The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice, written by Huda J. Fakhreddine

Abstract

some Iraqis feel about minority groups, and the contributions they have made, rapidly disappearing from Iraq in current times. This final chapter thus provides a succinct, detailed background to the politics of Jewish exile and the precarity of belonging in Iraq. What, then, is the politics of this book’s location? It is first and foremost an archive and homage to the writers with whom Zeidel has interacted with over the years. His interactions have taken place in many forms, the first of which is via his corpus of Iraqi literature. His corpus is the 330 novels he has read in Arabic. He also dedicates Pluralism in the Iraqi Novel After 2003 to the Iraqi writers he has been interacting with, many of whose opinions and contributions to his work have been kept anonymous by Zeidel for their own safety (xi). This is why many statements on Iraqi literature which Zeidel attributes to Iraqi writers themselves, are not referenced to individual Iraqi writers. What Zeidel does state, however, is that much of his opinions on developments on Iraqi literature are very much informed by his “interactions” (xi) with Iraqi “activists, writers, publishers, journalists, poets, exiles, students and others”, most of which were only possible post-2003 due to political changes in Iraq and what he terms as “the technical revolution” in Iraq. Zeidel makes it explicit that he sourced much of the primary materials for his research from the University of Haifa (xi), which is why it is not surprising that other books may not have come to his attention due this specific location. Zeidel puts forward, for example, al-Dil` (The Rib, 2006), by Hamid al-Iqabi, as the sole example of a non-Kurdish Iraqi writer showing what Zeidel terms as “real empathy” (112) towards the tragedy of Kurdish Iraqis in Iraq. Other examples by non-Kurdish Iraqi writers showing similar empathy with Kurdish Iraqis within post-2003 context do exist, such as Hadiya Husayn’s novel Mā Sayaʾtī (What Will Come, 2017) as one example. I refer to this point not as a critique of Zeidel’s analysis but to highlight how the ‘politics of location’ impacts on all scholars’ archival literary research. Zeidel holds a view of Iraq as a country needing to embrace societal plurality and diversity as part of its recovery from the Iraqi Baʿthist era and the prevalence of hegemonic discourses of national identity. He thus reads examples of how the nationalist novel has “become pluralistic” (1) by tracking how explicitly Iraqi writers have shown representations of Iraqi identities in their novels. He takes the community identity of each Iraqi writer as an equally explicit instrument of analysis. Zeidel also clarifies the literary perspectives from which he reads, noting that “as an historian, I consider the literary text primarily as a source and not a text...Indeed, the literary text should be analysed in depth by specialists” (15). Such an approach, as noted earlier, precludes exploring the aesthetics by which many Iraqi novelists have expressed their visions of Iraqi society. For this reason, Zeidel’s broad-stroke “non-literary” approach alongside a “identity-framing” lens of analysis may initially come across as an unfamiliar methodology to scholars of literature accustomed to close readings of texts. Introduced by Zeidel with such openness, candor and clarity, Pluralism in the Iraqi Novel After 2003 however makes very compelling reading and must be recognised as a great archival resource of Iraqi literature from beginning to end. In particular, the book’s bibliography listing Iraqi authors and their novels showcases the range of Zeidel’s research to great effect while furnishing us with much inspiration for further work on Iraq’s diverse literatures.