the Iraqi Shalash the Iraqi

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-913505-65-3
Verlag: And Other Stories
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten

Populated by a cast of imagined con artists, holy fools, drag queens, and partisans - as well as some very factual politicians, priests, and generals - this novel started life as a pseudonymous blog written 'live' by 'Shalash' during and after the Second Iraq War. Never written to be published, all but lost save for disintegrating printouts treasured by its devotees, Shalash the Iraqi is here presented in its first authorised translation, with the blessing and commentary of 'Shalash' himself. The second U.S. invasion of Iraq began in the spring of 2003. By the autumn of 2005, though the Saddam Hussein regime had reached its bloody end, ordinary Iraqis were seeing little improvement in their daily lives. In the midst of this turmoil, a hero arose - or, rather, a jester. In a country where electricity was only intermittently available, a series of blog posts began to appear at a soon-to-be-defunct website and took Baghdad by storm. Individual entries were printed out and passed around for months, until the pages were nearly shredded. Where neither computers nor printers were available, the posts were retold aloud, then passed along at second- and third-hand. What could inspire such devotion? Signed 'Shalash the Iraqi', the posts proved to be nothing less than portions of a madcap serial novel thumbing its nose at Iraq's new normal. From drunken monologues to prayers, from poetry to dirty jokes, from fairy tales and folk stories to pratfall humour, this novel delights readers and sheds light on Iraq in equal measure.

Shalash the Iraqi is the Iraqi author of Shalash the Iraqi. He probably lives in Iraq.

Autoren/Hrsg.

the Iraqi, Shalash

Weitere Mitwirkende

Leafgren, Luke

Leseproben

Introduction

Who Is Shalash the Iraqi?

I first met “Shalash the Iraqi” in Paris in the summer of 2006. An odd place for two Iraqis who don’t speak French to meet, chosen in part by circumstance (roughly halfway between Cambridge, USA, and Baghdad, Iraq), but also because the chronicler of the ever-so-endearing residents of city block number 41 in Madinat al-Thawra needed to visit the cafés and city haunts of Jean-Paul Sartre. And that is how we spent our first week together, walking Sartre’s streets and talking about an Iraq that had descended into sectarian strife the previous year, just about when Shalash started posting the daily blogs that made him so famous among Iraqis that it seemed no conversation between them, anywhere in the world, could be conducted without some reference to one of his stories.

Alas, I cannot tell you much more about “Shalash the Iraqi.” Not even his name. All I can say is that he is the author of some eighty posts written in colloquial Baghdadi dialect between 2005 and 2006. Oh, and I can say that he is a polymath who at the time of our first meeting was much taken with the French intellectual life of the 1960s and ’70s (Sartre, Foucault, Derrida)—as indeed was typical of the small group of Iraqi oppositionists operating then in Baghdad as an Eastern European-style samizdat collective.

I myself had an Anglophone education alongside my official Arabic one, and never could make head or tail of anything Derrida wrote. I was therefore flabbergasted not only by the fact that Derrida and Foucault were known, but being hotly debated during the 1990s in the privacy of at least some Iraqi homes and cafés in Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad. Shalash introduced me to those circles inside Iraq, hitherto completely unknown to those of us exiles outside the country so preoccupied with opposing the Saddam regime. And, as I soon discovered, a delightful novel called Baba Sartre (Papa Sartre), written by the gifted Iraqi writer Ali Badr, captured the fascination with Sartre inside those circles, among whom Shalash was by far the leading light.

Another of Shalash’s many gifts is his ability to recite from memory all of Saddam’s speeches, in exactly the tone and register that they had been delivered; the difference being that when Shalash recited them one could not help but collapse in paroxysms of laughter, whereas laughter in general (not only while Saddam was delivering a speech) was foreign to the Iraq that Saddam built. I envied Shalash his prodigious memory, as any fellow writer would; and whereas I had only written about the Iraq–Iran war, he had served on its frontlines for eight grueling and exceptionally cruel years. Those are two entirely different ways of “knowing” war. To “know” the biggest war of the post-Independence “Third World,” and still be able to make people laugh, is a blessing granted to very few.

But again, alas, I cannot tell you much more about who Shalash really is, because the identity of the person who created this fictional alter-ego must, for the security of his family and friends, remain a secret, even today, sixteen years after he abruptly stopped writing his stories. The fear this time does not derive from some brutal dictator or the all-pervasive organs of a security state; it derives from the anarchy that Iraq fell into shortly after the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

The morning after Saddam fled Baghdad on April 10, 2003, Iraqis found themselves in a state of deep anxiety and confusion. They had learned only too well the rules underlying survival in a semi-totalitarian state. But they did not understand waking up overnight to find themselves in a world with no rules.

By the late 1990s many of them could see that another war was brewing, but they assumed it would end like the last one, in 1991, with a bruised dictator still very much in power. Even when American troops were on the outskirts of Baghdad, and in spite of all the rhetoric about freedom and democracy, they never in their wildest dreams expected a foreign occupation. When it came, it was a total rupture with their past, in the form of a new beginning to which they had not contributed and yet in which they were now expected to serve as principal actors. In such conditions, it was easy to imagine that American incompetence was deliberate; that every Iraqi who popped up on the public stage was either a fool, an opportunist, a carpetbagger, or someone else’s stooge. And, to be sure, some of them were all these things at once.

Shalash writes about such people. He created a constellation of villains and other characters who pop up again and again in his stories, all of which center around one small neighborhood in Thawra City, a sprawling Shiite suburb of Baghdad containing roughly half of the city’s population of eight million strong. Featured are bumbling Imams, suddenly politicized thugs, vain and venal politicians, and fanatical militiamen who switch allegiances at the drop of a hat, carpetbaggers descending like an army of cockroaches from all corners of the world to make a quick buck.

In the course of doing so, Shalash made anxious and worried Iraqis laugh. They hadn’t laughed much in the previous thirty years. In fact, it was dangerous to so much as crack a joke. Humor had landed many an Iraqi in jail, and worse. But it turns out that laughing was a kind of tonic to the unfolding craziness, especially after that craziness evolved into civil strife between 2005 and 2007. Laughing was, even more importantly, a safety valve, a form of sorely needed solace.

However, just as abruptly as they had burst onto the scene, and right when the sectarian killings were at their peak, the anonymous writings stopped. When I pressed Shalash, who had revealed himself to me that same year, to explain why he had given up on giving us more of Shalash’s stories, he told me he just didn’t know how to be funny anymore.

*

The Palestinian cultural critic, Salma Khadra Jayyusi, has written about humor and irony in Arabic literature:

With only a few exceptions, modern Arab writers … wrote in the romantic or realistic tradition, in the tragic or heroic mode, they favored a serious tone and a direct approach. The comic apprehension of experience, burlesque and parody, double meaning, the picaresque, the ironic and sarcastic, were not easily adopted, and the richness of both classical Arabic and Western literatures in these modes was rarely utilized … it remains true, as one peruses the vast panorama of Arabic literature, that the tragic spirit is more spontaneous with the Arabs, while the heroic, so muted in modern Western literature, is even more constantly alive in their hearts.*

Standard written Arabic, in which most literature is written, is a poor halfway house between the classical language of the Qur’an and the multitude of spoken local Arabic dialects. No one speaks it on a daily basis, although everyone understands it; it is the language of newspapers and radio broadcasts; the language of politics and speechifying that does not know humor. In fact, all feelings are strangers to this kind of Arabic, which is what makes it so ineffectual in the fictional mode. But Shalash was deploying sarcasm, wit and irony; in order to make people laugh at the newly installed Iraqi political elite, he had to write in the way that ordinary Iraqis speak, not listen to speeches or read newspapers. In this sense, Shalash is a very different kind of Arabic writer. For one thing, his use of an already “minor” dialect is peppered with phrases and expressions used primarily in Thawra City itself. His language feels, from an Iraqi point of view, deeply authentic, and deeply hilarious—things that most literary writing in Arabic has a great deal of trouble achieving.

There is a drawback to this authenticity, of course: it is “local” almost to a fault. Shalash’s humor is not always a movable feast. His writing makes for uphill work to the prospective translator, being difficult at times for even non-Iraqi Arabs to follow. Marvel then at the easygoing, raffish, faux-naïve, rollicking tone of Luke Leafgren’s English-language Shalash—a remarkable achievement, and the fruit of many, many days and months working with Shalash himself, and with other Iraqis too: devotees of Shalash who were familiar with his language and Thawra City’s range of idiomatic idiosyncrasies.

I have said that Iraqis found—and find—Shalash hilarious. Who were the Iraqis laughing at? Themselves. That is the deeper source of his achievement; the beating heart of his “Iraqiness.” It is impossible to laugh at “Imperialism” or “Zionism” or “Arab Reaction”—the subject matter of Saddam’s officially sanctioned cartoonists and storytellers. Real laughter comes from the inside; it is an eruption from the belly, not an emanation of the brain. Instinctively, Shalash understood that; one laughs and loves at the same time. And what is it that Shalash loved? Iraq: the very thing that the political elite installed by the American Occupation were falling over themselves to forget. They chose to govern in the name of their sect or ethnic group, or as stooges for the Islamic Republic next door, never as upholders of that collective abstraction, that multiethnic mosaic of groups and religions held together in our imaginations by a name: Iraq. It is those very same factions, with their false and foreign allegiances pilloried by Shalash, that the youth of Iraq rebelled against in 2019; and they did so in the name of Iraq, toppling perhaps the most sectarian government of post-2003 Iraq, and the most beholden to Iran’s...