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• Title: Political Modernism, Jabra, And the Baghdad Modern Art Group (Jabra Ibrahim Jabra; Baghdad, Iraq) (Critical Essay)
• Author : Nathaniel Greenberg
• Release Date : January 01, 2010
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 110 KB

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More than any other prose author of his generation, the Palestinian exile and Iraqi citizen Jabra Ibrahim Jabra strove to integrate Western epistemologies into the creation of a local aesthetic that served both his political stance toward the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and the role of modernist art in the post-World War II era. The principal translator of Shakespeare, Faulkner, and Becket to Arabic, Jabra's knowledge of Western literature did not define his understanding of the craft; rather, it helped him in expanding the horizon of experimentation in the Arabic literary form (see Neuwirth). Poet, painter, novelist, and critic, the diversity of his talents suggests a greater concern for the ideas implicit in art than the medium itself. His first two novels--Passage in the Silent Night (1955) and Hunters in a Narrow Street (1960), both written in English--reveal in the words of his former student and lifelong critic Issa J. Boullata, a "deep concern with the contemporary Arab city" ("Living" 216). In step with the visual avant-garde leanings of the leading figure of the Baghdad Modern Art Group, Jawad Selim, Jabra sought to confront the new kineticism of the post-war city with a similarly dynamic philosophy, existentialism. Jabra believed the novel was the only form capable of capturing the "revolutionary fire" of the times and conversely igniting in the reader the kind of radical immanence that was necessary to rattle the quiescence of traditionalism that in his eyes had allowed for the loss of Palestine (Jabra, "Jabra" 54). The uniqueness of Jabra's art derived from a preoccupation with acts of spontaneity, self awareness through internal division, and a form of activism based not on alliance building or political posturing but a commitment to existential and temporal affectivity. The philosophy behind his novels developed first in his paintings. As in a blueprint we find in these paintings the fundamentals of an acutely existentialist eye. However, his art and the importance of the epistemology of European existentialism were always at risk of compromising the very subject-centered activism he purported. In examining several of his paintings, a work of criticism and his last two novels--Bahth 'an Walid Mas'ud (In Search of Walid Masoud) and Yawmiyyat Sarab 'Affan (The Journals of Sarab Affan)--I discuss the roots and political energy of his artistic projects: its limitations and ultimately its disappearance as a mode of viable political aestheticism. Jabra was one of the earliest Palestinian intellectuals to write on the experience of exile and the necessity and difficulty of fashioning an aesthetic to express the experience were apparent in his work by the early 1950s. In a 1979 essay Jabra recalls meeting British historian Arnold Toynbee in Baghdad in 1949 and quotes him saying the Palestinian ordeal of exile seemed comparable "to the expulsion by the Turks of the Greek thinkers and artists from Byzantium in 1453," who went on "to spread throughout Europe and were a major factor in ending the European dark ages and bringing about the Renaissance" (Jabra, "Palestinian" 85). Jabra drew a similar comparison to the Jews, who, like Palestinian exiles, were "knowledge peddlers" traveling with no more than a memory of home and a commitment to the recovery of what had been lost ("Palestinian" 77). Although he evaded the desperation felt by many Palestinians who fled in 1948, he would never return to the land of his birth. Alienation from his personal past mirrored what he perceived as the alienation of the Arab people from their collective past. But unlike the rest of the Arab world the heritage he had lost was not a buried concept but a separate reality. Perhaps the result of an overwhelming intellectual desire to integrate the existential experience of exile into the explosion of ideas that had taken root in the post-War period, Jabra's work assumed an expository, didactic quality that has obfuscated his rec

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