1963 Iraq Coup – Fall of ʿAbd al-Karīm Qāsim’s regime in Iraq

• Ismāʿīl Fahd Ismāʿīl’s (1940 – 2018, Kuwait) Kānat al-Samāʾ Zarqāʾ(‘The sky was blue’, 1970), al-Mustanqaʿāt al-Ḍawʾiyyah (‘Light swamps’, 1971), and al-Ḥabl (‘The rope’, 1972) depict life in Iraq before the fall of ʿAbd al-Karīm Qāsim and the atmosphere of political repression and terror and its destructive effects on the mental state of the protagonists (reference) (also in G: Dysfunctional Governance: Oppression and Dictatorship).

In Kānat al-Samāʾ Zarqāʾ, a young intellectual is married off to a young woman who forbids him from buying books. They have little girl together. One day, he starts an affair with a woman who visits them with her family. The narrator tells his story and memories from a café chair in a timespan of five hours, reflecting on his personal life as well as the intellectual restrictions he faces from his immediate environment, but also form the broader social and political context.

al-Mustanqaʿāt al-Ḍawʾiyyah, main character is the intellectual writer Humayda, who is imprisoned on the charge of manslaughter. Humayda mocks the regime, but soon develops a friendship with the prison warden who discovers his intellectual identity and takes him on outings outside the prison. Nevertheless, Humayda never runs away when unshackled outside the prison walls, implying that life inside and outside prison do not differ in Iraq of the 1950s and 1960s (reference).

In al-Ḥabl, the protagonist, an unnamed Iraqi from Basra, has written a satiric poem about the Qāsim government and is interrogated, tortured, and considered a political-extremist because of that (reference). This autobiographical element of the novel reflects on the authors own experience. The protagonist is eventually smuggled out of Iraq to Kuwait.