Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa has had a significant—but largely unacknowledged—impact on modern Arab literatures. ʿAlī Badr’s 2009 novel Ḥāris al-tibgh is imbued with Pessoa’s presence both formally and thematically: the very title is a reference to the poem “Tabacaria” written by Pessoa under his heteronym Álvaro de Campos. The novel is framed as a journalist’s account of his research for a book about the life of Iraqi violinist Kamāl Medḥat, who also assumed the identities of Yūsuf Sāmī Ṣāliḥ, an Iraqi Jew living in Baghdad, and Ḥaydar Salmān, an Iraqi Shiʿi living in Iran and Iraq. These three personae directly parallel three of Pessoa’s most well-known heteronyms: Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis. This paper argues that Badr employs Pessoa’s particular model of heteronymy to provide a nuanced portrayal of shifting identity politics in Iraq from the 1920s to 2006. It further considers Pessoa’s broader influence on Arab writers, and his own relationship to the literary “East” and to orientalism.