Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, Cold War Poet

Abstract

In the autumn of 1959, the Iraqi modernist poet Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb (1926–1964) published a series of perplexing autobiographical vignettes entitled I Used to be a Communist (Kuntu shiyū‘iyyan) in the Baghdad daily, Al-Ḥurriyya (Freedom). For 17 weeks, al-Sayyāb detailed his involvement with the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), his decision to leave in 1954 and his reflections on the present state of Iraqi culture and politics. Al-Sayyāb’s writing attempts to settle personal scores and reveal uncomfortable secrets, but it does more than that—it serves to plant al-Sayyāb’s flag within a Cold War that is as local as it is global. Indeed, its publication took place in the shadow of al-Sayyāb’s emerging relation with the Central Intelligence Agency front organization, the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Kuntu shiyū‘iyyan is more than a key document in the shifting political tides of 1959; it is also a literary-critical work, and indeed the only major prose work by one of modern Iraq’s most important poets. The author would like to thank Qussay Al-Attabi, Elizabeth Holt, Kevin Jones, and Levi Thompson for their astute comments and help on earlier drafts of this essay. My special appreciation to Elizabeth Holt for so generously sharing the jewels she has been extracting from the IACF mines.