On 26 June 1950, the trial of the Iraqi poet Husayn Mardan (1927–72) convened in Baghdad after the 1949 publication of his “obscene” collection (dīwān) Qasaʾid ʿAriya (Naked Poems). Attending the trial were a large number of Iraqi poets and a committee of culture (lajna adabiyya) that would assist the court in determining the aesthetic value of Mardan's work. According to court proceedings, Mardan, charged with insulting public decency, responded to questions asked of him by the judge calmly and directly. The function of the poet, he argued, was “to be honest in his expression of his innermost feelings,” and to “expose the naked truth to the people.”Footnote 1 Mardan's defense attorney, Safaʾ al-Urfali, defended his client by appealing both to the necessity and universality of artistic freedom and to the dispassionate and objective spirit of scientific inquiry, which demands the revelation of objective truth regardless of the unpleasant or offensive reality it may reveal in the course of its findings.
Al-Urfali's defense of Mardan began with a reference to the 1857 trial of Gustave Flaubert on similar charges of “outrage to public and religious morality and to good morals” for his novel Madame Bovary.Footnote 2 There were artists, argued al-Urfali, who spread virtue by illuminating it in their aesthetic production, and there were others who spread virtue through exposing depravity.Footnote 3 Flaubert had been acquitted because the judge presiding over his trial recognized the aesthetic strategy of illuminating vice in order to prevent it. Similar art, including the poetry of Mardan, which functioned to reveal or expose the social world (al-adab al-makshūf), was to be found in the homes of Iraq's wealthy and in the books taught in Iraq's public schools and universities. Such art was also available for purchase in markets throughout the nation, and included representations of the naked body as a transhistorical and transgeographic phenomenon. Is it possible, al-Urfali asked, that all expressions of nudity in art, which span cultures and geography, are contrary to decency (mukhālifat li-l-ādāb)?
Expanding his legal argument beyond an advocacy of freedom of expression in literature and the arts, al-Urfali argued that the transgressive elements of Mardan's poetry were equivalent to the pursuit of knowledge associated with scientific research, in particular psychology (ʿilm al-nafs). Like “exploratory” (i.e., indecent) art, al-Urfali continued, the science of psychology, in its pursuit of knowledge of the self, had produced studies on psychological illness and the relationship of the self to moral and spiritual health, in particular through studies on sexual deviance (al-shudhūdh al-jinsī) that had as their purpose the discovery of knowledge and the appropriate use of that knowledge in the promotion of virtue in society. Were these scientific studies of sexual deviance, sold in bookstores and taught in universities in Iraq and throughout the world, al-Urfali asked, also opposed to ādāb and in violation of the same law against indecency that Mardan was charged with violating? Al-Urfali concluded that the publication of Mardan's dīwān was no different from the hypothetical publication of a scientific text about sexual deviance; the intent of the scientific publication is not to incite or provoke the crimes of sexual deviance, but to further the cause of science for the sake of knowledge and to correct such undesirable behavior. Similarly, al-Urfali argued, the aim of Mardan's poetry was to contribute to Arabic literature and to serve society by directing it away from vice.Footnote 4
At one point in his argument, al-Urfali briefly recalled the classical Arabic poetic tradition and its treatment of the obscene. Obscene poetry, he argued, was produced during the flowering of Islamic civilization and was embraced in the courts of the caliphs, who not only developed a taste for the lascivious but also praised and rewarded the poets who created it. Curiously, al-Urfali did not linger on the classical tradition and its cultivation of obscene poetry, nor did he cite any classical poets, such as Abu Nuwas, whose obscene poetry is associated with the city of Baghdad at the height of its glory. Indeed, al-Urfali would not have had to look hard to find the “indecent” in the Arabic literary tradition, particularly in the historical legacy of cultural production of medieval Baghdad. The genre of mujūn (licentiousness, libertinage, bawdiness) was both a genre of classical prose and poetry and a mode of behavior referring to the casting off of societal restraints and shameless indulgence in prohibited pleasures, in particular the consumption of wine and sexual profligacy.Footnote 5 This omission is both strategic and revealing: Al-Urfali's defense of Mardan began with a reference to Flaubert, and his legal strategy was to parallel the social function of the poet to that of a scientist, arguing that both produced research and knowledge that would aid in the social uplift and moral health of the nation.
The logic of al-Urfali's claim that Mardan engaged in representing vice in order to spread virtue is transparently cynical, but was an effective way to win the dismissal of the case against his client.Footnote 6 Both al-Urfali's symbolic reference to Flaubert and his casting of Mardan's poetry as scientific discovery to be used in the service of the moral advancement of the nation are signs of the historical moment in which the trial took place. In other words, that the defense of Mardan rested on references to a seminal literary figure associated with the materialization of European modernity and a scientific rationale as the basis to argue for freedom of expression in the arts was a reflection of the material, political, and cultural forces shaping national formation in the historic moment of development and modern state building in Iraq. For Iraq and much of the Arab world, cultural production was not only inflected by the material transformations of the state-led modernization project but also intervened in these transformations by shaping national culture and popular responses to the state.
The years of British Mandate rule in Iraq (1920–32) and of indirect British rule mediated by the nominally independent Hashimite monarchy (1932–58) witnessed profound social upheaval: the increasing rationalization and bureaucratization of the state, the emergence of powerful secular political movements in opposition to the colonial regime, the appearance of a small but growing bourgeois middle class and its expanding role in defining the political and cultural values of the nation, the mass migration of southern peasants (in Iraq, often pejoratively termed sharāgwa) from the countryside to the cities, and, significantly, a temporally condensed state-led modernization program which aimed to transform Iraq from a largely peasant, agrarian society to a modern, technologically advanced state. The story of increasing state power and political centralization in Iraq was almost entirely enabled by its transformation into a petro-state. Travelers to Baghdad from the 1930s onward, and particularly in the 1950s, observed a city undergoing dramatic physical change. In a 1932 visit, the Lebanese mahjar writer Amin al-Rihani heralded the beginning of a new age for Iraq, what he called the “age of oil” (zaman al-nafṭ), marked by the embrace of technology. “In the future,” he wrote, “oil will become the great chemical soul of Baghdad.”Footnote 7 Over the next few decades, the concerted modernization projects of the British-backed Iraqi monarchy, planned and implemented by the Iraq Development Board and publicly celebrated in staged events such as the annual “Development Week,” fundamentally reshaped the urban fabric of Iraqi cities.Footnote 8 These transformations were documented approvingly in the Iraqi and Western press and in travel narratives by Western visitors to Baghdad.Footnote 9
The political climate in the period of Mardan's arrest was marked by increasing government censorship and persecution of intellectual figures who were at the forefront of articulating a new cultural consciousness for the nation and political opposition to the monarchy. Ottoman laws regulating the press were readopted in 1921 under British rule and remained practically unchanged until 1931, when only minimal revisions were made. These laws “gave power to the state to interfere in the public sphere. Such laws were imposed throughout the history of Hashimite Iraq when publications appeared too critical or ran out of favor with the government.”Footnote 10 Publishers were required to obtain government approval prior to the production of periodicals and it was illegal for publications to “breach public morality or decency.” Finally, the British often attempted to directly control and manipulate the press, while simultaneously producing their own publications aimed at swaying public opinion against Arab nationalism and communism.Footnote 11
As local opposition to British and monarchical rule increased, so too did government censorship practices, whose purpose, according to King Faysal I, was “to put a limit to the press's unreasonable critique of government activities.”Footnote 12 In 1938, the Iraqi government passed a new press law stating that any individual who “expressed approval or disseminates by any means of publication . . . any of the doctrines of communism, anarchy, or the like” would face punishment of up to seven years in prison.Footnote 13 By the late 1940s and into the 1950s, government harassment and persecution of communist and nationalist intellectuals and activists was routine and reflected the growing power and centralization of the state. The execution in 1949 of Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) leader Yusif Salman Yusif (nom de guerre Fahd) and several of his comrades, by hanging in a public square in Baghdad, was the most notorious example of the mass government crackdown on anticolonial communist activism, which reached its apex after the 1948 rebellion (al-Wathba, or “great leap”), when hundreds of communists, including the party's leadership, were arrested. The same year, the poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab was seized in his home village of Jaykur in southern Iraq and taken to a detention center in Baghdad, where he remained from January until April, when he was released with other prisoners suspected of ties to the ICP.Footnote 14 During the 1952 Intifada, hundreds of activists were imprisoned, including the poets Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, Muhammad Salih Bahr al-ʿUlum, and ʿAbd Allah Goran.Footnote 15 At a time when the Iraqi state was at the height of its political repression of activists and intellectuals, the arrest of Mardan for violating “public decency” must be understood in the context of the state's exercise of power against any articulation of dissent. As is often the case, charges of “breaching public morality and decency” are rarely simply about upholding a certain vision of public morality but are intertwined with a ruling authority's claims to legitimacy.
My interest in the state's persecution of Mardan has to do with the public courtroom spectacle it repeatedly created around what has come to be called his “Baudelarian” poetry, and the ways that this spectacle has been effectively written out of cultural and literary histories of this period in Iraq and of Arabic poetry more generally. Literary histories of the modernist poetic movements of Baghdad that coincide with Mardan's trial rarely mention the significance of his poetry or the state's efforts to silence him.Footnote 16 Instead, vague and perfunctory references to Mardan as a “vagabond poet” and a rebellious bohemian in the tradition of Baudelaire (1821–67) cast his poetry as external to the politically engaged verse employed by other more celebrated, and canonized, modernist poets, in particular Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Nazik al-Malaʾika, ʿAbd al-Wahhab al-Bayyati, and Buland al-Haydari.Footnote 17 The process and politics of canonization operate in a historically contingent manner, formed through a variety of factors that deem certain works emblematic of the cultural, political, and aesthetic trends of a particular historical moment. Since placing aesthetic value on a work is a largely subjective process, that a poet like Mardan, deemed a threat to public order by the state, has been largely excluded from the Arabic canon poses questions about both canon formation in the Arabic tradition and the cultural politics of his historical moment.Footnote 18
The marginalization of Mardan is, I argue, in large measure a consequence of the subject matter of his poetry: libidinal desires, the pleasures of the body and the flesh, chaotic and inconsequential rebellion in the space of the brothel, an extreme antiromanticism which celebrates nihilistic and hedonistic pleasure, self-indulgence, anarchism, and a rejection of religious orthodoxy. In the moment of anticolonial revolution that demanded political engagement with an increasingly oppressive state apparatus and a politically committed aesthetics, Mardan's bohemianism is treated as a provocative though ultimately frivolous and out-of-place libertinism, and as fashionable evidence of the manifestation of a variant of Baudelarian rebellion and depravity in an unexpected and ultimately inhospitable third world space. Mardan's production of an alternative revolutionary paradigm, one focused on the gratification of the self and the body, was and remains unintelligible in any attempt to map his relevance to the period. The symbolic incongruity of the self-styled Baudelarian hedonist, an allegory of bourgeois modernity, in an uneven colonial space struggling to evince the modern is thus rationalized as aberrant and, more damning, mimetic; the now mechanical association of Mardan with Baudelaire posits Mardan's work as a kind of derivative and unthinking mimicry or a cursory production of pastiche.
How do we understand the local impulses that produced Mardan and fashioned his identity as a political subject in a revolutionary, anticolonial moment, and in particular in the urban spaces of a modernizing Baghdad? How was the singularity of Mardan's work in the radical, colonial unevenness of Baghdad an enactment of that unevenness? Is it possible to associate Mardan's poetic interiority with the external political mechanisms shaping modern Baghdad: the increasingly repressive bureaucratic state, the regulation and management of public life, the material transformation of its spaces, and the oppressive nature of social institutions (family, religion, the law, sexual morality)? Situating Mardan's transgressive and rebellious poetry and its themes within these social formations centers the concept of space as a social fact that is always political and strategic. Reading the aesthetic production of Mardan through its spatial mappings and absences introduces a necessary element in the reading of the poetics of this period, one Mardan's contemporaries, including al-Sayyab, were attuned to: namely, the mediation between the discursive and the material, the political and the self.
It is precisely external disciplinary forces that are displaced onto Mardan's corporeal poetics, a poetics that articulate a crisis of consciousness induced by a lack of faith in progress, development, and the utopian. Mardan's poetry is marked by absence—in particular, the emphatic absence and rejection of any utopian and romantic associations, such as the rural imaginary present in the poetry of al-Sayyab, the promise of social justice associated with the revolutionary politics of the city, and the sentimentality of romantic love which modernist Arab poets were rebelling against. It is characterized instead by a resigned nihilism and skepticism toward any kind of program of political justice. This is not to suggest that Mardan was never directly political; as a communist and journalist, his essays included a wide range of political and cultural topics, from commentaries on aesthetics to the Algerian anticolonial movement to Iraq's own liberation struggle. But his poems rarely include overt references to political events and movements. Rather, they express a fundamental unease and pessimism with the material and social conditions inaugurated by the modern. That Mardan expresses such pessimism in the moment of high modernism, when the promise of development, modernization, and secular nationalism was embedded in both the political and aesthetic realms, is not due to the author's lack of political commitment. Rather, in his poetry, the political is displaced onto the body and is expressed through the phenomenological, that is, through structures of consciousness encountering modern forms of discipline established by the state and its nascent middle-class subjects. The relevance of Mardan's poetics to a period of unprecedented aesthetic innovation and political commitment (iltizām) is in how it helps us to map the emergence of new social spaces and alternate routes to understanding the encounter and assimilation of a changing material reality. Mardan's rebellious poetics and his unease with the disciplinary order being fashioned in his time foreshadow the coming expansive machinery of the authoritarian state in Iraq—first in the form of the colonial government and its increasingly centralized apparatus of power and then in the brutal nationalist dictatorships that followed, dictatorships whose control over the Iraqi population infiltrated the public and private realms by policing political thought, spatial movement, and interpersonal relationships.
LIBERTINISM IN THE COLONIAL SPACE
Born the son of a police officer in the rural town of Hindiyya, Mardan migrated to Baghdad at the age of twenty in 1947 and immediately began frequenting the al-Zahawi café on al-Rashid Street, where he immersed himself in the city's aesthetic and political debates with other prominent poets, including Badr Shakir al-Sayyab. Sharing with al-Sayyab the experience of migration from the provincial, rural town to the urban center, Mardan's poetry departs radically from al-Sayyab's idyllic portraits of his home village Jaykur, north of Basra, that serves in his poetry as emblematic of a lost pastoral ideal. The absence of the rural space in Mardan's poetics is not accidental; it is a repudiation of the romantic sentimentality associated with the rural imaginary created by other Iraqi writers in this period, in both prose narratives and poetry.Footnote 19
Mardan's dīwān Qasaʾid ʿAriya begins with the following dedication:
Lam uḥib shayʾān mithalmā aḥibabtu nafsī.
Fa ilā al-mārid al-jabbār al-multaf bi-thiyāb al-ḍabāb.
Ilā al-shāʿir al-thāʾir wa-l-mufakkir al-ḥurr.
Ilā . . . Ḥusayn Mardān
Arfauʿ hādhihi al-ṣarakhāt allatī inbaʿathat
Min ʿurūqihi fī lahẓāt al-hāʾila
Min ḥayātihi al-rahība. 20
I did not love anything as I loved myself.
To the great rebel clothed in fog.
To the revolutionary poet and free thinker.
To . . . Husayn Mardan
I lift these screams that originated
From his roots in ghastly moments
From his dreadful life.
The collection's dedication to the self exhibits characteristic features of the poems contained within. As a manifesto, it announces a retreat inward to the private self and it declares that the poetic realm is an interiorized space, where the exchange between first and third person is a personal communication contained within the recesses of the author's mind. The external world, including the reader, is intentionally excluded, a bystander to the dialogue the author conducts with himself. The sinister terminology—al-mārid, a malevolent rebel, insurgent and demonic, is clothed not in material garments, but in the natural, dissipating fog. The themes of roots, origins, and the oppressive past appear repeatedly in the collection—frightful and suffocating, to be ridiculed as a source of horror and stifling oppression and to be replaced by an embrace of the carnal pleasures of the moment.
The poem “Milad Shaytan” (A Devil's Birthday) recapitulates many of these ideas and serves as emblematic of the themes of the rest of the collection. It begins with the following sentence: Al-ḥurriyya: kalima ʿajība la yafham maʿnāhā ghayr al-ḥayawān (Freedom: A wondrous word whose meaning only an animal understands). Mardan's association of freedom not with the successful terminal stages of revolutionary political praxis but with baser instincts, unattainable in any permanent way and fundamentally opposed to the standardizations of time and space of the modern world, is a radical rejection of the teleology of the utopian. What defines this rejection is his portrayal of all spaces in the modern world as metaphorical prisons, articulated in his poetry by locating liberation in fleeting, impermanent pleasures associated with the body, and most explicitly by locating it spatially in the transgressive and marginal space of the brothel, a space exterior to moral and social regulation. The poem begins with the following stanza:
Yā yawma mawlidī al-mashʾūm mā fatiʾat
Dhikrāk tuzʿij ahl al-arḍ aḥyānān
Fa hal ataytu ilā al-dunyā li-amlāʾhā
Khiziyyān wa-ʿārān wa-aḥzānān wa-kufrānān?
Oh accursed day of my birth that never ceased
On occasion, invoking your memory disturbs the living
Did I come to the world to fill it
With disgrace and shame, grief and blasphemy?
Sharibtu alfa ḥayātin fī ghaḍāratihā
Famā irtawaytu wa-lan yanhadda jabbār
Kaʾinannī jadhwa ḥamrāʾ min saqr
La tuṭfaʾ al-nār fī ʿamāqihā al-nār
I drank a thousand opulent lives
And I was not quenched nor was my greatness raised
As if I was a red ember from hell
Whose fiery depths could not be extinguished
Raqastu fawqa yad al-ahwāli mubtasimān
ʿIshrīn ʿāman fa lam atʿab wa-lam anim
Wa-ʿishtu fī ʿatamat al-mākhūr munṭariḥān
Fawqa al-luḥūm fa lam ashbaʿ wa-lam aqum
I danced above the hand of horrors smiling
Twenty years and I did not tire or sleep
I lived discarded in the gloom of the brothel
Above the flesh and I was not satiated nor did I riseFootnote 21
The first stanza establishes once again, as in the dedication, the speaker's interior dialogue, alternating between first and third person and blurring the distinction between him and the malevolent presence of the devil. Unlike the dominant poetic movement of the period, the recourse to the other-worldly or the spiritual in Mardan's poetry is not to the myths and legends of the Mesopotamian past, as with the Tammuzi modernists, but entirely to the demonic presence of the Satanic, which accompanies his exploits in brothels and guides his rebellion against the stifling monotony of social convention. Mardan's mobilizations of the Satanic were consciously blasphemous; the spiritual thrust in his poetry, though, is intended to be religious only insofar as it rejects and mocks conventional deployments of religious discourse in public life.Footnote 22 The invocation of the demonic and Satanic is a literary motif, a deployment of the metaphysical meant to contest the privileged status of religion while disrupting the mundane, material basis of everyday life from beyond it. Mardan's pervasive deployments of the demonic both echo and depart from Baudelaire, and any comparative assessment of their similarities must account for the radically different sociopolitical and temporal realities of the local spaces in which they wrote. Nevertheless, understanding the demonic in Baudelaire is essential to reading its appropriation and rearticulation in Mardan's poetics.
In an essay on the role of the figure of Satan in the poetry of Baudelaire, Jonathan Culler argues that this aspect of his work is largely excluded from the various critical accounts that make his poetics synonymous with the disparate conditions associated with the emergence of bourgeois modernity. Culler writes:
There is a great difference of opinion about what it is that makes Baudelaire modern and worthy of special attention. Is it, as Albert Thibaudet and Walter Benjamin argue, that he was the first true poet of the city, the first to take the alienated experience of life in the modern city as the norm? Or is it, as Leo Bersani claims, that Baudelaire discovered and displayed the mobility of fantasy and of the desiring imagination? Or is it, as Paul de Man maintains, that Baudelaire invents modern self-consciousness about poetry itself, producing poems that allegorically expose the operations of the lyric?Footnote 23
Culler observes that what these various articulations of Baudelaire's unique position as the “poet of modernity” have in common is their exclusion of the aspect of his poetry that invokes demons and the devil.
That critics of such different orientations should agree in shunting aside the Satanic Baudelaire suggests that there is something worth investigating here, something disquieting and embarrassing, which may not in fact be merely trivial—which may complicate the story of modernity that has come to depend on Baudelaire as its originator. Perhaps the Satanic Baudelaire would tell us things about modernity we don't want to know.Footnote 24
Culler suggests that in order to make Baudelaire modern, critics have excised, marginalized, or dismissed the metaphysical articulations of the demonic in his poetry, but that one way of making this aspect of Baudelaire modern is to read the devil as “a personification of aspects of the Unconscious or Id, or forces that make us do what our conscious selves might reject.”Footnote 25 Another approach is to attempt to understand Baudelaire's own words on the matter—“it is more difficult for people of this century to believe in the devil than to love him. Everyone feels him and no one believes in him”—as an expression of one aspect of the modern condition: the dominance of material life over the metaphysical. The devil then comes to represent the forces that accompany and guide human behavior and mark the return of what the material has repressed.Footnote 26
Matei Calinescu offers a different reading of Baudelaire's relationship with the metaphysical, one that sees Baudelaire's engagement with the spiritual as entwined inextricably with his experience of modernity. He writes, “Modernity, from this point of view, appears as a spiritual adventure; the poet sets out to explore the forbidden realm of evil, whose most recent flowers, dangerously beautiful, he is supposed to discover and pluck.”Footnote 27 In other words, the task of the Baudelarian poet is “to reveal the poetry hidden behind the most horrifying contrasts of social modernity.”Footnote 28 These contrasts require the poet to “penetrate beyond the banality of observable appearances into a world of ‘correspondences’ where ephemerality and eternity are one. Since Baudelaire, the aesthetics of modernity has been consistently an aesthetics of imagination, opposed to any kind of realism.”Footnote 29 While Calinescu's argument that the aesthetics of modernity is opposed to “any kind of realism” mistakenly excises the relationship realism has with the modern, particularly in non-European literary traditions, we can take from his observations that an essential way of representing urban modernity is through the fantastic as haunting the otherwise sterile and monotonous existence of the modern subject. One way we can understand the modernist aesthetic recourse to myths, legends, and hauntings, deployed by Mardan through his use of the Satanic and by other Arab modernist poets through their use of Tammuz, the ancient Babylonian god of fertility, is precisely as an intervention into a world that, as Badr Shakir al-Sayyab stated,
has no poetry about it. The dominant values are non-poetic, the final word is for matter, not for the spirit . . . So what is the poet to do? He has returned to myths, to legends, which still retain their warmth because they are not part of this world; he has returned to them to use them as symbols and to build from them a world with which to defy the logic of gold and steel.Footnote 30
Mardan's deployments of the demonic share with Baudelaire a fundamental sense of the ephemeral and the metaphysical, linked to a tenuous existence at the margins of the city. But the presence of Satan is more frequent and imposing in the work of Mardan than Baudelaire, framing his encounters with women and guiding his explorations of bodily pleasure. In the first two stanzas of “Milad Shaytan,” a distinction is made between the speaker of the poem and ahl al-arḍ, the rest of humanity on Earth, whose monotonous, undifferentiated lives are occasionally agitated by the haunting of the devil, whose presence is eternal. Despite “drinking a thousand lives,” the devil's thirst is unquenched and his presence is perpetually on the margins, feeding off vice. This does not however extinguish his desire for more, a hunger that lurks at the margins of the material world, unseen yet guiding and infiltrating the actions of the masses of people.
The third stanza indicates a period of twenty years living discarded, atop the flesh of prostitutes in the gloom of a brothel. In Mardan's poetry, the frequent references to brothels function as a mobilization of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque. Unlike other contemporary deployments of the figure of the prostitute in Iraqi literature that functioned in a more transparently political way, Mardan's allegorical use of the prostitute closely parallels her function in the poetry of Baudelaire.Footnote 31 But unlike Mardan, Baudelaire's historical moment was of the emergence of the bourgeoisie as the class that shapes dominant political and cultural values, values that were predicated on the rejection of the carnivalesque in daily life and its increasing marginalization and repression—to be manifested in literature through acts Bakhtin associates with “the grotesque body” and the subversion, and inversion, of social hierarchies.Footnote 32 Bakhtin's theorization of the carnivalesque has been argued to be essential to the production of modernist literature in the Western canon. As M. Keith Booker has written, a “pervasive carnivalization” has been central to modernist texts such as T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses.Footnote 33 The function of the carnivalesque in modern literary production is varied, but the haunting of literary modernity by the carnivalesque is a symptom of its rejection in the repressed values of the bourgeois subject. Desire for the carnivalesque was embodied in the figure of the prostitute, whose body became the site of “codification, surveillance, regulation, and control.”Footnote 34 For Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire's prostitute is the allegory of modernity, a “saleswoman and wares in one.”Footnote 35 She serves not simply as the subject of Baudelaire's poetic expression, but as a model for his own behavior. The modern prostitute's identity is linked to the space of the city and the urban landscape, her flesh commodified en masse, reified and mediated increasingly, like all relations in the modern period, by the laws of capital. Simultaneously, her body acts “as a hieroglyph providing a trace to the sublime body, promising a connection to the sacred, which can, however, be maintained only for a fleeting moment.”Footnote 36
Mardan's deployments of the carnivalesque—through portraits of the brothel and the demonic—function in ways stylistically and thematically similar to Baudelaire and can be read as a kindred poetic haunting motivated by analogous sociohistorical conditions: the increasingly state-dominated public sphere, the ossified social and moral codes that policed individual behavior, and the alienation associated with the impersonal urban, material world. Yet there remains a dissonance between the spatial and temporal positioning of the poetics of Mardan and those of Baudelaire, and this dissonance requires us to historicize Mardan as a product of the local conditions that produced his poetics and, significantly, elicited a vociferous reaction from the state. If Baudelaire's poetics are today associated with the historical emergence of the bourgeoisie as the dominant social, political, and economic class in Europe, and the attending reification of material relations, how do we account for the poetics of Mardan in the colonial context of Baghdad, where the development of the bourgeoisie was incommensurable with that of Europe? Standard historiographies of the origins and development of the nascent Arab bourgeoisie overwhelmingly characterize it as an immature and underdeveloped class unable to meet its historical obligations to develop national industry, modernize agriculture, and effectively oppose European colonial interests.
Among Arab intellectuals, the small but increasingly influential bourgeoisie was often labeled a “comprador” class and was condemned as a “handmaiden of dependent development, which is to say no development at all.”Footnote 37 This recalls Frantz Fanon's famous characterization of the national bourgeoisie of the postcolonial world:
The national bourgeoisie in the underdeveloped countries is not geared to production, invention, creation, or work . . . its vocation is not to transform the nation but prosaically serve as a conveyor belt for capitalism, forced to camouflage itself behind the mask of neocolonialism . . . it mimics the Western bourgeoisie in its negative and decadent aspects without having accomplished the initial phases of exploration and invention that are the assets of this Western bourgeoisie.Footnote 38
Such characterizations of the emergent native bourgeoisie are useful insofar as they point to the integration of the colonial economies into a relationship of domination and exploitation with metropolitan economies. But they do little to account for the extent that the emergent local bourgeoisie impacted the local cultural and political spheres in ways disproportionate to its actual size. Recent scholarship has sought to delineate in greater detail the varied expressions and complexity of middle class modernity in the Arab world. In Being Modern in the Middle East, Keith Watenpaugh offers a conceptualization of the nascent Arab middle classes as “more than a neutral economic category,” one that instead
. . . constitutes an intellectual, social, and cultural construct linked to a set of historical and material circumstances; class is more than just one's relationship to the means of production or the accumulation of wealth . . . it is not simply a byproduct of industrialization (though this is an important factor), but should be understood in the context of new kinds of communicative technology, transportation, and urban forms, as well as high capitalism; and while classes emerge, they are also made and remade.Footnote 39
Locating the emergence of a bourgeois middle class as a transnational phenomenon that must be historicized spatially and temporally in each particular context, Watenpaugh's focus on the eastern Mediterranean, and Aleppo specifically, has important implications for similar processes in other parts of the Middle East.Footnote 40
By understanding the expression of modernity in the Middle East as correlated not simply with a particular set of economic conditions but also with the expression of particular political ideals and cultural production, we can begin to conceptualize “being modern” as a condition that was not exclusive to the middle class, but became part of a lived reality that found its expression in practices of everyday life and in cultural and literary texts like that of Mardan and similar writers. Apprehending the Baudelarian in a colonial space such as Baghdad requires us to understand its thematics as a rejection of bourgeois values while recognizing that those values were not necessarily tied to the political and economic hegemony of a dominant bourgeois class. In a modernizing, uneven Baghdad, the libertinism of the transgressive Baudelarian poet functions just as powerfully as a critique of the feudal landed order and its links to the dominant colonial power and to conservative religious and social institutions as it does against the small but burgeoning Iraqi middle class that sought to assert its own claims to the nation.
The poetics of Mardan can thus be read as an exterior intervention into the values of both the historically dominant elites and the emergent, diverse middle class. His work is directed toward educated, literate readers, inviting them into his poetics only to condemn them. This is accomplished in Qasaʾid ʿAriya in strident fashion immediately following the self-dedication of the text. In a message to his readers, Mardan positions himself in opposition to the reader:
To the Reader
I laugh hysterically each time I imagine your dear face as it transforms into a large question mark.
I laugh hysterically each time I picture you as the anger takes hold of you. I hurled my book in fury and disgust, and on your quivering lips I hurled a thousand and one curses.
Trust that you are not superior to me despite my filthiness. I live nakedly while you live hidden behind a thousand masks. My sincere advice to you is to avoid reading this collection if you fear your reality and the sight of the animal lurking in your depths.Footnote 41
Mardan's contempt for the reader's social uprightness is also a condemnation of the reader's pretense to enlightenment and of the fabricated layers of propriety that police middle-class behavior.Footnote 42 His rejection of the false purity of the reader, as opposed to his own filthiness, is an assertion of the fundamental alienation guiding modern life, one that requires the modern subject to hide “behind a thousand masks.” If Mardan's language here emphasizes the hygienic (his own filthiness versus the reader's sterility), it is also an emphatic rejection of romantic associations and nostalgic appropriations of the past. His hurling of “a thousand and one curses” is a reference to A Thousand and One Nights, the literary masterpiece of medieval Arabic literature synonymous with the city of Baghdad, which has guided nostalgic portrayals of the city's lost glory. Such a rejection of all traces of the romantic distinguishes Mardan from poets like Ilyas Abu Shabaka, whose work influenced Mardan but nevertheless retained romantic elements. Finally, references to the reader's alienation from his essential, animalistic nature is repeated throughout the collection, suggesting that becoming modern entails a fundamental alienation from the basic desires of the self.
The final stanzas of the poem “Milad Shaytan” capture the metaphysical haunting of the material world with references to the natural, bestial origins of man, origins that can never be fully repressed:
Wa-jiʾitnī al-yawm tabghīn al-hawwa qubalān
Bayḍāʾ tanḍaḥ bi-aḥlām wa-l-amal
Hayhāt lam tatruk al-ladhdhāt fī shafatī
Yā munyat al-nafs ghayr al-qayḥ wa-l-malal
You came to me today wanting kisses of love
White and overflowing with dreams and hope
But oh! Your kisses did not leave any pleasure on my lips
Oh my desire only pus and boredom
Ādaʿī al-ṭahr al-dunyā bi-ajmaʿihā
Taṭfū wa-taghṭus fī mustanqaʿ natin
Anā wa-ukhtī wa-ummī wa-l-wara wa-abī
Tasrī bi-aṣlābnā al-arjās min zaman
Shall I call on the world's purity
To float and plunge in a putrid swamp
Me and my sister and my mother and mankind and my father
Filth has been flowing in our bodies for ages
Wulidtu fī layla raʿnāʾ bārakahā
Rab al-jaḥīm fa lam yaʿlam bihā Allah
Fa jiʾtu fī ṣūrat al-shayṭān fa artaʿadat
ʿAla shifā adhāra al-ḥub āwā
I was born on a frivolous night blessed by
The lord of Hell and unknown to God
I came in the shape of Satan and I shuddered
On the lips of virgins of love seeking refuge
Qad kuntu azʿum annī mithilkum bashar
Law lam yakun jaddukum fi al-aṣl ḥaywānān
Majmūʿa min jarāthīm mushawwaha
Tadibbu fī janabāt al-arḍ alwānān
I used to pretend that I was human like you
If your ancestor were not originally an animal
Hordes of deformed germs
Crawling on the sides of earth
Lan yakhdaʿ al-nūr mithlī fī wujūhukum
Fa kullu qalb bihi li-l-rajis shayṭān
Yamtaṣṣ baʿḍukum baʿḍān fa daʿwatukum
Li-l-salim wa-l-ḥub taḍlīl wa-buhtān
Your innocent faces will not deceive me
For every heart has a filthy devil in it
You devour each other so your call
To peace and love is deception and liesFootnote 43
The first stanza begins with romantic associations—the purity of dreams and hopes, white and overflowing, that leave delight on the lips. Immediately, this vision is mocked as the poem's speaker abruptly shifts both language and tone, introducing bodily fluids (pus) and the image of defiled purity plunging into a putrid swamp. Flowing through the veins of his nuclear family (and mankind) is this false purity, handed down over the ages, a fiction maintained as truth. The speaker of the poem, blessed by Satan, portrays himself as an outcast, spreading vice to “virgins seeking refuge.” In the next stanza, the speaker shifts his discourse directly to the reader, interpellating him/her, as in his earlier message to the reader, into his existence by asserting that the reader's false reality was once his own. Unlike the reader, who continues to live behind a façade, the speaker of the poem no longer pretends to be human and suggests to the reader that his/her ancestor, too, is made of filthy germs from deep within the Earth. Finally, the poem concludes ominously, observing that attempts to repress natural urges, the obscene, the repugnant, will fail, and the final two lines create an image of incestuous intermingling, resulting in the irreconcilable cohabitation of peace and love with deception and lies.
Such thematic concerns hover over the rest of Mardan's collections. In the poem “Jarathim” (Germs), Mardan links piety with hypocrisy, lambasting the pious: “You and all of humanity without exception / are germs living on pustules.”Footnote 44 In his poem, “Li-l-Tin” (To Mud), Mardan's focus is on the erotic. The poem begins with the following sentence: Lan uḥib illa al-marʾā alatī taḥtaqir jamīʿ al-rajāl wa-tasjud quddāmī ānā waḥdī (I will only love a woman who despises all men and kneels at my feet alone).Footnote 45 The poem narrates a sexual encounter with an “impure” woman, likely a prostitute, and the momentary pleasure associated with fulfilling ephemeral and fleeting desires. “Love is nothing but desire,” declares the speaker of the poem, “so don't take away/Oh great whore your defiled mouth from mine.”Footnote 46 As the poem progresses, the speaker praises the impurity of his object of desire, telling her to “abandon discussions of virtue to the masses/who do not understand the unknown mysteries in life.” He urges his object of desire: “So be promiscuous oh daughter of Adam all of us/In our origins belong to defiled mud/Disgrace yourself and give to all those infatuated/What they desire of your burning body.”Footnote 47 The encouragement to promiscuity is clearly a rebellion against discourses of virtue, honor, and purity ascribed onto the female body. But in what sense is this rebellious profligacy liberating if it serves masculine pleasure? For Mardan's gendered poetics, the use of women's bodies to articulate a broader social critique ultimately inaugurates a sexual discourse predicated on the exploitation of the female body. But Mardan's sexual discourse was different from the prose narratives and poetry of his contemporaries, such as Fuʾad al-Takarli, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. Mardan's embrace of mud, dirt, and germs (jarāthīm) is a rejection of the discourse of ordered hygiene and social uplift present in works like al-Sayyab's poem “al-Mumis al-ʿAmyaʾ” (The Blind Prostitute) and Jabra's novel Hunters in a Narrow Street, set in 1950s Baghdad. While Jabra's fiction celebrated the transgressive elements that disrupted the sterile, disciplinary order transforming Baghdad, it did so from the vantage point of bourgeois revulsion, his characters refusing to partake in the pleasures Mardan's poetics embraces. In contrast to a writer like Jabra, who is perhaps the first Arab novelist to chronicle the perspectives and values of the Arab bourgeoisie, Mardan chooses to embrace the threat of filth and germs associated with transgressive sexual behavior rather than to order it or observe it from afar. If the ethos of the modern is to marginalize the filthy and unsightly, Mardan's discourse of embracing filth acts as a countercultural version of modernity, located specifically in the urban space rather than the rural, often conceived by modernists as the ideal pastoral space.
In Mardan's work, there is no attempt at social uplift, no direct political agenda of liberating women's bodies from traditional social arrangements or of linking women's freedom to overthrowing the colonial state, ubiquitous themes in the artistic output of what was a revolutionary period of aesthetic and cultural production in Baghdad. Instead, his emphasis on pleasure and the embrace of the transgressive—spaces, gestures, acts, bodies, dirt—articulates a different kind of politics, one that displaces the political onto the body and rejects programs of discipline on acts of pleasure. To view Mardan's poetics as divested of political content, as rebellious and nihilistic poetry without the commitment to anticolonialism prevalent in the period, is to misapprehend his place and his import. Beyond his neglected contributions to the evolution of modernist Arabic poetry, Mardan's poetry occupies a space on the margins of the cultural politics of 1950s Baghdad. In assessing how to understand and interpret a poet like Mardan, whose use of Baudelaire guides his own poetic expression and who has been regarded largely as an anomalous curiosity, simply reproducing the Baudelarian in another time and space, I suggest that we must locate him firmly within the local social and political context of his historical moment. What this means is that the “presence” of Baudelaire in the work of a poet like Mardan—and this has ramifications for any discussion of literary borrowing and the migration of cultural forms—is not the appropriation or reproduction of a static set of ideas; rather, as Kristin Ross writes in her important study of the French poet Rimbaud, it is about “the embracing of a situation, a posture in the world . . . the invention or dream of new social relations. What is transmitted is not a solitary, reified literary monument but rather the often prescient strategies that constructed and mobilized it.”Footnote 48 These strategies are rooted not simply in the discursive migration of the text from one tradition to another but in the material circumstances of a capitalist modernity. The process is one of “historical relays” whereby Baudelaire's thematic usefulness in Mardan's particular space and time is to lend itself to be transformed and displaced, yet simultaneously inhabit a common experience encountering the modern.
