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
6 - Two Houses, Two Women: Iraq at War in Mahdī ʿĪsā al-Ṣaqr's Novels
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
‘Didn't you say, just a few moments ago, that writing was for you an expression of a desire to scream?’…
‘What I meant,’ I said … ‘was turning the desire to scream into literary or artistic creation, something of that sort.’
Mahdī ʿĪsā al-Ṣaqr, East Winds, West Winds (2010: 132)1980: a Year in the Life of Iraq
In 1980, only one year after taking over the presidency of the country, Saddam Hussein launched a military attack on neighbouring Iran. The ensuing war lasted eight years, thus becoming one of the longest armed conflicts of the twentieth century.
In 1980, Mahdī ʿĪsā al-Ṣaqr retired from his job as personnel manager at the Marine Transportation Department and began writing full-time.
Largely thanks to the novels that he published from 1987 (the year before the war with Iran ended) until the end of his life (2006), Mahdī ʿĪsā al-Ṣaqr has emerged as one of the key writers of the Fifties generation. His novels, along with those of Ghāʾib Ṭuʿma Farmān and Fuʾād al-Takarlī (‘the golden trio’ of the Iraqi novel; Badr 2011: 6) have been loosely defined as realistic. As we have discussed above in Chapter 3 in our analysis of Farmān's al-Nakhla wa-’l-jīrān (‘he Palm Tree and the Neighbours’), this overly abstract definition needs further qualification. However, it is useful in so far as it points to the fact that all these writers were inspired by real events taking place in Iraq at specific historical junctures.
- Type
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- Information
- The Iraqi NovelKey Writers, Key Texts, pp. 163 - 193Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013