This paper analyzes the role of public protest in the drive for national liberation, social justice and economic equality in Iraq by analyzing the popular uprisings of 1948, 1952, and 1956. My research is drawn from a broad array of historical sources, including documents and correspondence from the British National Archives and the U.S. National Archives, local newspapers and journals, retrospective memoirs, and popular poetry. I argue that mid-century demands for reform and revolution were framed by an anti-colonial historical discourse and shaped by Cold War politics. By situating these popular movements within the historical context of regional anti-colonial struggles in Palestine (1947-1948), Iran (1951-1953), and Egypt (1956), I demonstrate the interplay of global and local politics and the refraction of anti-colonial rhetoric and sentiment across both vertical and horizontal solidarities of the nationalist and socialist movements. The chapter devotes particular attention to the use of poetry in the public sphere during these cycles of protest and to the deployment of poetry as both an impetus for popular mobilization and a summation of popular demands. As the principle cultural medium for expressing anti-colonialism and political dissent, Arabic poetry constitutes a fertile ground for historical research due to its tremendous popular resonance and capacity to inflame emotions and ignite rebellions. Attention to this critically overlooked historical source enables a more critical analysis of the testimony of British and American officials and their Iraqi interlocutors. Popular poetry undercuts elite conceptualizations of vertical agency, which posits mass political movements as the product of partisan mobilization campaigns contingent on the personal rivalries of elite political actors. My analysis underscores the cultural implications of poetry as an instrument of subaltern political movements. By analyzing the poems of figures like Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, Muhammad Saleh Bahr al-?Ulum, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, and ?Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati, publicly composed and delivered in front of crowds of workers, peasants, and students involved in the mass uprisings, I illustrate the capacity of poets to appropriate nationalist legacies of anti-colonialism to reframe public debates about social justice and national liberation through the creative articulation of a new “horizon lit with blood,” as Jawahiri poignantly framed it in the celebrated poem “My Brother Ja?far.”

Persian poets have long used the metaphor of winter as a signifier for repressive rule. This trope survives as a symbol of political censorship and also holds a personal connotation to the poet. This paper will examine the theme of winter as it manifests itself in the works of Mehdi Akhvan-e Sales and Forough Farrokhzad, both pre-Revolutionary poets who wrote poems that have been commonly interpreted as being anti-regime. Not only this, but these poets were part of a new wave of Persian poetry, that resulted in the dissolving of many of the past literary norms. However, as a result of their use of the motif of winter, their works have transcended the limits of pure historical allusion by tying themselves to a greater poetic tradition. Fascinatingly, both of these poets have been re-appropriated by the political left as rallying points against not only the Shah's regime, but also against the Islamic Republic after the much contested elections in 2009. The continued use of these poems in the political arena during times of societal turmoil suggests that they embody a qualitative aspect that transcends their temporal weight. However, when used politically, the focus tends to shift towards key phrases and sections while leaving the body of the work untouched, thus ignoring some of the personal themes that are latent in the works. Drawing inspiration from existing work on the relationship between art and politics, this paper examines the conflict between a temporally contextualized reading of a work and a purely literary one. By looking at the variety of meanings that the trope of winter offers, this paper strives to dissolve the binary that exists between a wholly theoretical reading of the work, and the most commonly used political reading.

I examine the poetry of apre-Islamic poetess al-Hujayjah Safiyah bint Tha'labah al-Shaybaniyah that came down to us through the context of the battle of Dhu-Qar between the Banu Shayban, al-Hujayjah’s tribe, and the Sassanid army as found in Harb Bani Shayban ma'a Kisra? Anushirwan narrated by Bishr ibn Marwan Asadi?. I use speech act theory to analyze these poems and treat each poem as an illocutionary act, the purpose or point of which is to incite the poetess’s people to fight the Sassanid army. In addition, I argue, using the dated manuscripts of the book, which the story of the battle of Dhu-Qar as a si?rah or epic is set in the historical Arab-Persian conflict, especially in Iraq. This conflict started due to the pro-Arab reaction against the movement of Shu'biyah in the Abbasid period, continued through to the siege of al-Basrah under the Persian rule of the Zand Dynasty (1750–1794) and, finally, through the Iraq-Iran war (1980-1988). It should be noted that the book was edited by an Iraqi scholar, Muhammad Jasim al-Mashhadani, and published in Baghda?d 1988. I argue throughout my paper that al-Hujayjah poetry as speech act within the text of Harb Bani Shayban ma'a Kisra Anushirwan worked successfully in inciting Banu Shayban to protect al-Hurqah. Al-Hujayjah poetry within the historical context in Harb Bani Shayban ma'a Kisra? Anushirwan also work allegorically in later periods to incite the Arab against their opponents especially the Persians. The victory of Banu Shayban in protecting their identity has been developed as a source of inspiration to the Arab in some later period

Fiction and the Unofficial History of Iraqi Poets In his recent novel The Professors of Illusion (2011) Iraqi author Ali Bader tries to document the devastating and alienating effects of war on a marginal group of Iraqi poets who participated in the Iran Iraq war and found death as martyrs or because of desertion. In this fictional exploration of poets and poetry in times of war The Professors of illusion with humor and irony draws a dramatic psychological portrait of alienated young poets who came under the influence of western poets and ended up in a state of total disconnection from their realities. At the center of their philosophy the novel stresses how these outsiders poets in their opposition to war did not even condemn it in their poems, rather they followed a Sarterian conception whereby the poem is considered as an imaginary aesthetic object outside the world; and where poetry, as opposed to prose, cannot be committed to moral ideas or social and political causes. Poetry saves them from the craziness of war only to deepen their alienation and their schizophrenia. In this paper I will try to shed light on the relevance of this war novel and its approach of the devastating and alienating effects of war on marginal poets/soldiers. And I will examine its historical importance at the light of the context of the literary records of propaganda war poetry written in the 1980’s during the Iran Iraq war.

In this paper, I examine the emerging phenomenon of literary and filmic works that take as their subject, various types of “backward glances” at the Lebanese Civil War, by or about eye-witnesses or those who experienced it directly, from the vantage point of thirty years from the time of the events portrayed. In addition to the topic/subject matter of these works and their specific distance in time from events portrayed, one of the distinctive features that these works exhibit is the highly stylized and aesthetically self-conscious representations of the violence of the Civil War, some of which clearly deliberately juxtapose or bring within the same frame the horrific and the graceful or beautiful. In this paper, these instances of aestheticized violence are shown to only partially fall within the purview of Baudrillard’s well-known formulations about the aestheticazation of violence, which highlight the operations of simulations and the play of images and signs, much of which is produced uncritically (i.e., without casting a critical lens on the violence represented). For in the representations I examine, the highly stylized modes of representing violent scenes from the Lebanese Civil war contribute to the construction of a critical discourse about and deconstruction of the violence represented, not simply a reproduction of it. The three main works I will discuss (selected from a larger set of works, due to time constraints) are Lebanese- Canadian Wajdi Mouawad’s play “Incendies”/ Scorched (2003) [specific productions of it] Israeli Ari Folman’s graphic/animated film “Waltz with Bashir,” (2008), and Lebanese author and artist Lamia Ziade’s “Bye, Bye Babylone: Beyrouth 1975-1979. In Incendies, I focus on the portrayal of Nihad, or Abu Tareq, a sniper who dances with his machine-gun as an intimate partner to music, while also making photographic artwork of his kills. I analyze a similar scene in Folman’s “Waltz with Bashir” in which an Israeli soldier “waltzes” while shooting in the streets of Beirut, as well as the film’s extended stylized representation in its graphic form, with this brought starkly into view with the sudden “real” footage of the Sabra and Shatilla massacre at the film’s end. Ziade’s “almost” graphic memoir is full of the author’s drawings/paintings of popular cultural images (e.g. brand names and packages of western products) woven seamlessly with “pretty” military and violent images.