Grupos o colectivos afectados por el RD, el azote a los más débiles

An excellent example of a story that blends odd elements with the realistic is the story “Ẓahīrat al-qirṭa” (“Afternoon of the Honey Badger.”) Khuḍayyir seems to

413_{Shākir Nūrī, Kilāb Jiljāmish(Algiers, Beirut: Manshūrāt al-Ikhtilāf / al-Dār al-ʿarabiyya li-l-ʿulūm}

nāshirūn, 2008.) Fāḍil al-ʿAzzāwī, Akhir al-Malāʾika(London, Cyprus: Riyāḍ al-Rayyis, 1992.)

414 _{As discussed in Chapter Four, the stories “al-Tābūt” and “Ilā l-maʾwā” seem to draw on some of these} magical/non-rational elements as well.

have first written the story in 1968, and then revised it in 1995 for publication in the 1998 collection Taḥnīṭ.415

The setting of “Ẓahīrat al-qirṭa” is distinctly rural, taking place in the marshes of southern Iraq. The story focuses on a man and his deaf-mute adolescent son.

Throughout the story, the father and son communicate via gestures (ishārāt), displacing the usual role of dialogue in the narrative. The story opens with the son climbing onto the roof of their semi-open shelter in the heat of the afternoon to hang palm tree spadixes which are filled with water to cool.416 _{The scene is domestic, but is interrupted}

by the appearance of an old woman, her face covered in warts, who is a witch-like folk healer with an air of supernatural menace about her:

She was one of those women who appear unexpectedly, and often it is difficult to make her out at sunset as she gathers herbs from a hill behind the palm grove, or wanders in a graveyard like a bat: the late afternoon air spreads out the abaya she is wrapped in.417

The woman has instructed the father to hunt and kill a honey badger as a cure for his son’s muteness. The father is to cut out the honey badger’s tongue, dry it, grind and mix it with cat urine for his son to drink. The witch has had a claim on the boy

415 _{Muḥammad Khuḍayyir, Taḥnīt: mukhtārāt qiṣaṣiyya(Cairo: Thaqāfa ḍidda al-Ḥiṣār, 1998), 41.} 416 _{Ibid., 33.}

since infancy: as a baby, when he was late in speaking, his grandmother had brought him to the witch to nurse him, and now she pointedly tells the father, “Remember that he is my nurseling.”418 _{(Throughout the story, the boy’s mother is asleep in the hut,}

thus yielding her maternal role to the old woman, who instructs the father not to let his wife know of the cure she is prescribing for her son.)

The boy’s muteness and his ties to the witch mean that his ability to speak is both less and more powerful than other humans: the father knows that when a witch’s nurseling, like his son, is able to utter speech, “then he can address dumb beasts, wild animals, and winged creatures, and he will possess the nurses’ ability to control deaf and dumb people, wrongdoers, thieves and baby-snatchers.”419

One part of the narrative is focalized through the son, as the father and son float on a boat down the river to the hill where the father will hunt for the honey badger’s lair. The reader becomes privy to the son’s wordless, soundless encounter with the visual world. As he lies in the boat, he watches the sunlight and leaves overhead pass by him

… in silence, a silence whose essence he didn’t understand, nor could he fathom its extent. Nature’s shapes and colors made him sense existence stripped of sounds. They were signs that accompanied his first visual

418 _{Ibid., 35.} 419 _{Ibid., 35.}

perception of the things that he did not know how to name, but he sensed the visible world with a profound internal intelligence and its images were not absent from his memory.420

He also makes shapes with his lips, forming words that are otherwise “blocked” since he cannot make the sounds other creatures—including his father—make.421 _{At the}

same time, the text seems to suggest that the son understands the language of animals, while he misattributes this same ability to his father as well (“He thought that his father could hear their singing and their secret talk but that he pretended not to know of their existence”). Iser, drawing on Roman Ingarden’s term, would refer to this section of the text as a “place of indeterminacy” (Unbestimmtheitsstelle), and therefore a site which compels the reader to determine the meaning of the son’s muteness and the significance of the reader being privy to the son’s encounter with the world.422

The story ends with the father shooting the honey badger and bringing its corpse back to the boat where his son is waiting. The honey badger becomes a proxy for the old woman who nursed the son: like her, the honey badger’s face is covered in warts, and it has long dugs hanging from its chest. At the sight of the dead body, the son lets out “a frightful howl,” imitating the sound the animal made when it was shot,

420 _{Ibid., 36.} 421 _{Ibid., 37.}

and runs away.423 _{For the father, his son’s animal-like howl—presumably the first sound}

he has ever uttered—may be a sign that he can now speak.

With its elements of folk magic, “Ẓahīrat al-qirṭa” blurs lines between elements reader would normally think as separate: in this story, speech is rendered as gestures (particularly during a long sign-language conversation in which the father explains to the son his connection to the old woman), while a non-speaking character is portrayed as being able to communicate with animals in a way that speaking humans cannot. As a result, the story defamiliarizes the normal hierarchies of language and speechlessness, and the boundaries between the human and non-human worlds. Iser would argue that it succeeds in requiring the reader to modify his expectations in the course of reading and thus enact a “performance” of the text.424

5.2.2 “Shajarat al-Asmāʾ”

The story “Shajarat al-Asmāʾ” (“Tree of Names”), published as part of al-

Mamlaka al-sawdāʾ, shares some of the same themes as “Ẓahīrat al-qirṭa,” although that story was published in its final form over two decades later. Like “Ẓahīrat al-qirṭa,” “Shajarat al-Asmāʾ” also revolves around adolescents, and features an unfamiliar

423 _{Khuḍayyir, Taḥnīt, 41. The story uses the same noun, ʿawāʾ, for both sounds.} 424 _{Iser, Act of Reading, 27.}

language, as well as a female character who embodies magical qualities and straddles the human and natural worlds.425

The setting for this story is a river bank near a city at low tide (presumably modeled on the Shaṭṭ al-ʿArab in Basra) in a liminal area between the water and the rocks along the shore that block the view of the corniche above. The city and ships are reflected on the surface of the river, where “a cover like a green cloud undulates in the sky of a lower city under the water.”426 _{The story opens, then, with the image of an}

alternative world beneath the water. Ṭahmāzī and al-Muṭṭalibī, in their study of

Khuḍayyir’s fiction, argue that this riverine world also exists outside of the confines of time, as symbolized by the image of the ships endlessly rocking on the river, which they characterize as “a movement of nothingness.”427

The sole two characters of the story are a school boy, whose connection to the human world is represented by the school book he carries, and a girl who approaches him on the sandbar. She not only smells like water, but is the same gray color as the rocks behind them.428 _{The receded water of low tide has exposed the hollows in the}

425 _{Several other stories in al-Mamlaka al-sawdāʾ feature children or adolescent characters, including}

“Nāfidha ʿalā l-sāḥa” and “Al-mamlaka al-sawdāʾ”. In his study of Iraqi fiction, Bāsim ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd Ḥammūdī de-emphasizes the magical, supernatural elements of this story, seeing the plot instead as “an act of protest by two young children against reality.” Ḥammūdī, 152.

426 _{Khuḍayyir, al-Mamlaka al-sawdāʾ, 67.} 427_{Ṭahmāzī and al-Muṭṭalibī, 25.} 428 _{Khuḍayyir, al-Mamlaka al-sawdāʾ, 68.}