Difficult variations: Saadi Youssef’s impossible returns

Abstract

Abstract This article traces the dialectics of exile and return in some of the late poems Saadi Youssef, the most important Iraqi poet in the last half century and one of the pioneers of modern Arabic poetry. It pays particular attention to the effects the Anglo-American invasion of 2003 and the disintegration and dismemberment of Iraq on Youssef’s poetic discourse and the ways in which he attempts to reconstruct and represent a vanishing homeland and articulate his relationship to its landscape. It addresses Youssef’s poetic conversations with Muḥammad Mahdīal-Jawāhirī (1899–1997), another great Iraqi poet who, like Youssef, lived much of his life exiled from Iraq.