Stirring words: traditions and subversions in the poetry of Muzaffar al-Nawwab - Modern Iraqi Literature in English Translation

Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ), Fall, 1997 by Carol Bardenstein

Watariyyat Layliyya was composed over the years 1970 to 1975, and published in Beirut(15) in book form with two accompanying audio cassettes of the poet's recitation of the poem.(16) Since its original publication, at least three other "editions" of this poem have appeared in print, which are apparently photocopies of the original edition, and which contain no information regarding the location or date of publication.(17) The approximately two-hour long recitation of the poem has been widely distributed through non-commercial duplication of the original recording. Jisr al-Mabahij al-Qadima was composed in 1976-77, and has been disseminated as an approximately 90-minute audio cassette recording.(18) To my knowledge, this work has not appeared in print, neither through "official" publication at a press, nor in samizdat unofficial print reproduction. Al-Nawwab's most recent published work is a short collection of five poems entitled Urs al-Intifada (The Wedding of the Intifada), published in Tunisia in 1988.(19) A commercial recording of Sa'di al-Hadithi singing al-Nawwab's Li al-Rayl wa Hamad on audio-cassette was produced in London in 1995, and in recent years al-Hadithi and al-Nawwab have appeared in live performances together in Berlin, London, Chicago, Boston, and elsewhere. At these performances al-Nawwab has presented a mixture of his older poems as well as newer unpublished compositions.(20)

In mainstream works about modern Arabic literature and poetry, even in surveys of considerable breadth, Muzaffar al-Nawwab and his poetry are mentioned at most only in passing, and more often, they are not mentioned at all. This is the case in spite of the fact that his work has circulated widely throughout the Arab World and among Arab communities outside of the Middle East for decades, with sections of poems he composed nearly twenty years ago still actively circulating on tape and on the lips of young Palestinians in the West Bank, for example, during the intifada in the late 1980s and into the 1990s.(21)

HOMELAND IS A STATE OF MIND: AN INVITATION TO COLLECTIVE LONGING

A wide array of variants of the notion of homeland are repeatedly conjured up in the poetry of Muzaffar al-Nawwab, most of them shot through with ardent and passionate longing. The particular ways that "homeland" is evoked serve to construct an imagined collective Arab homeland, one that is inclusive to a broad Arab listenership, through focusing both on very particular memory-sites and points on the map of this collective "Arabdom," as well as on its more general and abstract manifestations which re-articulate a transcendant spirit of the nation. In what follows, I will illustrate how al-Nawwab articulates overlapping and inter-penetrating notions of a longed-for homeland - notions that contribute to his appeal to and consumption by a broader audience than just an Iraqi one, as something more than, or other than, "simply" an Iraqi poet.

LONGING FOR BASRA...

One of the homelands constructed in al-Nawwab's poetry, longed-for, recalled from afar, imagined, lamented, is, not surprisingly, the homeland from which the poet has been in exile for nearly thirty years, Iraq. Born to an aristocratic family in Baghdad in 1932,(22) al-Nawwab completed his formal education in Iraq through university, where he apparently had his first associations with the communist movement, with which he remained affiliated for some time. In 1963, he had to flee Iraq after the intensificaiton of the political struggle between the nationalists and the communists, the two main political forces in the country at the time. He fled to Iran, and in trying to cross the border into Russia, he was arrested and subjected to torture at the hands of the SAVAK. He was eventually handed back over to Iraqi authorities, who sentenced him to death. This was converted to a life sentence through some intervention on the part of his family, but then three years were added to the sentence for what was deemed to be a particularly subversive poem he wrote, called "al-Bara'a," (The Disavowal). He served four years of his sentence, then successfully escaped from prison in 1967. He lived in hiding in Baghdad for some time, then in towns in the southern region of Iraq for a year. After 1968 he was granted amnesty and returned to Baghdad.