does not change things for the better. To be caught in these cobwebs means to get stuck in a static paradigm with no future. For a critique of Krasznahorkai’s works as bleak disillusionment, see Robert Boyers, The Dictator’s Dictation: The Politics of Novels and Novelists (New York: University of Columbia Press, 2005), 169–178. For a more optimistic reading of Satantango, see Mikkel Krause Frantzen, “Destroying Necessity with Necessity—on László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango,” Textual Practice, published online (2020), DOI: 10.1080/ 0950236X.2020.1839945.
For Farḥah’s Satanwebs, see Naqqāsh, Nzūlah, 545–546, 549–550. For Ṣabriyyah’s Satanwebs, see ibid., 613. There are several hints to suggest that khēṭ al-shiṭān goes well beyond its idiomatic meaning of “cobwebs.” At the end of Farḥah’s passage, the vernacular khēṭ is substituted with the standard Arabic shibāk to give shibāk al-shayṭān, “the devil’s nets/network” (Ibid., 550). Naqqāsh’s blurb on the original 1986 edition ends with a reference to the many people whose life is depicted in the novel:
[…]
“[…] many people who have in common the fact that they live in the same house, occasionally the café and the street put them together, but the most important bond [linking them all] is Satan’s thread.” Samīr Naqqāsh, Nzūlah u-khēṭ al-shiṭān (Jerusalem: Rābiṭat al-jāmiʿiyyīn al-yahūd al-nāziḥīn min al-ʿIrāq, 1986), blurb.
For Naʿīma’s remarks, see Naqqāsh, Nzūlah, 49. Ḥamīda speaks Jewish dialect with her Jewish neighbor ʿAmām but at times mixes the Jewish and Muslim dialects (Nzūlah, 291, footnote (*)).
Alcalay, Keys to the Garden, 106. On Naqqāsh’s work as being inspired by the ideas of Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, see Benyamin Rish, “Samīr Naqqāsh in his Writings Challenges Existentialist Philosophers with the Ideas of Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī,” Journal of Semitic Studies 59.2 (2014): 409–434, and Aline Schlaepfer, “Baghdad-Jérusalem: le début ou la fin de l’exil? Conflits identitaires dans la littérature de Samīr Naqqāsh,” in Standing on the Beach with a Gun in my Hand, Eternal Tour Jérusalem, 2010, eds. Donatella Bernardi and Noémie Etienne (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2011), 44–45.
For example, the Iraqi Jewish novelist Isḥāq Bār-Mūshe (Ishaq Bar-Moshe) found Naqqāsh’s work to be “unreadable” and “not enjoyable” (Berg, Exile from Exile, 55). Naqqāsh himself remarked that some of his work was “virtually unreadable” (Alcalay, Keys to the Garden, 107).
The narrative often mimics the way people actually tell a story, and this is not only because the vernacular is prominent in it, but also because it is full of parenthetic asides. An example of this multi-directional narrative stream that mimics oral storytelling is Nājī al-Jundī’s telling of his misadventures (e.g., Ch. 4, Part 9, Naqqāsh, Nzūlah, 505–516).
In a letter dated 16 July 1991 to the Iraqi novelist Inʿām Kachachī (Inaam Kachachi), Naqqāsh writes that he still remembers the child of his neighbors in Baghdad, the Qarrūjī family (Āl Qarrūjī), Jūdī, and how he used to open his fingers towards him and say: “dah dah dah …” Naqqāsh also writes how his family were protected by the Qarrūjī family during the Farhūd (“Risālat Samīr Naqqāsh ilā Inʿām Kachachī,” [Samīr Naqqāsh’s Letter to Inaam Kachachi] al-Anṭūlūjiyāh, March 23 (2016), https://alantologia.com/blogs/5011). In Nzūlah, ʿAṭiyyah al-Qarāwchī, Jūdī’s mother, refers to how she defended her Jewish neighbors during the Farhūd when she was living in the al-ʿĀgūliyyah (al-ʿĀqūliyyah) quarter. This is another episode in the novel that faithfully reflects what had happened in Iraq in those days when numerous Muslims risked their own life to defend their Jewish neighbors (see for example, Bashkin, New Babylonians, 100–102, 119, 122–125).
See for example, Behar and Evri, “Polyglotic Literature,” 121.
Naqqāsh, Nzūlah, 77.
The novel is also a collection of jargon related to different professions (e.g., that of musicians, shoemakers) and specific lexica (e.g., card games and children’s games).
In his Paratexts, Gérard Genette does not refer to footnotes like Naqqāsh’s, i.e., predominantly offering a translation from a variety to another variety of the same language, with the information and guidelines we have described. Genette does not see the stage direction in parentheses in the text of Tartuffe as paratext: “The well-known ‘It is a scoundrel who says this’ in Tartuffe [4.5.1487] is presented in every aspect as a stage direction and I see no reason to credit that category in general to the account of the paratext.” Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 333–334. Would he if the short guideline were included in a footnote as in Nzūlah? In any case, the footnotes in Nzūlah do correspond to the definition of the paratext as an in-between “a zone not only of transition but also of transaction” that influences, directs the reader (Ibid., 2). Levy convincingly refers Genette’s work to the Naqqāshian text, see Levy, Poetic Trespass, 132.
Ibid.
In a multiple narration worthy of One Thousand and One Nights, Ḥamīdah is actually narrating the story her son Majīd narrated to her.
In the context of the Farhūd, al-Futuwwah refers to a right-wing paramilitary youth organization (Bashkin, New Babylonians, 106). As the argument between Mahdī and Yaʿgūb goes on the former repeats an allegation that ʿAlwān took an active part in the Farhūd whereas he, Mahdī, protected the Jews. Yaʿgūb dismisses the allegation; however, in the second part of the novel, ʿAlwān’s increasing anti-Jewish stance will alienate Yaʿgūb who will indeed become more friendly with Mahdī.
There are other examples of extraordinary extradiegetic intrusion via footnotes that are clearly meant to help the reader navigate and understand the text: footnote n. 4, p. 416 helps the readers remember what the character (Āminah) alludes to in reference to an episode they read hundreds of pages back in the text; footnote n. 32, p. 544 helps the reader understand the meaning of a sentence the character (Farḥah) does not finish, by providing the second part of it in the footnote only!
Levy, Poetic Trespass, 132.
In line with this syncretism is also the paratextual gloss that Naqqāsh adds to Silmān’s lament that, should he die, no one except the atheist, communist Jamīl would be left to recite the Jewish Prayer for the Dead, Qiddīsh (Kaddish). In the footnote, Naqqāsh translates Qiddīsh as al-Fātiḥah, the opening sūrah of the Qurʾān: “Who then will recite the Fātiḥah for my soul?” (Naqqāsh, Nzūlah, 175, footnote n. 9).
Levy, Poetic Trespass, 139.
Khālidah Ḥātim ʿAlwān, al-Riwāʾiyyūn al-ʿirāqiyyūn al-yahūd: Dirāsah fī al-thaqāfah wa-l- mutakhayyal wa-l-tajrīb al-riwāʾī (Iraqi Jewish Novelists: A Study of Culture, Imaginary and Novelistic Practice) (Baghdad: Dār Mīzūbūtāmiyā, 2014), 192–193.
Aḥmad, Taʿaddud al-aṣwāt, 122.
This and the way characters interact in the novel confirm that the confessional Arabic vernaculars of Baghdad are indeed close relatives in the wider Arabic family, as Shohat compellingly argues in her critique of the concept of Judeo-Arabic which within a Zionist ideological framework tends to be presented as a specifically Jewish, non-Arabic idiom (Shohat, “Invention of Judeo-Arabic,” and especially 189–193).
Apter, Against World Literature, 17.
Ibid.
Both ʿAwrat al-Malāʾikah (1991) and Shlūmū al-kurdī wa-anā wa-l-zaman (2004) were published by Manshūrāt al-Jamal in Cologne, and in Baghdad, Beirut and Freiberg, respectively.
See for example, Behar and Evri, “Polyglotic Literature,” 111. For an introduction to the work of another Iraqi Jewish writer who decided to continue writing Arabic in Israel, Ishaq Bar-Moshe (b. 1927, Baghdad–d. 2003, Manchester), see Reuven Snir, “‘When Time Stopped’: Ishaq Bar-Moshe as Arab-Jewish Writer in Israel,” Jewish Social Studies 11.2 (Winter, 2005): 102–135. For a more general discussion on the choice of literary language for Iraqi writers in Israel, see Chapter 4, “The Choice of Language” in Berg, Exile from Exile, 43–66.
See Levy, Poetic Trespass and especially Part I, “Historical Visions and Elisions,” 21–102 and Orit Bashkin, Impossible Exodus: Iraqi Jews in Israel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017).
See Behar and Evri, “Polyglotic Literature,” 112–113.
Naqqāsh confessed his ambition for his work to be translated into foreign languages like English and French; Alcalay, Keys to the Garden, 111; Laṭīf, Naqsh ʿirāqī, 72–73.
Apter, Against World Literature, 17.
Ibid.
Richard Pevear, “Introduction,” in Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Vintage, 2009), xiii.
Tolstoy quoted in ibid.
The very presence of the footnotes interrupts the reading even of that ever-shrinking readership that can promptly understand and read the three main linguistic idioms (Jewish and Muslim Baghdadi dialects, and fuṣḥā). Curiosity will inevitably take even those readers towards the footnotes: the footnote is present and shall not be ignored. The same can happen to those viewers of subtitled films who can understand both languages of the film: the original one spoken by actors, and the written one of the subtitles. Of course, the readers of a book like Nzūlah are more likely to read the footnotes than the viewers of the film the subtitles: reading for the latter needs be immediate and is disturbed by the moving picture.
In Nzūlah what characters think and say is often presented as storytelling, as speech made to an intended addressee in the second person. The addressee is sometimes an explicit character (Jamīl often addresses the night watch Abū Ghālib, at times only in his own mind, without actually uttering a word to him), sometimes characters are addressing an indefinite “you.” In either case, they are speaking to us the readers (this complexity is often lost in the English translation).
Levy, Poetic Trespass, 136.
Behar and Evri, “Polyglotic Literature,” 125.
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 66–67; quoted in Behar and Evri, Polyglotic Literature, 126.
Nzūlah makes it clear that the Muslim tenants and neighbors have been damaged by the departure of their Jewish friends. Levy concludes her article on the literary representations of Jewish Baghdad by referring to “a vanished cosmopolitan world […] a world that is indeed nearly impossible to imagine today, not only for the Jews who left for Israel and the West, but for the Muslims and others who remained to witness the decades-long destruction of their city and country by totalitarianism, sanctions, and war” (Levy, “Jewish Baghdad,” 196–197).
Levy, Poetic Trespass, 253–254.
As an homage to Hess and Naqqāsh, we have taken upon ourselves to transcribe the text into Arabic imitating Naqqāsh’s way of transcribing Jewish Baghdadi Arabic in Nzūlah. Our Arabic is based on Levy’s own phonetic transliteration from the Hebrew (ibid., 254–255).
Ibid., 255.
Ibid.
For more information on the plot and significance of the story, see ibid., 274.
Ibid.
Naqqāsh received the Prime Minister’s Prize for Arabic Literature in 1981 and 1985 (Alcalay, Keys to the Garden, 101).
As an homage to the protagonist of Behar’s story, I decided to quote from the Arabic translation of the story that can be found on the website of the Egyptian translator, Muḥammad ʿAbbūd, (http://aboud78.blogspot.com/search/label/
This is my translation from the Arabic. An English translation of the original in Hebrew can be found on the writer’s website at: https://almogbehar.wordpress.com/english and in Snir, Arab-Jewish Literature, 309–316.
For a discussion of the term Mizraḥi (pl. Mizraḥim) and its complexity, see Levy, Poetic Trespass, 6 and Bashkin, Impossible Exile, 11–13.
Chana Morgenstern, “Artists Talk: Israel/Palestine. An Interview with Almog Behar,” Words without Borders, February 9 (2011), https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/artists-talk-israel-palestine.-an-interview-with-almog-behar/.
In her poem, Hess challenges an Israeli nationalistic narrative of sacrifice for the good of the state, by suggesting that if it is good to die for one’s country, maybe she should have died for Baghdad (Levy, Poetic Trespass, 257–258). In his story, Behar daringly tries to empathize with the Palestinian sense of humiliation and hopelessness that can lead to suicide bombing (Ibid. 274–275). In Poetic Trespass, Levy also compellingly discusses the systematic marginalization of the Palestinians who live in Israel.
ʿAlwān, al-Riwāʾiyyūn al-ʿirāqiyyūn, blurb.
The digital medium might be an ideal environment for a hybrid text like Nzūlah with its numerous hypertextual potentialities, e.g., clickable footnotes that open into texts, illustrations, maps, photographs and, perhaps more importantly, audio clips with recordings of the different vernaculars. In her work Kitāb al-hawāmish (The Book of Margins) (2017), the Lebanese visual artist, designer and educator Jana Traboulsi (Janā Ṭrābulsī) explores the dynamics of center and peripheries in the book format as an artistic space, creating a connection between ancient reading practices and contemporary aesthetics and functions. See https://janatraboulsi.site/The-Book-of-Margins.
This idealistic reading of Nzūlah echoes “Arab artistic, cultural and academic practices” that aim at a positive re-thinking of Arab-Jews, and “are rich in possibilities for a transformed cultural and political landscape” (Shohat, “Invention of Judeo-Arabic,” 187). In other words, this reading is not a mere nostalgic return to a lost world, but rather corroborates the idea put forward by Shohat of “a symbolic diasporic ‘return’” of the concept of Arab-Jew to the Arab cultural spheres, in the name of “a multidirectional cross-border approach to the culture of Arab-Jews and their language” (ibid., 188).
