An Excerpt from al-Sayyid Asghar Akbar by Murtedha Gzar

The following is a translation of an excerpt from the novel Al-Sayyid Asghar Ak bar (Dar al-Tanwir, 2012) by Iraqi author Murtedha Gzar. This recent work by a young engineer from the southern city of Basra has received considerable attention in literary circles at home and abroad, significantly for the ways in which it departs from the mimetic norms of social realism that were found in the established narratological models of the pre-2003 U.S. occupation era, such as the varieties cultivated in the 1960s and 1970s in Iraq by seminal authors lik e Gha’ib Ṭu`mah Farman, Mahdi Isa al-Saqr, and Fu’ad al-Takarli. Al-Sayyid Asghar Akbar has been hailed as “unique in its magical realist narration,” and a “harbinger of a new style of narration that departs completely from the literary output of multiple generations of Iraqi narrators.” Part of this uniqueness comes from the ways in which the novel restructures iconic Iraqi places, mainly the Shrine city of Najaf, transgresses intradiegetic time, and reconstructs historical discourses. By so doing it defies our expectations and media- and government-cast collective images of twentieth-century Iraq. Instead, it negotiates a discursive space that lies on the peripheries of two hegemonic, official narratives of Iraqi culture: the national narrative of the Ba`th regime and the religious counter-narrative of the traditional Shi`i opposition. It exposes a discrepancy between two authoritative, normative processes of historicizing; the ‘Rewriting of Iraqi History Project’ and the Najafi ijtihad and taqlid traditions. Ultimately, in this complex work Gzar accomplishes a skeptical deconstruction of Iraq’s cultural formations and a new, post-Ba`thist reading of Shi`ism, Najaf, and Iraqi identity by telling the story of three generations of family genealogists from the Shi’i shrine city of Najaf. The narrative time spans the period between 1871, the year the grandfather Asghar Akbar arrived to Najaf aboard a ship that was transporting corpses from India to be buried in the holy grounds of Najaf’s cemetery; and 2005, the year his three childless granddaughters, Nadhmah, Mu`inah, and Wahidiyyah, conclude his lineage and are found buried in the vault of their grandfather’s house. These sisters jointly narrate the bulk of the novel’s events. Sometimes alternating and sometimes in unison, the unique narrative voice of these sisters tells the story of their grandfather by rearranging the letters on the lead sorts (pieces of type) that make up the remains of a decayed printing press that used to belong to the grandfather Asghar Akbar. Worried that they would run out of letter sorts before finishing their account, they feverishly type-narrate the story of their grandfather, an eccentric horse genealogist who arrived to Najaf on a dubious sea journey. They narrate, with countless digressions into their personal stories and the present, how the controversial Asghar Ak bar was to become the city’s most acclaimed family genealogist despite the suspicion of the city’s legal and political establishment. As they synchronously type-narrate the novel’s events, the sisters commit typos that affect the development of the plot and wreak havoc on the city. As they distort and deconstruct the established accounts of k ey political events such as the Najaf Revolt of 1916, the 1918 British siege of the city, the popular uprising against Saddam Hussein’s regime in 1991, and the U.S. occupation of Iraq in 2003, the sisters rewrite the modern social history of Najaf and reveal striking parallels between the political events of the turn of the previous century and the turn of the current century

Beyond the Trauma of War: Iraqi Literature

A decade after the U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq, we cannot approach Iraqi literature today without recognizing the multiple shifts and varieties in its expression. In a matter of ten years, the post-Ba\u27thist era has witnessed the sudden fall of a long-lasting dictatorship, an encounter with Western occupation, and an unprecedented upsurge in sectarian discourses, to name only the most prominent events. In addition to these influences, the development of contemporary Iraqi literature is the product of several fluctuations in cultural expression that span the bulk of the twentieth century. The abrupt transitions from the Hashemite monarchy (1932–58) to \u27Abd al-Karim Qasim’s regime (1958–63), the dictatorship of the Ba\u27th Party (1968–2003), the embargo years (1991–2003), and finally the post-2003 occupation era punctuate the ideological schisms and fractious state-writer relationship. The literary shifts also highlight the emergence of civic society in Iraq, the dynamics within the public sphere, and the ideological makeup of the various state-controlled cultural projects

The Politics of Minority: Chaldeans between Iraq and America.

The modern Chaldeans are customarily defined, by themselves and by others, as an Aramaic-speaking Catholic minority from the ancient land of Mesopotamia. Articulations of Chaldeanness in the United States—whether written or oral; popular or academic; public or private—exhibit a recurrent association between the monumentality of their history, the progress of modernity, and the identity label “Chaldean.” This study examines these ancient-modern inflections in contemporary Chaldean identity discourses, and analyzes the cultural mechanisms that augment these processes of collective identity formation, re-formation and maintenance through a discussion of the impact of the uses of history as a collective commodity for sustaining a positive community image in the present, and the uses of language revival and monumental symbolism to claim association with Christian and pre-Christian traditions. Among the political agendas of such articulations is setting the Chaldeans apart from the Islamic and Arab discourses associated with the contemporary Iraqi ethno-religious majorities (Sunni and Shiite Arabs and Kurds) and bringing them closer to the Christian West, particularly in the diasporic locale of the United States. The first half of the dissertation shows how the ancient identity label “Chaldean” was revived in the sixteenth century and bolstered during the nineteenth century through the establishment of Western archeological and missionary enterprises in Mesopotamia. The second half analyzes the contemporary Chaldean communities through a transnational lens that reexamines the family, Church and non-religious Chaldean institutions in their capacity as social fields where transnational identities are enacted. The second half also probes the question of ethnic identity formation in the United States through the analysis of a nascent body of Chaldean-American fiction and the dominant identity discourses propagated by an influential elite group of Chaldean culture-makers. This dissertation employs an interdisciplinary approach that benefits from anthropological perspectives, cultural studies and sociology in combination with fieldwork among multigenerational Chaldean residents of southeast Michigan. It depends on European and American travelogues, missionary reports, church and community histories and Chaldean periodicals as source materials for the analysis of cultural phenomena that shaped Chaldean identities in Iraq and the United States from the sixteenth century to the present.Ph.D.Near Eastern StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61663/1/yhanoosh_1.pd

Two Stories by Luay Hamza Abbas

Closing His Eyes (Ighmadh al-‘Aynayn) is a collection of seventeen short stories written between 2003-2007. It is the fourth and latest collection of short stories by Iraqi novelist, literary critic and short story writer Luay Hamza Abbas (published by Azmina, Amman, 2008). Through this collection, Luay Hamza Abbas’ talent as a storyteller has been acknowledged with national and international awards. The most recent of these is the Iraqi Ministry of Culture Award for Creative Short Story (2010) for his story bearing the title of the collection. “Closing His Eyes” has also won the Kikah Best Short Story Award in London in 2006. Abbas’ literary works began to attract the attention of Iraqi and Arab literary critics since the appearance of his first collection of short stories, On a Bicycle at Night, in 1997 and his novel, The Prey, in 2005. Abbas has created for himself a singular voice within the contemporary literary scene in Iraq for numerous reasons. His ability to locate the textual balance between imaginary and factual events allows his fiction to portray the experience of war and to historicize the subjective encounter with violence and death without reiterating political events or explicitly invoking the often-employed symbols of Iraqi authoritarianism. Space, public and private, as a key component of human identity also receives a particularly complex treatment in Abbas’ fiction. This attentive and successful treatment of space, coupled with the introduction of subtle elements of magical realism, has not been witnessed in Iraqi literature, in my opinion, since Muhammed Khudayyir’ Basrayatha (1996). His voice is one of the most important literary voices to have emerged in Iraq during the post-Saddam era. The stories of the collection offer multiple articulations of the everyday violence lived by ordinary people in Iraq during the past decade. Without sacrificing its spatial or historical particularity, Abbas was able in these stories to portray the Iraqi experience as a universal one of fear, disillusionment, nihilism and liminality. Through minimalist sketches of nebulous characters who transgress various Iraqi spaces like apparitions, without fully inhabiting them, Abbas paints the shifting, tenuous contours of the collective identity in a country that has gradually but chronically lost its quotidian stability and cultural definiteness. Ambiguity and abstraction are the qualities that distinguish Abbas’ short works in this collection. The duality of dream and reality, of lucidity and delirium, and the absence of direct references to names of historical events and places all provide for a literary context where the subjective experience of violent death—unjustified murder in particular—is masterfully communicated

In Search of the Iraqi Other: Iraqi Fiction in Diaspora and the Discursive Reenactment of Ethno-Religious Identities

In Iraqi fiction, the prerogative to narrate the experience of marginal identities, particularly ethno-religious ones, appeared only in the post-occupation era. Traditionally, secular Iraqi discourse struggled to openly address “sectarianism” due to the prevalent notion that sectarian identities are mutually exclusive and oppositional to national identity. It is distinctly in post-2003 Iraq—more precisely, since the sectarian violence of 2006–2007 began to cut across class, civil society, and urban identities—that works which consciously refuse to depict normative Iraqi identities with their mainstream formulations became noticeable. We witness this development first in the Western diaspora, where Iraqi novels exhibit a fascination with the ethno-religious culture of the Iraqi margins or subalterns and impart a message of pluralistic secularism. This paper investigates the origins of the taboo that proscribed articulations of ethno-religious subjectivities in 20th-century Iraqi fiction, and then culls examples of recent diasporic Iraqi novels in which these subjectivities are encoded and amplified in distinct ways. In the diasporic novel, I argue, modern Iraqi intellectuals attain the conceptual and political distance necessary for contending retrospectively with their formative socialization experiences in Iraq. Through a new medium of marginalization—the diasporic experience of the authors themselves—they are equipped with a newfound desire to unmask subcultures in Iraq and to write more effectively about marginal aspects of Iraqi identity inside and outside the country. These new diasporic writings showcase processes of ethnic and religious socialization in the Iraqi public sphere. The result is the deconstruction of mainstream Iraqi identity narratives and the instrumentalization of marginal identities in a nonviolent struggle against sectarian violence

In Search of the Iraqi Other: Iraqi Fiction in Diaspora and the Discursive Reenactment of Ethno-Religious Identities

In Iraqi fiction, the prerogative to narrate the experience of marginal identities, particularly ethno-religious ones, appeared only in the post-occupation era. Traditionally, secular Iraqi discourse struggled to openly address “sectarianism” due to the prevalent notion that sectarian identities are mutually exclusive and oppositional to national identity. It is distinctly in post-2003 Iraq—more precisely, since the sectarian violence of 2006–2007 began to cut across class, civil society, and urban identities—that works which consciously refuse to depict normative Iraqi identities with their mainstream formulations became noticeable. We witness this development first in the Western diaspora, where Iraqi novels exhibit a fascination with the ethno-religious culture of the Iraqi margins or subalterns and impart a message of pluralistic secularism. This paper investigates the origins of the taboo that proscribed articulations of ethno-religious subjectivities in 20th-century Iraqi fiction, and then culls examples of recent diasporic Iraqi novels in which these subjectivities are encoded and amplified in distinct ways. In the diasporic novel, I argue, modern Iraqi intellectuals attain the conceptual and political distance necessary for contending retrospectively with their formative socialization experiences in Iraq. Through a new medium of marginalization—the diasporic experience of the authors themselves—they are equipped with a newfound desire to unmask subcultures in Iraq and to write more effectively about marginal aspects of Iraqi identity inside and outside the country. These new diasporic writings showcase processes of ethnic and religious socialization in the Iraqi public sphere. The result is the deconstruction of mainstream Iraqi identity narratives and the instrumentalization of marginal identities in a nonviolent struggle against sectarian violence