By Hussain Sana

Muthaffar Al-Nawwab is an Iraqi poet who was born in the 30s and passed away about two years ago. Like every Iraqi of his generation, his life story is a walkthrough of Iraqi modern history and politics — a life filled with noble sorrow and tragedies, but also with the darkest sense of humor and the pleasant moments of a “belle époque”.

He lived between Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, European metropoles and other places, spending most of his life on the runaway or in exile. His poetry is known to be “the smuggled poem” for the amount of lines he had to hide and smuggle out of prisons. It is said that his aristocratic Shiite family came to Iraq after his grandfather, a ruler in one of India’s states was exiled by British colonialism. Muthaffar became a teacher of Arabic in an Iraqi school but was fired for his political leftist affiliation and stayed unemployed for a few years, paying the price for his opinions.

He was imprisoned during the Iraqi monarch rule and got tortured. After the coup in 1963, he escaped Iraq to the Iranian Kingdom, in the hope to reach the Soviet Union, only to get imprisoned and tortured by the Shah’s intelligence and state security (SAVAK) who later returned him to the Iraqi authorities.

Back in Iraq, a court sentenced him to death by execution for one of his poems, but the ruling was reduced later to life in prison. He escaped prison (what a tragic comedy!) and hid in Baghdad. Then in Ahwar in Southern Iraq, hiding among farmers in the countryside, he joined a communist group which tried to topple the regime through a guerrilla warfare launched from the Ahwar, in a clear influence and inspiration of Castro’s Cuban revolution.

Needless to say, their revolution failed, with the group members going on different paths between prison, death and exile. The Baathist regime would go further decades later by drying the beautiful Ahwar area to prevent any refuge of opposition in nature, where regime forces would find a hard time searching for and capturing dissidents.

Muthaffar was known for some of the most beautiful poetry that was turned into pop songs, writing about deep love, sorrow, heroism, separation, hope, dreams, hallucinations, pain endurance and other themes. In contradiction, he was also known for some of the most radical poems (like a typical communist!), and political poetry lines that are filled with rage, anger and curses.

At times, he cursed many Arab leaders and regimes for their failures and defeats. Other times, like in his poem “A Poem from the World of Cats”, he sarcastically mocked Arab leaders. I guess you can only reach that level of sarcasm and mockery after hitting rock bottom in tragedy and despair.

One more thing Muthaffar was known for is extremely rude and vulgar poetry. Many Arab intellects and poets did not consider him one of them, arguing that his poetry is nothing more than lines of curses, insults and vulgarity (and it was!). In one of his late writings he wrote:

“Forgive my sadness, my wine, my anger, my harsh words.

Some of you will say vulgar, it is fine.

Show me a more vulgar position than the one we are at.”

Speaking about the political and social reality of Arabs, he said:

“I was criticized for hyper focusing on Palestine in my writings, for sounding like a propagandist, for writing as if I am insulting sometimes. I do not intend that, I would love to be fair and just, to write beautifully and academically. But show me a more propagandist, a more insulting reality than the one we are at.”

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