Much of modern Iraqi literature, especially in English translation, is read politically. Certainly, there is a good reason for this practice: the relationship between literature and politics is an intimate one, and the centrality of modern Iraqi literature, especially poetry, to the country’s politics is as paramount as the influence of political ideologies and realities on its literary production. However, the “politics” of literature has often been taken to mean one of two things: either the politics of the writer or the representation of political events in literary works. The present panel offers an alternative, though necessarily complementary, approach by asking two framing questions: What would studying literature AS LITERATURE, i.e. using conventional tools of literary analysis, tell us about politics? And, in return, what does this politics of literature reveal about the literariness of texts? The papers will grapple with these questions from different angles. However, they share the foundational understanding that the relationship between poetics and politics is a dialectic one: Iraqi politics has influenced the production, interpretation and consumption of literature, and, on its part, the country’s literature continues to impact the production, codification and implementation of politics. The panel aims to showcase examples of an engaged method of literary analysis that carves out (and questions) the textual ideologies of literary production in modern Iraq.
The panelists will tackle the intersection of literature and politics in the works and lives of four 20th-century Iraqi writers. The first paper reads the dealings of Badr Shakir al-Sayyab (1926-1964) with a CIA front organization as a curious case of imperial interference in third-world literary production when literary views were exchanged for cash. The second paper studies ‘Abd al-Muhsin al-Kazimi’s (1865-1936) curious deployment of the descriptive language of the desert and Bedouin tribalism in his politically engaging poems in order to argue that al-Kazimi was the first cosmopolitan Arab poet of the modern period. The third paper deals with the politics of reception in modern Iraq scholarship, situating the work of Shadhil Taqah (1929-1974) in relation to the development of free verse in Iraq during the 1950s and 1960s, and investigating both the local content as well as decolonial politics of his poetry. The fourth paper examines “Ya Swayhib,” an old poem by Muzaffar al-Nawwab (1934-) written about the assassination of a communist organizer in the 1950s and explores why it has resurfaced recently and reappropriated by a new generation to become an anthem of sorts in the October revolt of 2019.
There is a curious paradox that characterizes the political readings of Badr Shakir al-Sayyab (1926-1964). On the one hand, he is often celebrated as one of the most “committed” of Arab poets. In his classic study of commitment in Arabic poetry, Al-iltizam fi-l-shi'r al-‘arabi, Ahmed Abu Haqqa names al-Sayyab as one of the foremost committed poets and uses excerpts from his poetry to showcase commitment in modern Arabic poetry. On the other hand, however, al-Sayyab spent much of his later life denouncing commitment and preaching against the politicization of literature. In 1961, for example, he wrote a scathing rebuke of commitment, entitled “Al-iltizam wa-l-la-iltizam fi al-adab al-'arabi al-hadith,” in which he denounced iltizam and doubled down attacks on communism. Al-Sayyab scholars have generally either played down the importance of these manifestos--M.M. Badawi called “Al-iltizam wa-l-la-iltizam” a “confused paper” (209) in his Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry--or ignored them altogether, which is what Abu Haqqa, for example, did. The paradox entangles even further when we consider the fact that al-Sayyab wrote his most engaging poems at the time when he penned his fiercest anti-commitment critiques.
This paper attempts to resolve the paradox by reading al-Sayyab’s later writings against the archives of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), the CIA front organization from which al-Sayyab received much-needed funding and which influenced (and sometimes dictated) his views on political questions. Such reading reveals that al-Sayyab wrote those anti-commitment views not necessarily because he believed them but rather to please his CIA handlers and keep the cash flowing to pay for his medical expenses. The paper argues that in order to resolve the paradox that has accompanied the political readings of al-Sayyab, we need to read it as a curious case of imperial interference in third-world literary production which facilitated the exchange of literary views for cash. This understanding will, on the one hand, help us comprehend how al-Sayyab was waging an anti-commitment campaign at the same time he was writing “committed” poems and, on the other, allow us to provide a fresh reading of the complex intersection of aesthetics and politics in al-Sayyab’s later writings.
Of those poets who established the “free verse” movement (al-shi'r al-hurr) during the mid-twentieth century in Iraq, Shadhil Taqah (1929-1974) has remained relatively unknown among scholars of modern Arabic poetry. While Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Nazik al-Mala'ikah, and Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati, along with several other poets educated at the Baghdad Teacher’s College—where Taqah also attended—have gotten some attention within Western academia, Taqah’s contributions to free verse poetry have gone almost totally unaddressed. This might be because his first collection of poetry, al-Masa' al-akhir (The Last Night) appeared in 1950, a few years after Sayyab and Mala'ikah’s initial free verse forays. But Bayati’s breakthrough free verse collection Abariq Muhashshamah did not come out until 1954, and several studies have been devoted to his work. So why haven’t scholars been willing to consider Taqah’s poetry as an integral part of the free verse movement? This paper situates Taqah’s work in relation to the development of free verse in Iraq during the 1950s and 1960s and highlights the profound connections in forms and themes between his work and that of the better-known Iraqi modernist poets.
In addition to The Last Night, I also address in the paper 1963’s Thumma mata al-layl (And Then the Night Died) and 1969’s al-A'war al-dajjal wa-l-ghuraba' (The One-Eyed Antichrist and the Strangers) to show how Taqah engaged with foot-based taf'ilah poetry in much the same way as the other Iraqi modernists. I pay particular attention to Taqah’s penchant for integrating local content into his poems from his native Mosul and the ancient Mesopotamian capital of Nineveh, now situated right beside the modern city. For instance, And Then the Night Died opens with “Cain in Damlamajah,” a spring outside Mosul probably dating to the Hellenistic period. However, like his Iraqi compatriots, Taqah also deals directly with decolonial politics in his poetry, as he does in the next poems in the collection, “Dawn in Oran” and “Algeria, Dawn, and the Martyr,” both about the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). Furthermore, Taqah served as the Iraqi Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1969 to 1970, an experience that puts him alongside several other Arab poets who spent time in Russia during the height of the Cold War. In my conclusion, therefore, I suggest some future directions in which studying Taqah’s life and work might take us in the hopes of writing a chapter missing from the history of Iraqi modernism.
