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.
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
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
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 al-Sayyāb’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-from-below, 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
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. Birds? Or children laughing 59. Or water, ripened by stone,
60. So the grass becomes moist and the flowers dewy 61. Flowers and light
62. A lark singing,
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
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,
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 transnationalism-from-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
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
civilization.”x 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.
i
Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, Kuntu shuyūʿiyyan (Kūlūnīyā [Cologne]: Manshūrāt al-Jamal, 2007), 15-16. Also see Kevin 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.
iii
Al-Sayyāb, Kuntu shuyūʿiyyan, 216-217.
ivMinor 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-A
ʿmāl al-shiʿriyyah al-kāmilah, 4th Ed.[Baghdād: Dār al-Ḥurriyyah 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).
viIḥsān ʿAbbās, Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb: Dirāsah fīḥayātih wa-shiʿrih, (Bayrūt: Dār al-Thaqāfah, 1969), 182.
viiAl-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.
viii “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!
xAl-Sayyāb, al-Iltizām wa-l-lāiltizām, 248-249.
