This paper examines the cultural context of political violence between Iraqi nationalists and communists in the Qasim era. Within months of the July 1958 Revolution, the national front coalition that dominated anti-colonial politics in the 1950s was decisively and violently polarized into competing camps of Iraqist (watani) supporters of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) and their pan-Arabist (qawmi) opponents. I contend that the transformation of political alliances in this period was integrally shaped by the cultural dynamics of the new political landscape. The poets and intellectuals of this period were not merely providing intellectual and aesthetic representations of political reality, but rather fundamentally reshaping the cultural landscape in which the new politics of violence was constructed. While most histories of the period emphasize the sectarian dimensions of the conflict between qawmi nationalists and watani communists, I argue that greater attention to issues of class and gender reveals that polarization and violence were not the logical and inevitable products of ideological rivalries. Both the strength of sectarian enmity and the gravity of qawmi/watani differences on Arab unity were far less significant in the immediate aftermath of the July 1958 Revolution than is commonly assumed, and thus the qawmi assault on the watani position did not simply emphasize the ethnic and religious diversity of the ICP as a threat to Sunni Arab interests. Instead, the conflict between the two factions played out upon a Cold War cultural battleground in which qawmi poets and intellectuals depicted the social background and alleged sexual perversions of Communists as a threat to Arab masculinity and middle class morality. In an effort to stake their own claim to the legacy of anti-colonialism and social revolution, qawmi poets and intellectuals constructed an anti-communist polemic that both highlighted foreign (Soviet) influence and the alleged hypocrisy of communist attitudes and actions toward women. Sectarianism, I argue, was the product and not the cause of this cultural discourse and anti-communist polemics. The paper is based on an extensive survey of archival documents, court transcripts, newspapers, memoirs, and poetry from the period. Poets and intellectuals whose work I analyze in this paper include ʿAbd al-Wahhab al-Bayati, ʿAli al-Hilli, Kazim Jawad, Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, Nazik al-Malaʾikah, Hilal Naji, ʿAdnan al-Rawi, Shakir Mustafa Salim, and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab.

Drawing on the work of Edward Said, and in particular the argument of his essay “Traveling Theory” that theories travel both geographically and temporally, I investigate the journey of Sartre’s engagement (commitment) in Iraq during the two eventful decades of the 1950s and the 1960s. During those formative decades, I argue, there were two working interpretations of Sartre’s engagement in the Iraqi literary scene: one which adhered to a Pan-Arab Nationalist framework, and another communist interpretation which presented the concept as being synonymous with social realism and, hence, establishing strong affinity with the Iraqi Communist Party—the strongest political party in the country at the time. I show that those two representations of the concept correlated closely with the unfolding events of modern Iraqi history. In other words, when the communist party was operating (either as a tolerated opposition party during the monarchy, 1921-1958, or as an active participant in the affairs of the state during General Qāsim’s rule, 1958-1963), it popularized Sartre’s engagement as a communist one, so to speak, often exaggerating Sartre’s affiliation with communism. On the other hand, when the Arab Nationalists took over ruling Iraq and brutally suppressed the Iraqi Communist Party, they propagated a pan-Arabist version of commitment. My paper studies ʿAlī al-Wardī’s Uṣṭūrat al-adab al-rafīʿ (The Myth of Refined Literature) as well as the proceedings of the fifth Congress of Arab Writers, held in Baghdad in February, 1965, to trace the mutation in the meaning of Sartre’s engagement in Iraq from a communist concept to a Pan-Arabist one.

Sa'laka translated variously as vagabondism, social rebellion or outsider status has a venerable status in Arabic literature beginning in the pre-modern era. Several well-known sa'alik were also famous poets in the period of the jahiliyya, and the practice continued through the Umayyad and early Abbasid eras. Then su´luk poetry appears to recede or disappear for reasons that are not well understood until the modern era, when new sa'alik poets emerge, most strongly in Iraq, in the 20th century. The panel presentation will focus mostly on the modern sa'alik, and attempt to highlight some of the theoretical issues concerning the underlying social, cultural, and literary factors that challenge our understanding of the roots of modern sa'laka; its location, thematics, and links to Arabic literary modernity. It is clear that the lifestyle intrinsic to sa?laka is primarily a homosocial (and antisocial) one, and would not be sustainable for a woman in 20th century because of the lifestyle of living on the pavements and in cheap bars, so unless some fraternity of vagabond women emerge in the coming decades/centuries there is no possibility of a female su?luk. I will focus on two modern sa´alik poets, Husayn Mardan (1927-1972) and Jan Dammu (1943-2003). I will discuss Mardan's revolt against the bourgeois modernization plans of the monarchy era and in creating nathr murakkaz as a new poetic genre. I will also highlight Jan Dammu's absurdist parody of the "heroic literature" of the Iran-Iraq war and his clownish mocking of the leading poets in the era of the Baathist dictatorship of Saddam Husayn.

The eight-year long war with Iran produced a plethora of literature. Largely known as the “Literature of Saddam’s Qadisiyya” it is now primarily seen as derivative, state-sponsored propaganda and dismissed by many as a stain on the Iraqi literary scene. Following the war, however, writers and poets began to cautiously rewrite the war narrative, challenging the bellicose tone of the state-sponsored wartime literature. Since 2003 this has taken a new turn with the Iran-Iraq War forming but one episode of over 35 years of warfare and violence imposed upon Iraq. This paper will examine how three prominent Iraqi novelists, Lu’ay Hamza Abbas, Ahmad Sa’adawi and Sinan Antoon, have looked back at the eight years of war with Iran within their post-2003 writings of violence and war in Iraq. The novels under consideration are Abbas’ Madinat al-suwwar (City of Images) Antoon’s Wahdaha shajarat al-rumman (translated as The Corpse Washer) and Sa’adawi’s Frankishtayn fi Baghdad (Frankenstein in Baghdad). The paper will discuss how these novels, all published between 2011 and 2015, attempt to rearticulate the experience of total warfare that was foisted upon Iraq from 1980-1988. In so doing, it claims that they give voice to narratives of civilian resistance during a period that most historical studies continue to neglect and that many current journalistic accounts generalize or ignore. Critically, the paper will address two important questions that these novels pose to modern Iraqi literary and historical studies. Firstly, how have these authors chosen to take on the narrative of sectarianism that now threatens to overshadow all of Iraqi history? Secondly, how have the aesthetics of violence transformed in literary narratives of the war from a time of intense state-involvement in the production of culture (the 1980s) to the current day, when the Iraqi state has all but collapsed. As such, the paper makes an intervention in current studies of modern Iraqi literature, as well as Arabic literature more generally, by shedding light on the aesthetics of writing about the memory of a past war at a time of intense violence, foreign occupation and rising sectarian discourse.