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
5 - The Other Shore: Dialogue and Diference in Mahdī ʿĪsā al-Ṣaqr's al-Shāṭiʿ al-thānī
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
The Basra Connection
As we are in Basra, city of river, sea and song …
Preface to Mukhtārāt min al-adab al-baṣrī al-ḥadīth (Selections from New Literature from Basra)(1956: a)
Mahdī ʿĪsā al-Ṣaqr was a prominent member of the Fifties generation, a contemporary of Nūrī, Farmān, al-Takarlī and Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb. He came from Basra and although he settled in Baghdad in 1969, Basra was the setting for his most distinctive work, including al-Shāṭiʾ al-thānī (‘The Other Shore’, 1998; henceforth Shāṭiʾ). He was initially a short-story writer, who then published seven novels between 1987 and his death in 2006, which are remarkable for their technical innovation, and disciplined and lyrical language. In this chapter, after a brief introduction to the writer, we will discuss his novel Shāṭiʾ in detail, focusing particularly on the use of internal dialogue and second-person narration, and the bearing these have on spatial and temporal elements of the novel. Shāṭiʿ is immediately different from all the works mentioned above because of its setting, the southern city of Basra. Salām ʿAbbūd identifies Basra as home to many independent-minded and determined writers (ʿAbbūd 2002: 268–9).
Al-Ṣaqr was born in Basra in 1927, and died in Baghdad in March 2006. His first collection of stories (Mujrimūn ṭayyibūn, ‘Goodhearted Criminals’) was published in 1954, the same year as Nūrī's Nashīd al-ard.
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- The Iraqi NovelKey Writers, Key Texts, pp. 139 - 162Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013