Fase de recogida de datos

The years of the Iran-Iraq War were not the only period in recent Iraqi history in which instability, political repression, and violence have placed constraints on the lives of Iraqi writers and played a role in the nature of fiction being written in Iraq. One

236 _{Mohsen, 10.}

237 _{Hanoosh, 399-400 and 399, n.84.} 238 _{Al-Musawi, Reading Iraq, 94.}

scholar has even referred to the collective Iraqi experience in recent decades as “a historical nightmare and a horror serial.”239 _{The years that followed the Iran-Iraq War,}

however, are notable for their violence: the 1990 occupation of Kuwait; the Gulf War in

1991, followed by a widespread Shiʿī uprising in southern Iraq and its suppression by

the regime; the years of embargo (1991-2003); the destruction caused by the U.S.-led invasion in 2003; and the years of chaos, civil war, and violence that followed.

The sanctions era (1991-2003) witnessed a shift in Iraq’s cultural landscape, causing “the iron fist…to loosen[…] its grip,” as ṢaddāmḤusayn’s oldest son ʿUdayy was put in charge of several official cultural organizations.240_{ʿUdayy removed many writers}

of the 60s generation from their posts and absorbed younger outsiders into the state apparatus. Yasmine Hanoosh attributes this shift in part to a greater attention paid by the outside world—including new Gulf media and Western academics—to marginalized Iraqi voices.241 _{Internally, it also reflected the growing disjuncture between Iraqis and}

the regime that had failed to impose hegemony over them: as Muhsin al-Musawi expresses it, “the masses no longer had a vested interest in a system that, to use

239 _{Ferial J. Ghazoul, “Iraqi Short Fiction: The Unhomely at Home and Abroad,” in Journal of Arabic} Literature 35, no. 1 (2004): 1.

240 _{Mohsen, 22.} 241 _{Hanoosh, 394.}

Fanon’s words, expelled them from history.”242 _{Al-Musawi’s view of the Baʿthist state’s}

failure to impose hegemony over the Iraqi populace contrasts with an earlier

conception of Baʿthist Iraq as a uniquely totalitarian state that used fear to ensure the

silent consent of Iraqis, a view associated most closely with Kanan Makiya and his 1998 book Republic of Fear, and which scholars have more recently come to reject.243

The weakening of the regime’s authority during the embargo years had an emboldening effect on the Iraqi literary field: the regime’s censorship apparatus weakened sufficiently that writers on the inside were able to produce writing that Fatima Mohsen terms “resistance” literature, although they avoided direct

confrontation with the regime through the use of symbols and indirect narrative.244

The high cost of printed books due to the embargo led to the phenomenon of the “photocopy book,” in which self-published and pirated texts circulated on the black market. The result was an informal circulation of literature that escaped the notice and control of state censorship.245 _{At the same time, the extended period of sanctions}

242 _{Al-Musawi, Reading Iraq, 88.}

243 _{Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989;} Revised edition: 1998). For a summation of the arguments against Makiya’s view, see Achim Rohde, “Revisiting the Republic of Fear: Lessons for Research on Contemporary Iraq,” in Iraq Between Occupations:

Perspectives from the 1920s to the Present, edited by Amatzia Baram, Achim Rohde, and Ronen Zeidel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 129-141.

244 _{Mohsen, 6.} 245 _{Hanoosh, 397.}

coupled with decades of authoritarian rule led to “aridness” and “fatigue” in Iraqi culture, which drove many prominent Iraqi writers who came of age during the 1990s—

such as ʿAlī Badr (b. 1977) and Ḥasan Blāsim (b. 1973)—to leave Iraq during that period, or soon after the 2003 occupation.246

The decades of authoritarianism, war, and economic isolation inevitably had an impact on the nature of Iraqi fiction as well, as a number of scholars have pointed out. In contrast to the realism that predominated in previous decades, Ferial Ghazoul says that recent Iraqi fiction

has veered towards the fantastic, the surrealist, the Kafkaesque, the labyrinthine, the uncanny, not out of renunciation of the real, but out of verisimilitude… [C]onfidence in a hopeful future has given way to a consciousness of the absurd and monstrous.247

In a separate essay, Ghazoul links the “excesses and contradictions in Iraqi culture” to the prominence of the “fantastic” and the “strange” in contemporary Iraqi fictional discourse.248 _{In this essay, she encapsulates this sense of displacement and strangeness}

(“the unfamiliar experienced as familiar”) as being “uncanny” (borrowing a translation

246 _{Mohsen, 20.}

247 _{Ferial Ghazoul, “A Forest of Symbols: Iraqi Fiction Today,” in Banipal 14 (2002): 3-4.} 248 _{Ghazoul, “The Unhomely at Home and Abroad,” 1.}

of Freud’s term Unheimlich.)249 _{The Iraqi critic Fāḍil Thāmir also noted an experimental}

and fantastic turn in Iraqi literature in the late 1980s and early 1990s, pointing out that many of its proponents were older writers from the 1960s and 1970s generations, including Khuḍayyir. For Thāmir, the turn towards the fantastic was “marked by an attempt to return to legend, history, and fantasy, and sometimes has recourse in making use of storytelling and classical (turāthiyya) language.”250

To be sure, the fantastic mode draws on much older sources. Iraqi critic Qays

Kāẓim al-Janābī links the fantastic mode to ancient Mesopotamian myth, magical

realism, and the tradition of visions in Iraqi fiction, by means of which “new narrative writings attempt [to] transcend a narrative account through the use of the tools of intertextuality and suggestion.”251 _{Ghazoul describes the fantastic as an “irruption” of}

pre-modern narrative elements into contemporary fiction: it offers a range of motifs that serves as “both an aesthetic quest and a political camouflage,” as a way to avoid censorship.252 _{But even if fantastic motifs draw on earlier narrative traditions, their}

249 _{Ibid., 2.}

250_{Fāḍil Thāmir, al-Maqmūʿ wa-l-maskūt ʿanhu fī l-sard al-ʿarabī(Damascus: Dār al-Madā, 2004), 225.} 251_{Qays Kāẓim al-Janābī, al-Riwāya al-ʿirāqiyya al-muʿāṣira: anmāṭ wa-muqārabāt(Damascus: Manshūrāt} ittiḥād al-kuttāb al-ʿarab, 2012), 157-58.

presence in contemporary Iraqi fiction, along with tragic, paranoid, and absurd elements, also reflect the crises that have marked Iraqi life at least since the 1980s.