Symbols of History and Nation?

In both al-Rajʿ al-baʿīd (The Long Way Back, 1980; henceforth Rajʿ) and al-Masarrāt wa-’l-awjāʿ (‘Joys and Sorrows’, 1998) events in the lives of the central characters are related in very specific ways – sometimes obliquely and sometimes explicitly – to particular events in recent Iraqi history. Rajʿ is set in Iraq between 1962 and 1963 against the background of the overthrow of ʿAbd al-Karīm Qāsim by a Baʿthist–Nasserite–Arab nationalist junta. In a pivotal scene of the novel, a character called ʿAdnān rapes the main female character, Munīra. Commentators have had no trouble in seeing Munīra as a symbol of Iraq, the Iraqi Communist Party or even of the 1958 Revolution hijacked in 1963. They have been less forthcoming, in print at least, as to what ʿAdnān represents on the allegorical level, although many readers were apparently quick to identify him with the Baʿth Party, and the Iraqi censor asked the author to cut out the character of ʿAdnān, on the grounds that his part was gratuitous and he made the book too long. (This led to the book being published in Beirut instead of Baghdad.)