Badr Shakir al-Sayyab's Transnational Turn
Levi Thompson
MESA Paper: Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s Transnational Turn (Delivered Nov. 18th, 2016)
DRAFT COPY – NOT FOR CIRCULATION
The 1953 coup d’état in Iran didn’t just shake Iranian society; its aftershocks
transformed countless lives outside Iran as well. The coup was engineered by the American
and British intelligence services to oust the popular Iranian Prime Minister Muḥammad
Muṣaddiq and restore the Shah’s absolute power. Among the coup’s first-hand witnesses was
Iraqi poet Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, who was hiding out with the Iranian Communist Party (the
Tūdah) in Tehran at the time. The Tūdah’s refusal to intervene against the events of the coup
forced al-Sayyāb to reconsider his commitment to Communism and caused a turn in his
politics and poetics. Scholars have neglected to examine the coup’s effect on al-Sayyāb’s poetic
development, but his reaction to it is indispensable if we want to understand his move from
political commitment to a more nuanced, ambivalent, and complicated poetics that
interrogates the death-rebirth cycles he is known for. In the end, al-Sayyāb emerged a changed
man from the rubble of the coup, and by the time he died in 1964, his politics aligned with the
Baʿthist camp. His experiences during the coup and after incrementally led to this change, a
sharp contrast with his earlier Communist-inspired commitment that transcended national
borders. The transnational forces at work behind the coup defined his poetics and the poetry
he published after it resonated transnationally.
On August 19th, 1953, Muḥammad Muṣaddiq, the Prime Minister of Iran elected in 1951
amidst a wave of popular support, was removed from power in a joint effort by the American
1
Levi Thompson
MESA Paper: Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s Transnational Turn (Delivered Nov. 18th, 2016)
DRAFT COPY – NOT FOR CIRCULATION
and British spy agencies. Al-Sayyāb was hiding out with the Tūdah north of Tehran at the time
and witnessed the aftermath of the coup while making his way back into the city with
members of the Tūdah Party on August 20th or 21st. He found the streets filled with trucks
carrying soldiers he would later discover were supporters of the coup and not of Muṣaddiq as
he originally believed. The next day in Tehran, he awoke to find a small group of fifty or sixty
reactionaries taking control of the streets around where he was staying. The Party did nothing.
When al-Sayyāb asked his Tūdah companions why they were not trying to reverse the coup
and calling for mass protests, one of them told him,
‘Listen, Arab comrade. We’re on the border of Ittiḥād-i shūravī’—that’s
what they called the Soviet Union.
‘Sure,’ I replied, ‘I know that.’
[…]
‘So, if we take control of the government—us, the Communists—do you
think the Americans will stay silent about it? Of course not! They’ll intervene,
and once they do, it will cause problems for the Soviet Union.’
My blood boiled in my veins, and I screamed back at him, my voice
charged with emotion, “But you all are Iranians, not Soviets! Your job is to
defend the interests of your own people, the Iranian people, not the Soviet
Union and its people. Comrade, the Soviet Union is capable of defending itself!”i
By 1953, al-Sayyāb had been a member of the Iraqi Communist Party for nearly seven
years. During that time, he took part in many popular demonstrations against British
involvement in Iraq, including 1948’s Wathbah (“the Leap”) and an Intifāḍah (“shaking off”) that
lasted from 1952-1953. Al-Sayyāb’s memoir, Kuntu shuyūʿiyyan (I Was a Communist) includes
2
Levi Thompson
MESA Paper: Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s Transnational Turn (Delivered Nov. 18th, 2016)
DRAFT COPY – NOT FOR CIRCULATION
lengthy explanations of how he lost faith in Communism, but we have to take his memories
with a healthy dose of salt. On November 23rd, 1952, al-Sayyāb recalls reciting his poems at the
head of a group of protestors during the Intifāḍah. Confronted by “one or two rifles” from the
Iraqi police, he remembers the crowd becoming violent and taking over a police station,
murdering at least two people in the process. Hanna Batutu reports the Communists had faced
a “fierce fusillade” from the station, which killed twelve of them and explains their outrage.ii
Al-Sayyāb’s selective memory is certainly on display here, but the poet really was forced to flee
Iraq afterwards, to Iran. He would remain in exile between Iran and Kuwait until late 1953.
When he finally returned to Iraq, his faith in Communism had been shaken to its core.
Exiled in Kuwait, he lived in a Communist safe-house, where “there was a continual
battle between [him] and [his comrades] about what [he] read. If you wanted to read a story,
then it had to be one by Maxime Gorky, Chekov, Ilya Ehrenburg, or [other Communists]. If you
wanted to read poetry, then you had to read Nāẓim Ḥikmat, Pablo Neruda, and so on—
Communist poets. The newspaper you were supposed to read was the Communist Lebanese
paper al-Thaqāfah al-waṭaniyyah (National Culture), and [their] journal was al-Ṭarīq (The Way)—
also Communist.” Once, al-Sayyāb brought home a copy of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s
Lover, and—because they thought the subject matter too bourgeois—his housemates forbade
him from reading it and took it from him. Their radio stayed tuned to Moscow.iii
3
Levi Thompson
MESA Paper: Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s Transnational Turn (Delivered Nov. 18th, 2016)
DRAFT COPY – NOT FOR CIRCULATION
Looking back on his time with the Communists, al-Sayyāb points to his experience of
the Tūdah’s inaction during the Iranian coup as the main reason for his complete and total
break with the Communists after he returned to Iraq in late 1953. Al-Sayyāb chafed at the idea
that Iranian nationalism was a secondary priority for the Tūdah, and this was in fact a
harbinger of his subsequent move to Iraqi nationalism. So how are we to understand alSayyāb’s literary output in light of this transnational experience?
The current model of transnational literary studies might work for post-Cold War lit,
but transnationalism existed long before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the 2005 collection Minor
Transnationalism, the editors outline the differences between “transnationalism-from-above”
and “transnationalism-from-below.” The first is driven by a globalizing economy increasingly
subservient to capitalism; homogenizing, totalizing, in a word: bad. Transnationalism-frombelow, on the other hand, is “the sum of the counterhegemonic operations of the nonelite who
refuse assimilation to one given nation-state […].”iv “Weapons and Children” presents a
problem for the given concept of “transnationalism-from-above” because it negotiates a
“transnationalism-from-above” driven not by capitalism, but by Soviet communism.
The poem is more than 400 lines long and in eight parts. Al-Sayyāb wrote it while exiled
in 1953. Broadly, it tells the story of the Iraqi countryside during wartime, the stanzas
punctuated by a merchant’s incessant calls for ḥadīd (iron) and raṣāṣ (bullets or lead), which he
4
Levi Thompson
MESA Paper: Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s Transnational Turn (Delivered Nov. 18th, 2016)
DRAFT COPY – NOT FOR CIRCULATION
buys to resell to the warmongers of the world. These words also provide a formal foundation
for the poem as they match its constituent meter, al-mutaqārib, the base foot of which is faʿūlun
(short, long, long). The merchant’s call thus ties the poem’s form and content together as the
words he shouts match exactly in terms of metrics. The poem’s meter formally represents how
capitalism’s omnipresence structures the experience of modern life. The poem is founded on
the dichotomy of water (innocence; beginning; life) and fire (guilt; end; death). Along with
water, the positive category includes children, birds, music, dolls, and harvest scenes, whereas
weapons, bombs, gunfire, bullets, and scorched earth occupy the negative category. The
merchant is the agent of change through which the positive elements are transformed into the
negative ones. He turns bed-frames into weapons and dolls’ eyes into bullets, transmogrifying
childhood innocence into terror. The central conceit shows how capitalism destroys while
filiative community builds.
After opening on an idyllic scene describing a mother’s love for her child, a reference to
Romeo and Juliet shifts the poem into the second side of its dualism: weapons and death. It
goes:
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
Birds? Or children laughing
Or water, ripened by stone,
So the grass becomes moist and the flowers dewy
Flowers and light
A lark singing,
And an apple blossom.
5
Levi Thompson
MESA Paper: Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s Transnational Turn (Delivered Nov. 18th, 2016)
DRAFT COPY – NOT FOR CIRCULATION
64. The flap of bird wings has
65. An echo of a mother’s kiss on her baby’s cheek
66. “Wilt thou be gone? That was not the lark!
67. Believe me, [love,] it was the nightingale,
68. Yon light is not daylight.”v
69. Are those the ships that lost course
70. On the way to a harbor lamented by the winds?
71. Soldiers’ hands beckoning there
72. For a thousand Juliets on the sidewalk,
73. “Goodbye, goodbye to those who don’t return.”
74. For a mother, all alone during fall
75. Behind the darkness, a tree stripped of her leaves
76. Whose songbirds have fled!
The lines from Shakespeare shift the poem out of the idyll. Initially, the poem’s speaker cannot
differentiate between bird songs and laughing children and continues to play on this mixture,
connecting child, mother, and bird wings in a single moment, “The flap of bird wings has / An
echo of a mother’s kiss on her baby’s cheek.” Suddenly, the innocent scene between child and
mother collapses with Juliet’s question to Romeo at the end of their first (and only) night
together, “Wilt thou be gone? That was not the lark! / Believe me, [love,] it was the
nightingale, / Yon light is not daylight.” Though Juliet attempts to deny the coming of
daybreak by claiming she hears a nightingale instead of the lark, the sunrise indicates that the
time has come for Romeo to leave her bed and Verona behind. The lines represent the
impossible wish of holding on to the idyll indefinitely and herald the coming of the inevitable.
The children from the earlier lines grow up to become soldiers, cast out on the seas like Romeo
6
Levi Thompson
MESA Paper: Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s Transnational Turn (Delivered Nov. 18th, 2016)
DRAFT COPY – NOT FOR CIRCULATION
on the road to Mantua. Now adults of fighting age, the children long for their idyllic past,
“Soldiers’ hands beckoning there / For a thousand Juliets on the sidewalk,” while the mother
whose kisses fluttered on her children’s cheek’s like bird wings is left alone, “a tree stripped of
her leaves / Whose songbirds have fled!”
Though the poem was well-received by the Iraqi Communists,vi had they picked up on
the reference to Shakespeare, the situation may have been quite different. Once, a Communist
critic described Shakespeare to al-Sayyāb as “a ‘reactionary, feudalist poet’ who only talked
about kings, princes, and pimps and never workers and peasants.” Al-Sayyāb responded by
asking him how Shakespeare could ever have been a communist since Marx hadn’t even been
born yet.vii The Communists didn’t stop with Shakespeare either, offering similar ahistorical
criticisms of pre-modern Arabic literature, including al-Mutanabbī. This incensed al-Sayyāb,
who elaborated on the problem during a talk in Rome (at a conference sponsored by the
Congress for Cultural Freedom) in 1961,
One Iraqi Communist wrote an article on al-Mutanabbī and his poem about
Bawwān Valley,viii using the following line as a starting point:
In Bawwān Valley my horse asked,
‘Shall we leave this life of ease for battle?’
He concluded from this that al-Mutanabbī was in favor of war while his horse
supported peace. Despite the fact that I was a Communist at the time, I
commented on his article, saying that al-Mutanabbī’s horse must have signed
the Stockholm Appeal with its hoof.ix (The Stockholm Appeal was a call to ban
nuclear weapons in 1950.)
7
Levi Thompson
MESA Paper: Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s Transnational Turn (Delivered Nov. 18th, 2016)
DRAFT COPY – NOT FOR CIRCULATION
Al-Sayyāb’s awareness of the importance of understanding the historical context of a
literary work’s composition requires our careful consideration when approaching his
intertextual references. The lines from Romeo and Juliet add a new aesthetic dimension to
“Weapons and Children,” creating a transitional space between the initial descriptions of the
idyll and the scenes of war that follow them, brought on by the end of Romeo and Juliet’s only
night together and their giving in to the reality of their situation and the impossibility of their
love.
This is only one of the ways al-Sayyāb positions “Weapons and Children” between
traditions and against the countervailing winds of Communist and capitalist transnationalismfrom-above blowing through the 1950s. In fact, the poem’s continual returns to local Iraqi
scenes and championing of the Iraqi peasant betray a hint of the Iraqi nationalism that would
replace al-Sayyāb’s Communist affiliation after his break with the party.
When he republished the poem in his 1960 dīwān, Unshūdat al-maṭar (Rain Song), he
made some telling emendations to the original version. There is not enough time to give
extensive examples, but I would like to quickly mention some of the removed lines. The
changes indicate al-Sayyāb’s positioning of himself as a Cold War intellectual on the side of the
United States and Britain. In 1960, he took out one line reading “The merciless lords of Wall
Street / […] turn the bed-frame / Into a sin,” i.e. into weapons. He also removed an extended
8
Levi Thompson
MESA Paper: Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s Transnational Turn (Delivered Nov. 18th, 2016)
DRAFT COPY – NOT FOR CIRCULATION
description of the plight of African-Americans in Mississippi and the lynch mobs they faced
there. In the last section, he took out the following: “For the daybreak of the slaves’ release has
dawned, / And we have raised the banner of peace”. Finally, he changed salāmun ʿalā al-Dūn
(“Peace to the Don” [a river south of Moscow]) to salāmun ʿalā al-Kunj (“Peace to the Ganges”).
The changes show an obvious attempt to dissociate the poem from its original explicit support
of Communist commitment. While the earlier version’s political meaning remained somewhat
open due to its intertextual makeup and other aesthetic features, al-Sayyāb’s later
emendations were made for solely political reasons after his split with the Communists.
Al-Sayyāb’s adoption of western ideology in the Cold War led him to take up some
really awful positions during his later life, including Arab chauvinism, antisemitism, and an
uncompromising sort of proto-Baʿthist Iraqi nationalism. So how should we read his work in
light of the nasty reality of his politics? Well, I think al-Sayyāb’s own take on the Western
writers he appreciated during his Communist period works well for us too. Al-Sayyāb was
famously willing, for instance, to engage with T. S. Eliot’s poetry despite the conservative, even
reactionary, political positions of its author. In 1961, al-Sayyāb told his Rome audience that he
“would not be going too far if [he] were to say that modern European civilization has faced no
deeper or more violent ridicule than that of T. S. Eliot in his poem The Waste Land, not in
everything Communist writers and poets have written against capitalism’s role in said
9
Levi Thompson
MESA Paper: Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s Transnational Turn (Delivered Nov. 18th, 2016)
DRAFT COPY – NOT FOR CIRCULATION
x
civilization.” To continue to appreciate al-Sayyāb’s poetry we must do the same. We have to
try and see through the distorting nationalist veneer he attempted to shellac over “Weapons
and Children” following his transnational turn.
Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, Kuntu shuyūʿiyyan (Kūlūnīyā [Cologne]: Manshūrāt al-Jamal, 2007), 15-16. Also see Kevin
i
Jones, “The Poetics of Revolution: Cultures, Practices, and Politics of Anti-Colonialism in Iraq, 1932-1960,” PhD
diss. (The University of Michigan, 2013), 284-285.
ii
The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978), 669.
Al-Sayyāb, Kuntu shuyūʿiyyan, 216-217.
iii
iv
Minor Transnationalism, eds. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 5-6.
They quote Sarah J. Mahler, “Theoretical and Empirical Contributions toward a Research Agenda for
Transnationalism,” Transnationalism from Below, eds. Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarzino (London:
Transaction, 1998), 64-100.
v
The note in the edition of the poem used here (al-Aʿmāl al-shiʿriyyah al-kāmilah, 4th Ed. [Baghdād: Dār alḤurriyyah li-l-Ṭibāʿah wa-l-Nashr, 2008]) reads, “Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet.” The exact lines are not given,
but they are 3.5.1, 5, and 12. Al-Sayyāb, who studied English, probably engaged with the text in the original, either
during his school days or at the Teachers College in Baghdad. My Shakespeare citation depends on William
Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Alfred Harbage, ed. (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1972).
vi
Iḥsān ʿAbbās, Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb: Dirāsah fī ḥayātih wa-shiʿrih, (Bayrūt: Dār al-Thaqāfah, 1969), 182.
vii
Al-Sayyāb “al-Iltizām wa-l-lāiltizām fi al-adab al-ʿarabī al-ḥadīth,” al-Adab al-ʿarabī al-muʿāṣir: aʿmāl muʾtamar Rūmā
al-munʿaqid fī Tishrīn al-awwal sanat 1961 (Manshūrāt Aḍwāʾ, 1961), 246-247.
“A well-forested area in Fars, Iran.” Glossary of Names and Terms in Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī, What ʿĪsā Ibn
Hishām Told Us or A Period of Time, Vol. II, Roger Allen, ed. and trans., Philip Kennedy, vol. ed. (New York: New York
University Press, 2015), 371. “Bawwān Valley is located near Shiraz, full of trees and water, and counted among
the paradises on earth.” Sharḥ dīwān al-Mutanabbī, waḍaʿahu ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Barqūqī, Vol. 4 (al-Qāhirah: 1938),
383.
ix
Al-Sayyāb, al-Iltizām wa-l-lāiltizām, 247. Al-Sayyāb recounts the same story in Kuntu shuyūʿiyyan, 174, adding that
the author of the article claimed that al-Mutanabbī was a propagandist for war and an agent of colonialism for not
signing the Stockholm Appeal himself!
x
Al-Sayyāb, al-Iltizām wa-l-lāiltizām, 248-249.
viii
10
MESA Paper: Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s Transnational Turn (Delivered Nov. 18th, 2016)
DRAFT COPY – NOT FOR CIRCULATION
The 1953 coup d’état in Iran didn’t just shake Iranian society; its aftershocks
transformed countless lives outside Iran as well. The coup was engineered by the American
and British intelligence services to oust the popular Iranian Prime Minister Muḥammad
Muṣaddiq and restore the Shah’s absolute power. Among the coup’s first-hand witnesses was
Iraqi poet Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, who was hiding out with the Iranian Communist Party (the
Tūdah) in Tehran at the time. The Tūdah’s refusal to intervene against the events of the coup
forced al-Sayyāb to reconsider his commitment to Communism and caused a turn in his
politics and poetics. Scholars have neglected to examine the coup’s effect on al-Sayyāb’s poetic
development, but his reaction to it is indispensable if we want to understand his move from
political commitment to a more nuanced, ambivalent, and complicated poetics that
interrogates the death-rebirth cycles he is known for. In the end, al-Sayyāb emerged a changed
man from the rubble of the coup, and by the time he died in 1964, his politics aligned with the
Baʿthist camp. His experiences during the coup and after incrementally led to this change, a
sharp contrast with his earlier Communist-inspired commitment that transcended national
borders. The transnational forces at work behind the coup defined his poetics and the poetry
he published after it resonated transnationally.
On August 19th, 1953, Muḥammad Muṣaddiq, the Prime Minister of Iran elected in 1951
amidst a wave of popular support, was removed from power in a joint effort by the American
1
Levi Thompson
MESA Paper: Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s Transnational Turn (Delivered Nov. 18th, 2016)
DRAFT COPY – NOT FOR CIRCULATION
and British spy agencies. Al-Sayyāb was hiding out with the Tūdah north of Tehran at the time
and witnessed the aftermath of the coup while making his way back into the city with
members of the Tūdah Party on August 20th or 21st. He found the streets filled with trucks
carrying soldiers he would later discover were supporters of the coup and not of Muṣaddiq as
he originally believed. The next day in Tehran, he awoke to find a small group of fifty or sixty
reactionaries taking control of the streets around where he was staying. The Party did nothing.
When al-Sayyāb asked his Tūdah companions why they were not trying to reverse the coup
and calling for mass protests, one of them told him,
‘Listen, Arab comrade. We’re on the border of Ittiḥād-i shūravī’—that’s
what they called the Soviet Union.
‘Sure,’ I replied, ‘I know that.’
[…]
‘So, if we take control of the government—us, the Communists—do you
think the Americans will stay silent about it? Of course not! They’ll intervene,
and once they do, it will cause problems for the Soviet Union.’
My blood boiled in my veins, and I screamed back at him, my voice
charged with emotion, “But you all are Iranians, not Soviets! Your job is to
defend the interests of your own people, the Iranian people, not the Soviet
Union and its people. Comrade, the Soviet Union is capable of defending itself!”i
By 1953, al-Sayyāb had been a member of the Iraqi Communist Party for nearly seven
years. During that time, he took part in many popular demonstrations against British
involvement in Iraq, including 1948’s Wathbah (“the Leap”) and an Intifāḍah (“shaking off”) that
lasted from 1952-1953. Al-Sayyāb’s memoir, Kuntu shuyūʿiyyan (I Was a Communist) includes
2
Levi Thompson
MESA Paper: Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s Transnational Turn (Delivered Nov. 18th, 2016)
DRAFT COPY – NOT FOR CIRCULATION
lengthy explanations of how he lost faith in Communism, but we have to take his memories
with a healthy dose of salt. On November 23rd, 1952, al-Sayyāb recalls reciting his poems at the
head of a group of protestors during the Intifāḍah. Confronted by “one or two rifles” from the
Iraqi police, he remembers the crowd becoming violent and taking over a police station,
murdering at least two people in the process. Hanna Batutu reports the Communists had faced
a “fierce fusillade” from the station, which killed twelve of them and explains their outrage.ii
Al-Sayyāb’s selective memory is certainly on display here, but the poet really was forced to flee
Iraq afterwards, to Iran. He would remain in exile between Iran and Kuwait until late 1953.
When he finally returned to Iraq, his faith in Communism had been shaken to its core.
Exiled in Kuwait, he lived in a Communist safe-house, where “there was a continual
battle between [him] and [his comrades] about what [he] read. If you wanted to read a story,
then it had to be one by Maxime Gorky, Chekov, Ilya Ehrenburg, or [other Communists]. If you
wanted to read poetry, then you had to read Nāẓim Ḥikmat, Pablo Neruda, and so on—
Communist poets. The newspaper you were supposed to read was the Communist Lebanese
paper al-Thaqāfah al-waṭaniyyah (National Culture), and [their] journal was al-Ṭarīq (The Way)—
also Communist.” Once, al-Sayyāb brought home a copy of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s
Lover, and—because they thought the subject matter too bourgeois—his housemates forbade
him from reading it and took it from him. Their radio stayed tuned to Moscow.iii
3
Levi Thompson
MESA Paper: Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s Transnational Turn (Delivered Nov. 18th, 2016)
DRAFT COPY – NOT FOR CIRCULATION
Looking back on his time with the Communists, al-Sayyāb points to his experience of
the Tūdah’s inaction during the Iranian coup as the main reason for his complete and total
break with the Communists after he returned to Iraq in late 1953. Al-Sayyāb chafed at the idea
that Iranian nationalism was a secondary priority for the Tūdah, and this was in fact a
harbinger of his subsequent move to Iraqi nationalism. So how are we to understand alSayyāb’s literary output in light of this transnational experience?
The current model of transnational literary studies might work for post-Cold War lit,
but transnationalism existed long before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the 2005 collection Minor
Transnationalism, the editors outline the differences between “transnationalism-from-above”
and “transnationalism-from-below.” The first is driven by a globalizing economy increasingly
subservient to capitalism; homogenizing, totalizing, in a word: bad. Transnationalism-frombelow, on the other hand, is “the sum of the counterhegemonic operations of the nonelite who
refuse assimilation to one given nation-state […].”iv “Weapons and Children” presents a
problem for the given concept of “transnationalism-from-above” because it negotiates a
“transnationalism-from-above” driven not by capitalism, but by Soviet communism.
The poem is more than 400 lines long and in eight parts. Al-Sayyāb wrote it while exiled
in 1953. Broadly, it tells the story of the Iraqi countryside during wartime, the stanzas
punctuated by a merchant’s incessant calls for ḥadīd (iron) and raṣāṣ (bullets or lead), which he
4
Levi Thompson
MESA Paper: Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s Transnational Turn (Delivered Nov. 18th, 2016)
DRAFT COPY – NOT FOR CIRCULATION
buys to resell to the warmongers of the world. These words also provide a formal foundation
for the poem as they match its constituent meter, al-mutaqārib, the base foot of which is faʿūlun
(short, long, long). The merchant’s call thus ties the poem’s form and content together as the
words he shouts match exactly in terms of metrics. The poem’s meter formally represents how
capitalism’s omnipresence structures the experience of modern life. The poem is founded on
the dichotomy of water (innocence; beginning; life) and fire (guilt; end; death). Along with
water, the positive category includes children, birds, music, dolls, and harvest scenes, whereas
weapons, bombs, gunfire, bullets, and scorched earth occupy the negative category. The
merchant is the agent of change through which the positive elements are transformed into the
negative ones. He turns bed-frames into weapons and dolls’ eyes into bullets, transmogrifying
childhood innocence into terror. The central conceit shows how capitalism destroys while
filiative community builds.
After opening on an idyllic scene describing a mother’s love for her child, a reference to
Romeo and Juliet shifts the poem into the second side of its dualism: weapons and death. It
goes:
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
Birds? Or children laughing
Or water, ripened by stone,
So the grass becomes moist and the flowers dewy
Flowers and light
A lark singing,
And an apple blossom.
5
Levi Thompson
MESA Paper: Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s Transnational Turn (Delivered Nov. 18th, 2016)
DRAFT COPY – NOT FOR CIRCULATION
64. The flap of bird wings has
65. An echo of a mother’s kiss on her baby’s cheek
66. “Wilt thou be gone? That was not the lark!
67. Believe me, [love,] it was the nightingale,
68. Yon light is not daylight.”v
69. Are those the ships that lost course
70. On the way to a harbor lamented by the winds?
71. Soldiers’ hands beckoning there
72. For a thousand Juliets on the sidewalk,
73. “Goodbye, goodbye to those who don’t return.”
74. For a mother, all alone during fall
75. Behind the darkness, a tree stripped of her leaves
76. Whose songbirds have fled!
The lines from Shakespeare shift the poem out of the idyll. Initially, the poem’s speaker cannot
differentiate between bird songs and laughing children and continues to play on this mixture,
connecting child, mother, and bird wings in a single moment, “The flap of bird wings has / An
echo of a mother’s kiss on her baby’s cheek.” Suddenly, the innocent scene between child and
mother collapses with Juliet’s question to Romeo at the end of their first (and only) night
together, “Wilt thou be gone? That was not the lark! / Believe me, [love,] it was the
nightingale, / Yon light is not daylight.” Though Juliet attempts to deny the coming of
daybreak by claiming she hears a nightingale instead of the lark, the sunrise indicates that the
time has come for Romeo to leave her bed and Verona behind. The lines represent the
impossible wish of holding on to the idyll indefinitely and herald the coming of the inevitable.
The children from the earlier lines grow up to become soldiers, cast out on the seas like Romeo
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MESA Paper: Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s Transnational Turn (Delivered Nov. 18th, 2016)
DRAFT COPY – NOT FOR CIRCULATION
on the road to Mantua. Now adults of fighting age, the children long for their idyllic past,
“Soldiers’ hands beckoning there / For a thousand Juliets on the sidewalk,” while the mother
whose kisses fluttered on her children’s cheek’s like bird wings is left alone, “a tree stripped of
her leaves / Whose songbirds have fled!”
Though the poem was well-received by the Iraqi Communists,vi had they picked up on
the reference to Shakespeare, the situation may have been quite different. Once, a Communist
critic described Shakespeare to al-Sayyāb as “a ‘reactionary, feudalist poet’ who only talked
about kings, princes, and pimps and never workers and peasants.” Al-Sayyāb responded by
asking him how Shakespeare could ever have been a communist since Marx hadn’t even been
born yet.vii The Communists didn’t stop with Shakespeare either, offering similar ahistorical
criticisms of pre-modern Arabic literature, including al-Mutanabbī. This incensed al-Sayyāb,
who elaborated on the problem during a talk in Rome (at a conference sponsored by the
Congress for Cultural Freedom) in 1961,
One Iraqi Communist wrote an article on al-Mutanabbī and his poem about
Bawwān Valley,viii using the following line as a starting point:
In Bawwān Valley my horse asked,
‘Shall we leave this life of ease for battle?’
He concluded from this that al-Mutanabbī was in favor of war while his horse
supported peace. Despite the fact that I was a Communist at the time, I
commented on his article, saying that al-Mutanabbī’s horse must have signed
the Stockholm Appeal with its hoof.ix (The Stockholm Appeal was a call to ban
nuclear weapons in 1950.)
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MESA Paper: Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s Transnational Turn (Delivered Nov. 18th, 2016)
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Al-Sayyāb’s awareness of the importance of understanding the historical context of a
literary work’s composition requires our careful consideration when approaching his
intertextual references. The lines from Romeo and Juliet add a new aesthetic dimension to
“Weapons and Children,” creating a transitional space between the initial descriptions of the
idyll and the scenes of war that follow them, brought on by the end of Romeo and Juliet’s only
night together and their giving in to the reality of their situation and the impossibility of their
love.
This is only one of the ways al-Sayyāb positions “Weapons and Children” between
traditions and against the countervailing winds of Communist and capitalist transnationalismfrom-above blowing through the 1950s. In fact, the poem’s continual returns to local Iraqi
scenes and championing of the Iraqi peasant betray a hint of the Iraqi nationalism that would
replace al-Sayyāb’s Communist affiliation after his break with the party.
When he republished the poem in his 1960 dīwān, Unshūdat al-maṭar (Rain Song), he
made some telling emendations to the original version. There is not enough time to give
extensive examples, but I would like to quickly mention some of the removed lines. The
changes indicate al-Sayyāb’s positioning of himself as a Cold War intellectual on the side of the
United States and Britain. In 1960, he took out one line reading “The merciless lords of Wall
Street / […] turn the bed-frame / Into a sin,” i.e. into weapons. He also removed an extended
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MESA Paper: Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s Transnational Turn (Delivered Nov. 18th, 2016)
DRAFT COPY – NOT FOR CIRCULATION
description of the plight of African-Americans in Mississippi and the lynch mobs they faced
there. In the last section, he took out the following: “For the daybreak of the slaves’ release has
dawned, / And we have raised the banner of peace”. Finally, he changed salāmun ʿalā al-Dūn
(“Peace to the Don” [a river south of Moscow]) to salāmun ʿalā al-Kunj (“Peace to the Ganges”).
The changes show an obvious attempt to dissociate the poem from its original explicit support
of Communist commitment. While the earlier version’s political meaning remained somewhat
open due to its intertextual makeup and other aesthetic features, al-Sayyāb’s later
emendations were made for solely political reasons after his split with the Communists.
Al-Sayyāb’s adoption of western ideology in the Cold War led him to take up some
really awful positions during his later life, including Arab chauvinism, antisemitism, and an
uncompromising sort of proto-Baʿthist Iraqi nationalism. So how should we read his work in
light of the nasty reality of his politics? Well, I think al-Sayyāb’s own take on the Western
writers he appreciated during his Communist period works well for us too. Al-Sayyāb was
famously willing, for instance, to engage with T. S. Eliot’s poetry despite the conservative, even
reactionary, political positions of its author. In 1961, al-Sayyāb told his Rome audience that he
“would not be going too far if [he] were to say that modern European civilization has faced no
deeper or more violent ridicule than that of T. S. Eliot in his poem The Waste Land, not in
everything Communist writers and poets have written against capitalism’s role in said
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MESA Paper: Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s Transnational Turn (Delivered Nov. 18th, 2016)
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x
civilization.” To continue to appreciate al-Sayyāb’s poetry we must do the same. We have to
try and see through the distorting nationalist veneer he attempted to shellac over “Weapons
and Children” following his transnational turn.
Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, Kuntu shuyūʿiyyan (Kūlūnīyā [Cologne]: Manshūrāt al-Jamal, 2007), 15-16. Also see Kevin
i
Jones, “The Poetics of Revolution: Cultures, Practices, and Politics of Anti-Colonialism in Iraq, 1932-1960,” PhD
diss. (The University of Michigan, 2013), 284-285.
ii
The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978), 669.
Al-Sayyāb, Kuntu shuyūʿiyyan, 216-217.
iii
iv
Minor Transnationalism, eds. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 5-6.
They quote Sarah J. Mahler, “Theoretical and Empirical Contributions toward a Research Agenda for
Transnationalism,” Transnationalism from Below, eds. Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarzino (London:
Transaction, 1998), 64-100.
v
The note in the edition of the poem used here (al-Aʿmāl al-shiʿriyyah al-kāmilah, 4th Ed. [Baghdād: Dār alḤurriyyah li-l-Ṭibāʿah wa-l-Nashr, 2008]) reads, “Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet.” The exact lines are not given,
but they are 3.5.1, 5, and 12. Al-Sayyāb, who studied English, probably engaged with the text in the original, either
during his school days or at the Teachers College in Baghdad. My Shakespeare citation depends on William
Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Alfred Harbage, ed. (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1972).
vi
Iḥsān ʿAbbās, Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb: Dirāsah fī ḥayātih wa-shiʿrih, (Bayrūt: Dār al-Thaqāfah, 1969), 182.
vii
Al-Sayyāb “al-Iltizām wa-l-lāiltizām fi al-adab al-ʿarabī al-ḥadīth,” al-Adab al-ʿarabī al-muʿāṣir: aʿmāl muʾtamar Rūmā
al-munʿaqid fī Tishrīn al-awwal sanat 1961 (Manshūrāt Aḍwāʾ, 1961), 246-247.
“A well-forested area in Fars, Iran.” Glossary of Names and Terms in Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī, What ʿĪsā Ibn
Hishām Told Us or A Period of Time, Vol. II, Roger Allen, ed. and trans., Philip Kennedy, vol. ed. (New York: New York
University Press, 2015), 371. “Bawwān Valley is located near Shiraz, full of trees and water, and counted among
the paradises on earth.” Sharḥ dīwān al-Mutanabbī, waḍaʿahu ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Barqūqī, Vol. 4 (al-Qāhirah: 1938),
383.
ix
Al-Sayyāb, al-Iltizām wa-l-lāiltizām, 247. Al-Sayyāb recounts the same story in Kuntu shuyūʿiyyan, 174, adding that
the author of the article claimed that al-Mutanabbī was a propagandist for war and an agent of colonialism for not
signing the Stockholm Appeal himself!
x
Al-Sayyāb, al-Iltizām wa-l-lāiltizām, 248-249.
viii
10