Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Dedication
- 1 Introduction: The Awakening Story
- 2 Revolutionary Pioneer: ʿAbd al-Malik Nūrī in Six Stories
- 3 Realism and Space in the First Iraqi Novel
- 4 From Khamsat aṣwāt to al-Markab: ‘Writing about the People of Iraq’
- 5 The Other Shore: Dialogue and Diference in Mahdī ʿĪsā al-Ṣaqr's al-Shāṭiʿ al-thānī
- 6 Two Houses, Two Women: Iraq at War in Mahdī ʿĪsā al-Ṣaqr's Novels
- 7 Reading and Writing in al-Masarrāt wa-'l-awjāʿ by Fuʾād al-Takarlī
- 8 The Long Way Back: Possibilities for Survival and Renewal in al-Rajʿ al-baʿīd by Fuʾād al-Takarlī
- Epilogue: Relections on Iraqi Fiction, Inluence and Exile, or the Life and Times of Yūsuf Ibn Hilāl
- Bibliography
- Index
Epilogue: Relections on Iraqi Fiction, Inluence and Exile, or the Life and Times of Yūsuf Ibn Hilāl
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Dedication
- 1 Introduction: The Awakening Story
- 2 Revolutionary Pioneer: ʿAbd al-Malik Nūrī in Six Stories
- 3 Realism and Space in the First Iraqi Novel
- 4 From Khamsat aṣwāt to al-Markab: ‘Writing about the People of Iraq’
- 5 The Other Shore: Dialogue and Diference in Mahdī ʿĪsā al-Ṣaqr's al-Shāṭiʿ al-thānī
- 6 Two Houses, Two Women: Iraq at War in Mahdī ʿĪsā al-Ṣaqr's Novels
- 7 Reading and Writing in al-Masarrāt wa-'l-awjāʿ by Fuʾād al-Takarlī
- 8 The Long Way Back: Possibilities for Survival and Renewal in al-Rajʿ al-baʿīd by Fuʾād al-Takarlī
- Epilogue: Relections on Iraqi Fiction, Inluence and Exile, or the Life and Times of Yūsuf Ibn Hilāl
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Dear Mr. ʿAbd al-Malik Nūrī … allow me to say that it is a condition for [literary] influence that those who influence should be invisible.
Muḥammad Khuḍayyir, al-Washm al-baghdādī … Ilā ʿAbd al-Malik Nūrī
(‘he Baghdad Tattoo. To ʿAbd al-Malik Nūrī’, 2012)On 24 August 1990, Mahdī ʿĪsā al-Ṣaqr learned from ‘a short report published in a newspaper’ that Ghāʾib Ṭuʿma Farmān had died recently in Moscow (al-Ṣaqr 2001c: 79).
Earlier that month, on the day the Iraqi forces crossed the Kuwaiti border to occupy the country (Thursday, 2 August 1990), the writer wrote just one line in his diaries: ‘I cannot write today’ (ibid., p. 78). Al-Ṣaqr clearly felt that another tragedy, after the long war with Iran, was about to befall the people of Iraq, and he had become concerned that he might not be able to finish the novel he was working on. He wrote later in the same month: ‘I'm working on finishing the last pages of the novel before something happens that might prevent me from finishing it, or perhaps even from going on living, and I don't want to leave an unfinished work behind’ (ibid., pp. 78–9).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Iraqi NovelKey Writers, Key Texts, pp. 241 - 246Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013