Premise and Method

Baṣrayātha, the celebrated contemporary Iraqi author Muḥammad Khuḍayyir's memoir as a cityscape, is a unique way of writing both the Arab city and a self-portrait. Since demonstrating a work's uniqueness is a fool's errand or a lifetime task, this chapter will instead attempt a meditative interpretation of Baṣrayātha by providing a careful analysis of the text through the mirror of Khuḍayyir's extensive literary criticism and other works of fiction.

Introduction

Khuḍayyir in Baṣrayātha instructs the reader cryptically that: “Before Baṣra, there was Baṣrayātha.” In other words, the city's model existed before the real city. In this work Khuḍayyir merges narrator and city, style and content, drawing on an eclectic group of inspirations, both medieval and modern, Middle Eastern and European. Thus he creates the literary equivalent of a secret spice blend including: a Neo-Cubist collage style, a mixture of narrative and discursive sections, an emphasis on the storyteller who creates and preserves a city, the use of vintage photographs as part of the text rather than illustrations for it, the author's self-conscious construction of a model city – which by reference to Foucault he terms a heterotopia – rather than a narrative that uses a protagonist or a family to personify a city or a country, and the way in which the model city he creates crosses over into his other works. Each element of Baṣrayātha has mirrored or prefigured – as if in a cut-glass muqarnas (a squinch composed of many little squinches) – other Arabic-language novels, but Khuḍayyir's precise combination is unlikely to be paralleled or to have been paralleled. Fabio Caiani and Catherine Cobham refer, for example, to his Arabic prose style as “one of the most original to appear in the last few decades …”

Baṣrayātha as Model and Collage

In Baṣrayātha, Khuḍayyir constructs a model of his native city: Baṣra, Iraq, from a collage of fragments from a memoir.