“CREATING A CITY THROUGH STORYTELLING”. BAGHDAD: BIOGRAPHY OF A CITY BY NAJIM WĀLĪ

The article discusses the Iraqi writer Najim Wālī’s Baghdād: sīrat madīna (Baghdad: Biography of a City) (2015), which combines some characteristics of the biography of a place and autobiography. It examines Wālī’s work as an exemplary model of nuṣūṣ al-makān al-dhātī (texts about subjective spaces), a relatively new genre on the Iraqi literary scene. According to the Iraqi scholar Nadā Nāṣir Sharhān, texts within this genre are written mainly by Iraqi authors in exile, but also by those who lived in the country before the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003 and remained there after this massive political change. Texts about subjective spaces juxtapose two contrasting images of a place: its “actual” current image and its idealised past image. This article scrutinizes some of the specific features of nuṣūṣ al-makān al-dhātī in Wālī’s work, including the impact of his exilic perspective. It briefly explores the narrative structure of Baghdād: sīrat madīna and the reasons behind the narrator’s real and imaginary journeys through the streets of Baghdad. It likewise examines an exemplary “fragmentary subjective space” in the neighbourhood of al-Bāb al-Sharqī.