The Last Iraqi Communist Comes to Heaven

“Change with the Red” (غيّر بالأحمر), is today’s slogan of the Lebanese Communist Party for its 85th anniversary, a good opportunity to recall the very significant role of the various Marxist parties in the intellectual and cultural life of the modern Arab world. A good example is Iraq where the “Red menace” is still rearing its ugly head in the literary field after democracy has been generously “given” to its native people!

Around the middle of the 20th century, various young Iraqi poets conduced the Arabic poetic revolution. Among them, Badr Shakir Sayyab (بدر شاكر السياب). Born in a modest family from the southern part of the country, Sayyab joined the (then) powerful communist party during his studies in Bagdad. Later, he publicly moved away from his former “comrades” with a collection of articles first published in the Iraqi daily Al-Hurriya, then collected in a book in Beirut under the title “I was a communist”. (The book has been recently reissued by Al-Jamal, an Arabic Publishing house in Germany.)

Also coming from the south of the country, Saadi Youssef (سعدي يوسف) may be the last « great Arab poet » after Mahmud Darwish’s death. Faithfully following the poetic innovations of the 1950’, Saadi Youssef carries on his writing year after year. Two years ago, he has published a new collection: The Last Communist Comes to Heaven. A telling title for somebody grown up in the feverish atmosphere of the communist militants a mid-century ago and now established in London when his country is occupied by foreign troops.

As the inexorable decline of poetry in Arab literature is balanced by the irresistible rise of prose fiction, the formally Iraqi poet Ali Badr will be our third example. After his first novel, Papa Sartre, which gives an ironic description of the leftist intellectual life in the Bagdag of the sixties (the book has been translated into English), Ali Badr has written other books such as Chasing the wolves (الركض وراء الذئاب), a brilliant story which relates the fate of various Iraqi communists in Africa, where they fled the Saddam Hussein’s regime.

As usual, here is the link to the more developed post in French.

Wandering Jewish Arabic Voices in Israel

We don’t hear very much about Antun Shammas, a Palestinian that many specialists considered as one of the best writers in Hebrew. But who has never heard about Samir Naqqash (سمير نقاش), an Israeli Jew writing in Arabic?

His family arrived in Israel when he was 13 years old, like many other Jewish families signing away their Iraki citizenship in order to emigrate to Israel, after bombings in Bagdag that could have been done by some sionist organisations willing to “encourage” the millenarian Jewish community in Irak to flee to Israel.

Samir Naqqash spent his whole life in search of a “better” exile, crossing the Lebanese border when he was 15 years old, then looking hopelessly for a more appropriate homeland in Iran, India, Turkey, Egypt after the Camp David agreements…

He died in 2004, after half of a century in his new homeland where he refused to give up his first language, the colloquial Arabic spoken by the Jewish people of Bagdad. His last novel, Shlomo the Kurd, myself and time, has been published by al-Jamal, an Arabic publishing house in Germany, a good summary of the literary destiny of an Israeli Jewish author writing in Arabic facing the Arab policy toward the Arab Jews and the contempt of the sionist state for the Arabic culture.

But not all the Iraki Jews living in Israel stuck to their native language. On the contrary, most of them use Hebrew, sometimes as a way to promote the Arabic culture through translations. Born in Irak in 1926, friend of the great Palestinian writer Emile Habibi, Sami Mikhail (سامي ميخائيل) has translated into Hebrew Nagib Mahfouz’s famous Trilogy.

His latest book, The pigeons of Trafalgar, offers a rather unusual dialogue with the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, assassinated in Beirut by the Mossad in the beginning of the 1970’ and author of the world-acclaimed Returning to Haifa. In his own novel, Sami Mikhail suggests another ending to this story of a couple of Palestinians going back to Haifa in order to enquire about the son they had lost there because of the war in 1948. After the death of her husband in a military operation, the mother of Khaldun/Dov – the Palestinian boy raised as an Israeli – refuses to abandon none of her children and tries to gather them around her in Cyprus.

Not surprisingly, some people have been upset by what they have called the “spoliation” (see previous post) of a Palestinian work but others were obviously interested to see how two voices, doomed to live in two different endless exiles, could, nonetheless, hold such a literary dialogue.

As usual, here is the link to the more developed post in French.

The Slave Market: War, Prostitution and Creation

Sundus Abdul Hadi is a Iraqi-Canadian artist who lives in Canada. She draws her inspiration from Ancient Sumerian art and the early Islamic aesthetic and, in her own words, her work is “a commentary on the media, history, politics and social issues as related to being an Arab woman in today's world”.

Shortly after the US press did so, the online daily Elaph mentioned a few days ago one of her works, called “Inanna in Damascus” (Inanna is the Sumerian goddess for sexuality and war). As she explain in her blog, she wants, with this reinterpretation of Jean-Léon Gérôme, a French Orientalist painter, to “expose the sex industry that is currently running rampant in Middle East due to the consequences of the 2003 war in Iraq and the resulting exodus of refugees”. She sees that “these same connections of pimp and client, the soldier and the politician, and the Arab businessman [already] existed in the 19th century and today.”

To fully understand the strength of Sundus Abdul Hadi’s work(s), one has to remember how important the Iraqi school has been for modern Arab plastic expression, especially in the 50’s with the foundation of a local form of abstraction based on the use of the Arabic alphabet (a school called hurûfiyya in Arabic: see previous post.

Memories of such a fertile experience make the present time particularly bitter to the Arabs artists and intellectuals. The exodus of the Iraqi artists, which started in the 90’, is now so important that it is said that more than three quarters of them live abroad.

Thus, those who stayed in the country deserve a warm tribute, as does Artiquea, a gallery in London which has done its first exhibition with works done by twenty-three artists “who still live and work in Iraq”.

As usual, the link to the more elaborated post in French.

Soccer and Politics in the Arab Middle-East

After an Iraki singer made it to the last round of the very famous "Star Academy show" aired by Lebanese satellite channel LBC, the victory of the national soccer team at the Asian soccer cup was a rare opportunity in Irak for manifestations of joy and national pride and unity (that the last goal was the result of a joined action between sunni, kurdish and shiite players!)

But war is also on the football fields. For example in Turkey where a clash between two players, one Israeli and the other Egyptian in September 2006 just after the Israeli bombardments in Lebanon has led to riots.

In Israel too, political issues are obviously at stake when it comes to sport, for instance when the Bitar Club, supported by the right wing, meets the surprisingly successful "Son of Sakhneen" team, supported by the so-called "Arab Israelis".

Then there is the incredible story published in the Israeli Yediot Aharonot some time ago about two Brasilian twins playing, one for an Israeli team and the other for a Syrian one! Is this the New Middle-East?

To read the original post in french