Fase interpretativa: análisis y discusión de los datos

Muhammad Khuḍayyir was born in the riverside neighborhood of Manāwī Bāshā in central Basra.258 _{According to his regularly updated Facebook page, which he}

uses to publish his recent writings, short essays, and artwork, he was born on July 1,

258 _{Many of the details in this chapter on Khuḍayyir’s personal and family life come from my email} correspondence with him. In response to two sets of questions I emailed him in Arabic, he wrote to me on July 22, 2014 and on June 19, 2015. Quotations attributed to him are my translations of his responses.

1942.259 _{At the time, British troops were stationed in Iraq, including at a base in Basra,}

in the wake of the “second British occupation” a year earlier. Both of Khuḍayyir’s parents came from peasant families from the region around Basra, and were recent arrivals in the city itself:

My father was from a peasant family in the al-Jazīra region on the

eastern bank of the Shatt al-ʿArab, and my mother was also from a

peasant family that resided in Abū l-Khaṣīb south of Basra. Except that

my father’s family migrated to live in the city center soon after the First World War and the entry of the British into the city…260

Khuḍayyir’s father, a recent rural transplant to the city, worked with the Hills Brothers Company, which exported Basran dates to the United States. Hills Brothers was one of the export companies—mostly British and American—that created a large agricultural industry in the Gulf in the late 19th _{century, and contributed to the growth}

of port cities such as Basra and Muscat.261 _{Khuḍayyir describes Hills Brothers as a}

British company, although it was in fact an American firm. The confusion possibly stems from the company’s British staff, such as its manager H.P. Clark, who ran the

259 _{“About Muḥammad Khuḍayyir”. https://www.facebook.com/mohammed.khudair/info?tab=page_info,} Accessed 3/17/15.

260 _{Personal correspondence, 7/22/14.}

261 _{Matthew S. Hopper, “The Globalization of Dried Fruit: Transformations in the Eastern Arabian} Economy, 1860s-1920s,” in Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print, edited by James L. Gelvin and Nile Green (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013), 169.

company’s Basra office in the years immediately before World War I, when Hills Brothers dominated Basra’s date trade.262 _{By the time Khuḍayyir was born, however, a}

British company, Andrew Weir, working in conjunction with the national government in Baghdad, had secured a monopoly on date exports lasting from 1939 to 1949.263

Employment with an international export company represented a major

opportunity for Iraqis such as Khuḍayyir’s father, since Hills Brothers “employed, along with my father, dozens of peasants who had migrated from the eastern bank of the river.”264 _{Working on the motors of steam launches, his father learned the trade of a}

mechanic and eventually earned a pilot’s license, which in turn broadened the horizons of the future author as well:

From the company he obtained a river pilot’s license that allowed him to go back and forth between the banks of the river, where the company had set up date presses among the dense palm orchards. My father’s career allowed me to accompany him on his launch and visit unknown districts in the branches of the river and the most remote villages. This was a stimulating experience that acquainted me with different kinds of people and with strange creatures from virgin nature not yet touched by civilization.265

262 _{Hopper, 175.}

263 _{Reidar Visser, “Britain in Basra: Past Experiences and Current Challenges.”} http://www.historiae.org/cosmopolitanism.asp. Accessed 11/11/14.

264 _{Khuḍayyir, personal correspondence, 7/22/14.} 265 _{Khuḍayyir, personal correspondence, 7/22/14.}

Khuḍayyir rarely speaks of his own religious background, although his fiction is littered with mentions of prominent literary figures and scholars from Islamic history, as well as occasional mentions of local shrines (such as the tomb of Zubayr, a

Companion of the Prophet Muḥammad, described in his novel Baṣrayāthā.) In spite of

the prominent Shiʿī presence in southern Iraq, Khuḍayyir rarely mentions specifically

Shiʿī cultural or religious practices: the exception is his short story “al-Shafīʿ” (“The Intercessor”), published in his 1972 collection, al-Mamlaka al-sawdāʾ, which is about a

pregnant woman watching an ʿĀshūrāʾ procession from her building as it passes by on

the street outside.266

Both of Khuḍayyir’s parents were illiterate, but they enrolled him in state

schools, starting with the King Ghazi Primary School in 1948. His experience, as the first generation of his family to receive formal schooling, reflected the general expansion of access to primary and secondary education in Iraq over the course of the twentieth century.267 _{Khuḍayyir did not continue on to university, due to what he terms}

“economic and political circumstances.” Basra had no university until 1964, which may

266_{In an 2013 interview, he makes oblique reference to a Shiʿī religious background when he is asked}

about this story, comparing the Arab defeat in 1967 to “the tragedy of Karbalāʾ,” and telling the

interviewer that “I was one of the river of collectively hypnotized human masses, carried away and

sinking into the vault of debacles and collective performances that continue down to today.” ʿAdnān al-

Hilālī, “Muḥammad Khuḍayyir: al-qiṣṣa al-ʿirāqiyya al-yawm nawʿ maḥallī rathth.” Al-Safīr, 18 January 2013. http://assafir.com/Article/212/299011/AuthorArticle. Accessed 6/25/15.

also have been a factor, but it is likely that his Communist sympathies at the time played a role in the “political circumstances” he refers to. In a recent essay published in the Lebanese newspaper As-Safīr, he attributes the July 14, 1958 coup in Iraq to the spread of “the contagion of Bolshevik madness” among Iraqi youth, a “crimson cloud” that he admits enveloped him as well.268

In lieu of a university degree, he obtained a teaching diploma in 1962 equivalent to a certificate in education, and began a thirty-year career as a primary school teacher,

at first teaching in rural schools in the governorates of Dhī Qār, Dīwāniyya, and Basra.

Khuḍayyir makes reference to his early teaching years in the countryside in the initial autobiographical chapters of Ḥadāʾiq al-wujūh, including his spartan accommodations in a residence attached to the school, his readings of literature by lamplight, and his friendship with a local ferryman.269 _{He attributes his undesirable posting to remote}

village schools in those years to his Communist beliefs at the time, referring to his experience as being “exiled to the most remote fringes of the unfortunate republic”

268 _{Muḥammad Khuḍayyir. “al-Washm al-Baghdādī… ilā ʿAbd al-Malik Nūrī.” As-Safīr, 6 August 2012.} http://assafir.com/Article/277945/Archive. Accessed 6/25/15.

from 1964-68.270 _{However, he has also credited this same rural “exile” as having taught}

him to closely observe people and the natural world, which shaped his early writing.271