It is a vivid account of the wanton and brutal treatment of the Iraqi people by Saddam Husseins feared secret police and of the arbitrariness of life under tyranny. The senselessness of his arrest and the torture he and other prisoners endure drive Mustafa to see Hussein’s Iraq as a place where “being free only meant one thing: imminent arrest.” Mahmoud Saeeds devastating novel evokes the works of Kafka, Solzhenitsyn and Elie Wiesel. Saeed’s novel depicts the fear and despair of Baghdad schoolteacher Mustafa Ali Noman as he is shuttled from prison to prison. Mahmoud Saeed currently teaches intermediate and advanced Arabic langauge courses at DePaul University, as well as Arab Culture and Iraqi Political History. The novel is based on the true experience of Saeed’s experiences as a political prisoner in Iraq. Saddam City, published in 2004 by Dar Al-Saqi in London, is Saeed’s most famous novel. His most important novels after Rue Ben Baraka are The Girls of Jacob, The World Through the Angel’s Eyes, I am the One Who Saw, and Trilogy of Chicago.Īfter fleeing Iraq in 1985, Saeed had to leave his family behind in the United Arab Emirates to live as a political refugee in the United States. Authorities banned the publication of any book written by him from 1963 to 2008. Rue Ben Barka was published fifteen years later in Egypt, Jordan, and Beirut in 1997. The authorities prevented his novel Rhythm and Obsession from being published in 1968, and banned his novel Rue Ben Barka, in 1970. In 1963, the coup of the government destroyed his two novels, The Old Case and The Strike, which he deposited in Iraqi Union Guild. He issued a collection of short stories, “Port Saeed and other stories” in 1957. He wrote an award-winning short story in the Newspaper “Fatal Iraq, Newspaper” in 1956. He started writing short stories at an early age. Born in Mosul, Saeed has written more than twenty novels and short story collections, and hundreds of articles. Mahmoud Saeed (born 1939) is an Iraqi-born American award-winning novelist. Translated into English by Lake Forest College sociology professor Ahmad Sadri, Saddam City was penned in the early 1980s as a “condemnation of all dictators and all tyrants wherever they are.” On Monday, October 3rd we discussed Saddam City ( أنا الذي راء ) by Mahmoud Saeed, in which Iraqi schoolteacher and novelist Mahmoud Saeed, arrested numerous times by former dictator Saddam Hussein, recalls the harrowing months he spent in prison.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |