Chapter 4 - Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb between Communism and World Literature

Summary

The Iraqi modernist poet Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s political positions underwent a monumental shift after he witnessed Mossadegh’s ouster first-hand while on the run from the Iraqi police in Iran. Chapter 4 traces the effects this political shift had on Sayyāb’s view of his own poetry and the worlds he imagined within it. Sayyāb was a card-carrying Communist prior to the coup against Mossadegh, but afterwards he began to support a nationalist politics informed by Western Liberalism. The changes his poetry underwent thus offer an indispensable point of comparison with Shāmlū’s committed project. After experiencing the events of 1953 in Iran, Sayyāb returned to a volatile period in Iraq’s history as a bloody 1958 revolution overthrew the pro-British Iraqi monarchy and instituted a radical military dictatorship in its stead. During the ensuing years, Sayyāb published several modernist poems, which have been hailed by critics as crucial contributions to the development of modernist forms and themes in Arabic. In this chapter, I explore Sayyāb’s development of modernist themes alongside his retention of premodern Arabic prosodic form in his 1954 long poem “Weapons and Children.”