“We Yearn for the Sun Like a Baby Yearns for Its Mother's Milk”: An Ecocritical Reading of Iraqi Literature of Exiles

Ghaʾib Ṭuʿma Farmān’s novel al-Murtajā wa-l-muʾajjal (The Yearned for and the Postponed, 1986) depicts the lives of Iraqi exiles in Russia. By using a new ecocritical analytical approach – a combination of Georg Lukács’s theory (1974) regarding the connection between longing and form, Mas‛ud Hamdan’s description of art as a means of expressing the complexities of human life (2009), and Theodor Adorno’s view of exile as a mutilating experience (2000) – this article aims to explore how Farmān uses ecological landscapes to reflect the exilic experience. The analysis, coupling environmental studies with migration studies and contributing to both, shows that not only is this novel as relevant to the depiction of current-day exile as it was at the time when it was published, but that through it, Farmān informs the existing knowledge of historical events by artistically documenting horrific chapters in Iraqi political history from the victims’ point of view, in a way that transcends the scope of the abovementioned theories.

Creativity as a response to chaos: innovation and imagination in post-2003 Iraqi literature and art

My study focuses on Iraq, and, more specifically, on the creative works of fiction and art that emerged in the years following the 2003 US invasion when chaos became a reality. Analysing these works will show how their emergence and flowering during the period after the war, as well as the decades of censorship and stagnation prove the existence of a viable connection between chaos, creativity, and knowledge. In other words, I will show how the violence and disorder in the post-war period stimulated creativity in two Iraqi authors and artists. [...] Their works show how imagination can spring from chaos to describe it, embrace it, or suggest certain ways to resist it.

اعادة النظر في تمثيل الوحش: الجمالية الطوباوية في رواية فرانكشتاين في بغداد لأحمد السعداوي

Monsters throughout history are always explained in terms of abjection, horror and something to be avoided in order that the system and regulation of society to be restored. Following the dynamic conception of contemporary utopia, the present paper aims at analyzing the monster or the violence in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (FB) 2014 in terms of utopian site of hope, freedom and justice. It intends to show in what ways the issue of the “neo-Utopianism” or a desire for grand narratives is addressed in contemporary Iraqi fiction and why this issue is significant in post- postmodern thought. The paper revolves around post-traditional thinking of monster through investigating how a monster is related to a collective desire of hope for better roles in relation to the multiple societal crises. Other than an abject or “Other”, the value of creating such a monster is to introduce a new vision to the reader accomplished with the hope and salvation instead of the fragile spirit that comes from the postmodern failure and destruction. Within this conception the paper unfolds three routes that explicitly address a utopian desire: the body, the name and the aim or the message. The article, moreover, uncovers a new dimension of monstrosity in Iraqi literature which marks a shift from postmodernism to new era characterized by a utopian revival. The paper concludes that the monster is given a new voice and vision to be accepted in symbolic order unlike its traditional image in Gothic literature, one to speak about horror or monstrosity.

Days like Nights Indeed?

This paper deals with the methods which the Kurdish-Iraqi expatriate poet Buland Akram al-Ḥaydarī (1926 Baghdad–1996 London) used to express his experiences and feelings of exile as the representative of an entire generation of writers, and describes the relationship between intellectuals and the regime in Iraq in the mid-20th century. It analyzes the manner in which these methods contribute to the dissemination of his message in the process of literary communication. The main artistic method which will be examined is that of patterns and themes of time in his poems and their meanings, based on the collection Khuṭuwāt fī l-ghurba (Steps in Exile), in addition to other artistic devices found in his other works, in order to show how they contribute to understanding the evolution of ways of expression in Modern Iraqi literature versus Classical Arabic compositions. The paper consists of three sections: an introduction to cultural life in Iraq in the mid-20th century and the exile experienced by leftist writers; the unique artistic devices used by al-Ḥaydarī in his poems; and a comparison between expressions of time in Classical Arabic poetry and in the works of al-Ḥaydarī and his contemporaries, as a result of their relations with the regime.