The Basra Connection

Mahdī ʿĪsā al-Ṣaqr was a prominent member of the Fifties generation, a contemporary of Nūrī, Farmān, al-Takarlī and Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb. He came from Basra and although he settled in Baghdad in 1969, Basra was the setting for his most distinctive work, including al-Shāṭiʾ al-thānī (‘The Other Shore’, 1998; henceforth Shāṭiʾ). He was initially a short-story writer, who then published seven novels between 1987 and his death in 2006, which are remarkable for their technical innovation, and disciplined and lyrical language. In this chapter, after a brief introduction to the writer, we will discuss his novel Shāṭiʾ in detail, focusing particularly on the use of internal dialogue and second-person narration, and the bearing these have on spatial and temporal elements of the novel. Shāṭiʿ is immediately different from all the works mentioned above because of its setting, the southern city of Basra. Salām ʿAbbūd identifies Basra as home to many independent-minded and determined writers (ʿAbbūd 2002: 268–9).

Al-Ṣaqr was born in Basra in 1927, and died in Baghdad in March 2006. His first collection of stories (Mujrimūn ṭayyibūn, ‘Goodhearted Criminals’) was published in 1954, the same year as Nūrī's Nashīd al-ard.