Muhammad Khudair: The Eighties exposes the deception of the equation that equates the creative and age periods

This year, the Iraqi cultural community celebrates the eighties of the storyteller and novelist Muhammad Khudair, who is considered one of the creative and pioneer figures in Iraqi and Arab storytelling, and one of the important symbols in Iraqi culture. Through six decades of writing, he formulated his own style and distinguished literary presence.
Khudair was born in Basra in 1942, where he obtained a certificate from the Teachers’ House. He published his first story in the Iraqi “Al-Adeeb” magazine in 1962, and his first collection, “The Black Kingdom” was published in 1972. He received a number of awards, including the Sultan Al Owais Award in 2004, and the “Golden Pen” award from the Union of Writers in Iraq in 2008. She met him.” Middle East” to highlight some details of his writing experience.

> At a time when we celebrate your eighties, we remember that we should celebrate your sixties in writing, as it was the first story you published in 1962 in the “Iraqi Adib” magazine… When you look back at a distance of sixty years, what do you talk about your experience?
Eighty is a hypothetical time limit, from which I recall past life’s stations, quiet and violent memories, and days filled with wonder and delicious sorrow. When I turned back, I saw the young boy and he had gone from making “school wall flyers” to writing the short story, amid a turbulent social turmoil. This was not a smooth transition, as the “Sixty” was a leap over the regular school fence to the bustling Thawra Street. This far was not only the year of graduating from high school, but also witnessed the assassination attempt on the Iraqi leader Abdul Karim Qassem, the flight of Yuri Gagarin in space, and the demonstrations of mass support for the Algerian revolution. It so happened that a year after my graduation in 1959, I was appointed as a teacher in an elementary school in the countryside of Nasiriyah Governorate. I took with me my idiocy and my civic selves and mixed them with the marshes’ wonder, serenity, and social and natural depth. This mixture resulted in the writing of the first mature story under the title “Al-Nisani” which was published by the Iraqi Writers Union magazine in 1962. The story’s subject included scenes of the wheat harvest in which farm workers from neighboring southern governorates participate in addition to the farmers of the marshes. It was a work from which I gained the idea of ​​choosing characters by their real names, a structural flaw that I did not repeat in my subsequent stories, which were contained in my first collection (The Black Kingdom) published in 1972.
> In “The Book of Contracts,” some critics believe that the texts it contains are extracted from your biography and simulate your life, and if you try to negate this “suspicion” with doses of imagination, and assuming lives and destinies… What do you say about that?
The “Book of Contracts” included two important chapters, dedicated to recounting my distant personal experiences. In the “eighty” section, I wrote stories that take place underground, in which I anticipate my life, which is shared with me in imagining a group of residents of a city under the flame of the sun. As for the hypothetical “ninety” section, it contained a different kind of anticipation under the label “experiences in death.” More importantly than these two imaginary scenarios is the narrative coherence I achieved in the two chapters, which was evident in my recent books, which I produced under a philosophical subjective feeling, which I explained in one of my articles. I think that the life of the Iraqi writer, and the Arab in general, is divided into two chapters, or two hypothetical limits, which are the chapter of “Al-Kawous” and the chapter on “The Law”. In the first chapter, the writer’s life takes a chaotic and wild turn, which takes him and his texts to the sky; But it settles and calms down and does not leave the earth in the chapter “law”. Perhaps the second chapter, “The Law” is what imprinted my last texts with the character of an autobiography, as the writer supplies his narrative texts with the treasury of a forgotten and neglected age in the corners of the past years.
> There is some connection between the “Black Kingdom” of your first important group, and your narratives that you recently wrote… Do you think there is a natural connection between them? Or do you think he has matured in writing?
Rather, it is a basic structural transition in vision and formation that reflects the narrator’s search for a final settlement in the midst of the “eighty” zigzag journey between seasons and age stations. I do not mean the regularity of life and writing in my previous answer to my chapter “Al Kawes and the Law”, as I do not feel a technical development that is categorically responsive to an advanced stage of my life, but rather the opposite, as the eighties expose the deception of the equation that equates the creative and age-times. The writer may precede his evolutionary time with what he produces of “wise” texts in his youth, and he may feel the accelerating current of years in his old age and produce what he had been slower in producing before (the number of books published in the last period and their abundance compared to the first Kawas period). In order to demonstrate this overlap between the two hypothetical terms, the causal and the law, I give an example of the “Kitab” boy who feels anticipating his age and temporal growth when he concludes the Holy Qur’an (memorizing it by heart). At some point in my life, I was that child – the boy of the book – who stuttered because of his “seal” of the Qur’an, and thought that he had lived the life of one of the “people of the cave.”
> Language is the main obsession in Muhammad Khudair’s narrative world, at the expense of events and dialogue. In your texts from the beginning, narrative sentences charged with significance, I see that they are outside the art of the short story, with its customary definition… What do you think?
– On the contrary, I think that the narrative language formed, grew, and settled on its market (its last narrative field in particular, that is, the field of autobiographical texts, is strong and experienced). The reason for this consistency and linguistic growth is due to the strength of the narrative reference that charged the texts with maximum significance and far-reaching goals. Language is a being that grows and intensifies its return through continuous self-education and age-testing of unique themes that the writer does not participate in formulating with others. Without a strong theme, language is disrupted and does not play its role in noticing and ‘hairing’ – from poetics – and dies out like a hearth of fire. Imagine with me the theme of the story “The Hearth’s Tale” from my first collection. Can it ignite with other tales of the old woman who visits the family of the absent soldier regularly every evening? It is not war that ignites the hearth of tales, but the hearts engulfed in it are the ones who write their story with the references they possess of pain and separation through the tongue of perennial grandmothers over the age of eighty, or those who have exceeded ages and reached the end of the hypothetical limit of the narrative inherited through the centuries.
> In your “Quarry” group, you deal with the October 2019 demonstrations, and you put the October revolutionaries against the German revolutionaries who brought down the Berlin Wall in 1989… To what extent did the “quarry” stories describe this historical event?
– In an article of mine from the book “Letters from the Cancer Hole” titled “It’s Missing What Has Been Missed And What Comes,” I reviewed the “misses” of an old writer, who experienced important events such as revolution, war, dictatorship, siege and occupation, for a whole century, without giving strong testimony about them. He let those dangerous incidents go as if they were a terrifying phantom that touched him in a dream and robbed him of his will and his tongue; So, in his old age, he is faced with a special event, a protest or a popular uprising, which has a special taste that combines the flavors of the “passed” past with the present “Shawat” in one kitchen. The October 2019 incidents erupted to ignite the faint tone in previous texts that revolved around reality and did not break into it from within. Reality is ready on a plate prepared by Marx and Hannah Arendt in the text of the first group Under the Bridge, and complex characters who have come down from the greatest “falls” of the writer’s eightie life are gathered. I think that the stories of the quarry are a fair compensation, not for the writer of the first text, but for the characters born from the womb of the new generations, and experienced the great revolution in the realistic expression of the old generations. Breaking the revolutionary “taboo” became possible and permissible by replacing the dystopian imagination with the utopian imagination that once prevailed in the stories of the past. The theme of dystopia worked in the deep layer of the “quarry” texts, especially in the single story with this title, by marrying the revolution and the epidemic (Covid-19) to indicate a direct indication of its stage.
> You said to me once in one of our conversations: Whoever is led to the writing workshop is like a prisoner condemned to eternity, which is a frightening fate, because he crucifies me like Prometheus… Is it what makes you incline to the essential and essential of experiences and knowledge, and believe that “not everything we write is relevant? Values”?
– In many reviews (which I included in my theoretical biography in three books: The New Story/Narrative and The Book/The Garden in the Summer) I wondered about the usefulness of writing, whether it accompanies one literary genre and one way of seeing reality. In this hypothetical limit – the eighty – I ask the same question: Have we written something of value? Did we not confine ourselves to a narrow angle, and did not open it up to the many possibilities that different writers from the world before us realized? What are these capabilities in the closest designations?
The disintegration of central world systems (dominant ideologies) alerted us to the death of the great classic narratives: realism, symbolism and surrealism, and sub-narratives witnessed a fundamental shift towards “truth narrative”, a type that breaks the barrier of imagination and displaces the illusion of realistic simulation in favor of writing that is more like a journalistic report, and in its best forms It is more personal. In this type of narration, the “real narrators” provide important testimonies about their era (Kundera, Saramago, Galeano, Isabel Allende, Kenzo Buru Oy, Paul Auster, Carol Joyce Oates…). In this limitation of the great displacement to simulate reality, the direction of an ancient and disciplined art, such as the short story, may shift and be biased towards telling the truth, which is carried out by an effective narrator, who does not hide behind the back of an imaginary narrator and artificial accidents. As a short story narrator, I experimented with a secondary form of storytelling, “narrative sketch”, trying to discover its potential and return it to the main narrative track, after developing its journalistic nature. It is a transition similar to the evolution of plastic arts and cinema, based on new experiments in pop art and digital media. It is also a temporary salvation from the crises of the narrative and the blockage of its true course.