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
8 - The Long Way Back: Possibilities for Survival and Renewal in al-Rajʿ al-baʿīd by Fuʾād al-Takarlī
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
This mass of pages does not contain what people believe it does. No sighs, no talk, no groans or smiles. No sublimity, suffering, fear, or desire. No eyes, lips, blood, or tears. If they are thrown away they will not protest. They are dumb pages which are neither harmful nor beneficial, and it is better for them and for everyone if they are left in peace and forgotten.
Al-Takarlī, al-Rajʿ al-baʿīd (1980: 491, 379)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.)
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Iraqi NovelKey Writers, Key Texts, pp. 219 - 240Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013