Chapter Five
Flames of Fire in Qadisiya

Dear husband, you died young, and left me your widow
Alone in the palace. Our child is still tiny,
The child you and I, crossed by fate, had together.
I think he will never grow up . . .
For not in your bed did you die.
Homer, The Iliad

In the summer of 1991 Al-Raida, the quarterly journal of the Institute for Women's Studies in the Arab World at Beirut University College, published an article asking what had happened to Iraqi women after their war with Iran ended in 1988. What, the anonymous author asked, "has become of powerful women's groups like the General Federation of Iraqi Women?" Although researchers at the institute knew and had approached women who were more recent refugees from Iraq to Lebanon, they found them reluctant to speak. It remains difficult to assess what the repercussions of the war have been on women many considered to have been the Arab world's most educated and highest trained, employed, and paid population.^[1] In comparing Iraqi and Lebanese elite strategies for state building, the anthropologist Suad Joseph talks of the importance of women "to the Ba'th agenda for state construction: the need for labor and for re-aligning the allegiances of the population." In the decentralized pre-Baath state, women's allegiance was particularly important. As the state worked to industrialize and bring heterogeneous groups under its control, it targeted women for resocialization into new Iraqi women and "included general vocational and political education for participation in the formal economy and the polity." In this connection in 1968 the Baath Party founded the General Federation of Iraqi Women (GFIW) as a

"female arm of the party." By 1980 the GFIW had 256 centers and 177,000 members, and women's literacy rates went up 300 percent. Literacy centers appeared everywhere and Iraqis who did not go or barred others from attending were penalized. Child care centers were built everywhere and women were given generous maternity leave. Women were given the right to vote and to run for public office. Joseph describes a high level of loyalty among women for one another, for the party, and for Saddam Hussein. She points out that the state's support for the family in some ways undermined its goal of resocializing the individuals to absolute loyalty to the state (Joseph 1991, 176–200). How did the war affect women?

Iraqi women supported the war; they were "enlisted in the army during the Iran-Iraq War. It is said that at one point, Iraqi women were selling their jewelry to support the army." Why? Did they believe in the war? Were they acknowledging a debt to the state? If so, why did the state suddenly revoke some of the many rights it had originally lavished? I ask this because what is known is that with the outbreak of the war, women found many of their freedoms curtailed. For example, laws were promulgated forbidding women to travel without husbands' or fathers' permission. They were told that it was their patriotic duty to have five children for the war; in 1986 "birth control devices disappeared from the market; even condoms were declared illegal" (Lorenz 1991). At the same time and typically for a state at war, women were filling in for the men who had left for the front. Officially we do not know, and may not find out for quite some time, what happened to Iraqi women during and after the war. But we do have the words of a few of them that give us fictionalized accounts of what we may assume were their experiences.

I met Daisy al-Amir, one of Iraq's best known women writers, in Beirut in 1980. Since before the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, she had been working as press attaché in the Iraqi Cultural Center. She stayed until 1986, when the Iraqi embassy in Beirut was blown up. She lost friends and her ten-year conviction that she

should stay in Lebanon, however difficult things became. She returned to her native Iraq, only to find herself in another, but very different war.

Rather than civil war al-Amir found an apparently conventional war between two sovereign states, Iraq and Iran. In his Republic of Fear, Samir al-Khalil called the war, whose casualties—between five hundred thousand and one million deaths—amounted to more than the total number of those in all Israeli-Palestinian wars, even including the Lebanese civil war, "the first completely indigenous 'great war' of the third world" (al-Khalil 1989, 274). Both the Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, and the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, eventually claimed that they were fighting a jihad; the Iranians even brought their own coffins to the front in hopes of martyrdom. For each nation this mode of total warfare had a major problem: it was "singularly unsuited to their equipment and completely at variance with their training" (al-Khalil 1989, 280). If the two militaries were fighting an epic war for which they were not prepared, it seemed at least that its space was that of the great wars of Europe: trench and air combat was taking place at various fronts along the border dividing the two neighboring countries. The cities and centers of concentrated populations appeared intact, calm.

The illusion of wartime calm, when lived, was almost harder to bear than the chaos al-Amir had negotiated in Lebanon. The Iraqi critic Matti Moosa called me on al-Amir's behalf and I arranged for her to come to lecture at Duke University. After jumping through various bureaucratic hoops, she arrived in March 1990, relieved and—to my disappointment—not at all anxious to talk about this most recent war experience. Ironically, only ten months later our two countries would be at war with each other in the Persian Gulf.

I had organized a conference on the theme of the journey in Middle Eastern literatures to coincide with her visit. When al-Amir heard that two of the papers were to be on premodern Persian literature, she announced summarily that she could not take part, could not in fact even stay for the event. Why? How, she retorted, could she be associated with Iran? But the papers were about poetry written centuries ago. She was not to be swayed. Before her premature departure, we had time for a hilarious mishap at the hair-

dresser's and several long rambling conversations. I told her of my project on war fiction in the Arab world and asked her who was writing what in Iraq. She was dismissive of my interest. She could not understand why after writing War's Other Voices I was still interested in such a topic. Al-Amir had written Wu'ud li al-bay' (Promises for sale, 1981) and Fi duwwamat al-hubb wa al-karahiya (In the vortex of love and hate, 1979), her two collections of short stories on the Lebanese civil war, and then a slim volume, 'Ala la'ihat al-intizar (On the waiting list, 1988), which she had written in Iraq and published in Beirut. The stories are filled with anxiety and dread but say nothing about the war. The mood that haunts the stories is one of unbearable aloneness and heaviness and mistrust as people wait, unwillingly, for the unknown. Each story grapples with the problem of time and how to escape it without destroying the self. In "Thaman bakhs" (A bargain), al-Amir writes of a woman who buys an anonymous family album: "I bought a heavy past at a time when I had decided to escape it" (al Amir 1988, 32). After leafing through others' memories, the woman throws the album away only to be plunged back into her anxiety about her own past and future that in their dialogue with each other always eliminated her present. This woman might have been the author herself.^[2]

Several days after al-Amir's departure, the postman delivered two gunnysacks sent by the Iraqi embassy in Washington, D.C. They were filled with novels, short stories, and volumes of literary criticism produced by the Iraqi Ministry of Culture and Information during the last four years of the Iran-Iraq War. One by one, I took the books out and glanced at their imprints: "On War and Culture" and "Qadisiyat Saddam—Under Flames of Fire." As I browsed through these volumes, I kept noticing this name Qadisiyat Saddam, meaning Saddam's Qadisiya, in connection with literary activities surrounding the war. It was attached to a book series, to a literary competition, even to an entire museum. Qadisiya refers to the 637 C.E. battle that marked the first victory of the Arab Muslim forces over their Sassanian Iranian enemy. To announce the significance of the Iran-Iraq War even before the outcome was known, Saddam Hussein already in 1980 named the war Qadisiya.

He was thus comparing and linking his adventure in the Shatt al-'Arab with one of the most significant turning points in the expansion of the Islamic empire beyond its Arab heartland. This naming, representing, and memorializing of an event's importance, often before its actual occurrence, became the hallmark of Saddam Hussein's strategy in prosecuting this war.

I wasn't sure what to do with this treasure trove, wondering whether writings that a government at war commissioned could be anything but propaganda. Despite my misgivings I took a pile of these books with me when I traveled north later that month. I was to spend a term at Dartmouth College as a fellow in the War and Gender Humanities Institute. The first person I met upon my arrival in Hanover, New Hampshire, was the senior fellow in the same institute, Klaus Theweleit. We immediately started to chat about the institute and our own projects. I told Klaus about the Iraqi books and my concern that I probably could not use them. He countered that the very fact that they were state-sponsored, fully censored by others made them particularly interesting. The writings of the Freikorps men he had analyzed for his Male Fantasies were also mainly propaganda items. With their own and their censors' attention beamed on particular political themes, tropes, and words, they were paradoxically free to write what they liked about their feelings. My curiosity was piqued.

Qadisiya Against Itself?

Most of the books were by men, only three by women. Since my original interest was in what women were writing on the war, I had thought that most of the novels and short stories would be good only for leisure reading. After speaking with Theweleit, I decided that I should see what works by Iraqi men could tell me about the psychological concerns of writers who had decided to put their talents at the disposal of their government, works someone at the Iraqi embassy in Washington had chosen for me. Later, and thanks to 'Abd al-Hamid Hammudi (1986), I came across the names of writers like 'Abd al-Sattar Nasir, 'Ali Khayyun, 'Abd al-Khaliq al-Rukkabi, and a few other writers who are better known than

most of the ones whose books were delivered to my door in gunnysacks. Nevertheless I decided to limit my data to these books because of the special circumstances surrounding their acquisition.

I was also curious to know whether social and literary critics had been right to condemn writers for complicity with the Iraqi regime. Without knowing for sure, I questioned their view: the writers had a long history of aligning themselves with the people against the state. In discussing Shakir Khusbak's short story "Years of Terrorism" (1952), Muhsin Jassim al-Musawi notes: "The narrator associated rejection of involvement with the state with the ability to establish a sense of personal security and peace of mind." In the 1970s the new oil wealth did seduce some writers to sell their services to the state; many, however, withdrew from public life. Then came the war and its literature that al-Musawi describes as "a channel for projecting internal modes of feeling and experience" (al-Musawi 1991, 203, 210). Was this true of the fiction sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and Information that the embassy had sent me?

Attracted by the title, Imra'a min al-nisa' (A woman among women), I first read 'Ali Lufta Sa'id's title story. It is a monologue by a son to his beloved mother. She preaches patient acceptance of God's will and tolerates no expressions of grief or pain. Then comes the war, indirectly alluded to as a "wicked time infiltrating the cells of the house . . . coming from the East" (Sa'id 1988, 61–62)—from Iran.^[3] First, her two oldest sons come home on a bier and she is a model of constraint and steadfastness because they had done their duty, struggled "to remove the plague so that our house and other houses might be proud" (61). Next, her husband, who had spent time as "a guest on the hills overlooking the central borders," returns on his bier. This time, she does give way to grief. Briefly. When she has torn at the shroud and discovers that he was laughing, she stops her tears. Her youngest son, the narrator, has understood nothing except that as the last male, the last "wall of the house" he is responsible for keeping love and happiness in the "nation that is you" (63). This was a good patriotic ending for a story that verged on the critical.^[4] The war had not been described as great, but rather as a wicked time, and the loss of the three men had not been presented as serving a cause beyond pride, the pride of the house.

Spartan to the end, the mother controls her grief because she is glad to have been able to exchange sons for pride. She is a harsh woman who demands that people around her be happy and that they not break down. In a proleptic paragraph, the narrator describes living with this mother after the rest of her men had died. He dares not weep in her presence lest she look at him with those "glances that carried a thousand and one meanings and that would be intermingled with your well-known words: that I should be a man to confront circumstances, life would not be compassionate to me if I continued to be so lacking in patience, so weak-willed, so emotional. In fact, I would be consumed and crumble into the first pile of dirt" (59). This exacting woman he then calls the nation. I read this passage as a criticism of the nation symbolized by the mother who consumes her men for no good reason and does not even allow the survivors to grieve.

Next I read Faysal 'Abd al-Hasan Hajim's novel Al-layl wa al-nahar (Night and day, 1985).^[5] I was intrigued because it had won the first prize in the 1984 annual state-sponsored Qadisiyat Saddam Novels Competition (the novel was completed in November 1983 but not published until 1985 and was, I assume, submitted to the competition in manuscript form). I expected propaganda but found blackness and jolting disjunctures between contiguous passages. A cheerful song—"We'll have something to tell our kids / Tralalalalalala / Scary things, /Happy things / But we'll never forget to teach them / That there's nothing better than peace"—is interrupted by "the camp exploded into limbs, heavy dust, and black smoke. Earcracking thunder followed. Wild screams rose, boulders and torn sandbags fell. A fierce fire. Red shrapnel like fiery butterflies, heavy black smoke. A real hell of fire and screaming. Explosions everywhere" (Hajim 1985, 69). This Remarquesque novel begins and ends with landscapes of destruction and decay: "Were it not for the darkness the soldiers could have seen the skin of the soldiers who had been killed months earlier in no-man's land and which had yellowed and then become pinkish. Their swollen stomachs were light green, their backs dark green" (25–26).

The plot revolves around three soldiers who are called the Fire Soldier, who has had extensive combat experience, the Other Sol-

dier, who is a poet, and the Lute Soldier, who is a musician.^[6] The Iraqi critic 'Abdallah Ibrahim writes that many fictional warriors are described as being absorbed in writing; he understands this recurrence of warrior-poets as being a way for the writer to express himself more directly (Ibrahim 1988, 116–20). The Lute Soldier is killed when their shelter is struck; the other two are wedged together under the weight of the debris. They start to talk about their painful pasts that they are mortified to discover they share. It transpires that the wife of the poet is a nurse who was brought up in an orphanage with the Fire Soldier. They fell in love but she refused to have anything to do with him lest he turn out to be her brother. During a moment of passion and frustration, he raped his orphanage sister. Further, her mother had had an affair with the grandfather of the Lute Soldier, who thus might well be the nurse's nephew. These three men, one of whom gave his life for his country, are caught in a ring of incest around a woman who dedicates her life to healing the war's wounded. If Ibrahim is right and the Other Soldier speaks on behalf of Hajim and the identifying reader-warrior, then the danger of cuckoldry, of losing personal honor on the battlefront, becomes a more significant theme of the novel. So much for patriotic duty and male bonding under battle duress. The men are unable to defend their women even from their own countrymen, how much less so from a determined enemy. Had the two young men not been immobilized by the ruins of the shelter they might have killed each other. At the end the Fire Soldier, the singer of the song, declares the war to be "cursed and totally immoral" (Hajim 1985, 83). Already in 1983 Hajim was articulating criticism of the war that was actually financing his writing project and would confer on him the 1984 Qadisiyat Saddam prize.

Five years later Hajim published Junud (Soldiers, 1988), a collection of short stories that ends with "'Asha' akhar" (A last supper). As its title indicates, it is full of foreboding and ritual. A mechanic has just received permission to leave the army and he is to spend his last night with his companions. They eagerly await the supper when they expect him to distribute among them the contents of a box he had safeguarded throughout the years he spent in the unit. They want to know what are the things he carried.^[7] They

watch the Last Supper Man, who no longer seems to belong in their world. They warn him about his wife and how difficult it will be for him to help with the children's problems. When he replies that he did fine before the war, one retorts that now things have changed and that he will "not be able to do a thing," and that he had better leave everything to his wife and not do anything without consulting her because with all that had happened—the war—he could no longer function effectively in civilian society (Hajim 1988, 90, 92). When he finally opens the precious box, out come odds and ends like an almost empty perfume bottle, some black shrapnel, a worn towel, a small shaving mirror chipped in a corner, a needle in a ball of thread, a rusty pair of shaving scissors. Although each item held an important memory for him, for them the most valuable object was an unused can of shoe polish. Finally, the soldiers do find something intriguing: a matchbox-size talisman carefully wrapped in cloth. He remonstrates that they should not touch it because his mother had given it to him. But they have to know what is inside. They open it to find a blank sheet of wrinkled, yellowed paper. The Last Supper Man is astonished: "A blank sheet of paper protected me all these years. I can't believe it" (93). The story ends with bombs exploding close to them.

The other stories in this collection underscore the sometimes angry, always despairing mood of "A Last Supper." Soldiers relate their experiences at a front that was the antithesis of glory. The narrator of "Dhubul" (Withering) is a sensitive young man who learned from his girlfriend, a flower vendor, that flowers are "a method of philosophical, spiritual, and aesthetic communication between nature and humans. They are the path of peace about which Buddhist philosophy teaches." She told him about how "the Fascists had stopped Emile Nolda from painting his flowers, but he painted several canvases in liquid colors that represented other hidden flowers and his harsh guards noticed nothing" (Hajim 1988, 65). Are these harsh guards standing in for Hajim's censors who cannot read subversive messages calling for peace? Then the narrator had gone to the front to learn "the meaning of attack and martyrdom. I spent some dark hours and some so bright they

blinded me. In the trenches my feet got soaked and my toes disintegrated in the military boots. . . . My clothes became salt and of one piece as though they were made of cardboard; they stuck to my skin, lacerated by the salt water in which I had been wading waist-deep for days" (66). When he came home on leave, he wanted to tell her about what he had been through, but he could say nothing and he no longer enjoyed her conversations about flowers. The war had withered his link with the one who taught him the meaning of peace.

Two of the stories are about men's need to be in touch with their loved ones at home, but with a bitter twist. After we have read through the letter of "Risala mu'ada" (A returned letter) as though we were the addressee, we discover that we are in fact three engineer colleagues. They have opened this letter because it had been sent back: the wife had just been "martyred" during the bombardment of Basra. The front no longer has any meaning when the home front is being targeted; the combatant can no longer define his acts in opposition to the calm domesticity of his woman. The other letter is in a story entitled "Ma'an wa ila al-abad" (Together forever), which earned an honorable mention in the 1987 Qadisiyat Saddam novels and short stories competition. The soldier is writing to his wife of his dreams for peacetime, of cultivating with her the land that his father left on the Shatt al-'Arab even though it is full of shrapnel. The letter ends: "I shall whisper to you after drawing a rose in the air with my finger soaked in blood. You and I together forever . . ." and the letter ends with ellipses. Did he die as he was writing?

Was this propaganda? Might these short stories and novel serve the interests of the state? How did the censors read this literature? As A. Peter Foulkes writes, literature functions "both as propaganda and anti-propaganda." It should be studied both "as a set of documents" and as "a set of aesthetic objects. For in effect it denies the validity of such a distinction by assuming that the propagandistic or demystifying moment of literary communication may be inseparable from its aesthetic function. This point of intersection will be historically determined but it should not be regarded as a

frozen act of past communication" (Foulkes 1983, 106). Propaganda is like censorship in that it is driven by a dynamic that is constantly changing. The Russian critic Lev Loseff, who analyzes Aesopian language as the technique that Russian writers used for two and a half centuries to overcome state censorship, explains that censorship works within the author-reader-censor triangle. It produces a "special literary system, one whose structure allows interaction between author and reader at the same time that it conceals inadmissible content from the censor" (Loseff 1984, x). The role of the censor is not necessarily content-oriented. Censorship may become "an end in itself, necessary as one attribute of the myth of power" (Loseff 1984, 223). The censors must be kept on their toes; the critics must learn how to read Aesopian techniques and to recognize the moment when they have been so thoroughly understood that they have been institutionalized and have lost their resistant meaning and force.

I have never set foot on Iraqi soil or met anyone who knows about the ways in which the government controlled information and knowledge during the war. Yet these few stories persuaded me that there were writers who knew what they were doing, that they were critical of the military enterprise and they wanted to package their message in such a way that it would get through to the targeted audience. I was curious to read on.

Martial Simulacra

As in most wars, the control and manipulation of culture and history, of knowledge, was an essential component of the war. Culture past and present became frontline ammunition. Saddam Hussein situated himself in history: he was the last link in a chain of Iraqi luminaries that stretched from Nebuchadnezzar through the Prophet of Islam to today. Otto Friedrich writes that "Saddam Hussein had himself photographed in a replica of the chariot of Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king whom Saddam apparently reveres as his hero" (Friedrich 1990, 23; my emphasis). Samir al-Khalil writes that the problem with inventing lineage and a heritage,

or what he calls turath , is that "there is actually no continuity with a historic past. When the Ba'th finally came around to realizing a twenty-year-old dream to rebuild Babylon . . ., they built the five-thousand-year-old capital of Nebuchadnezzar out of thermalite blocks 'in the style of the Barbican,' according to one English observer." Whereas Nebuchadnezzar had ordered all bricks to be inscribed with the words "Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon from far sea to far sea," Saddam ordered these bricks to be inscribed: "Rebuilt in the era of the leader Saddam Husain [sic ]" (al-Khalil 1991, 70–71).

Saddam then turned to the history of Iraq and, without any sense of humor, systematically rearranged it under the aegis of his project for the rewriting of history (Davis and Gavrielides 1991, 132). In his Hawla kitabat al-tarikh (On the writing of history), which the aforementioned Ministry of Culture and Information published in 1979, he explains that he had to do this to correct all the mistakes perpetrated by Western orientalists, adding that "history should be written to serve the interests of Iraqi society as defined by Baathist ideology" (quoted in Davis and Gavrielides 1991, 139).^[8] A year before launching what was supposed to be a Blitzkrieg into Iran, Saddam Hussein is declaring his intention: possess history lest it possess you. The past could, in fact should, be rewritten, the future should be created to precede and thus to transform an always already malleable present, the perfect simulacrum. Lyotard describes this interaction between time and the creative artist as the formulation of "rules of what will have been done . Hence, the fact that work and text have the characters of an event; hence also, they always come too late for their author, or, what amounts to the same thing, their being put into work, their realization [mise en oeuvre ] always begins too soon. Post modern would have to be understood according to the paradox of the future (post ) anterior (modo )" (Lyotard 1987, 81).

Iraqi civilians became responsible for the success of this cultural construction, of this invention of turath . When the war broke out, the fighters were the most burdened because they could only come into their own after winning the victory already said to be won. If

God willed that they should die, why then their names would be added to the monument already constructed in memory of their martyrdom!

How could this anticipatory representation be effected? Artists and writers had to be mobilized to sculpt, paint, write, and sing the glories of the war that, even if they were not yet quite glorious, might in time become so thanks to pens, brushes, chisels, and lutes. During the first year of the war, the Qadisiyat Saddam publication series had already published two anthologies of short stories, which must have been written during the very first days of the war. In the mid-1980s Shakir Hasan Al Sa'id was sent with a group of artists to paint Mandalay after a victory had been won. He published a book of some of the drawings entitled 'Inda masharif khandaq al-istishhad (Overlooking the martyring trench, 1988). The reproductions are poor but what can be made out does not seem particularly glorious. I was caught by one image that shows the commander's vehicle safely tucked away into a military shelter by the side of a slope and surrounded by sandbags. A few steps away is a sign that reads "Iraq will never bow its head and will continue to fight heroically and courageously." The absence of the courageous heroes speaks volumes (Al Sa'id 1988, 62). The other images are at times so minimalist as to be incomprehensible. Are they as subversive? They may well be and yet these ambiguous drawings were accepted and published by the Ministry of Culture and Information, but, needless to say, with an introduction that talks about the privilege of being permitted to "participate in Saddam's Qadisiya through art."

Fiction, art, but also—and more dramatically—monumental architecture. The huge triumphal double arch of arms—replicas of Saddam's own—crossing swords in Baghdad "was erected shortly after what the regime deems to have been a 'victory' in the Iraq-Iran war, and it was erected to commemorate that victory. Yet it was commissioned several hundred thousand lives earlier, in 1985, when no victory was in sight. Its conception therefore precedes the reality it is meant to commemorate, which is most uncommon in the history of monument making" (al-Khalil 1991, 10). The Martyr Monument also was planned before the object to be memorialized

existed: "The war began in September 1980 and on-site construction started in April 1981. The project would have been planned, drawn, managed and detailed many months before" (al-Khalil 1991, 23). In other words, the martyrs were being commemorated before they even knew that there was going to be a war in which they were going to be killed.

At first glance, some of the Iraqi men's war fiction sent to me as well as works about which I later read seemed to function like this monumental architecture: it was anticipatory and glorifying. Stories glorified men's heroism, humanitarianism, and patriotism and women's jingoism. Perhaps the first story on this war to be translated into English is Abdullah Abdul Razzaq's "Voices from Near and Far." A mother dictating a letter to her son at the front is critical of all men who do not volunteer, including the scribe who is doing her this invaluable service. She idolizes the fighters, even investing in a radio so that she may hear her son's voice should he ever get to a microphone to send home greetings. But even if he does not, it is enough for her that she can hear other soldiers' voices: "The voices would scatter and coagulate. . . . What is it that gives their voices this similar tone? Is it the love that binds them together? Or is it that great shared thing that unites them?" Her son's voice is brought to her through these other voices, and the loves their voices, she loves them all because "those are my sons" (Abdul Razzaq 1983, 114). Her jingoism is an inspiration to all: if mothers are for the war, who can be against?

One of the most striking examples of patriotic writing that I have read is Al-maudi' al-turabi (The dusty place). This collection of short stories that Makram Rashid al-Talibani translated from the Kurdish was published in 1987 (in which year, ironically, the government began its systematic purging of the Kurds). It comprises seven stories of exemplary heroism, of undying loyalty to the Iraqi regime and its just cause and certain victory, of Iraqi soldiers' humanity to their barbaric, pseudo-religious, cowardly enemy. Even women write this way. The soldier in Khalida Khadar Ibrahim's "Tears of Joy" is rescuing a wounded comrade when he sees

an Iranian keel over and sink into blood and mud. Recognizing this man's greater need, the soldier gently drops his Iraqi comrade to pick up the Iranian enemy. He delivers him to an ambulance as a prisoner of war but one who should be given special medical attention. From a distance, as the camera focus softens and music gently plays, the briefly abandoned wounded Iraqi soldier looks on, his eyes overflowing with tears of joy at the sight! (al-Talibani 1987, 36). There is no evocation of pain or fear, just heroism, camaraderie, and melodramatic compassion for the enemy.

In 1985 at the annual Marbid Cultural Festival, the American-Iraqi critic Matti Moosa delivered a lecture entitled "Love, Death, Honor: Major Themes in Recent Iraqi Short Fiction." It deals with the preoccupations of Iraqi writers between the outbreak of the war in September 1980 until 1982 (literature to which I have not had access).^[9] Moosa restricts his analysis to the 452 (!) short stories that had been produced during the war's first two years. Perhaps because the lecture is part of a state-sponsored festival, Moosa limits his taxonomy to expressions of patriotic sentiment and the writes' avowed intent to play their part in counteracting "cultural destruction" by the Iranians. He singles out three major topics: heroism, humanitarianism, patriotism.

Heroism, at both the individual and the collective level, is depicted in the army, the air force, and the navy. The compassion of the protagonist for the enemy, which can already be read in the early literature, has by the late 1980s become a topos, even for some women. Moosa summarizes Balqis Ni'mat al-'Aziz's "Swing of Fire," which lionizes an Iraqi soldier who refrains from killing an Iranian boy because he recognizes in him his own son. Reading Moosa's account, I cannot assess whether this evocation of humanitarianism is in praise of the soldier or a criticism of the war. Some of the early 1980s stories go beyond praise of the Iraqi soldier to adulation of the Iraqi leader. 'Ali Khayyun's "Time Has Three States" and 'Adil Kamil's "The Symbol" extol Saddam Hussein's compassion for the families of martyrs.

Women, Moosa intimates, are reduced to patriotic symbols. We have already seen an example in Abdul Razzaq's "Voices from Near and Far." 'Abd al-Sattar Nasir's patriotic "A Fighter's Wife"

(1982) traces the transformation of a woman's rejection of the war to its hearty espousal. The woman in Raja' al-Buhaysh's 1982 "Tales of Iraqi Suns" incites her grandson to enlist so that he may have the chance to be as heroic as his grandfather had been during the 1920 Iraqi revolution against the British. In 1983 the prolific Lutfiya al-Dulaymi wrote her didactic "A Dinner for Two." A pregnant wife awaits her husband whom she expects to come home on leave from the front. A knock at the door. It is not he, but two unknown soldiers. She fears the worst, but no, he is not dead. He has generously given up his leave so that a companion may get away to marry. The woman shares her would-be romantic dinner with the fighters. No one counts personal sacrifice. Moosa concludes his lecture with a paean to writers who have produced stories "written in the noble spirit and conviction that Iraq is fighting a decisive war for its very existence and national well-being . . . there is no more appropriate vehicle to portray the sentiment, hope, and bravery of the Iraqi people than fiction."

Critics at the Front

These pious concluding remarks echo the tone of most of the literary criticism on the voluminous Iraqi war literature produced on the eight years of the war. Indeed, the criticism, probably more than the fiction itself, became an exercise in proving patriotism and unquestioning support of the war. The critic Basim 'Abd al-Hamid Hammudi quotes a remark by the writer Salah al-'Ansari: whereas the "world wars were inhuman, our war against the Iranian enemy was human because it sought to restore rights" (Hammudi 1986, 97). Numerous literary competitions, cultural festivals, conferences, seminars, debates, and monographs embrace the study of this literature. All critics emphasize the importance of asserting that the war was not only militarily but also culturally significant (Hammudi 1986, 43; and Ibrahim 1988, 5). Thus they justify the political importance of their own roles as bridges or mediators between these two complementary aspects of the Iraq-Iran War. 'Abdallah Ibrahim introduces his monograph on the structure of fifty-seven war novels written in Iraq between 1980 and 1985 with quotations

from major French philosophers like Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Tzvetan Todorov arguing that the work of the creative writer and of the critic are utterly intertwined (Ibrahim 1988, 11). Hammudi believes that criticism should precede and encourage the production of literature—a criticism meditating on a not-yet-written literature whose realization it is thus fostering (Hammudi 1986, 15). This criticism literally "pre-scribes" its subject.

Many critical events and publications begin with some discussion of the term "war literature," often also called qissat al-harb , or the War Story. Some write as though they were the ones to coin the term (e.g., Ibrahim 1988, 5); others recognize that such literature exists elsewhere. These latter often compare Iraqi war literature favorably with international exemplars of the genre, for example, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Remarque, and even the Argentinian Julio Cortazar. Others, including the internationally esteemed Palestinian-Iraqi writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, talk of its importance to modern Arabic literature. Jabra claims that this war—along with the Palestinian resistance and the Algerian war of liberation—inspired many great works: "this war added the figure of the 'real combatant facing death' to the social, emotional, and political themes of modern Arabic literature." Those works by authors who have had actual battle experience are described as particularly important, and they "will remain in communal memory in a way that no other writing can; it is these stories with their emphasis on the tragic and nobility in its overcoming that have made such a special contribution to modern Arabic literature" (Hammudi 1986, 205–10). Hammudi describes this literature as forging a link between literature on traditional Islamic wars and "Arab resistance literature, e.g., Algerian and Palestinian dramatists who wrote about the struggle between the Arabs and colonialism" (Hammudi 1986, 37). Ibrahim points out the uniqueness (tafarrud ) of the parallel structure of the Iraqi war story and the use of personal or subjective narrative that before had only been successfully implemented by giants like Najib Mahfuz, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, and Fathi Ghanim. He celebrates also the creation of a new literary character: the warrior with his physical strength, his specialized skills, his battle experience, his ability to confront danger and to submit to the

military system. This character embodies at once the individual and the collective consciousness; its role is to "represent the society during a historical period when it was defending values and ideals." Such a description may be a reflection of reality but much in it smacks again of pre-scription. Almost as though to deflect attention from this prescriptive aspect, Ibrahim praises this new literary personality as making an important contribution to Arabic literature in general. This Iraqi hero has a sense of belonging and commitment that has overcome the alienation dominating Arabic literature in the 1960s (Ibrahim 1988, 63, 192, 86, 111, 115).

Some critics assert that the mere fact that the literature is about glorious victories—some of them yet to come—in itself creates aesthetic value. In his 1981 introduction to the first volume of the Qadisiyat Saddam series, Salim 'Abd al-Qadir al-Samira'i wrote that the war had "marked the beginning of a new artistic life" (Hammudi 1986, 58). Seven years later, in his preface to Nu'man Majid's Fi al-ghasaq 'adat 'arus al-bahr (At dusk the mermaid returned), a 1988 collection of twelve stories selected for inclusion in an anthology on the liberation of Fao Island, the critic Khudayyir 'Abd al-'Amir echoes the sentiments of al-Samira'i and adds that the war had brought Iraqi literature to a maturity it would not otherwise have enjoyed: "The war inflamed the writers' imagination and provided them with rich material that, combining with artistic vision, produced a writing whose ground was the reality of inspiration and whose structure was formed by the deeds of the fighters at the fronts. . . . War literature in Iraq became a phenomenon that attracted the attention of Arab readers and critics. They referred to it as a rich substance that produced a literary movement. . . . The more the battles raged and the victories multiplied, the surer and maturer became the fiction to the extent that there emerged short stories and novels that could stand alongside international war fiction. . . . Iraqi fiction today is mature and its maturity is due to its having lived with the fighting, politically and militarily" (quoted in Majid 1988, 6, 8). Nu'man Majid, the editor of this collection, elaborates to claim that the mere fact of documenting the wondrous liberation of Fao lent the writing artistic value (Majid 1988, 13). Hammudi enthusiastically endorses such a sentiment by claiming

that even journalistic accounts of glorious events can have literary merit (Hammudi 1986, 106).

These critics were not oblivious to the Wordsworthian caveat against the writing of literature without reflection. They discussed the issue in terms of takhzin , or storage. Far from agreeing with the Lake District poet and critic, Majid argues that such takhzin would detract from the urgency and literary merit of immediate documentation. 'Abd al-Sattar Nasir, a fiction writer and critic, maintains that war literature must be written at once and not ten or twenty-five years later, it must record "now—and not tomorrow—the extraordinary heroisms of the Iraqis. If the Iraqi pen did not speak today about the martyrs and the sacrifices and the legendary battles, when will it speak and participate in the defense of the land and children of Iraq?" He goes on to describe this literature as not needing time to mature because the inspiring experience is already mature. He calls for utter clarity and directness because this literature must communicate with as many people as possible, for example "a martyr, a family all of whose sons have gone to the front, an old man who goes daily to the train station to ask about his son who has not yet returned, a woman whose husband is in prison or who is lost" (Hammudi 1986, 213).

All, however, are careful to state that, of course, no one has a role that begins to approach that performed by the fighters. Nasir calls his stories "no more than a handful of bullets in soldiers' belts, a drop of water in a desert noon that a patient fighter may drink" (Hammudi 1986, 215). The more writers create role models at the front as well as at the home front, the more will their work approach the significance of the warrior's work. This is probably why so many of the critics talk of their own experiences at the front (Hammudi 1986, 17–18). In one of her rare writings on the war, Daisy al-Amir reiterates this sentiment in a few prose poems that compare the pen unfavorably with the gun.^[10] "Al-asatidha wa al-talamidh" (Teachers and pupils), published in Al-Jumhuriya , on 5 April 1986, includes the following lines:

Fighters and heroes forgive us
God forbid that your heroic deeds be compared with our words

God forbid that your ammunition be compared with our pens
God forbid that your pure blood be compared with our ink
You are the ones that urge us to write
You are the ones to teach us how to serve our country
You are the teachers, we the pupils.

Basim 'Abd al-Hamid Hammudi's Al-naquid wa qissat al-harb (The critic and the war story, 1986) surveys the mass of critical writing on five years of literary production. Hammudi sets out seven rules for the writing of the War Story. These rules are: (1) do not conform with the run-of-the-mill; (2) use actual events to increase impact; (3) do not rely on skill alone in the search for effect, find a way to turn the ordinary into something unusual and new, that is, turn the event into a literary event; (4) interact with the raw material; (5) like a journalist, enter no-man's land carefully to reproduce the event but do not use "journalese"; (6) culture [he does not elaborate this point]; (7) destroy the ordinary and escape monotony (Hammudi 1986, 28–29). Hammudi explains that the War Story makes room for what in other literature might be considered weakness, for example, too many coincidences. He concludes that it is time that the world recognize that this war has produced excellent literature and that negative comparisons with other literatures are no longer appropriate. Whenever a writer seems to veer toward criticism of the war, Hammudi will pan the style, the mastery of language, the skill in plot construction (e.g., 34, 106, 185). When a critic does not like a story that was written about a front experience, particularly when the writer may have had the experience he is describing, Hammudi is stern. He seems angry with Muhammad 'Abd al-Majid for his attack on 'Ali Khayyun's prize-winning "Mourning Is Inappropriate for Martyrs." This is a story published in the first year of the war that tells of a martyr who returns to his village to see how family and friends are reacting to his death. Hammudi accuses al-Majid of being unable to appreciate a story about combat because he has not had the experience; he suggests condescendingly that in future al-Majid should write "with love and objectivity because that will be more useful for us and for Iraqi literature" (189–92).

If monuments are built before the realities they are supposed to commemorate have happened, and if criticism pre-scribes stories that have been commissioned to laud heroisms that are yet to be played out, what are we to make of the artist's and writer's responsibility? Is it possible for women and men whose livelihood depends on the government's pleasure to retain a sense of mission, of a special role as the people's conscience? How can I respond to Samir al-Khalil's accusation? He says, "An entire generation of Iraqi intellectuals collaborated with the Ba'thist regime in Iraq. . . . From within the world of fear, opportunism rules behaviour; from within the world of hopelessness, cynicism rules intelligent thought. Never is there a justification for art in itself; survival is all that counts. . . . The peculiarity of the Iraqi regime therefore is to have involved enormous numbers of people directly in its crimes over twenty years, while making the rest of the population at least complicit in their commission. Yet everyone inside the country, including the opposition outside, denies all responsibility for what they know has been going on" (al-Khalil 1991, 116, 117, 129). One of the goals of this chapter is to find some response to this blanket condemnation.

The Stories Women Wrote

As my prefatory remarks about the fiction of Faysal 'Abd al-Hasan Hajim and 'Ali Lufta Sa'id suggest, not all men's and women's war stories are as ideologically driven as this criticism. Sometimes the preface and the contents of a book may be at odds with each other so that the critical commentary, the most transparent genre, is patriotic and the plot is not. This is the case for the Fao collection, At Dusk the Mermaid Returned . The triumphalist introduction does not spill over into all the stories. Their message may not be explicit, but it colors the deliberate ambiguity or irony of the language. In the male writer Natiq Khulusi's "Al-diya' al-awwal li al-fajr" (The first light of dawn), an intellectual joins up. His encomiums about the war are interrupted by the death of his companion and then the appearance of the Iraqi flag. In a farcical passage reminiscent of Michael Herr's Dispatches out of Vietnam

(see the chapter two epigraph), the narrator says: "I raised my hand in a salute and suddenly I remembered what the heroes of the film Burning Borders had done. I thought that Mas'ud would do as they had done, and he did not disappoint me. I saw him raise in salute a hand that was dripping blood" (Majid 1988, 84). Reality and representation fuse in the ironic juxtaposition of death description and filmic prescription.

My reading of the women's writings on the war that were published in these two government-sponsored series reveals considerable courage. "Sama' al-Faw min jadid" (The sky of Fao again) by Layla Karim 'Amran plays with the humanitarian topos. Her use of a male protagonist serves two purposes: it signals that this is a "war story," even if written by a woman; and it overcomes the common objection to women writing about experiences at the front (Higonnet 1993). The protagonist has been mortally shot, yet he tries to help an Iranian who is in even worse shape than he. As he is tearing off his shirt to stanch the bleeding, the Iranian dies. The protagonist's mind wanders from the killing field to Jinan, his beloved who died when he left for the front, and then back to his own dying. Although the content of the story accords with a very popular theme, the bitter tone does not. Neither man dies for a good reason.

'Aliya Talib's 1988 collection entitled Al-mumirrat (Corridors) goes further than the one by 'Amran. The horror of the front and the pointlessness of death in such a war haunts each story. More than most, Talib parodies this war. Like 'Amran, she often chooses male protagonists. Beyond overcoming the prohibition against women writing about combat, she can portray through their eyes war's unglorious side and its charade of heroism. Talib's most trenchant criticism is reserved for the martyrdom-heroism ethos that the fathers propagate and that the mothers diligently instill in their sons—no one talks about girls!

In "'Uyun ukhra" (Other eyes), the reader follows a soldier who is determined to win glory during his first assignment. His tank has just destroyed four tanks after advancing painfully through mud and rain—a scene worthy of Wilfred Owne. He is shouting for joy when "friendly shrapnel" blinds him! The story ends in a red fog

as the hero tries to remain standing, to maintain his dignity as he makes his way, despite impossible odds, toward "heroism, the most important goal" (Talib 1988, 21). This young man has accomplished tremendous feats of military skill and bravery on behalf of his country and yet it is his countrymen who by mistake and stupidity reward him with blindness. The incongruence of the end—the greenhorn less concerned about his sight and pain than he is about heroism—is almost comical. The disjuncture between content and tone is a good example of Aesopian writing.

In "Al-ikhdirar" (Greening), Talib ridicules another male fighter who holds on to his hollow values even when facing death. He is shot first in the arm and then fatally "below the waist." Talib constantly repeats how the soldier is fighting his weakness (Talib 1988, 67), for he must return to his pregnant wife before she gives birth. Before leaving, he gave her strict instructions that he "must be the first to see him "—the possibility that his wife might give birth to a daughter does not even cross his mind. The narrative switches from first to third person and back, and then between the wife's agony as she tries to prevent the child from coming and the soldier's agony as he realizes that he is mortally wounded. In a staccato exchange of vignettes, the reader is presented with the two stereo-typical associations of the apogee of pain thought to be specific to men and women, a soldier dying on the battlefield and a mother giving birth. Each needs to prevent the inevitable outcome. But the pain has to end, and in both cases it produces death: the baby is stillborn, the father martyred. The final scene lampoons the mother's satisfaction as she presses the dead infant's lips against the dead father's brow. She at least keeps her promise that the father should be the first to "see" his son.^[11]

In "Al-nawaris" (The gulls), yet another man is wounded in the mud. He is not sure whether he is alive or dead, unaware of the moment of his dying. Images flash across his mind's eye and sensations through his body as he struggles to understand what has happened. If he has died, why then he must assure himself that the death was glorious. He remembers the hordes of enemies and the explosions, but above all he hears his father's words boom out of the past: "Even if you feel you're dying, do not buckle under! How

splendid is death when we welcome him standing!" To which the boy had replied: "My feet shall not waver, Father. I promise." As he forces himself to remain upright after being fatally hit, his father's red, flashing eyes observe his determination (Talib 1988, 43). Finally, he can no longer stand and he hears his father's voice screaming: "Don't fall! Shame on you!" This story is an example of ironic intertextuality. It comments on and satirizes a preoccupation in men's writings: parents' expectations of and prescriptions for men's behavior in the line of duty. "The Gulls" recalls the mother in Sa'id's "Imra'a min al-nisa'" (A woman among women), who instilled the values of masculinity in her son and who insisted that death in battle, regardless of how and why, was to be celebrated.^[12]

When choosing a woman protagonist, Talib is no less ironic. In "Al-'inaq al-madi'" (The luminous embrace), she enters the deranged mind of a young woman being dragged toward the coffin of her martyred lover. Her life has been ruined, all that she has left are memories. The heroine of another story entitled "Intizar jadid" (A new wait) has abandoned all her education and training and is awaiting her husband's return. As in "Greening," war imagery serves to link this woman's story on the home front with men's experiences at the front. She is holding the baby that was conceived on the eve of his departure. She has turned the boy into the image of the father and will not be satisfied until she has "made him exactly like him"—only then can the father return (Talib 1988, 38). He does, dead. The message is loud and clear: if a mother insists on perpetuating the destructive cycle of the War Story, she will turn her son into a corpse. The other message of this grim story is equally clear: to sacrifice all for the men at the front is to sacrifice all for nothing, for the men are dying. Women who buy into the war rhetoric will end up losing not only their men but personal resources as well.

Suhayla Salman is less concerned with individual psychology than she is with the government and its attempts to control women's bodies, for example, that women must bear sons for the war. At a time when the war effort was being underwritten by the Soviet Union, she dared to write a stinging critique of the benefactors. "Lara" tells of an Iraqi woman's visit to Moscow and Leningrad

under the guidance of Lara, a fat, jovial Russian divorcée. The protagonist watches in amazement as Lara inhales vast quantities of food, much of it, symbolically, from the protagonist's plate. But she does not only take, she offers the protagonist pork and vodka! Lara is so oblivious of the needs and practices of her protégée that she does not even realize that such food and drink are forbidden to a Muslim. She is also shocked when the narrator tells her that she should lose weight and stop eating off another's plate. Lara had not realized that the other woman had noticed. Lara's greed and self-indulgence extend to her sexual morals. She allows herself to be picked up by complete strangers and is surprised that her Iraqi charge will not do the same. The story ends with the protagonist's effeminate but insistent admirer, who turns out to be an unscrupulous government official, latching on to them. These Russians are not nice people.

More subversive are Salman's stories about life in Iraq. The first story in her 1988 collection, Al-liqa ' (The meeting), is entitled "Mashhad." Mashhad is the holiest city for Shiites in Iran; it is a pilgrimage site to the tomb of Imam Reza, yet Salman does not once mention this fact. The reader is supposed to know that the women in the story are on a pilgrimage into enemy territory. There is the young, pregnant woman who has had five sons, the exact number that the government had proclaimed to be necessary for a woman to prove herself to be a Patriotic Mother. In contrast with 'Aliya Talib's stories that talk only of male offspring, this one introduces the possibility that even in times of war women's wombs may rebel and produce girls. All the women pilgrims wish the pregnant woman a daughter, and not another piece of cannon fodder. In fact, they think that she will probably have a daughter because she is so beautiful—beauty in pregnancy is a sure sign that the baby will be female. The young woman is even more vehement in her desire for a girl: "I'll kill myself if it's a boy!" (Salman 1988, 8). She had not had those five boys for the war, as it would have seemed at first, but because she had kept trying for a girl! The focus then turns to the older woman who is going to visit her martyred son's grave. While chatting at length with his ghost, she reflects bitterly on the many ways in which the war had destroyed all their hopes and

ambitions (14). This concern with the destruction of the future reappears in "Khayt ma'qud, khayt mahlul" (A knotted thread, a loose thread), a story that was written in 1984. Two sons return to their mother on the same day: the one, a surgeon, had been killed by loose shrapnel as he was saving another's life. The other son was killed on his way to join his brother.

The aunt of "Khalti Umm Malik 'addaha hisan" (A horse bit my aunt Umm Malik, Salman 1988), also written in 1984, was a feminist before the war, which she calls "this disaster that was forced on the country," and this "vicious war against a stupid enemy." She gave up her activism to be with the women in their time of trouble. Whenever a son came back from the front or a letter was received from a prisoner of war, it was "as if he were the son of all the women in the neighborhood. How many martyrs, how many lost men had all of them wept with pain and anger as though each one of them had lost her own son " (60–70; my emphasis). This description would seem harmless enough until we start to compare such group consciousness with the madres of the Plaza de Mayo and the Palestinian mothers in the Intifada and those in South Africa. These women collectively claim each man as their own. They may eventually challenge the authorities' right to "disappear" young men. Salman's hint at the politicization of the domestic is important because it announces readiness to confront state terrorism.

Lutfiya al-Dulaymi's Budhur al-nar (Seeds of fire, 1988) is an example of subversive writing from the pen of a woman whose earlier works were hailed as impeccably patriotic. Her heroine in "Returning from Abroad" (1974) glorifies Baghdad's "streets washed by justice, joy upon the faces, the city no longer rejects its dwellers" (Davis and Gavrielides 1991, 224). Her "Fi al-ghasaq 'adat 'arus al-bahr" (At dawn the mermaid returned), which gave the Fao collection its title, tells of the return of the mermaid to Fao Island after an absence of two years during which period "savages," that is, Iranians, had occupied the island. As soon as she hears shots from the Iranian coast, she slips back into the sea. She leaves behind the sound of her "tender, maternal voice" that promises her return. Then, during the last year of the Iran-Iraq War, al-Dulaymi published Budhur al-nar (Seeds of fire).

Seeds of Fire appears to be a conventional home-front novel about two couples on the margins of the war whom circumstances have separated.^[13] In fact, this is a novel that traces through the transformation of Layla, a woman working with the system, into a dissident as she uses art to forge an oppositional discourse. Layla had already been politically active after 1967 and had then withdrawn to become a graphic artist for an advertising agency. Layla's director tells her that her job is to convince "people to do what you want" (al-Dulaymi 1988, 42). Layla understands but she needs to create beautiful objects. Her desire to embellish the message makes her director very nervous. Consumers must not be aware of the message; they must be incited to buy without knowing why. He warns her that once consumers become aware of the art in the message, they will become aware of the artist, of the intention underlying the work of art, and of the result in their own actions. At that point, they will be less likely to continue doing what they have been doing. This prescription for the creation of subliminal messages in advertising recalls Foulkes's definitions of "integration propaganda." In both cases, awareness of the message will depend on maintaining "the ideological distance which separates the observer from the act of communication observed." Therefore, the real power of advertising, as of propaganda, "lies in its capacity to conceal itself, to appear natural, to coalesce completely and indivisibly with the values and accepted power symbols of a given society . . . propaganda which is the most elusive, and which for that reason is most in need of detection, is not the one we observe but the one which succeeds in engaging us directly as participants in its communicative systems" (Foulkes 1983, 5, 6, 3, 107). Layla's art makes explicit what was meant to remain hidden, but in the very same process it hides another message that is the story of its purpose. Her art demystifies the information the company is disseminating and changes consumers from unconscious participants into observers.

The director knows how dangerous this can be; Layla's designs had already lost them an important contract with an insecticide company. This reference to insecticides within a war context is very

significant. After all, there is a well-known precedent: Hitler ordered the development of gas for the extermination chambers of his World War II concentration camps from a substance that had been used as an insecticide. Then there is the fact that Layla's art appeals to women in particular. The director knows this fact and tries to use it against itself: "You are copying pagan arts; our ancestors, despite everything, were pagans in the way they regarded women. Women will attack you. Please avoid such situations. I'm concerned about your reputation" (al-Dulaymi 1988, 165). He has identified an audience that he evidently fears Layla is targeting and that will create dangerous meaning out of her nonconformist art. The reader makes easy, obvious connections with other passages referring to women's legendary power and status in pagan times. In one of Yasir's sections, we read of a tradition of strong women that no one remembers. They were leaders in battles and of tribes. They themselves took revenge for the killing of their men. Their stories were not told by "travelers or passing historians or legend tellers. Their exploits were told by hired female mourners, by letters carved in stone and on sword blades" (56). The director fears Layla and her targeted audience of strong women who threaten to disrupt and subvert the system he has put into place. Is it not possible that this passage about Layla's role in losing the insecticide company contract is an allegory for women's role in exposing the Iraqi government's policy of using chemical weapons against its own citizens, particularly the Kurds?

Does Layla know what she is doing? Are we reading of subversion by Layla or by Lutfiya al-Dulaymi? Might this state-sponsored book about an artist who uses her art against those who pay her be a work against the state? Loseff writes of the Aesopian writer—which I believe al-Dulaymi to be—that she "alludes to information, or rather a body of information, which is already known to the reader by experience, rumor, or other channels as foreign radio broadcasts" (Loseff 1984, 219–20). She turns this information into a story she can readily defend as pure fiction, knowing full well that "art and literature are capable of producing a counter-vision which in turn creates the sense of ideological distance which renders

propaganda visible . . . fiction [can] subvert the very processes of general ideology, and not merely express its sense of disinheritance from it" (Foulkes 1983, 6, 39–40).

Death and Desire

Some writers are critical of the war and the role they are expected to play; others are critical also of the ways in which the war and their role are represented. I am interested in how this critique is conducted. My readings of some of these novels and short stories indicate that the connections writers make between desire, love, and death during war reveal profound opposition to a war that was destroying their society.

Most people most of the time function as though Eros, or the sexual instinct as the embodiment of the will to live, and Thanatos, or death as libidinal sublimation, were completely separate. Yet Freud insists, only "by the concurrent or mutually opposing action of the two primal instincts—Eros and the death instinct—never by one or the other alone, can we explain the rich multiplicity of the phenomena of life" (quoted in Boothby 1991, 4). Gray elaborates the consequence of this interplay when he writes that Freud's belief in the eternal enmeshment of Eros and Thanatos made him "pessimistic about ever eradicating war as an institution. Men are in one part of their being in love with death, and periods of war in human society represent the dominance of this impulsion" (Gray 1970, 53–54). War provides opportunities for such close, charged encounters.

Freud claims that war produces three reactions to death: anxiety, fear, and fright. Anxiety "describes a particular state of expecting the danger or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one. 'Fear' requires a definite object of which to be afraid. 'Fright,' however, is the name we give to the state a person gets into when he has run into danger without being prepared for it" (Freud 1961 [1919], 6). To these three categories I now add a fourth: denial.^[14] Denial manifests itself in two ways: a reckless embrace of danger; a pretense that control has not been lost. Denial of death is a crucial aspect of wartime behavior because it accounts for the ways in

which individuals function in an otherwise impossible situation. War—in preparation and in metaphor—has become part of everyday life, another, if more extreme manifestation of systemic violence become ordinary. War can be war without feeling like war. It is best survived, for a while at least, if it is denied. More concretely, combat pilots deny death in war least fear and anxiety make them impotent.

Combat pilots in postmodern wars fight alone, seeing the enemy only as an electronic target. In a death-charged landscape they must overcome this alienating distance so as to remain alert and effective. Many pilots, actual as well as in films and novels, speak of an intense aliveness that translates into erotic fantasy. Wendy Chapkis describes the language that pilots use in the film Top Gun as eroticized and she quotes one as saying that viewing training films of F-14s in action gives him a "hard-on." Another pilot remarks that the enemy aircraft "'must be close, I'm getting a hard-on'" (Chapkis 1988, 109–10). They fight virtually alone and with the illusion of power and immortality because of their distance and situation above the enemy. They must not focus on death lest they lose their effectiveness. They must tap into what is most alive in them. Eros—desire for life experienced as sexual desire—is the body's most resilient resource against Thanatos.

The novels and short stories of men like Salah al-'Ansari and Dawud Salman al-Shuwayli interweave desire and death. The eroticism of fright confirms the appropriateness of such a death. Men who die suffused with love and excitement without fear and anger are real men who have not given in to the feminine within because they have directed the masculine out on to a feminized other. These two writers depict several men, often officers directing rather than engaging in combat, at the moment they realize that they have been mortally hit. They almost invariably hallucinate or project images of their beloved. Jabra Ibrahim Jabra labels this use of flashback, nearly always to a woman, a simplistic escape from dealing with trauma (quoted in Hammudi 1986, 208), whereas I read such flashbacks as serving an important function within this literary economy: death is enmeshed with fantasies that provide a libidinal sublimation. Stanley Rosenberg quotes a U.S. Air Force pilot who

had done duty in Vietnam: "First, just flying the airplane is a thrill. Then, you need to be dropping bombs. Then, you have to see what you're dropping bombs on. Then, to feel the thrill, you have to see that you've hit what you're dropping bombs on. Then, you need to be getting shot at while you see what you've blown up. Then, you have to be getting hit to feel the thrill, and the last thing is, to get dead" (Rosenberg 1993, 62–63).^[15]

Sexual arousal is associated with risking death. Gray tries to theorize away the connections between death and desire as though afraid that such a connection might dilute the greatness of communal participation, of the loss of the ego in moments of ecstasy. Yet later in his analysis of erotic love in war he describes the soldiers' preoccupation with the need for women that derives from the desire for conquest of an interchangeable partner or enemy (Gray 1970, 45, 67). War writers like the Algerian Mohamed Dib and the German Freikorps of whom Theweleit wrote emphasize the connections between fear of death and erotic arousal. They create combatants whose fright is accompanied by erotic fantasies that counterbalance the threat of disintegration, physical as well as psychological, by producing an illusory unity, a reinforced masculinity so as to withstand the threat of dissolving into the feminine. Desire is good as long as it is not allowed release.

Dawud al-Shuwayli dedicates his 1988 novel Ababil (Flocks) to the heroic pilots, officers, engineers, and technicians of the 29th Air Unit, "emblems of Saddam's glorious Qadisiya."^[16] This novel places in high relief the Eros-Thanatos construct. Yasin, an ace pilot on his mission over Iranian territory, is the hero. The planes take off in perfect flying formation, reach their target, drop their payloads, and then turn back. Yasin's plane is hit. Defying commands to bail out, he keeps on course and steers back home. Spartan warrior to the last, we assume that he will not risk being taken prisoner, perhaps even being raped or dying on enemy land. He will return dead or a hero (al-Shuwayli 1988, 74, 84, 92). The novel ends with Yasin's ecstatic dying utterance: "God is great!" This war cry, which has become emblematic of Islamic holy war, seems to mark the author's approval of death in a just war such as this one is for this man.

His inspiration for such bravery is Sausan. The echo of this woman's words reassures him not only of his masculinity but also of his potential heroism. For had he not been a hero she "would not have accepted to be related to you" (75). Then there is Amal, who is not merely inspiration, she is also an erotic presence from the moment that he is about to drop the bomb until his realization that he is going to die. The narrative fragments into a staccato alternation between descriptions of the present operation and flashbacks to encounters with Amal that become increasingly physical. He conflates signifieds as he interchangeably calls his plane and his fiancée his beloved (ya habibati ). As the crisis climaxes, he hears Amal again urging him to hold her tightly: "O, Yasin, embrace me . . . ! Stretch out your hands! Hold me close to you! Don't leave me like this! Without hope! Hold me to you!" (93). Frantically, he tries to grab hold of the 'atala . Although the reader assumes that what is referred to by 'atala is the pilot's "joystick," its actual meaning (according to Hans Wehr's Arabic-English Dictionary ) is a "crowbar" or (according to E. W. Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon ) a "large, or thick, rod of iron, having a wide head. Or, a thick staff of wood." Since the term is left imprecise, it is hard within this eroticized context not to assume a phallic referent. Yasin finally gives up, frozen with fright that, as Freud describes it, is "a lack of hypercathexis of the systems that would be the first to receive the stimulus. Owing to their low cathexis those systems are not in a good position for binding the inflowing amounts of excitation and the consequences of the breach in the protective shield follow all the more easily . . . the mechanical violence of the trauma would liberate a quantity of sexual excitation" (Freud 1961 [1919], 25, 27). Yasin has lost control of himself and of his plane. He swoops so low over the earth that he can see everything clearly. Then, at the height of the trauma, he is overwhelmed by a sense of dissolving: "The earth welcomes me. I see her opening her arms . . . she is calling to me" (al-Shuwayli 1988, 94). The association of danger, death, desire, and release in union is at once orgasmic and Oedipal—the son returning into the embrace of the mother.

In August 1993 I was interviewed by Wayne Ponds of National Public Radio's "Soundings." He was asking me about Gendering

War Talk , a collection of essays that I had edited with Angela Woollacott and that Princeton had just published. The following week, the Southern author Clyde Edgerton contacted me in connection with the program. He sent me a copy of a story he had written about his experience in Vietnam, a story he had never liked enough to publish. I was startled by the parallels between it and the Iraqi men's stories that I had analyzed. Briefly, "Search and Rescue" is about what a pilot believes to be his last moments. Fact is interspersed with fantasy. At the critical point, he flashes to a pornographic film he had once seen. A woman enters a room, takes off her long white robe. She sits naked on a couch, rubs her breasts, and "wets her lips. . . . The woman gets down on her hands and knees in front of the couch and looks behind her. A pig walks on screen from behind her and sniffs at her butt, which she wiggles back and forth." After a flash back to reality, the narrator returns to the pig, its penis, and the woman it is mounting.^[17]

Not only male protagonists experience arousal in war, women do also. For women the stimulants are different. Wendy Chapkis notes that women in real life may be as susceptible as men to the eroticism of the military myth, but for different reasons. She writes that when women become combatants, the military myth provides "an avenue to personally transgress gender boundaries or as a means to project the eroticism of power on to male objects of desire" (Chapkis 1988, 111).

Although women were involved in the war—in 1976 Iraqi women were enrolled into the popular militia forces that, by 1982, had 40,000 women combatants (al-Khalil 1989, 92)—the novels and stories I have read do not describe military women. Military service is not necessarily key. As I have already argued, war literature can be the site for the transformation of a women into a combatant. These women challenge gender norms by refusing society's rules of proper conduct for women. The change from observer to combatant is often erotically marked, strikingly so in the literature on the Lebanese civil war. After bidding her husband farewell, Nuha Samara's protagonist of "Two Faces One Woman"

(1980) finds herself alone in the war. It is the first time that she has ever had the opportunity to think for herself, to make her own decisions. From this new vantage point, she begins to assess her situation rather differently. It is suddenly unacceptable that her husband should have left her in this dirty war, suddenly evident that she is not waiting passively. She is expected to cope alone in the chaos. Although at the time she had not objected to his decision to go, people's comments make her realize that staying alone involves responsibilities and self-defense. She cuts her hair, a literary convention that marks women's assumption of control over their lives, and enrolls in military training. The metamorphosis is erotically marked: looking at her newly masculinized image in the mirror, she masturbates. She then determines to find a lover and calls up her husband's best friend (Badran and Cooke 1990, 304–13).

The heroine of Hanan al-Shaykh's Story of Zahra also experiences sexual pleasure as she moves from the margins of the war to its center. When her neighborhood is plunged into a violence over which a sniper reigns supreme, Zahra begins to move out of her shell of pain and madness. Seeing others in pain makes her feel less alone, more willing to be touched. With time she adopts responsibility for those around her. Despite warnings, she ventures out into the menaced streets and makes her way to the building out of which the sniper is said to be functioning. If she can distract him even only for a while she will have saved one innocent person's life. Day after day, she trudges back to the building and up the stairs for a ritual reenactment of the first encounter. Finally, one day it is as though the sniper is actually making love to her, and he gives her pleasure. Zahra, like the woman in "Two Faces One Woman," has become a combatant who has found erotic pleasure in that role. She has not witnessed death while being constantly in its presence. She can thus imagine that the emblem of war's senseless killing is not a death machine but rather Sami, a man she would like as a husband for herself and as a father for their unborn child.

Likewise when Layla in al-Dulaymi's Seeds of Fire (see below) turns her job in the advertising agency into a site for the construction of a dissident discourse, she feels powerful and able to love Yasir. It is at the moment that these heroines recognize that

participation in the war always under the shadow of death gives them freedom, self-control, and the chance to affirm themselves as other than expected that they experience erotic desire and pleasure. These non-military women combatants bear out Chapkis's contention that making themselves into warriors allows women "to project the eroticism of power onto male objects of desire."

The difference between men's and women's erotic reactions to death in war is that whereas men's desire is activated by battle participation that confirms gender identity, women's desire marks the assumption of a role that contradicts social expectations of how they should behave. Each is in some ways overcoming the feminine condition that disables the warrior spirit. For men, the fantasies dissipate in the light of reality. For instance, the soldier in Salah al-'Ansari's "The Two Walls" tells his wife, "I loved a woman other than you" and it seems that this other woman was in fact her, but only when she was not who she was then (al-'Ansari 1988, 82).

The Binary Mandate

Men and women usually write of war heroes and heroines in gendered spaces. Out of these spaces, men and women talk about absent women and men. When they write of men and women together during war, the only love they invoke is a sick love. In women's writings, death brings the loved men home and reveals the emptiness, the destructiveness even of that love that required distance to survive. Remember 'Aliya Talib's young woman who is driven crazy by being dragged toward the coffin of her martyred lover; and the waiting wife who grimly plans to turn her son into the image of the father who is brought home on a bier; and the pregnant woman who prevents the birth of her fetus until her husband returns, and when he does, dead, she can finally release the dead baby from her body.

Lutfiya al-Dulaymi's Seeds of Fire is the only novel on the IraqIran War I have read to present both men's and women's perspectives on the war and on each other. It discusses their fantasies and representations of each other from three perspectives: Yasir's in the desert—a place that is not the front yet is described in terms that

always recall the front—and Layla's and Asila's in Baghdad. This assigning of sections to a man on an ersatz-front and to two women on the home front allows the author to establish as though self-evident gender-specific spaces and roles. Yasir, like the military men, is associated with spheres of death and war: the arid, life-devouring desert and the front with its risks of death and imprisonment. While in the desert Yasir reads about poetry, he even writes a book on the subject. The critic Ibrahim comments that beyond writing, many warriors in this war literature read "books specialized in literature, history, and culture" (Ibrahim 1988, 116–17). Hence, this hobby seems to link Yasir to other poet-warriors, including the aforementioned Hajim's Other Soldier, whose story subverts any possibility that this war might be considered glorious. The women are associated with life and peace: nature and doves and olives (al-Dulaymi 1988, 28) and lush greenness; they ripen "like fruit on the tree of waiting" (40). This marking of the man's absence as being "not at the front" allows al-Dulaymi to describe men's experience without trespassing on what was said to be male writers' turf. Yet the war is always there: explosions are heard in the distance (43); Yasir describes plants that survive the heat and the dryness as samid , or steadfast, a term that Palestinian usage fills with political and even military resonance (17); families are fragmented by the conscription of sons (114); mothers wait (43); martyrs are announced; aunts adopt war orphans; brothers are imprisoned; even the home front is hit; above all, women and men organize their lives around the "end of the war" (e.g., 27, 29, 225).

Yasir went to the desert mines to replace someone who had been conscripted to the front. The desert may not be the front, but he tells his wife, Layla, that she should think of it as though it were. Hence, she should not think of joining him because his co-workers, as though they were soldiers, will not respect her for who she is but will regard her as a body only (39). His experiences in the desert so parallel those of the soldiers (105) that the war becomes part of him: "The night winds of the desert had sown seeds of fire beneath his skin and in his blood, small seeds that the hand of time had scattered over the earth of his body. . . . When he feels the burning of the flames, distant and recent memories are churned up and for

a while he forgets this hell that pervaded his world and left in it fires, the stench of corpses, and the ghosts of the dead" (131). Rather than life at a mine, here is life on the battlefield: privation and nightmare but also oneiric escapism and heightened sensuality. On a furlough home, Layla tells him that she sees "seeds of fire" in his eyes (143).

During his times of loneliness and crisis far from home, Yasir, like the men discussed above, longs for a woman. His fevered imagination conjures up Layla. But this is not Layla the wife, this is Layla, a woman, Woman, who fuels his fantasies (17–20, 117).^[18] By calling the fantasy Layla, he can convince himself that his adventures with other women are not betrayal (122–27). Conversely, he calls one prostitute Laylayana so that he might imagine the affair as one with his wife. His acknowledgement of his misdemeanor involves an unspoken apology to Layla and the assurance that when he is with other women he feels himself to be with her (126–27). When he comes home, however, he loses his fantasy of Layla the lover and cannot tolerate Layla the wife. He wants her to be devoted to him and to his needs. He resents any sign of independence or lack of respect or admiration (191).

Outside the advertising agency, Layla plays her war role as waiting woman: pregnant, she awaits her unborn child; sister, she awaits her brother from the front; wife, she awaits her husband from the mine. She tells her friend Asila that women's lives are devoted to "waiting in which there is pleasure at combating death" (91). The possibility of combating the threat of death gives pleasure and feeds love. At the beginning of the novel, the waiting role predominates, though with immediate caveats as she contextualizes her fantasy within reality. When she hears an enemy bomb explode her first thought, spurred by the baby's kick, is that of the mother: she wants to give birth to the fruit of her love for Yasir before dying. A political reflex relieves this saccharine moment: thinking of her own motherhood makes her think of other, less happy mothers "as they awaited the return of their sons from the front" (43). In war, women give birth to death either as a product, a killed son, or as an instrument, a son who will kill. Then she is the waiting wife worrying about her husband's welfare as he confronts danger and

death. She can talk about love as "wanting someone for his sake and not for the sake of our happiness with him. . . . Love is giving happiness and joy without counting the cost. It is then that the loved one gives us what we would never have expected" (227).

When Yasir is home on a brief leave, his presence shatters illusions his absence nurtured. He is so self-absorbed that he does not even notice that she is pregnant (31–32). The mirage of connubial bliss dissipates in the bright light of reality. Involuntarily, she thinks back to the time of their engagement and his delight at being the possessor of so much "beauty, femininity, and gentleness" (38).^[19] This memory brings back others. They had talked "three years ago about putting on her first show and he had written the introduction to a few of her new canvases. However, his introductions were never published, and her show never happened" (184). When she tells Yasir that an art critic has taken an interest in her work and published an article about one of her paintings, he is annoyed: "I read the article. 'Abd al-'Aziz al-Qadiri didn't say anything new. He only wrote what I've always thought about your style and technique because I know your background and experience. Haven't I already told you everything he repeats in his article? . . . al-Qadiri is not an art critic. He merely flatters women painters" (184). Not only is Layla remembering an unfulfilled promise, she is again confronted with his jealous possessiveness. It should be enough for her that her husband admires her painting, irrelevant that another bothers to put into print and therefore bring to public attention what he merely thought. Eager to put his competitor down, Yasir loses himself in a paradoxical discourse. First, he establishes himself as the more credible critic because of privileged information; then, he turns his argument against himself by discrediting as flattery the criticism that he compared with his own. Another memory is of her director rebuking her for not asking him to intercede on her behalf so that Yasir should not be sent to the mines (167). It does not occur to him that Yasir may have chosen to go, that Layla may have been happy to let him do so.

Layla recognizes that her life is a struggle not to become a victim, "the worst role for women or for any human being" (61). She must resist her husband's indifference to who she really is, her friend's

need for Layla to suffer in love as she did (96, 101, 235), her male colleagues' fear of the power of her painting, and society as a whole. She can never be alone in public without suspicion of immorality. One day she is in the streets, enjoying her independence, when a woman silently hands her a jasmine flower and a soldier accosts her without respect for her pregnancy (173). Denied her own independent space, she turns their son into a "new independent island" (253). The future will be different if the next generation can be spared the influence of the fathers.

The other plot of Seeds of Fire involves the unscrupulous Rashid, the unrequited lover Riyad, and the sculptress Asila. Asila despises her soldier admirer and obstinately holds on to her love for Rashid, despite his marriage to another. Asila describes her love for Rashid as a "sickness" (100) and then later she describes his occupation of her thoughts as a "rape" (235). This is no soldier in danger of his life, he is a philanderer. Yet Asila is determined to love the man who jilted her as though he were a hero at the front. The loyalty she reserves for this man who abandons her but who yet wants to retain control over her is truly "madness." Asila has the choice between a conventional wartime relationship with Riyad and one with Rashid that goes against the grain: to love a non-soldier with the love reserved for the man at the front—passive loyalty. Rashid exults in Asila's misplaced love: "I know how to pull the strings and make the puppet dance. I have my ways that a dreaming lover like you, Yasir, who is satisfied with the love of one woman, does not know" (119). He mocks Yasir's loyalty that the reader learns is self-deceptive at best, hypocritical at worst.

Asila is not like other women who prefer education to marriage unless it be to richer and younger men than the divorcés and widowers who are currently presenting themselves (202–4). She pursues an old and hopeless love as far as the westernized neighborhood to which Rashid moved. Here his assistant Victoria presents her with another version of how to succeed as a woman: "I'd never have done well in my work if it hadn't been for you, Mr. Rashid. No woman, however talented, can succeed without a man's support" (213). Asila's life and friends are proofs of the contrary, yet because she made her choice in wartime to love someone who

opted out of the war, she finds herself in an impossible situation. During the last scene that Asila and Rashid share, bombs and death break into the meeting. This independent woman artist—who assumes the role of martyr's wife by adopting her nephew, a war orphan (90)^[20] —is driven to love a selfish man who hopes to use the war for his own purposes. Her love is always a "sickness," always a "madness." She does not need the return from the front to reveal her self-delusion. Her love is inappropriate; she loves a civilian, and a rascal at that, with the love reserved for the soldier. When the lover is not in danger of death, but rather is exploiting a situation of danger for others, such a love becomes destructive for both subject and object. Yet even under such perverse circumstances, during wartime a man is shown to be redeemable. Asila's love earns Rashid the title of martyr when he dies in the explosion. For he did not die, mata , he died as a martyr, istashhada . Asila, of course, also died; however, as a woman she could only die, matat!

When characters challenge the spatial and behavioral binaries proper to war, they destabilize identities and roles. Rashid refuses the war except for personal gain. While family and friends are dying at the front, he convinces his brother-in-law to finance his furniture and perfume factories. Soon his marriage falls apart, his businesses collapse, and he tries to lure Asila back. Just as he is about to succeed, they are both killed by a couple of explosions. Rashid brings the killing home. Layla, in contrast, uses the war and the consequent absence of men in Baghdad to establish a space of action for herself. She paints subversively. From the heart of the war machine, she is combating the system. Her methods are so subtle, so subliminal that even she does not seem to know what she is doing. Yet her art creates an alternative for others—particularly women—and for herself. It gives her the courage and self-assurance to confront the men who want to control her.

This artist's biography is reminiscent of those women have written out of other wars, for example, Sahar Khalifa's Memoirs of an Unrealistic Woman (see chapter four). Layla finds release from personal crisis through art: she constructs a world outside the one in which she was compelled to live. After hearing of her brother's capture at the front, Layla returns home and starts to paint. She

places his photograph on the table and begins to paint in "hot, staccato [mutaqata'a ] colors." Out of the colors emerge the shapes of lovers intertwined. She paints on "until the painting turned into a strange star freed from the bonds of existence and she hurried to give the man the features of Yasir. Contemplating the painting, she felt the satisfaction one gets after plunging into something beautiful. She felt relieved to have unloaded the weight in her head and body into the sudden, brilliant colors of her painting" (237). When reality becomes unbearable, she transforms it through art. As long as her husband is away, he can be her inspiration and her ideal.

The novel ends with Yasir returning home for good. He finds Layla slaving over a hot kitchen stove, the baby boy slumbering, and delicious smells wafting out of the kitchen. Who is she expecting? Why, him! Every night, she says, she prepares his welcome. Saying which, they fall woodenly into each other's arms. She is not the Layla of the preceding 260 pages, a woman who resists all the men who try to control her, Yasir in particular. Yet this ending provides the censor with a "happy ever after" sense of closure and the reader with the need to read beyond the ending. Indeed, the conclusion puts into question all those moments when Layla expresses any form of domestic delight. Hence, we anticipate beyond the ending to a month hence when Yasir will leave for the front, but we also return to page one. As long as Yasir is far away, at the ersatz-front, Layla loves him perfectly. She can daily charade the happy homecoming. When he is there, her love melts into frustration and anger. As long as he is gone, Yasir loves Layla, even if only as a fantasy he realizes through other women. Back home, he is annoyed at any sign of independence she may show.

Love and desire thrive only when men and women retain their gender-specific spaces as mandated by the exigencies of war. For men, as writers or characters, women are back home as Spartan Mother, castrating wife, or erotic fantasy. For women, men at the front are much loved heroes-in-the-making. When these men come home alive, reality effaces dreams. When they come home dead, the absurdity of the meaningless death—for that is how it is often described—strikes at the heart of constructions of masculinized

patriotism. Literature becomes the site of a struggle over the interpretation and definition of the war. Is it a manly war? Or does the war, as al-Dulaymi suggests, unman its men? As long as a man and a woman do not cross into each other's space, the Eros-Thanatos construct holds. When they do cross into each other's zone, which by being the other's is forbidden, they disturb what are seen to be "natural" social arrangements. although it is not mentioned explicitly, for in patronized, patriarchal literature it cannot be, their crossing into that forbidden zone shows how fragile are the foundations on which that segregated society is based. If men discover that during their absence women enter public, that is, male, space and are there negotiating power relations that the men thought to be essential and unchanging, then the reasons and motivations for going to war are destabilized. How manly is the soldier whose wife is independent and perhaps stronger than he? If an unpatriotic man can elicit the same devotion in a woman as one who is prepared pro patria mori, of what value is that love? Once notions of militarism as the quintessential domain of masculinity, and of this masculinity as inherently superior to femininity are questioned, stable gender relations so necessary to the peaceful waging of war are undermined.

As I read this literature, I felt like the protagonist of Jihad Majid's short story "Al-dhikra al-mi'awiya" (Centennial jubilee) who must orchestrate an event to celebrate the Fao victory in the year 2088. He has no contact with any of the participants and little access to the archives. He, the city historian, knows, as does the "administration" who set up the centennial committee, that something happened that should be memorialized. The committee, headed by the protagonist, includes an artist, a poet, a military analyst, and some administrators. Curiously enough, the artist and the poet are the only ones to question the appropriateness of their presence on such a committee—they implicitly reject the immediate connection between culture, or, rather, its manipulation, and war. The others find the connection to be self-evident, the reconstruction to be essential (in Majid 1988, 27–38).

My project is reconstructive also, I hope not as manipulative. I know almost none of the players. I may not be a hundred years removed from Fao, but I might as well be. I am piecing together a history that creative artists chronicled or, to be more precise, were paid to chronicle. I have acquired only a few dozen novels and collections of short stories out of a total output that at this point must exceed several hundred. I have seen only reproductions of drawings and monuments. Yet I maintain that among all the toadies who worked away during the government drive to whitewash and glorify the war there are some, many of them women, who risked much to tell the truth as they see it.^[21]

On a daily basis, the media bombard us with images and stories of a ruthless tyrant who will stop at nothing to eradicate dissent. By decoding their Aesopian symbols and subversions, am I endangering the lives of those who managed to survive their manipulations of the system? There will be those who argue that these writers used imagery and metaphor to veil their meaning so that they might continue to write in safety. Loseff poses the "ethical dilemma" of the investigator of Aesopian language thus: "to what extent has the critic the right to expose a writer's anti-censorship tactics when in Russia [but which is also the case in Iraq] ideological censorship has not only not been abolished but, on the contrary, is patently on the increase?" Loseff's solution is to look only at the works of those who left the country or of those who had "already been unmasked and branded or have repented." That decision, he laments, compels him to exclude some "highly relevant material in favor of less impressive examples," because "discussion of anti-censorship tactics is impossible in a state of censorship." Yet he quotes L. J. Paklina's Iskussto inoskazatel'noj reci: Èzopovskoe slovo v xudozestvennoj literature i publicistike (1971), where he writes that "to decipher an Aesopian image is not to put one's finger on that fact of reality which occasioned the allegory, but to interpret the life of this fact in the artistic world of the writer." Such is the case because Aesopian language does not translate facts directly into fiction; it is rather "a product of relationships which are formed on the surface of cultural life, in the political sphere" (Loseff 1984, x, xi, 13, 19, 51).

The question for me has been, should these Iraqi writings remain veiled? Should I have limited myself to the writings of Iraqi expa-

triates like Samira al-Mana so as not to endanger the lives of those who have written from within? I think not. I believe that the critic has a double role. First, to identify writing that interacts with its context in the hope, however forlorn, of transforming it. Second, to map a new terrain where the unspeakable can be read. Silence is not an option. As long as we remain silent about what these writers are doing, as long as we shy away from analyzing what and how writers are articulating their dissent in a totalitarian system, we collaborate with the silencers. We must study these sponsored-censored works in such a way that we reconstruct "the relationship between textual structure and reception . . . [so as to] transform the critic [and, I insist, the reader] into the observer of an actual sign process, it may also lead to a clearer understanding of the ways in which literature functions as propaganda," both for and against the government (Foulkes 1983, 107).

What I can read through, so can others. This transparency is essential to make us realize that even under the most coercive circumstances, consciousness and conscience do survive. These brave writings challenge damning contentions that state-sponsored literature is necessarily propaganda. We must not accuse all writers of opportunism and therefore of dubious aesthetic merit merely because of literary and artistic patronage. Where would that leave Mozart and Michelangelo? Loseff even supports the contention that censorship can improve a text because it necessitates recourse to metaphor that "renders a work structurally more complex and leads to additional stratification of the text." He credits Aesopian language with the "rise of new genres" (Loseff 1984, 9, 119). Is the new genre in this case the "War Story" that the critics had been celebrating in the late 1980s? Who knows? What is sure is that sponsorship is no surer a guarantee of quality of cultural production than is its obverse. Writers who are state-sponsored may write well or badly. They may obey the rules of the game or play with these rules. Those who play the rules against the game begin to undo the atomization of state terrorism. These writers are opening up a space in which lateral links can exist and where new voices can resound. These writings are only a beginning, a glimpse of a vision of a nation that would engage its citizens in shaping a future that would include all equally. Above all, they undermine the

Mephistophelian contract that Saddam Hussein tried to impose on each Iraqi citizen.

Gulf War Postscript

In April 1995 I received three accounts of the 1990–91 Gulf War written by women. There was a collection of short stories by the Kuwaiti Layla al-'Uthman, a novel by the Iraqi Ibtisam 'Abdallah, and a journal by the Iraqi poet Dunya Mikha'il. Each book told of the shock of the beginning of the war and the subsequent brutalities.

At a feminist conference that we were both attending, Layla al-'Uthman gave me a copy of her Al-hawajiz al-sawda' (Black barricades, 1994), a collection of short stories she had written during and shortly after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. She describes the shock of the invasion, its brutalities, the rape of mothers witnessed by their sons, and the small acts of resistance and defiance performed by Kuwaitis who refused to be cowed by the Iraqis, and finally the refusal to leave the land and, even more important, the sea that defined their existence. The collection ends with nine sections, each entitled Barricade. Each barricade has the narrator conversing with an Iraqi soldier. At Barricade Two, she meets a soldier who seems sympathetic to her and almost apologetic about his presence, assuring her: "I curse the hour that my feet stepped on this ground!" When she asks him why he came, he replies:

Orders!

Oppressed?

More than you.

Do you smoke?

I'd love to. Do you have a cigarette?

Aren't you afraid it might be poisoned?

We've already drunk poison over there.

Where's there?

During the Eight-Year War [referring to the Iran-Iraq War].

So you came to participate in a new war of liberation!!

You didn't need anyone to liberate you. You were free and we were envious.

Do you know the truth?

I know it very well . . . I wish . . . Ah . . .

What do you wish?

That Iraq might be liberated.

(al-'Uthman 1994, 149–51)

Layla al-'Uthman adds her voice of dissent to those already echoing within the Iraqi state. Her sadness at the loss of the country and her anger at its devastation at the hands of the filthy soldiers and their co-optation of some of her countrymen give way at the end to a realization that not all of these men are in Kuwait of their own free will. Saddam Hussein is one thing and the miserable creatures that have found themselves far from home and doing the unspeakable are quite another.

Ibtisam 'Abdallah's Matar aswad . . . matar ahmar (Black rain . . . red rain, 1994) provides the obverse of al-'Uthman's stories. We read of the invasion but from Baghdad.^[22] Riham, whose name means gentle rain, is a thirty-year-old upper-middle-class woman who recently divorced her husband. She buys a flower store, hoping that owning a business will allow her to pull her life together. She has planned a trip for 10 August 1990, but then 2 August intervenes. Kuwait is not mentioned by name. The American government and its military are the enemy. Five months and twenty-five days later, after the night of bombing that marked the beginning of umm al-ma'arik (the mother of battles), Riham opens a curtain and looks out: "The sky was multicolored, a panorama of yellow and red explosions, like a video game " ('Abdallah 1994, 66; my emphasis). We read here an Iraqi woman responding to what became cliché in North America during the Gulf War. She recognizes that this is "a world war, a modern war with the United States and the world." Later, she describes that orange-red sky as looking like Gone with the Wind, only worse. In an amusing exchange between an older woman and some men who are jostling for a place at the front of a line for fuel, 'Abdallah questions whether this war will allow men to remain men, let alone prove their masculinity! The narrator realizes that "this war is different from those preceding it. They are going to drop an atomic bomb on Baghdad." While that did not happen, it was certainly a commonly held fear. Civilians in Najaf came close enough to the

Americans that they could see the pilots flash victory signs at each other when they made a successful strike. And for those who wanted to believe in the smartness of these bombs, why all they had to do was to survey the damage and to whom it was done. The novel ends with the devastating assertion that the bombs that were dropped on Iraq were "six times what was dropped on Hiroshima" (72, 91, 82, 75, 90, 98, 135).

Dunya Mikha'il's Yawmiyat mawja kharij al-bahr (The journal of a wave outside the sea, 1995) is published by the Iraqi Ministry of Culture and Information, the ministry that sponsored publication of the books analyzed above. It thus forms a perfect last link in the chain of this chapter's story.^[23] This journal is written as a series of prose poems that trace through, sometimes with the help of a time machine, the poet's reactions to the events of the war with a particular focus on 17 January 1991, the "night of nightmares." The episodic, fantastic, sometimes mythic, generally macabre nature of the pieces are reminiscent of Ghada al-Samman's 1980 Kawabis Bayrut (Beirut nightmares) that chronicled the days in which the hotels battle of autumn 1976 took place. Mikha'il describes the Iraqi people cowering in their houses like sardines in their cans, while "they [unspecified, but clearly the Americans] sit calmly in front of their electronic screens, pressing a button to shred our torn wings just before our low flight above our devastation." But those for whom she feels the greatest sadness and bitterness are the children who ask the difficult questions: "What did the twentieth-century Santa Claus feel when he brought the children of Iraq sacks full of shrapnel? What did he feel when they returned him the sacks full of gifts that included an amputated finger, a red hair plait, the guts of a book, a smashed doll, and a ticket of protest for Christopher Columbus." But as in all wars, there are also the war merchants, those who sell air (Mikha'il 1995, 12–13, 21).

These are only three of what I assume will turn out to be a stream of writings that will be produced over the coming years. The Gulf War may not have lasted long but it introduced into the Arab world a postmodern war that threw into question all the certainties surrounding preceding wars.