Fase de planificación de la investigación

The eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War, which began when Iraq launched an invasion into Iranian territory in September, 1980, intensified the regime’s efforts to achieve hegemony. The Iraqi government’s attempts to use culture to boost support for the war included its sponsorship of the 1981 film al-Qādisiyya, which was about the early Islamic conquest of Sasanian Persia in 636CE. The film served as thinly-disguised anti-Iranian propaganda, a connection that was particularly clear since the Baʿthist regime had already made “al-Qādisiyya” the official name for the Iraqi war campaign.

Some Iraqi poets, such as ʿAbd al-Razzāq ʿAbd al-Wāḥid and Ḥamīd Saʿīd,

wholeheartedly embraced the government line and authored verse enthusiastically praising ṢaddāmḤusayn.227

In the first year of the war, the state launched “a campaign of arrests, purges and dismissals” which affected intellectuals linked to the left and the Communist Party and prompted a wave of exiles.228 _{Authors who were deemed to be opposed to the war}

faced imprisonment or execution, and thus, by the time the war ended in 1988, “Indirection as a way to escape censorship flourished.”229

Evasiveness often led writers to come up with methods of “narrative

codification” that permitted them to express their critical views safely.230 _{The use of}

complex literary techniques to avoid the dangers of a repressive political environment was neither new nor unique to Iraq: Roger Allen writes that for authors in the Arab world in the 1960s, “the copious use of symbolism… was not merely an artistic phenomenon but a matter of strict practicality.”231 _{Cultural opposition in the 1980s}

often took the form of a generational challenge, as younger Iraqi writers and poets

227_{ʿAbd al-Razzāq ʿAbd al-Wāḥid became known as “the poet of the war,” and won the Saddam Literature} Prize in 1987. For an overview of ʿAbd al-Wāḥid’s status during the Baʿthist period and the critical

assessment of his work by critics and poets in the Arab world after 2003, see Stephan Milich, “The Positioning of Baathist Intellectuals and Writers Before and After 2003: The Case of the Iraqi Poet Abd al- Razzaq Abd al-Wahid,” in Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 4, No. 1 (2011): 298-319.

228 _{Mohsen, 5.}

229 _{Al-Musawi, Reading Iraq, 85.}

230 _{Hafez, “Modern Arabic Short Story,” 325.} 231 _{Allen, The ArabicNovel, 58.}

came to resent older writers from the 1960s generation who had become co-opted by the state. Their opposition also found expression in the adoption of the new genre of the prose poem (qaṣīdat al-nathr).232 _{Nevertheless, as Fatima Mohsen points out, during}

the 1980s, “there was almost no writer or artist who was spared the ordeal of declaring his strict and unwavering agreement with the war and praising the President.”233

Another option left to Iraqi authors seeking to avoid being co-opted or absorbed by the state was the more drastic step of self-censorship. During the long Iran-Iraq War, Muḥammad Khuḍayyir himself stopped writing fiction (or at least stopped publishing it), crediting the political volatility of Iraq as both the inspiration for his writing and the reason for the decade-long gap between his 1978 short story collection Fī darajat

khams wa-arbaʿīn miʾawī and the individual essays published in Iraqi journals in the late 1980s that would later become chapters of Baṣrayāthā. Khuḍayyir’s period of silence is not unusual among Iraqi authors; perhaps the most prominent example of an Iraqi author with a long self-imposed silence is Mahdī ʿĪsā al-Ṣaqr, who also had a long gap between his early collections of short stories and his prolific output later in life, including five novels and a short story collection published between 1986 and 1998.234

232 _{Hanoosh, 393.} 233 _{Mohsen, 15.}

234 _{Shakir Mustafa, Contemporary Iraqi Fiction: An Anthology (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008),} 44.

Many Iraqi authors chose to live in exile rather than be forced to choose

between silence and varying degrees of co-optation by the state. The 1970s saw the first wave of emigration of Iraqi intellectuals and writers into exile, in some cases imposed by the state, which termed exile “the migration option” (khiyār al-hijra) for dissident writers and those who otherwise refused to be co-opted. The exile or deportation of

Iraqi writers and poets did not begin with the Baʿthist regime—the time that renowned Iraqi poet Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb spent in exile in Kuwait is an earlier example of this phenomenon—but the scale of it was new. The numbers of exiles increased during the years of the Iran-Iraq War, continuing through the sanctions period and through the years of violence and civil war that have plagued post-Baʿthist Iraq.

Many writers who remained in Iraq compromised with or were absorbed by the state, and a division grew among writers along ideological and geographical lines, between a growing diaspora of authors in exile, and those who remained in Iraq. Fatima Mohsen characterizes this outside/inside binary as a new “rift” in Iraqi culture,235 _as the literature produced by exiles and by those within Baʿthist Iraq grew increasingly

disconnected from each other. The rift was further widened by Iraqi government

efforts near the end of Iran-Iraq War to suppress the works of writers in exile within Iraq.236

The social and political impact of the Iran-Iraq War influenced Iraqi writing in a number of ways: for one thing, the war served as the subject of a number of novels, including those written by exiles writing critically about the war. A literature of escape (adab al-hurūb) emerged among writers in exile, portraying the devastating effects of war on individual protagonists.237 _{At the same time, it also gave rise to a series of short}

story volumes on heroic Iraqi soldiers published by Iraq’s Ministry of Information as a form of propaganda. The war also took its toll on Iraq’s cultural scene in the 1980s, as the state’s success at co-opting or silencing authors produced what Muhsin al-Musawi terms a “mixture of complacency and dissent, compliance and revolt.”238