Ibrāhīm Aḥmad’s The Guitar of Agatha Christie: Postcolonial and Biofictional Perspectives on Iraq’s Post-World War I Past and Post-2003 Present

Abstract

In recent years, several anglophone biographical novels devoted to Agatha Christie have been published. Some of them focus on her 1926 disappearance in England, while others allude to this incident as a significant event from her past. The article investigates Iraqi author Ibrāhīm Aḥmad’s The Guitar of Agatha Christie (2016), an Arabic novel that tells the story of Christie’s disappearance in Baghdad in 1949. This novel is considered a postcolonial, postmodern and biographical novel in the article, and thus examined with reference to a number of studies on postcolonial fiction, biofiction and Genette’s narratology. Emphasis is placed on its narrative structure and “dual temporality”, a term introduced by Michael Lackey to describe how a biographical subject is employed in a narrative as a means for reflecting upon both his or her times and present-day reality. The article seeks answers to the question of how Aḥmad’s historical and cultural background impacts his vision of particular events in Christie’s life. The article concludes by identifying four diegetic and temporal levels in the novel that resembles a portmanteau narrative. Agatha Christie and the story of her disappearance serve as a pretext to discuss Iraq’s post-World War I past and post-2003 present. Several other stories are included in this narrative, all of which involve encounters between representatives of the East and the West.