Gaib Tuma Farman – His Life and Works
Gaib Tuma Farman to be awarded a Katara Prize for Arabic Fiction 2020, and the winners in the categories
07.11.2020G aib Tuma Farman, who began his career as a poet but became famous for his prose works, was born into a poor family in a lower-class neighborhood in Baghdad in 1927[1]. This environment was the beginning of his acquaintance with Communist and socialist ideas[2] and greatly influenced his writings, as can easily be observed in his characters and their surroundings.
Contrary to expectations, Farman did not become as well-known as his pioneering role in Iraqi literature would suggest. Iraqi-born academic and translator Yasmeen Hanoosh correctly counts Farman among the three most prominent Iraqi prose writers, all of them Marxists, together with Fu’ad al- Takarli (1927-2008) and Mahdi ‘Isa al-Saqr (1927-2006), who, from the 1960s onwards, initiated the change toward literary modernism[3]; yet, his works are relatively rare in libraries. Khalid al-Misri justifiably claims that there are two main reasons for this: his absence in practice from the Iraqi literary scene and the Leftist political leanings that caused him to be persecuted in his homeland and then driven into exile. He adds that these two reasons are interrelated. In fact, even before he was exiled, the Iraqi censor intervened in the contents of his works and at times also prevented their dissemination.[4] Farman managed to travel and to study at Cairo University already at the end of 1947[5]. There he encountered various ideas and confronted the literary need to introduce new methods of thought and to connect his artistic work with life itself. He became acquainted with the pro-Western Coptic thinker Salama Musa (1887-1958) and Nobel Prize laureate Najib Mahfuz (1911-2006), simultaneously with his journalistic work[6]. Musa’s Marxist ideas and Mahfuz’s stories influenced Farman immensely, adding to his own experiences as a youngster growing up in a poor neighborhood, and the influence of the Russian, French and American works of literature that he read[7].
A fter returning to Iraq in 1951 Farman applied for employment, but all his applications were rejected.[8] On 24 November 1952, two days after the protests of the Iraqi intifada began, and on the very same day that the new Prime Minister Nur al-Din Mahmud declared martial law and banned demonstrations, [9] Farman himself was arrested and placed in the Abu Ghrayb detention camp. Until recently it was only known that Farman and editors and journalists of the National Democratic Party (NDP) were arrested[10], but not the exact date of the arrest. However, an acquaintance of Farman, the late Iraqi-born Jewish journalist Murad al-’Imari (1923-2012), revealed the precise date. Farman and al-’Imari were both arrested on the very same day. Al-’Imary was not a member of the NDP, but contributed greatly to its paper, al-Ahali, just like Farman. The arrest date was given to me by al-’Imary in an interview I conducted with him in Jerusalem in April 2001, contributing another piece of information about the connection between Farman and the activities of the intifada in 1952, as well as between him and the party[11].
In 1954, when the Iraqi al-Ahali newspaper where he worked was closed by the authorities for political reasons [12] Farman had to leave Iraq again. He went to Syria and Lebanon to look for a job as a teacher[13]. In Lebanon he participated in a conference of the Arab Writers Union and played a prominent role in its New Literature Committee. Afterwards he continued to Egypt. Those were years in which Farman was alternately forced to travel abroad and forbidden to do so, having been put on a “black list” by the authorities, who suspected him of sympathizing with the ideas of Fahd, the leader of the Iraqi Communist Party (1901-1949)[14].
Subsequently Farman found himself in Egypt once again, where he published his al-Hukm al-aswad fi al-Iraq (1957), in which he criticized the Iraqi monarchy. Afterwards he traveled to China, where he worked for the Chinese news agency in Peking for about two years. He came back to Iraq after the monarchy was toppled and it became a republic in 1958. This development filled him with great hope, as it did very many other young Iraqi intellectuals. In 1960 Farman decided to leave Iraq once again and settled in Moscow, where he worked as a translator[15]. In fact, Farman is probably the Iraqi writer who is more closely associated with the Eastern Bloc than any other, although his writings focused on Iraq itself, as suggested by Johanna Sellman[16]. The choice of Moscow as home may have been due to the fact that it gave Farman the chance to read his admired Russian authors in their native language, as suggested by al-Misri [17]. However, it is quite likely that Farman decided to settle in Moscow not only because of the city’s cultural wealth, but also because he was in financial need[18] and suffered from bad health, and medical care in Russia was free[19]. He returned to Iraq for visits when it was possible, especially after 1969, when he was given back his revoked citizenship[20]. In Moscow Farman married a Russian woman, with whom he had a son.
1. Yoav Di-Capua, “Jabarti of the Twentieth Century: The National Epic of ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Rafi’i and Other Egyptian Histories,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 36(2004), 429-450.
2. Orit Bashkin, The Other Iraq (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
3. On understanding history through other readings, see: Yoav Di-Capua, “Trauma and Other Historians (an introduction),” Historical Reflections, vol. 41, issue 3, winter 2015, 3-4, 6.
4. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth- Century Europe (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973)- On White, his successors and opponents see: Di-Capua, “Trauma,” 1-12.
5. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 51.
6. Ibid., 81-100.
7. Hayden White, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesid Effect (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 29.
8. White, Tropics of Discourse, 81-100.
9. Frank Lentricchia, “Reading History with Kenneth Burke” in: Hayden White and Margaret Brose (eds.), Representing Kenneth Burke (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press,1982), 119-149; Lloyd S. Kramer, “Literature, Criticism, and Historical Imagination: the Literary Challenge of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra” in: Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 97-128.
10. Nico Israel, Outlandish (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 17.
11. Ibid. 75-122, esp. 77.
12. Ibid. 81.
13. Ibid., 82-83.
14. Noga Efrati, “Competing Narratives: Histories of the Women’s Movement in Iraq, 1910-1958,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Volume 40, Issue 03 (2008), 445-466; idem., Women in Iraq: Past Meets Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
15. Hilla Peled-Shapira, ‘“Permitted and Forbidden’”—Conventions of Relations between the Sexes and Their Contravention as Reflected in the Novels of Gaib Tuma Farman,” Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 49, issue 3 (2013), 402-13.
16. Ibid.
17. Noga Efrati, “The Other ‘Awakening’ in Iraq: The Women’s Movement in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, November 2004, 31(2), 153-173.
18. Haytham Bahoora, “Baudelaire in Baghdad: Modernism, the Body, and Husayn Mardan’s Poetics of the Self,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45 (2013), 313-329.
19. Ibid.
20. Sami Zubaida, Islam: the People & the State (London: I.B.Tauris, 1993).
