Poetics of Exile and Identity: The Case of Modern Iraqi Poetry

Abstract

In contrast to the postmodernist and postcolonialist glorification of “hybridity” and “loss of identity”, which in effect often serves only to bolster existing lines of demarcation guarding both literary being and literary expression, modern Iraqi poets, who played a vital role in the formation and rejuvenation of Arabic poetry in the twentieth century, while formed by the experience of exile that helped to bring them closer to world literary heritage, remained very much bound both to the rich, national, cultural heritage and to the contemporary social circumstances that affected the lives of the Iraqi people. Far from wanting to escape national identity into a vague “inbetween” state of postmodernist “unbelonging”, these poets were, in fact, instrumental in the very formation of a modern Iraqi national identity; an identity, furthermore, that far from the connotations of narrowness or xenophobia it may sometimes acquire, was truly cosmopolitan and open to the rich heritage both of world culture and of international literary practice..