Shalash the Iraqi by Shalash, translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren, And Other Stories, 2023
Anonymity fascinates and seduces. Endless speculations have circled invasively around who Elena Ferrante “truly” is; Catherine Lacey’s recent Biography of X reckons with erasing a layered past with a single letter of the alphabet; the first season of Bridgerton, the hit Regency-era romance on Netflix, has its narrative engine propelled by the question of Lady Whistledown’s real identity. These instances from the Global North exemplify the allure of mystery, but they fail to account for the stakes of remaining nameless in a political climate where to unveil oneself might be to threaten one’s own safety.
One might, in a moment of facetiousness, think of the eponymous chronicler of Shalash the Iraqi as the Lady Whistledown of Iraq’s Sadr City (or Thawra City, as it is lovingly christened by Shalash). Both issued frequent dispatches from within the epicentre of social disarray, guaranteeing the pleasure of gossip. More importantly, their pseudonymous veneers facilitated a lurid candour that might not otherwise have been possible.
There the similarities end. The respectable circles of upper-crust London did not live in the penumbra of foreign occupation. Nor were they plagued with the constant risk of spectacular sectarian violence, or hampered by a corrupt government that has “thieves, cheats, swindlers, traders in conspiracies” for politicians. It was against such chaos that Shalash released his explosive, timely blog posts, garnering a rapidly expanding local readership despite patchy Internet access in the country. The academic Kanan Makiya tells us, in his introduction, that people were printing out the posts, “copying them longhand,” “bombarding Shalash with questions and opinions.” Even high-ranking cadres could not resist partaking in the fanfare: one official expressed admiration while entreating Shalash not to mock him, for fear of his children’s potential disappointment. Another claimed that upon reading the daily communiqués, he would fall off his chair laughing.
Laughter, perhaps, can always be counted on to forge an affinity, if not a unity, beyond fractures of sect, status, and ethnic affiliation. Iraqis would “drop everything for a good laugh”; they gather in bars and down glasses of arak to immerse themselves in a “great, communal, and nondenominational drunkenness.” Shalash knows this, and abundantly turns it to his advantage. Nothing and no one is spared from the crosshairs of his ridicule, populated by a variegated cast that encompasses sermonisers, soldiers, suicide bombers, and donkeys. A vice-president’s verbal pomposity sounds like “he just ate a few expensive dictionaries and is about to lose his lunch.” A woman about to be married off to an Australian cousin is told, should her fiancé divorce her, “just tell everyone that he’s a terrorist and you’ll have nothing to worry about.” An odious neighbour, eager to save a spot for himself in paradise, proselytises the necessity of voting in the referendum for Iraq’s new constitution: “Don’t you know the going rate for rewards in heaven for helping ratify the constitution? It’s worth a hundred visits to the shrine of the Eighth Imam, and that’s on the far side of Iran!” When the narrator casually uses Google Earth, he is accused of lecherously spying on the women of his residence, sparking off a widespread hysteria—and court case—about the “violation of the morals of the block.” Each instance of mockery is a shard in a wider mirror of collective trauma.
Jokes aside, Shalash could apprehend the zeitgeist with such panache because of how immediate his vignettes are, traversing the volatility of the day-to-day. They were never intended for compilation and publication—much less translation. Inconsistency is built into their very composition. We can detect, in the disjointed character biographies, a refraction of people’s amorphous allegiances and changing politics, tried on for size like so many garments, or the fragmentation in which Iraqis dwelled. Nothing really makes sense, and no one knows who to blame for it. The unreliable narratorial voice itself occasionally insists on the veracity and neutrality of its reportage—calling itself “a strategic analyst of the first order.” But later, Shalash transforms shamelessly into an itinerant poet during election season, singing panegyrics in tribute to the political parties he encounters and drawing a salary from each. Maybe the point is that there is no continuity to be had, much like the self-contradictory draft of the national constitution—a Franken-text that’s merely a “bunch of words written by a group of villagers, religious men in turbans, and a handful of failed lawyers.” One can only shapeshift with the chaos, disavowing past iterations of the self whenever convenient or exigent. Forged documents, passports, certificates and religious titles—hawked by the “brave souls down at Maridi Market”—certainly help, and even encourage, such masquerade.
Beginning in October 2005 and spanning a period of roughly twelve months, the writings in Shalash the Iraqi chart critical junctures in the aftermath of the American invasion, without ever loosening their grip on the streets’ seething pulse. On the legal trials of Saddam Hussein and his eventual death sentence, the narrator evinces not facile celebration, but ambivalent fear at the ex-dictator’s prosecution “with America’s protection, desire, and timetable.” What meaning can such liberation hold? Who can call it liberation? Grievances, however blasphemous, are aired for all to hear: “Back then, at least we had a country for a dictator to rule! Now we don’t have a country, but a brothel for political prostitution.” Ensconced in the morning after, Shalash yearns for a temporal otherwise, conjuring an almost utopian vision of Saddam being brought to justice before the people:
I wanted to see it at a time when construction increased, freedom spread, joy filled the streets, and Iraqis would stay up all night till morning on the banks of the Tigris. Our schools would compete with those of Japan, our streets would be cleaner than a vessel of buffalo cream, our riches would be obvious before our eyes, all our exiled brothers, scattered under all God’s stars, would return to their families and loved ones and everyone rejoiced together.
As soon as the elaborate dream is uttered, reality deals a hard slap. “Ruins,” “beggars,” and “tattered tents” stitch a landscape of impoverishment; “you’d think I was sitting on the frontlines, not at home.” Yet for all of reality’s intractability, Shalash breathes vitality into the landscape in affective, subterranean currents that might elsewhere be dismissed as wishful or ineffectual, granting fantasy and imagination a shelter on the page, and a renewed afterlife in Luke Leafgren’s masterful translation. Through his regard for both public and private consciousness, a kernel of seriousness coalesces beneath the dross, the infighting, the humour. “See how quickly this story got from silly to deadly?” The narrator’s hilarious depiction of two neighbours who can’t see eye to eye, their petty skirmishes eventually escalating to hyperbolic proportions, could well encapsulate the mood of the collection, its venom-laced wit.
It may sound obvious, but key to the humourist’s arsenal is none other than language itself—its malleability, its capacity for aggrandisement and diminishment alike. Indeed, the role that Shalash occupies in relation to his circumstances is hardly unprecedented in Arabic literature, with its rich lineage of tricksters, jesters, rogues, wise fools, and clowns. A shining exemplar is the titular party-crashing protagonist of the 11th-century work, Portrait of Abu al-Qasim al-Baghdadi, who not only interrupts a banquet but treats its guests to a veritable festival of insults and compliments. In a memorable sequence, he pits the virtues of one city against the vices of another, elevating the quality of Baghdad’s textiles, wines, and horses over those of Isfahan’s. Soon after, he switches sides completely, praising Isfahan at Baghdad’s expense. Not unlike this turncoat, Shalash attends dexterously to the ease with which words can be twisted beyond recognition, and names hollowed of semantic marrow: “These days people just say they’re a sayyid, or a partisan, or a Sadrist, and that’s enough to make it so, no?” When a Sunni says “our Shiite brothers,” Shalash muses, he really means “that lowlife, backwater scum.”
Just as Abu al-Qasim sought to make Baghdad—through his parodic, obscene text—a microcosm of humankind, Shalash’s literary ambition might be described as similarly ecumenical. In his Thawra City block alone are contained “more philosophers than Athens ever had,” “more politicians than all the countries of the European union,” “more gangs, petty thieves, and armed robbers than all the mafias of Italy,” “a number of martyrs far exceeding all the martyrs of Algeria.” His writing blends high and low registers, mixing classical Arabic with Iraqi dialect—a balance which Leafgren has carefully struck through his control of tone and diction.
It comes as no surprise, then, that while the lineaments of actual historical happenings are discernible in Shalash the Iraqi, they are almost always filled out with the reconfigured materials of fiction. The funniest stories, the ones that leave the most indelible impression, tend to be those in which one cannot tell where fact ends and fabulation begins. In the high-octane “The Privatisation of Da’bul’s Oil,” a mother discovers her son urinating oil, and strives to keep it a secret even as she benefits from the black gold. “The Lake of Light: A Long Story” tells of one family’s house, constantly lit from within while the rest of the neighbourhood suffers blackouts and outages. People investigate and find, in the wee hours of the night, an “enormous ball of light” descending from above and draping the blessed abode in “blankets of dreamlike music.” “Masters of the Elephant” features the sudden and inexplicable appearance of an elephant immune to explosions, soon exploited by the government as a means of transporting “some officials who were deprived of seeing their people.” Tell all the truth but tell it slant: Dickinson’s ethos could be Shalash’s. He joins a genealogy of contemporary Iraqi writers, like Ahmed Saadawi and Hassan Blasim, invested in relating the surreal, absurd textures of quotidian brutality. “We are a city that readily mixes fiction and reality,” he declares, almost as a badge of honour.
For all the specificity of its allusions—this is a work fundamentally addressed to an Iraqi audience—the distanced Anglophone reader might nonetheless find plenty to love, to learn, to despise, to dream about in the dramatis personae of Thawra City—if they cede to the guiding presence of Shalash as he winds his way through the labyrinths of his locale, and through the equally labyrinthine factionalism of the time. Yet, approaching the end of the collection, one sees how the carapace might have become too heavy to bear. The closing sketch presents us with a dialogue staged between the writer and his persona. Rarely have we witnessed Shalash this melancholic, this depleted; he laments being just a “borrowed name,” having acquired a “real existence” as a kind of moral conscience for the people. “I’m exhausted from smuggling my laugh out of my psychology,” the Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat wrote, “exhausted from smuggling my laugh / out of sins, ugly secrets, / and in ripped stockings.” Thus does Shalash give us pain in stolen flickers, like static at the peripheries of a TV screen crowded out by mirth. Anyone noticing “the tear perched in my eye” might say, “Here is an Iraqi.” That feeling—contraband as it comes, caught between the fictive and the true—might be the silliest, deadliest trick of all.
Alex Tan is Senior Assistant Editor at Asymptote.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog:
From Silly to Deadly: On Shalash the Iraqi by Shalash
. . .key to the humourist’s arsenal is none other than language itself—its malleability, its capacity for aggrandisement and diminishment alike.
Shalash the Iraqi by Shalash, translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren, And Other Stories, 2023
Anonymity fascinates and seduces. Endless speculations have circled invasively around who Elena Ferrante “truly” is; Catherine Lacey’s recent Biography of X reckons with erasing a layered past with a single letter of the alphabet; the first season of Bridgerton, the hit Regency-era romance on Netflix, has its narrative engine propelled by the question of Lady Whistledown’s real identity. These instances from the Global North exemplify the allure of mystery, but they fail to account for the stakes of remaining nameless in a political climate where to unveil oneself might be to threaten one’s own safety.
One might, in a moment of facetiousness, think of the eponymous chronicler of Shalash the Iraqi as the Lady Whistledown of Iraq’s Sadr City (or Thawra City, as it is lovingly christened by Shalash). Both issued frequent dispatches from within the epicentre of social disarray, guaranteeing the pleasure of gossip. More importantly, their pseudonymous veneers facilitated a lurid candour that might not otherwise have been possible.
There the similarities end. The respectable circles of upper-crust London did not live in the penumbra of foreign occupation. Nor were they plagued with the constant risk of spectacular sectarian violence, or hampered by a corrupt government that has “thieves, cheats, swindlers, traders in conspiracies” for politicians. It was against such chaos that Shalash released his explosive, timely blog posts, garnering a rapidly expanding local readership despite patchy Internet access in the country. The academic Kanan Makiya tells us, in his introduction, that people were printing out the posts, “copying them longhand,” “bombarding Shalash with questions and opinions.” Even high-ranking cadres could not resist partaking in the fanfare: one official expressed admiration while entreating Shalash not to mock him, for fear of his children’s potential disappointment. Another claimed that upon reading the daily communiqués, he would fall off his chair laughing.
Laughter, perhaps, can always be counted on to forge an affinity, if not a unity, beyond fractures of sect, status, and ethnic affiliation. Iraqis would “drop everything for a good laugh”; they gather in bars and down glasses of arak to immerse themselves in a “great, communal, and nondenominational drunkenness.” Shalash knows this, and abundantly turns it to his advantage. Nothing and no one is spared from the crosshairs of his ridicule, populated by a variegated cast that encompasses sermonisers, soldiers, suicide bombers, and donkeys. A vice-president’s verbal pomposity sounds like “he just ate a few expensive dictionaries and is about to lose his lunch.” A woman about to be married off to an Australian cousin is told, should her fiancé divorce her, “just tell everyone that he’s a terrorist and you’ll have nothing to worry about.” An odious neighbour, eager to save a spot for himself in paradise, proselytises the necessity of voting in the referendum for Iraq’s new constitution: “Don’t you know the going rate for rewards in heaven for helping ratify the constitution? It’s worth a hundred visits to the shrine of the Eighth Imam, and that’s on the far side of Iran!” When the narrator casually uses Google Earth, he is accused of lecherously spying on the women of his residence, sparking off a widespread hysteria—and court case—about the “violation of the morals of the block.” Each instance of mockery is a shard in a wider mirror of collective trauma.
Jokes aside, Shalash could apprehend the zeitgeist with such panache because of how immediate his vignettes are, traversing the volatility of the day-to-day. They were never intended for compilation and publication—much less translation. Inconsistency is built into their very composition. We can detect, in the disjointed character biographies, a refraction of people’s amorphous allegiances and changing politics, tried on for size like so many garments, or the fragmentation in which Iraqis dwelled. Nothing really makes sense, and no one knows who to blame for it. The unreliable narratorial voice itself occasionally insists on the veracity and neutrality of its reportage—calling itself “a strategic analyst of the first order.” But later, Shalash transforms shamelessly into an itinerant poet during election season, singing panegyrics in tribute to the political parties he encounters and drawing a salary from each. Maybe the point is that there is no continuity to be had, much like the self-contradictory draft of the national constitution—a Franken-text that’s merely a “bunch of words written by a group of villagers, religious men in turbans, and a handful of failed lawyers.” One can only shapeshift with the chaos, disavowing past iterations of the self whenever convenient or exigent. Forged documents, passports, certificates and religious titles—hawked by the “brave souls down at Maridi Market”—certainly help, and even encourage, such masquerade.
Beginning in October 2005 and spanning a period of roughly twelve months, the writings in Shalash the Iraqi chart critical junctures in the aftermath of the American invasion, without ever loosening their grip on the streets’ seething pulse. On the legal trials of Saddam Hussein and his eventual death sentence, the narrator evinces not facile celebration, but ambivalent fear at the ex-dictator’s prosecution “with America’s protection, desire, and timetable.” What meaning can such liberation hold? Who can call it liberation? Grievances, however blasphemous, are aired for all to hear: “Back then, at least we had a country for a dictator to rule! Now we don’t have a country, but a brothel for political prostitution.” Ensconced in the morning after, Shalash yearns for a temporal otherwise, conjuring an almost utopian vision of Saddam being brought to justice before the people:
As soon as the elaborate dream is uttered, reality deals a hard slap. “Ruins,” “beggars,” and “tattered tents” stitch a landscape of impoverishment; “you’d think I was sitting on the frontlines, not at home.” Yet for all of reality’s intractability, Shalash breathes vitality into the landscape in affective, subterranean currents that might elsewhere be dismissed as wishful or ineffectual, granting fantasy and imagination a shelter on the page, and a renewed afterlife in Luke Leafgren’s masterful translation. Through his regard for both public and private consciousness, a kernel of seriousness coalesces beneath the dross, the infighting, the humour. “See how quickly this story got from silly to deadly?” The narrator’s hilarious depiction of two neighbours who can’t see eye to eye, their petty skirmishes eventually escalating to hyperbolic proportions, could well encapsulate the mood of the collection, its venom-laced wit.
It may sound obvious, but key to the humourist’s arsenal is none other than language itself—its malleability, its capacity for aggrandisement and diminishment alike. Indeed, the role that Shalash occupies in relation to his circumstances is hardly unprecedented in Arabic literature, with its rich lineage of tricksters, jesters, rogues, wise fools, and clowns. A shining exemplar is the titular party-crashing protagonist of the 11th-century work, Portrait of Abu al-Qasim al-Baghdadi, who not only interrupts a banquet but treats its guests to a veritable festival of insults and compliments. In a memorable sequence, he pits the virtues of one city against the vices of another, elevating the quality of Baghdad’s textiles, wines, and horses over those of Isfahan’s. Soon after, he switches sides completely, praising Isfahan at Baghdad’s expense. Not unlike this turncoat, Shalash attends dexterously to the ease with which words can be twisted beyond recognition, and names hollowed of semantic marrow: “These days people just say they’re a sayyid, or a partisan, or a Sadrist, and that’s enough to make it so, no?” When a Sunni says “our Shiite brothers,” Shalash muses, he really means “that lowlife, backwater scum.”
Just as Abu al-Qasim sought to make Baghdad—through his parodic, obscene text—a microcosm of humankind, Shalash’s literary ambition might be described as similarly ecumenical. In his Thawra City block alone are contained “more philosophers than Athens ever had,” “more politicians than all the countries of the European union,” “more gangs, petty thieves, and armed robbers than all the mafias of Italy,” “a number of martyrs far exceeding all the martyrs of Algeria.” His writing blends high and low registers, mixing classical Arabic with Iraqi dialect—a balance which Leafgren has carefully struck through his control of tone and diction.
It comes as no surprise, then, that while the lineaments of actual historical happenings are discernible in Shalash the Iraqi, they are almost always filled out with the reconfigured materials of fiction. The funniest stories, the ones that leave the most indelible impression, tend to be those in which one cannot tell where fact ends and fabulation begins. In the high-octane “The Privatisation of Da’bul’s Oil,” a mother discovers her son urinating oil, and strives to keep it a secret even as she benefits from the black gold. “The Lake of Light: A Long Story” tells of one family’s house, constantly lit from within while the rest of the neighbourhood suffers blackouts and outages. People investigate and find, in the wee hours of the night, an “enormous ball of light” descending from above and draping the blessed abode in “blankets of dreamlike music.” “Masters of the Elephant” features the sudden and inexplicable appearance of an elephant immune to explosions, soon exploited by the government as a means of transporting “some officials who were deprived of seeing their people.” Tell all the truth but tell it slant: Dickinson’s ethos could be Shalash’s. He joins a genealogy of contemporary Iraqi writers, like Ahmed Saadawi and Hassan Blasim, invested in relating the surreal, absurd textures of quotidian brutality. “We are a city that readily mixes fiction and reality,” he declares, almost as a badge of honour.
For all the specificity of its allusions—this is a work fundamentally addressed to an Iraqi audience—the distanced Anglophone reader might nonetheless find plenty to love, to learn, to despise, to dream about in the dramatis personae of Thawra City—if they cede to the guiding presence of Shalash as he winds his way through the labyrinths of his locale, and through the equally labyrinthine factionalism of the time. Yet, approaching the end of the collection, one sees how the carapace might have become too heavy to bear. The closing sketch presents us with a dialogue staged between the writer and his persona. Rarely have we witnessed Shalash this melancholic, this depleted; he laments being just a “borrowed name,” having acquired a “real existence” as a kind of moral conscience for the people. “I’m exhausted from smuggling my laugh out of my psychology,” the Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat wrote, “exhausted from smuggling my laugh / out of sins, ugly secrets, / and in ripped stockings.” Thus does Shalash give us pain in stolen flickers, like static at the peripheries of a TV screen crowded out by mirth. Anyone noticing “the tear perched in my eye” might say, “Here is an Iraqi.” That feeling—contraband as it comes, caught between the fictive and the true—might be the silliest, deadliest trick of all.
Alex Tan is Senior Assistant Editor at Asymptote.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog:
Contributor:- Alex Tan
; Language: - Arabic
; Place: - Iraq
; Writers: - Abu al-Qasim
, - Ahmed Saadawi
, - Catherine Lacey
, - Elena Ferrante
, - Emily Dickinson
, - Hassan Blasim
, - Kanan Makiya
, - Maya Abu al-Hayyat
, - Shalash
; Tags: - American occupation
, - anonymity
, - arabic literature
, - blogging
, - humor
, - Iraqi literature
, - social commentary
, - US Invasion of Iraq