In the Fall of 1959, the Iraqi modernist poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab published his perplexing and disturbing memoir, I Used to be a Communist (Kuntu shiyu‘iyyan). For seventeen weeks, from 14 August to 17 November, al-Sayyab published regular installments in the Baghdad daily, al-Hurriyya. The episodes detail the history of his involvement with the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), his decision to leave in 1954, and his reflections on the present. The text is remarkable on many levels. The timing of the publication coincides with the period during which the ICP discovered that, even though it had supported and saved the Qasim regime only months before, it would remain on the outside of power, outflanked and, months later, eventually defeated. From the outset, it is clear that al-Sayyab’s motivation came from bitter recent experience, and the memoir is meant to settle personal scores and reveal uncomfortable secrets. But it does more than that. In the war between Qasim, the ICP, and other Arab nationalist parties, the memoir serves to establish al-Sayyab’s political allegiance. More importantly for my purposes, the memoir also articulates an aesthetic-ideological vision with deep implications of his iteration of modernist poetics. What are the implications of this memoir for making sense of al-Sayyab’s development as a poet during this period? How does this memoir square with the other memoirs by other modernist poets of the Arab world? Rather than reading Kuntu shiyu‘iyyan solely as a key document in the shifting political tides of that year, this paper will read the memoir as a literary work, and indeed, the only major prose work by one of modern Iraq’s most important poets.

This paper seeks to examine the Iraqi Nahda within the context of the Ottoman reforms, and to highlight the multiple synchronous modernities made possible by Iraq’s multilingual peripheral location within the imperial domains within the years 1869 - 1914. Of course these collective efforts of cultural and intellectual production, as well as linguistic preservation, were linked to other Arab cities and even Arab literary clubs in Istanbul. However, this paper underscores the cultural producers and their oeuvres, which comprise a distinct Iraqi tone. This unique multilingual reality, away from the proliferation of foreign missionary activity along the Mediterranean coast, manifested itself in both the form of bilingual cultural artifacts and in the persons of cultural mediators. State- and privately-owned newspapers and journals comprise the bulk of these bilingual cultural artifacts. It can be argued that the bilingualism of the state press is pedagogical, whereas the bilingualism of the private press is practical. Thus, here this paper inquires into the phenomenon of the bilingual private press in Iraq at the turn of the twentieth century, in order to reveal a more nuanced understanding of the Iraqi Nahda, in which a “one language, one nation, one modernity” model does not seem to apply. As for the cultural mediators, here this paper will examine Ma‘ruf al-Rusafi and his Arabic dictionary of 1912, Dafa‘ al-hajna fi irtidakh al-lukna (The Refutations of the Shortcomings in Speaking Arabic with an Accent). Better known for his poetry, here, Rusafi asks, since there are many Arabic words and a basis of Arabic grammar in Ottoman Turkish, why are there so many Arabs mispronouncing and misusing Arabic? Rusafi’s project uncovers the response of one who felt responsible to take the preservation of Fusha (Formal Arabic) into his own hands, and provide a medium for the community-at-large. Moreover, the specific linguistic nature of Rusafi’s project reinforces the idea that cultural and intellectual trends thrive in regional and transregional environments, such as the Iraqi Nahda in the Ottoman periphery.

In light of increased attention to the relation between science and intellectual development in the Arab world with recent studies addressing Darwin and Freud, for instance, this paper examines the contribution of Iraqi psychologist and intellectual Nuri Jafar (1914-1991) to theories of creativity in art including as study of originality in Al-Mutanabbi's poetry. Jafar’s theory, which continues to be relevant in the field of neuropsychology till this day, proposes that creativity results from neurophysiological processes that depend on social and biological conditions rather than metaphysical or mystical experiences. From the 1920s through the 1970s, the field of psychology in Iraq was dominated by psychoanalysis, which explained human behavior and creativity in art based on introspective models. Having obtained his PhD from the USA in 1949 and having lived and interacted with Soviet scientists in the 1960s , Jafar brought to the Iraqi intellectual scene a new perspective based on the conditioning theory of Pavlov. He also communicated with American philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) and examined the relation between language and mind. He analyzed the role of education in enhancing creativity and critiqued the failure of the teaching models followed in Iraq at the time. Jafar believed that every child should be taught how to use his imagination to be creative and that creativity is not limited to a small group of gifted people. Jaafar’s contributions have impacted several generations of Iraqi intellectuals such as Dr. Najah Hadi Kubba, Mr.Yasser Jassim Kasim, Dr.Amer Salih) in the way they understand behavior and creativity. Examining his contribution allows us to consider the link between scientific development, artistic production, and education in Iraq from the 1950s onward. It also enables scholars to understand USA-USSR scientific and intellectual influences in Iraq, which in turn informs cold war studies in the Arab intellectual context. 1. Human nature according to Pavlovian physiology, Dar AlZahra press, Baghadad,1971 2. Creativity and brain mechanisms (in English), Baghdad, Al-Zahra press, 1976 3. Originality in the poetry of Al Mutanabbi: It’s brain origin and social roots according to Pavlovian theory.(in Arabic). Baghdad, 1976