1990 – 1991 Iraq invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War
The invasion of Kuwait and the following Gulf War led to the second big migration wave of writers from Iraq (the first being after the coming to power of the Baʿth party in 1968). The long years of war and the economic embargo’s (from 1991 – 2003) that accompanied the Gulf War furthermore characterized the 1990s generation with pragmatism, solemnness, nihilism, and chaos (Yaseem Hanoosh. 2012. “Contempt: State Literati vs. Street Literati in Modern Iraq.” JAL 43: 372-408, p. 395, 396).
The Gulf War was one of the first asymmetrical ‘postmodern’ or ‘virtual’ mode of war. This meant that Iraqi soldiers did not experience the war existentially and did not feel a sense of agency during war (Ikram Masmoudi. 2015. War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, p. 86). Rather, Iraqi soldier felt obsolete, inadequate, and degraded fighting with an enemy they only rarely see, mostly only when they are captured. Many novels on the war deal with the feeling of fighting a ‘ghost war’.
Another effect of the Gulf War was that people came to doubt the longevity of Saddam Hussein’s authoritarianism, which began to undermine the isolation of Iraqi culture and the literary stagnation under the Baʿthist rule. To counter this fact, the regime attempted to include in the cultural administrative body a group of young literati who promoted a modernist trend and promoted prose poetry. In 1991 for example, a young prose writer from a Baʿthist family, Khālid Muṭlaq, replaced ʿAdnān al-Ṣāyigh, an influential state poet from the earlier generation, as the president of young Iraqi writers Muḥammad Ghāzi al-Akhras. 2011 (Kharīf al-Muthaqqaf fi-l-ʿIrāq (‘The Autumn of the Intellectual in Iraq’) al-Tanwīr: Beirut, p. 39).
Thirdly, the Gulf War and the resulting presence of international institutions in the region increased the interest in Iraqi and Kuwaiti literary production. Condemning Saddam Hussein and the Baʿth regime, the neoliberal world suddenly became interested in voices of the Iraqi margins, and the official narrative of Iraqi culture began to implode (Yaseem Hanoosh. 2012. “Contempt: State Literati vs. Street Literati in Modern Iraq.” JAL43: 372-408, p. 394-5). This gave way to new literati from different regions, social classes and religious beliefs, whose voice was not heard before.
In Kuwait, the literary output had until the Gulf War been focused on the local, Kuwaiti society. But its involvement in the war, and the subsequent literature that described this experience, led to an increased interest in Kuwaiti literature (al-Kabīr al-Dādīsī. 2018. Masārāt al-Riwāyah al-ʿArabiyyah al-Muʿāṣirah. Muʾassah al-raḥāb al-ḥadīthah: Bayrūt, p. 20).