התקרבות לאקספרימנטליזם בספרות הערבית: על רומן מאת סמיר נקאש
مقاربة التجريبية في الأدب العربي: حول رواية لسمير نقاش
Michele Barontini
Abstract The Iraqi-Israeli writer Samir Naqqash (1938-2004), respected as one of the most interesting Jew contributors to Arabic contemporary literature, after the mass expulsion from Iraq happened in the first fifties, has attempted many formal solutions and strategies in his performance. His actually known production of 15 works reaches a experimental peak in the novel ‘Fuwwa ya dam’. Some considerations are offered about the time dimension of this work.
1 Contemporary means change The Saudi Sociologist and Literate Abdulrahman Bin Mohammed al Wahhabi is the author of a long article about the Iraqi-Israeli writer Samir Naqqash (Al Wahhabi 2011) in which he express his admiration for his art and in the same time offers a good introduction to approach his literature. Al-Wahhabi proposes to the Arabic reader not only an informed review of an Israeli author, but an interesting exposition of the state of the arts in Saudi Literary Criticism, an invitation to minority cultural studies, to new efforts in Arabic literary criticism and theory and even to the study of experimental visions and techniques in literature. All this comes from a context in which the same idea and production of modern and contemporary literature is condemned through the influence of doctrinaire standpoints as a spiritually toxic vehicle of foreign plots (Al Ghamidi 2003:2181-sgg.). One would think this sort of doctrinaire criticism to be “old styled” and innocuously aprioristic. But no, it is updated at least, for example, to give an account of that chapter of cultural studies relative to the activity of the CIA in culture support and production, that is in particular the Center for Cultural Freedom and the foundations that supported financially covered propaganda starting from the
Cold War climate of the fifties.¹ It is worth to notice the reworking of the many data into a singular narration in the form of a populist “conspiracy theory” good for both wings, that has now wide diffusion in the whole world and in which Jews are seen as the rulers of America and Israel, their outpost in the Middle East, and as rulers in the world of finance whose final goal is to control the planet at their please. This narration is retroactive and may give account of previous historic phases linking to the colonial period and the Nahda of Arabic culture; it is shareable and easily translatable and it offers a cultural-historical ground to the global political opposition countering conspiracy; moreover it is largely shared from masses of discontent electors that are changing the political map of Europe and the Western World at large. Finally it may pose reasonable doubts about the same concept of “cultural freedom” and the roles, goals and nature of sponsorship in cultural production. This discourse outlined here is gradable and can be but partially agreed; it could be posed topologically as a field or a set. A subset of it elaborated in the circles of the professional of the Human Sciences and literature sees the production of Shoah Literature, in the form of a complete or partial subject in all the languages of the world as a powerful mean to assure a Jew hegemonic role in the wider field of global, transnational culture production. It is also gradable in the obvious sense that even the less convinced supporter of a notion of jew hegemony in literature will agree on the reality of its presence. Al Wahhabi himself seems to be convinced of the critical value of the studies dedicated to this matter, however he seems more interested about a fundamental step to make in evaluating Arabic contemporary literature, that is, accepting the fact that his space has become that of a trans-national project, and that its actual production can no more be seen exclusively in terms of national cultures. Not only this prevents to catch the wideness and the richness of the geography of this literature, but prevents to feel the pulse of what is happening on a scale that is even broader. In the initial paragraph of his conclusions he writes as follows.
The present study about the Arabic-Hebrew author Samir Naqqash is a panorama of his human and conceptual art intended as a presentation for the specialized or non the non-specialized Arabic reader without distinctions. Its scope is not solely to study his accomplishments, albeit profitable for widening our sight on contemporary Oriental Arabic prose, but to be useful also in the field of political and social thinking, and to inform the phantasms who are present in many circles of culture of the region about Arabic writers that are ¹As widely known this field was opened by a successful and well documented book by Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War (2000).
not localized only in the Arab World or in each of its countries, but that are active in a global dimension in different ways. (Al-Wahhabi 2011:80)
This global approach to literary space is not to see as a new concept. It is surely consequent with recognizing the participation of Jews to the developing of Arabic culture from classic times up to the Nahda. Naqqash is paradoxically connected with all these questions. As author of an Arabic literature that followed the whole story of the State of Israel, after its forced refuge in 1951 with operation Ezra and Nehemia, his production is that of an Iraqi Jew expressing the necessity to locate a great part of his works in the country of origin. And by having expressed his critical stance to the actual forms and the whole philosophy of the Zionist project in Israel, he payed the price of missing any kind of factual sponsorship in that country. Anyway he couldn’t avoid making choices orienting his effective narration of the tragedies afflicting the Jewish people in modern age. His choice has thus been that to concentrate on their Iraqi and Oriental side.² Through his heritage, as Wahhabi observes, at least a part of contemporary Jew literature with its narrations of persecution and exile enters in the wider field of Arabic literature. In this light, what is worth introducing as the first argument to discuss is that one the main problems posed by Arabic contemporary literature has been the relationship with time of entire societies. Writers as Abd el-Rahman Munif and Samir Naqqash have been able to expound so accurately a phenomenology of “living in another time”, in a way so convincing and close to life itself as to assist to its theater from within the same brain of their heroes. But in general what happens after publication is that such a world of complex percepts, affects and images falls back to be interpreted from purists, doctrinaires and even moderates, as the political “imposition” of a concept and a perception of time coming from the West, in this case as imported through the mode of foreign literary influence and its reception. We may notice that the main chapter devoted from Al-Wahhabi to Naqqash experimental practice is called “From influence to disengagement“, meaning the influence of western experimental practices, say, of a James Joyce or a Sartre, to the disengagement from it, coming finally to recognize the inherent value of Arabic literature. This is taken as demonstrated from the subsiding of experimental techniques in Naqqash’s last roman “Shlomo the Kurd, Me and Time”, in which he succeeds to maintain the interest of a personal and unique style in classical Arabic, abandoning the “modernist engagement” in experimentation of previous works. ²In Shlomo the Kurd, Me and Time, the “evil coming from the west” is the tragedy brought in the Middle East by the First World War.
However, Arabic literature is perceived from many people who can appreciate it, assess it and/or produce it, like superior to Western as a tradition and as a project, spiritually superior (as Naqqash itself seem to have stated), at least for his capacity to be alive, propositive and interesting in the wider space of contemporary arts, as younger writers actually maintain. The power of an hegemonic statu quo affecting its diffusion is reasonably demonstrated by the disproportionate small percentage of translated books; this happens for many languages but it is especially relevant for the biggest one: in the English book market, just the 3% of the whole production is translated literature, as explained by the young Libyan writer Hisham Matar (2018), a reality that tend to overrate the importance of Anglo-Saxon literature compared to all the others. From the other side and as Al-Wahhabi himself underlines, since it is still and always the question of breaking habits and unfounded securities, the simple facts of reading, studying and discussing what happens in contemporary literature is of vital importance to conceive cultural change in the Middle East as the case of Naqqash himself demonstrates. In fact, while less known and suspect to the Arabic academia as a Jew, Naqqash had the sort to be felt as ‘too Arabic’ in Israel, and recognized only in the literary circle of Iraqi immigrants, recognized as a major writer but easily dismissed because he was not writing in Hebrew. So risky is the “new” and the “different“ even in a world that seems sometimes asking about it as a primary necessity, to be paradoxically silenced from all sort of organized “persuasion”. The exemplary history of Naqqash and his failed reception is treated by many authors through the notions of “double identity”, “exile literature” and through a growing interest in discussing the same concept of translation in a world in which it may assume a sense of primary necessity even to survive. As a (still unpublished and risking extinction) translator of Naqqash, I explored the existing studies about him in a general attempt to approach his legacy. For what concern the results of four years of intense work, I am convinced to break any hesitation in treating this author as he presented himself, that is a philosophical mind ‘using’ fiction as a vehicle, and, through the skill and sense of responsibility perceivable from encountering his art, by noticing how high an idea he had of the construction of this vehicle.³ Coming back to Al-Wahhabi’s article, some inexact assumptions come to sight ³Naqqash does not oblige to look too far from his own writings since he is often transparent about his concepts and his lifelong open research disclosed only in form of literary output. However it seems to me that he was a sort of mind that respect the Peircian invitation: “Do not block the way to inquiry”; in this respect his career starts similarly to the Italian philosopher Furio Jesi, as him very soon showing interest and mastery about mythology and popular traditions. In his short life Jesi, quoted as a sharp inquirer on myth and mythology in this pages, was rather devoted to the essay and later published his literary efforts.
immediately, especially those of chronological and historical character relating to his reading of “Shlomo the Kurd, Me and Time.”⁴ The fact that there are differences or “flaws” in respective historical narrations should not surprise. My aim here is not to correct, but rather to remind all the interest of following the developments of Arabic literary criticism as a channel of dialogue, for its inherent political and cultural value, and as a field of possible questions to a wide range of human sciences (maybe all). An excellent example in case is offered from the works of the Tunisian born Abdelfattah Kilito about the imposing question of the mutual ‘non-equability’ of many aspects of Western and Arabic literature.⁵ The non-equability is to choose in respect to superiority or inferiority terms because a door to a qualitative choice of concepts is here largely preferable and theoretically useful than the forcing of quantitative ones. In this particular logic, considering contemporary literature as a “native” field of the West/East dialogue, and temporary pausing (when possible) attention to narrative sets and subsets orienting the social management of the discourse of Arabic Contemporary culture, what interests me more here is to continue following Wahhabi as he takes into account the time organization of the narration of the novel “Fuwwa ya Dam”, after considering this work as the highest experimental pitch reached by Naqqash among his fifteen works; in other words, aknowledging the time element as paramount to Naqqash’ literature in general as well as performatively instrumental in this novel.
2 Time’s quality and image In Bloom’sday a page is like sunken into silence: it’s lunch time and while he is undecided about where going to eat, walking in his city, he seems to jump on the famous verse of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanity, all is vanity”.
His smile faded as he walked, a heavy cloud hiding the sun slowly, Shadowing Trinity’s surly front. Trams passed one another, ingoing, outgoing, clanging. Useless words. Things go on the same; day after day; squads of police marching out, back; trams in, out. Those two loonies mooching about. Dignam carted off. Mina Purefoy swollen belly on a bed groaning to have a child tugged out of her. One born ⁴Wahhabi seems to presume that Jews were emigrating from that country after the bloody pogrom instigated after the failed putsch of Rashid al Kilani in 1941, the ‘farhud’. This is the denomination of the pogrom that followed the putsch attempted by the pro-Nazi al Kilani, whereas, on the contrary there are still ten years separating the events from the final clearing of the whole minority with operation Ezra and Nehemia. ⁵Kilito is translated and known since time French, Italian and Spanish, more recently also in English (for example see Kilito 2008).
every second somewhere. Other dying every second. Since I fed the birds five minutes. Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born; washing the blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb, bawling maaaaaa. Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on, passing on. Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of pavements, piledup bricks, stones. Changing hands. This owner, that. Landlord never dies, they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets his notice to quit. They buy the place up with gold and still they have all the gold. Swindle in it somewhere. Piled up in cities, worn away age after age. Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions. Slaves. Chinese wall. Babylon. Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble, sprawling suburbs, jerrybuilt, Kerwan’s mushroom houses, built of breeze. Shelter for the night. No one is anything. This is the very worst hour of the day. Vitality. Dull, gloomy: hate this hour. Feel as I had been eaten and spewed. (from Joyce’s “Ulysses”, [1922]1992, p.208)
No doubt that the book of the moderns may begin from the margins of the Bible and after Ulysses closes his cycle, and more could be included as the Slavic Epics or The Thousand Nights, for it is like a single book. Modern literature is as resentfully contrary to logic as logic is against philosophy. It is built on syntax, made of propositions, but its hidden power is that it works on the impossible proposition. “No one is anything” is a ‘percept’ felt as a sad music, but is also the simple proposition with no reference: “A has the property of all things” (Pierce’s model of an impossible logical object), “Cogito ergo sum” (Descartes, his optimistic statement), “Everything is vanity” (Ecclesiastes), “Everything is food for something else” (common saying with a biblical ground, employed by Naqqash in many ways, here as Bloom’s blues line). The long quotation from “Ulysses” is taken as a most synthetic intertextual bridge to characterize Bloom’s Hebraicity. It is employed here as a way to bypass actual sector theories, of practice or of cultural discourses, to limit the field of our discussion about the great change of modern art. Joyce page contains a sort of template for following writers in which a perception of intolerable immanence of the world and of life given to man, in Arabic an “obsession” [hāgis], is constructed in the form of an assemblage of reflections, random images, intertextuality, and many more eventually. All this converge in a perception. Time quality is a (complex) perception.
It is a way to proceed that writers apprehend as a continuous, and that probably could not surge at this peculiar character without the rise of cinema, first, and the other modern media, after. The fact is that in modern art concepts and distinctions, the art of disposition etc., work in a way much less effective that this new synthetic way to proceed. They are obliged to be collocated in other ways to construct a tissue of reality. Al-Wahhabi says it better:
Naqqash narrative language is performed by means of a representative technique in which the reality context is a linguistic construction rather than an overt realistic resort to phenomena of life […] or to historical persons. The singular short stories are told by utterances and distresses of their characters… (Al Wahhabi 2011:69).
In a work conceived like Fuwwa ya dam the dialogues in dialect constitute a plan of realistic images that could suffice to a general idea of the whole story, or at least reconstruct it somehow; it is rather the posture of the narrator that seems to change. The postures given to the narrator are many and they do not let be solved by a generic “stream of consciousness”. The narrator is the real transformer; he is the eye of the camera, scenarist, sometimes journalist or radiospeaker, poet, anonymous guest of the same cafe in which the story happens that reacts hearing what personages are saying speaking their own language, up to the physical environment or their world. Freedom at play in such way can be too much for people that are not used to it. In reality the narrator “records”, and this is the first social function of his performance, with its tendency to “omniscience” and its privileges.⁶ But the text is a game of plans and of dialogues in which the point is a sense of interplay of parts and not just of conforming or violating some sort of linguistic standard, or individuating with the maximum of precision certain particular cultural spaces, environments and times. All this still exists, but this sort of artistry in writing does not need to refer to rhetoric or to logic any more, even if it could use any suggestion possible to give form to the unformed through his own style. Maybe he liquidated these references putting them in a corner with some sort of capital problem posed to them. In this sense accuracy actualizes how the author decided to treat the time element. Consequently, it demonstrates highly fruitful to speak about times-images, or sound-images in cinema as well in modern literature.⁷ Since long, after the ⁶Wahhabi notes that in Fuwwa ya Dam the narrator has the privilege of a “limited omniscience” (Wahhabi 2012:63). See in the first fifty pages of Anti-Oedypus (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000 [1972]), about the “recording” privilege of the socius, the “desiring-machines”, and the “body without organs”, putting into place a whole decostruction of sociology and a critic of psychiatry. ⁷A reference to Gilles Deleuze’s works on cinema, I will return on this later in these pages.
great tests of Kafka or Joyce, it is demonstrated that different ways to proceed in this manner are shareable, received and perceived as aesthetically interesting. That does not mean that we could not find examples of a similar astonishing “modernity” in ancient literature, take for example the book of Job; I am rather slanted to assume that a general shift in modern arts crossed any linguistic wall and the perceived boundaries of different cultural “times”, just because ideas, scientific theories, new medias and common feelings, obsessions, were already in the world, they were “out there”. The great turning point of cinema and modern media, of modern sciences, that became more and more a form of creative activity shifting to proximity and dialogue with arts and philosophy, is not detached from time, it embeds immediately new forms of time, as from the famous description of Klee’s “Angel of Time” by Walter Benjamin. If to understand what is “discrete” and what is “continuous” keeps being among the most difficult questions in science and philosophy, this fact did not prevent man to assemble his knowledge, his creativity, and it capacity to invent devices and machines starting from his incomplete knowledge. Phonograph, radio, telephones, cinema, computers, are basically working from the old idea of imposing a vibration on a neutral space. The space changes in the substance of a support, the supports are made capable to vibrate at their turn. The phonograph records in reproducible variations the sound waves diffused in the air, radio transmits them trough radio-waves that may be re-emitted at distance by way of transducers, a telephone is a transducer of electric potentials of the air wave in proximity of our mouth and ears, cinema imposes on the optical field produced by the reflection of a lens on a plan in form of a dynamic receiver; trough a frequency of photo frames comparable at the oscillation of a sound wave and the mechanically shifting on a film the continuum is translated into discrete to become again a continuum in our perception. This is the magic of the moving image and his inherent power to build a reality of his own through a process of gradual comprehension, adaptation and experimentation of the possibilities of the medium. The computer will digitize all this speeds and potentials accelerating and channeling them by the strength of mathematical processors, microcircuits reducing the volume of the machines, and supports capable to store the results onto memory.⁸ All this reproducing power comes from a capability to manipulate an higher order and quality of speeds: mechanical, electrical, acoustic, photographic and digital speeds; a literature of “speed” has thus followed technical developments in modern age, when even a reasonable mind as Walter Benjamin was slanted to a moderate form of “futurism” that was no less capable to look into the past: to the Bible, and to minds like Bachofen and Nietzsche, letting his reader grasp ⁸See in Anti-Oedipus the relationship between “fluxes” and “recording” (Deleuze and Guattari 2000[1972]).
through his quotations something about mythology and the Greeks that was non actual, in the sense that went at another qualitative speed of thought, but was central for modern philosophy and art theory, surely central to read his Kafka, and at the center of main political and cultural issues of his time.⁹ But the epochal shift happened in the continuous of time, perceivable only in forms of signs; signs are perceived as discrete at first and only interpretation can collocate them in the continuity of a process. A conflict of different speeds will result from the dislocation of signs in a place where interpretation is not immediately given to the mind. So what happens is that the sense of modernity is a catastrophe announcing itself as foreign sign, given by the individuation of its factual effects somewhere else and reported to a repetition and a quality of time. In Naqqash is a Middle East that does not know yet tanks armed with cannons and where it happens, quoting the Bible, that “A certain Pharaoh doesn’t know Joseph any more”, and war happens as coming from the “hidden world” [‘ālam ul-ġayb]: for Shlomo the Kurd is gradual daily obsession that will demonstrate real and terribly clear. Samir Naqqash has been defined a postmodern oriented artist,¹⁰ maybe because the problems raised from his vision of myth and history had no correspondence to current debates happening in the Israeli cultural space. His literature obliges to seek for something “external“ and universal to be described. The postmodern definition can be corroborated from the side of an aesthetic response to political issues, or if we want to conceive his heritage as projected from modernity and beyond it. However, he shows all the character of a modern for two sensibilities and two main working machines, one oriented to the past and one to the future, that he has in his practice. The first is a mythological literary machine conceived as rotating around nothingness.¹¹ His duality between the popular commonplace terms of maġzan and ⁹Walter Benjamin gives the first lecture of Kafka much beyond the narration of his “shortcomings” and sufferance inaugurated by Max Brod. His lecture is parallel to his Bachofen in the climate of the “Bachofen renaissance” that will lead to Nazi theories of myth and instrumental distortion of mythology. This climate (a complex “time” and a catastrophe in itself) is masterly discussed from the Italian (philosopher, Germanist, archaeologist and writer passed in 1980) Furio Jesi in a master essay about the concept of myth and mythology in western culture (Jesi 1989). Jesi, author of an astonishingly rich production in Italian still untranslated in English except for for a book about the Spartacus revolt in Germany, was particularly active in unveiling the stance of attributing a “substance” to myth and consequently advocating its sacred power and the authority of its exegesis. ¹⁰Argument noted by Stern (2013:185) as “indicative of the difficulty to categorize him”. ¹¹I treated this question in a still unpublished small essay in French, developing a substitution of what some commentators call “poetic of the black hole”. It would be in Deleuzian-Guattarian terms, his version of an Asiatic desiring machine.
ḥikma¹² conceives the first as a center of negative potential around which the following linguistic form cannot but orbit without effective connections. It is a generative machine explainable in terms of relating to cabalistic traditions, of general semiotics, or in terms of a science of myth as science of “what is not”, of “what there isn’t” (Jesi 1989). The second is consequent what I wrote in the first chapter about Naqqash’s commitment in shaping his own style; it seems to me that his works reveal a theatrical and cinematographic way to construct the time context of the narration in which what is missing is equally important than what there is, in a way that is common especially in movie projects. In other words the given question is to construct a continuum by means of many discreet objects; and from here, from the many catastrophes showed into forms, a continuum is more or less constructed by contiguity, a continuum which is given to the receiver to reconstruct. Precisely in this last case the same limitations imposed by the way in which our brain organizes perceptions will provide him of a fundamental help. It becomes evident why modern (and postmodern) art practices may be conceived in terms of assemblages and machines; this concerns how to investigate them and the new concepts involved. Naqqash’s literature includes such a cinematic imagemachine.
The first example given in this section was a scholarly piece of “stream of consciousness”; before to pass to the last section in which I propose to discuss some aspect of time concepts and strategies employed by Naqqash in his “Fuwwa ya Dam”, I would like to present a fragment about an unsuccessful attempt to afford this style of writing by one of his personages, in a particular example of an “All is vanity” statement made from an East looking West. It is taken from his collection of short stories Hikāyat kul zaman wa-makān [Tale of any time and place], from the story entitled Al-fāqa‘āt [The Bubbles].
« Our disgrace is to have been thrown in this world too late, and even if we were admitted, it is like an old prostitute whose body does not have a single cell remained healthy. » So he wrote, and the idea of innovation was filling his head like an heavy headache, then he threw the pen and supported his cheek on the palm of his hand posed perpendicularly in respect to his elbow standing on the table. « I write… and in this same moment thousands like me are writing too. And they wrote yesterday and the day before. Thousands of years passed and man is not tired of writing. Everybody steals and ¹²Between ‘sense’ or ‘core’ and ‘philosophy’ or ‘wisdom’, or ‘sentence’.
quotes the ideas of someone else. There is who’s drawing in this moment. And there is who is singing, acting, sculpting, thinking, laughing, crying, who is born and who is dying. Today like any other day. And these days are competing one another in making up new facts, ridiculous things, idiocies, but in the end it comes out that each new day is the exact copy of another. Creativity had its day since man emptied the barrel of godly things. Then you got crazy people and genial people. The crazy people are raving and genial people are raving too. What remains is just fantasies, delirium, and rotten things worn out from time. » With impotence’s anger he tore up those words, words that had nothing to see with innovation. However they were stiff like iron in his brain; no hope to break them into pieces or to take them out. They stood there like a tick on the head of a dog, so seriously fixed in its sucking of that head. But he behave himself and stood up from his seat. « No way. » Human conventions have to be applied in their totality as long as they were consacrated from man. Take life and prayer. What among the two resembles the other? Isn’t it rather that both are equally apprehended and repeated from man, up to the point to become empty from content, idea and taste, after all that repetition? (Naqqash 1978:185-186)
An alarming sense of time-wasting comes out from the fact that the more literature available nowadays on art produced in the Middle East is socially oriented, history oriented or culture oriented. This keeps the work of art or the performance at distance with the unpleasant impression the we are kept far from thinking and discussing the matter and how it is functioning. Even if in the case of Arabic literary criticism any pain is worth to try to know what’s happening to contemporary arts in the Arab world, empirical analysis grounded in a whole tradition of problems inherited from philosophy and science such as Deleuze and Guattari on Kafka, or Deleuze Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, are still perplexing/impressing readers and treated from Deleuzian specialists in the West, little translated still in Arabic or ignored in Hebrew.¹³ In Naqqash’s case we know that even the unending polemic on history and identity flowing in all and any page of literary criticism in Israel has been pity- ¹³I do not know about Persian but in Arabic there are 13 translated book up to 2008 and in Turkish there are 37 works translated by Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari up to now, with his Cinema 1 (not yet Cinema 2) among them. In Israel one book: Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?; it is to expect such a stance because this author took some “enemy” position towards Israel? That’s why the Arab were moderately interested and Turks translated so intensively? And what about all this knowledge that has nothing to see with Israel and political opinions of the day?
lessly silent towards an author that could substitute the modern canon played by Hebrew authors like Shay Agnon, being more or less a century ahead of him.¹⁴ It’s time to try to speak another language, a language of speed.
3 Experimenting with speed and time-space qualitative potentials With friendly tone and unblemished politeness ‘Abd el-Rahman al-Wahhabi assumes that maybe in Fuwwa ya dam Samir Naqqash is exaggerating with time. Besides this, paying him my respect after reading a book of the utmost complexity (its “dialogues” are in Baghdad Judaeo-Arabic and the whole tissue is challenging in many respects), I will use here his useful table of the time-posts left by the narrator along the story (Al-Wahhabi 2011:78).
[…] in Fuwwa ya Dam! we assist to an exaggeration of the time element. The story is collocated in the Thirties of the past century in Baghdad, but the temporal scale of the events is particularly short and compressed. The plot is marked by an insertion of chronological landmarks as a particular Sunday, for example, or in the following way: « Monday at three PM » (Naqqash 1987:7), then the events are happening and on the rise « At three PM and one minute » (p.7), then « At three PM and a minute and a half » (p.9), then « At three PM and two minutes exactly » (p.15), then « At three PM and three minutes minus six seconds » (p.19), and things are going on and on up to « Three PM and three minutes of Monday » (p.102), and at the end all sort of things happened up to « Evening of Monday » (p.135). From this last point, when the narrator has almost finished to report the story, back to the first time-mark we have been running over 160 pages, format 16 x 22, printed with a 12 pt. font. There is no doubt here that the excess is about shortening the time and/or stretching the facts. ¹⁴A general comment of mine to what Almog Behar said in an interview to Eli Eliahu: « It’s a shame that [Agnon] is the only mediator between the writings of Jewish tradition and the secular world… I don’t feel that I drew from him necessarily, but rather more from the writings of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, or the book ’Ben Ish Hai’ by Rabbi Yosef Haim of Baghdad. » (Behar 2017:257). Behar is talking in terms of Jewish different traditions of “writings” in a society in which secular and religious “persuasions” are actually living in separate worlds. I’m forcing his argument over the general background of Israeli literature thinking about Samir Naqqash who said: “They pushed us back a thousands years, a hundred thousands years they pushed us back” (quoted in Ben Dor 2006); it seems that a hundred may be enough, comparing the literary climate of the fifties in Iraq and Israel where Agnon was the first literary authority.
Probably Al Wahhabi gets this idea of exaggeration by confronting this “attempt”, as Naqqash himself calls his works, with his last roman Shlomo the Kurdi, Myself and Time.¹⁵ There the time-framing of the whole work is complex too, but much more diluted on a long spanning of material retrieved from memory and redistributed to three narrators and three different stylistic levels of literary Arabic. In this novel the catastrophes (the biggest being the First World War) is realistically described and embedded in a time-continuum, even if non-consequential and reversed as noted by Al-Wahhabi. In Fuwwa ya dam on the contrary a day of crisis is embedding the narration regarding the memory of five personages and how they are sharing or participating to a common catastrophe; the problem is that this catastrophe has no name: something happens that is a non-event for history. To any personage is assigned a time-plan intersecting with the general short time of the “real fact“ they are actually sharing in the çaykhané, place of the reality frame where dialect is spoken. Since the personages are all popular as the normal customers of the place and the people of the neighborhood, it is as the eye of the camera chooses a random place, in reality to obtain exemplar stories close to the “substance” of myth. In many spots of the novel the narrator is evoking myth, mythologies, old and new, in the sense of popular traditions and new ways of thinking, and even touches the question of the substance of myth, that is if myth may have a sacred substance of his own, obviously without giving a response. Those personages never existed because they are a fruit of his fantasy, as written in the disclaimer on top of the book, but they would have never been existing because they are among the losers of history, forgotten though witnesses to a tragedy, obliged to a repetition. Different time plans are assigned to the personages; they need a qualitative individualization and the employ of different resources in term of images-assembly and stylistic language level to gain their momentum, a catastrophic momentum that will be lived in different places and situations. We may say that it is true indeed that narrative time is subject to a contraction: this contraction regards the collective dimension (what is shared), while individual sub-narrations are stretched in the mean time (sometimes along subsequent chapters). It is as a direct contraction of time and an otherwise unperceivable recreation of the world into another one. An omnipresent relationship to a symbolism of blood compromised with identity, human survival in terms of nourishment and slaughtering animals, sex and murder is causing the formation of a sort of gradient in the substance of time. This is because only “around” the icon pointing to it, the bloody hand situated in the tavern, and when in fact not much is happening really, things are however ¹⁵In fact those are the two works chosen to be examined in detail and compared in the article.
happening. Then time is percurred backwards narrations are starting here bringing elsewhere to come back almost at the beginning of every new chapter. So it is as a cosmic gravitation calling all personages to confront with it, implied in the fact of considering finally, and with accurate and pitiless logic how and on what human life on earth is founded. These facts are “truths.” This “bloody circulation” creates a climate of a sort of contemplation of an adverse mystery, that will bring to an epiphany announced from the narrator, only element who have the privilege and the responsibility (and bears the weight) to deal with the relationships between the events and knowledge at large. It must be said that the impression of a quantity of different “speeds” at play is given also from the inherent quality of the languages. Dialect is flashing if comprised, but slow if it must be ruminated through footnotes, and from the other side the literary Arabic of the narrator is subject to a fragmenting syntax that results in acceleration here, or subsides to more common standards there. It takes time and repeated readings, to get used to the different speeds derived from the double organization of the materials (500 footnotes explaining mainly dialect dialogues), and the main text which in fact is a score of machinic assemblages and a repository of images of an unforgettable originality. The main question, crossing the whole book, is about time as a scientific, philosophic and political problem, that can be tried in description, as follows. The plot conceives different plans of time including the living experience and the inner life of five personages experiencing myth in his becoming, as something coming in this world after having survived for millennia as “what there isn’t”.¹⁶ Therefore Al-Wahhabi’s indication of “Ulysses” behind the lines, as if Naqqash wanted to try his own “Iraqi remake”, sounds interesting to be followed. Joyce himself was reacting himself to the “Cuchulain” revival and to a nationalist vision of the Irish people that was stimulating him to engage directly compromising with mythology. So he has Bloom, a Jew as an hero, as a mean to subtract the project of literature from serving that sort of constructions. Joyce lets Bloom and his internalized Ecclesiastes strolling in Dublin, Naqqash lets his “Ecclesiastes” tracking Jews as they are in fact, in Baghdad, while involved in struggles with modernity that are beginning with assailing their unconscious. And he seems rather to announce that there is no lesson to expect from Jews, that they are people as the others, that the capacity of men to learn decisive lessons on coexistence and peace is non existent. In Naqqash’ case the choice is rather that of a ¹⁶A substantial demythization comes in the utterances exchanged in the çaykhané labeling what the personages are experimenting as the story of “Cain who kills Cain”; then the title itself is reformulated by the narrator as that “blood on sale on any market”; but the following: “woe to us producing it” does not come as expected. No form of self-criticism whatsoever comes to replace a particular and ancient form of human hypocrisy: question remains about what is capable to wash blood.
violent “demythisation” of blood symbolism unveiling as daily bloody practice in an apparent mirrored opposition to European “ideologized” revivals sanctifying it. And of course no liberation will result from all this. His indication of the half of the thirties in Baghdad and some time-mark of contemporary events is obviously meaningful in this sense. It must be noticed also that the temporary collective equilibrium broken by the catastrophe is a situation in which the certainties of the personages, based in popular traditions and religion, are reviewed and questioned by Safani, the young, modern and politically engaged. As for the necessary energy and the ideas and images shaping his practice, one may have a general feeling that may let arise an hypothesis. Superposing to Naqqash’s project the choice of the right place, and a “montage” assembled to the music and the obsessions of the narrator in a whole, it must be admitted that his literary ambitious plan requiring a concept absolved in practice of multiples “incomparabilities”, gives a result particularly apt to evolve to a movie scenario. All the time dynamics and movements in Fuwwa ya dam, comprised the one inscribing the role of the narrator, are independently inscribed in a great literary desiring-machine.¹⁷ Probably a next study could afford this rendering, examining the nature of the relationships between the different plans of the novel. Time-plans are horizontally delimited firstly by performance, however, as any good film must have, all plans should tend to bear a different quality and their own “infinity”, beside their cultural and temporal localization. However, there is a particular “vertical” (maybe “universal”) aspect of being possibly embodied in other pasts and territories offered to readers, even with the strict socio-political dialectal definition of the personages, still balanced from the general, basic, Biblical and Koranic references. And in fact the artistic text-object is charged by signs and allusions connecting together different time-spaces in a wide-open narrative tending to the allegorical. All this keeps making a strange object out of it, just as scaring as sometimes comic. Maybe it could be exemplified and discussed like a multiple, complex and polymorphic catastrophe model in terms of topological mathematics in the style of René Thom (1975). Probably even turned in such a way it would remain a wonderful case in question. The reference to the need of projecting the inquiry on “experimental” models, parallel to current methodologies in anthropology and even more in ethnomusicology since its first beginnings, is not merely justified by hypothesizing a change of scientific paradigm after structuralism towards post-modern shores; this would be closing the way to inquiry. Other reasons can be adduced. In ¹⁷From their Anti-Edypus and Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari use those machinic conceptualities, demonstrating that, among other things, literature is where a thought of modernity and its chronotopes emerges forcefully, even before new sciences such as psychoanalisis. In Naqqash’ novel, as compared with Kafka’s literary machines, we have a western “desiring” force processed into an Asian machine.
particular, for works like those of Naqqash that are sketching sonic and visual performance within the text, a pure reflexive methodology shows inadequate. This is demonstrated when the phonic nature of the parts in dialect is dismissed as a sort of weakness of the text in terms of his reception.¹⁸ On the other hand, comments have been made in terms of paratextual-textual organization, and even by hypothesizing that Naqqash had in mind the traditional form of the commentary in Hebrew and Arabic literary traditions.¹⁹ Nobody asked himself if approaching such a text in silent reading keeps being the only option, or if in fact more differentiated strategies have and must be deployed in reception. For if even Joyce’s “Ulysses” asks for a voice at least to start to enjoy it, a project like that of “Fuwwa ya dam” has an almost disappeared language into its theatrical machine, and the evident presence of it asks for a mediation even to be presented and eventually explained. The more so when we admit the dialect dialogues and their paratextual explanations have an anthropological and documentary value in itself.²⁰ It is like the phonic and sonic vest of the parts intersecting with Naqqash’ research of multi-functional and personal “stream of consciousness” are asking for a capacity to enter in contact with a sort of vitality of the word in itself, a capacity that, being given to disclose only by a forcibly reduced number of initiates, pushes back the text unto the soil of second performances and interpretations. I hope this not being another way “to kill inquiry” and eventual foundations from the beginning. But when a second life in translation or adaptation could be granted to “Fuwwa ya dam”, maybe it would not be very far from the logic of the sympathetic proposal for a spiritual reading of Kafka as a Sufi poem, advanced from the Egyptian writer Mahmud al Wardani expressing his desire of an Arabic- Kafkian song.
(…) It is as if Kafka is a place of our world, not only the creator of an aesthetic renewal and his high accomplishments; it is as he is ¹⁸However, nobody opened even the preliminary and necessary discussion about the method used by the author to transcribe dialect utterances. ¹⁹This came from Lital Levy (2014:132, 138) and in a definitely elogiative stance by the Iraqi writer ‘Abd el Amir Al-Rukkabi (2017). ²⁰A dense historical and linguistic repository as a contribution of the Iraqi dialect to human sciences and arts, in the words of Shmuel Moreh, quoted in Al-Wahhabi (2011:73). Stern, who is repeatedly referring to the substantial help received in his thesis by Anton Shammas, writes: « The idea of an “archive of knowledge” refers to the archive of Iraqi-Jewish customs, folklore, dialect, etc. that the totality of Samir Naqqash’s work generates. This “archive” however, cannot be processed outside of the literary context in which it emerges. This disjuncture between cultural knowledge and the medium in which it takes shape produces a fruitful reflection on the status of signifiers of a “vanishing culture” in literature and in diasporic communities. » (Stern 2013:187, n.18)
the “state” of Sufi enlightenment and the “path” to grasp it, in his attempt to counter the domain of fear (ldots) (Al Wardani 2005).
Should one comment, once again, pointing to the imposition of ancient philosophy on the modern, a tendence to living in the past, or assuming a pre-modern Arabic tradition of “Minor Literature”? Or maybe just taking notice that an author may be displaced in a thousand and one different worlds? Waiting for the mathematician that will be interested to draw the diagram formed by the different time-reality plans of “Fuwwa ya dam” according to topological functions that he’ll have to invent, and/or the “regisseur” directing the movie, let us try to give him at least some hints of where he could locate the points configuring a modality or a state of crisis along the complex object. The dialect dialogues should be divided from the rest of the text and examined independently according to any single role, their speeds reduced dramatically in order to be observed, because this is the reality frame. Then it will probably be necessary to examine the adjacent parts of commentary by the narrator, in effect considering them according to the machinic nature of of the “stream of consciousness” as his own stylistic accomplishment especially in the syntactic domain. In fact these proximal parts do not comment simply but they tra(ns)duce the virtual reality frame in image-sound assembly, through direct responses, quotations, or questions and hypotheses that may be misleading in relation to what will happen. Repetition and/or formal developments of those parts will have to be individuated along the narrative flow. This may cast some light on the different stances assumed by the narrator and eventually for their function. As a matter of fact the general plot is tissued in a way that is far from being solved once for all at the end. This practice of avoid resolutions makes of this book another sort of music, also in respect to other works of the same author. Following this logic and considering that the plot has an end in which the perceptive weight of multiple crossing and knotting of “mysteries” is dismissed, apparently freeing the narrator from the responsibility to follow events “from inside” (this happens in the chapter before the final one where the narrator takes distance falling back on writing a newspaper chronic of the case), the impression is that this is the novel of the “unsolved”, of doubt, where opposites have the same weight, of a “powerful fakery” or even “a tale of men and daemons.” A repertory of the assemblages of the material (in the first place the gravity force of icons and symbols as the social, biological and religious “blood system“, the “day one”, etc.) should be prepared in such a way to give an idea of the dynamics between the dialogues domain and the rest of it, that is not always and strictly “stream of consciousness”, but also the space where functions of place and time-marks are anticipating certain scenes or reconnecting utterances along
the text. Of course localizing the many flows of a repertory of clashing desires would be greatly useful to the attempts of a scenario for “Fuwwa ya dam.”
The remarkable appearance, connection or reconnection from main symbols of the story lets suppose main changes in qualitative time, state of consciousness or even physical state (inside the world of the narration, things and materials are repeatedly changing or melting one another) bearing a modal function to be maintained for a certain while. Those are the places where it is given to the reader, together with the narrator, a temporary state of partial and uncertain “persuasion” according to what he apprehended and felt from the narration so far, with which he may assess what is happening; that is, what happened and how to embark in what is coming.
End of the tour I hope that this partial outline was able to convey a general sense of the artistic interest to approach the particular side of Naqqash’ literature represented in this novel, that is the experimental “nouveau-roman” like aspect. In particular, it should be noted that the syntactic fragmentation of the text, contrasting other sort of patterns, may be considered as a practice informing different qualitative “times” of the novel, and that this sort of general framework is consistently cinematically aware. In other terms it produces a general continuum from a number of discontinued units and from a continuous work of frames, focuses and plans. The interest on the time element has a performative and metaphisical aspect, it returns in many ways in Naqqash production and philosophy, and it is primarily demonstrated in his experimental-cinematic approach from the nested structure of the whole narration.
Bibliography Al-Ghamidi, Sa‘id, 2003, Al inhiraf al ‘aqdi fi adab el hadhatha wa fikriha [Doctrinary Distortion in Contemporary Literature and Its Thought], Jeddah, Dar al andalus el khadra, Al-Wahhabi, ‘Abd el Rahman ben Muhammad, 2011, Al ada’ wa-l ru’ya al ideolojiya fi khitab al sard al riwa’i ‘and Samir Naqqash [Performance and Ideological Vision in the Narrative Prosaic Discourse by Samir Naqqash], in : « Majallat al ‘ulum al insaniya », vol. 21, Jeddah-Makkah, Jamiàt al Malik Àbd el Àziz, pp. 50-86. Behar, Almog, 2017, Take This Poem And Copy It. Selected poems and stories in Hebrew and in English translation, manuscript. Ben-Dor, Zvi, 2006, Invisible Exile: Iraqi Jews in Israel, « Journal of The Interdisciplinary Crossroads », Thematic Issue: “The Limits of Exile” (Eds.: D. Kettler and Z. Ben-Dor), vol. 3, n. 1 (April 2006), pp. 135-162. Deleuze, Gilles, 1986, Cinema 1, The Movement Image, (tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam), Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press [fr. version Cinema 1, L’Image-Mouvement, 1983, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit]. Deleuze, Gilles, 1989, Cinema 2, The Time Image, (tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta), Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press [fr. Cinema 2, L’Imagetemps, 1985, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit]. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, 2000[1977], Anti-Oedipus, Minneapolis-London, University of Minnesota Press (10th reprint), [French version: Anti-Oedipe, 1972, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit]. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, 1986, Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature, Minneapolis- London, University of Minnesota Press [French version: Kafka. Pour une litterature mineure, 1975, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit]. Kilito, Abdelfattah, 2008, Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language, Syracuse-N.Y., Syracuse University Press. Jesi, Furio, 1989, Mito [1st ed. 1972], Milano, Mondadori. Levy, Lital, 2014, Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine, 2014, Princeton/Oxford, Princeton University Press. Matar, Hisham, 2018, Hisham Matar: International literature is hugely underrated, while English books are often overrated, The Guardian (Int. Ed. Online). https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/20/hisham-matar-english-booksare-often-overrated-it-is-boring-and-dangerous Naqqash, Samir, 1978, Hikaya kul-zaman wa-makan [Tale of Any Time and Place] (short stories), Introduction by Prof. Shmuel Moreh and with an introduction by the Author], Jamaìya tashjiyia al abhath wal-adab wal-funun, Tel Aviv.
Naqqash, Samir, 1987, Fuwwa ya Dam! [Madder like Blood], Novella ‘Iraqiya, Al Quds. Naqqash, Samir, 2004, Shlomo al kurdi, ana wal-zaman [Shlomo the Kurd, Me and Time], Köln, Al-Kamel Verlag. Rukkabi, Àbd el Amir, 2017, Al Nakba wa nakba al yahud al ‘iraqiyin, nafa al manfa? [The Palestinian Catastrophe and That of Iraqi Jews. Refusing exile?], « Al Safir », digital review. http://arabi.assafir.com/Article/8076 Stern, Ramon J., 2013, Geographies of Escape: Diasporic Difference and Arab Ethnicity Re-Examined, Dissertation (Comparative Literature), University of Michigan. Stonor Saunders, Frances, 2000, The Cultural War. The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, New York, The New Press. Thom, René, 1975, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis [1st French edition 1972], Reading-Massachusets, W.A. Benjamin Inc. Al-Wardani, Mahmud, 2005, Darurat Kafka [Kafka as necessity], Akhbar al yom, 5 July 2005.