The paper foregrounds three narratives, which have received scant academic attention, depicting life in Baghdad in the middle to late decades of the twentieth century and shows how they foretold the current crisis of Baghdad, the heart and nerve centre of modern Iraq. Iraqi-Canadian Naim Kattan’s Farewell Babylon (1975) dramatizes the suffering of the Jews in Baghdad, especially during the Farhoud (pogrom) of 1941. Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s Hunters in a Narrow Street (1960) depicts the experiences of a Palestinian refugee working as a college professor in Baghdad in 1948. Nuha al-Radi’s Baghdad Diaries (1998 and 2003), chronicles the carnage and suffering inflicted on the people of Iraq during and after the first Gulf War of 1991. Strongly autobiographical, these three narratives represent a reality that has been deeply and intimately experienced by the authors. Underscoring the malaise of the postcolonial state, they reveal fissures and deformities within Iraq, both as polity and social construction, that explain subsequent events like looting, scapegoating minorities, and imposing a series of oppressive, dictatorial regimes.
Prophetic, but artistically and ideologically diverse, these writers reveal exciting perspectives on key questions of identity, exile, and ambivalent affiliations, while depicting contrasting images of Baghdad, a city of glorious heritage, hidden charms, but bad luck, corrupt and cruel rulers, and formidable unscrupulous predators. Like Kafka and Orwell, they, each in his/her own way, must have foreseen the chaos to destabilize Iraq.