Author's note: Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Berlin-based research program Europe in the Middle East—The Middle East in Europe and at the University of Colorado's Center for Asian Studies; I am grateful for comments and suggestions offered by those in attendance. I give special thanks to Sinan Antoon for his vital encouragement and critical comments on an earlier version of this paper. I also thank Kristin Ross, Hala Halim, Deepti Misri, Janice Ho, Najeeb Jan, and four anonymous IJMES reviewers for their helpful critiques and suggestions.

¹ Mardan, Husayn, Qasaʾid ʿAriya (Beirut: Dar al-Jadid, 2007), 9Google Scholar, originally published in 1949. I will be citing from the Dar al-Jadid edition, which includes court proceedings and arguments made on Mardan's behalf by his defense attorney Safaʾ al-Urfali, originally published in the newspaper al-ʿAlam al-ʿArabi. All translations are mine.

² LaCapra, Dominick, “Memory, Law, and Literature: The Cases of Flaubert and Baudelaire,” in History, Memory and the Law, ed. Sarat, Austin and Kearn, Thomas (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 95.Google Scholar Mardan consciously mobilized the thematics of Baudelaire's poetry in his work, though al-Urfali's reference to Flaubert in Mardan's trial highlights the similarities Mardan's poetic sensibility has with Flaubert's novelistic sensibility. Both Mardan and Flaubert were critics of a modern, bourgeois disciplinary order and the sanitized culture it produced, and both were tried for alleged affronts to public decency.

³ Mardan, Qasaʾid ʿAriya, 10.

⁴ Ibid., 14.

⁵ Primarily a product of the early Abbasid period (early 9th century), the mujūn genre revels in the lighthearted use of explicit sexual language and erotic tales that flout religious and social conventions. Mujūn poets such as Husayn ibn al-Dahhak and, most famously, Abu Nuwas were encouraged and their works celebrated at the courts of Abbasid caliphs. As interiorized and often dark, antiromantic poetry, Mardan's licentiousness was a departure, both in form and content, from the lightheartedness of the classical tradition.

⁶ After this case was dismissed, Mardan published his second collection of poems al-Lahn al-Aswad (A Black Melody) and was once again brought to trial on charges of violating public decency. This case was dismissed as well. During the next few years, Mardan published several more collections of poetry, notably, in 1951, Suwar Murʿiba (Horrifying Pictures), a collection that depicted hashish dens and the daily lives of drug addicts. In 1952, he published the short story collection ʿAzizati Fulana (My Dear So and So) and was arrested once again.

⁷ al-Rihani, Amin, Qalb al-ʿIraq: Siyaha wa-Siyasa wa-Adab wa-Tarikh (Beirut: Dar al-Rihani, 1957), 93.Google Scholar

⁸ Groundbreaking ceremonies for dams, bridges, roads, public buildings, and middle-class neighborhoods were attended by King Faysal II, members of the Board, and “distinguished guests from Iraq and other Arab states.” 250,000 spectators attended the opening of the Queen Aliya Bridge in Baghdad in 1956. Staged unveiling ceremonies to highlight development achievements for public consumption were a regular occurrence. “Development Week in Iraq,” Iraqi Bulletin 1, no. 2 (May 1957): 7. Published by the Iraqi Information Bureau, The Royal Embassy of Iraq, 21, Queens Gate, London, S.W. 7.

⁹ For example, Mora Dickson, the cofounder of the British international development organization Voluntary Services Overseas, traveled to Iraq in the late 1950s and described her encounter with the city of Baghdad: “First impressions were not of ancientness or easternness but, on the contrary, of brand new, immaculately dressed modernity. The young men who walked the streets in great numbers wore double-breasted suits, spotless white shirts, pale-coloured ties and gleaming shoes. The boulevards which radiated out from the city centre were lined by angular modern houses and intersected by roundabouts ablaze with flowers; water tanks and oil refineries shared the skyline with minarets and dome; the headquarters of the Rafidain Bank was a triumph of mid-century architecture, a gleaming white, many-storied block culminating in a roof garden with striped sunblinds and cunningly wrought trellises; of the cars parked beneath it the majority were high-powered, brightly coloured American. Everywhere new buildings were going up, new bridges being flung across the Tigris; whole streets were pulled down in clouds of dust while one looked on, and plans prepared for better, finer, newer quarters. Baghdad was alive, changing, on the move.” Mora Dickson, Baghdad and Beyond (London: Dennis Dobson, 1961), 11.

¹⁰ Bashkin, Orit, The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 37.Google Scholar

¹¹ Ibid., 38.

¹² Ibid., 53.

¹³ “Law Supplement to Baghdad Press Law,” 14 October 1938, FO 371/23847, cited in Bashkin, The Other Iraq, 53.

¹⁴ The government crackdown on communists included a campaign of systematic arrests targeting anyone with ties to the party. This was the second time al-Sayyab had been imprisoned, the first for a short period in 1946. For a detailed history of the Iraqi monarchy's crackdown against leftist opposition, see Ismael, Tareq Y., The Rise and Fall of the Communist Party of Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 39–41.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Bashkin, The Other Iraq, 109.

¹⁶ There have been occasional, infrequent references to Mardan's work in literary histories of Iraqi poetry. The most substantial occurs in Jalal al-Khayyat's al-Shiʿir al-ʿIraqi al-Hadith: Marhala wa-Tatawwar, in which one chapter is devoted to Mardan's poetics and his trial. More often, Mardan is referenced obliquely, often in negative terms. For example, the Iraqi critic and poet Yaseen Taha Hafiz, in his book Modern Iraqi Poetry, writes of Mardan, “Husayn Mardan was brought to court for his Black Tune, and for his Naked Poems before that. That Iraqi was an imitator of Baudelaire: corpulent, drunk, always speaking of sex in a far-reaching voice, perched on a wooden tea-house bench in the afternoons, and surrounded by the chosen few round the drinking table at night.” Hafiz, Yaseen Taha, Modern Iraqi Poetry (Baghdad: Dar al Maʾmun, 1989), 16Google Scholar.

¹⁷ The reference to Mardan as a “vagabond poet” occurs in Muhsin al-Musawi's expansive study of 20th-century Iraqi intellectual and artistic culture and is one of two references to Mardan in the book. The other contrasts Mardan with the Iraqi short story writer Dhu al-Nun Ayyub. Al-Musawi writes, “Although seemingly concerned with exposure rather than an ideological stand, Mardan was reckless in disparaging social and moral constraints . . . In Mardan's poetry, there is rebellion, but in Ayyub's narratives there is commitment.” al-Musawi, Muhsin, Reading Iraq: Culture and Power in Conflict (New York and London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 110Google Scholar, 139.

¹⁸ Since the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, there has been renewed interest in Iraq's pre-Baʿthist cultural history, focused in large part on the culture and politics of Hashimite Iraq, in particular the 1940s and 1950s. This historical period is today pointed to nostalgically as a golden age of cultural renaissance and political pluralism, in part as a reaction against the sectarianism that currently plagues Iraq.

¹⁹ To be sure, representations of the countryside were not uniform. In contrast to the idyllic representations of the village found in the poetry of al-Sayyab, Iraqi writers often used conditions in the countryside to advocate for social and political reform, linking the exploitation of peasants, especially peasant women, in Iraq to a feudal system exacerbated and perpetuated by colonial rule. See, for example, Fuʾad al-Takarli's collection of short stories al-Wajh al-Akhar (Baghdad: Manshurat al-Thaqafa al-Jadida, 1960).

²⁰ Mardan, Qasaʾid ʿAriya, 17.

²¹ Ibid., 45–46.

²² It is plausible that Mardan, through his deployment of the Satanic, is not only engaging Baudelaire's deployment of the Satanic but also parodying poets of the classical Arabic tradition who penned poems in which the speaker is in dialogue with the devil (iblīs). Poets such as Abu Nuwas and al-Farazdaq often attributed their own transgressions to Satan leading them astray. In one poem, Abu Nuwas alludes to the Qurʾanic exchange between God and Iblis in Surat al-Hijr “in which the fallen angel asks for respite until Judgment day to lead man astray: ‘I shall deck all fair to them in the Earth, and I shall pervert them all together.’” Kennedy, Phillip F., Abu Nuwas: A Genius of Poetry (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005), 46–47Google Scholar. Mardan's use of the demonic, however, has a distinctly modern sensibility, characterized by the conflicts associated with a liberal self unfolding within the material and cultural spaces of the modern.

²³ Culler, Jonathan, “Baudelaire's Satanic Verses,” Diacritics 28, no. 3 (1998): 86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ Ibid., 87.

²⁵ Ibid., 98.

²⁶ Baudelaire, Charles, Oeuvres completes, ed. Pichois, Charles, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 182–83Google Scholar, quoted in Culler, “Baudelaire's Satanic Verses,” 89.

²⁷ Calinescu, Matei, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987), 54.Google Scholar

²⁸ Ibid.

²⁹ Ibid., 54–55.

³⁰ Shiʿir, Beirut, no. 3 (Summer 1957): 112. Cited in Boullata, Issa J., “The Poetic Technique of Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab (1926–1964),” Journal of Arabic Literature 2 (1971): 111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³¹ See, for example, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab's poem “al-Mumis al-ʿAmyaʾ” (The Blind Prostitute), which links the violation of the prostitute's body with the colonial violation of the nation's sovereignty, or Fuʾad al-Takarli's short story “al-ʿUyun al-Khudr” (Green Eyes), where the physical and emotional abuse suffered by the story's main character, Salima, attributed to the conservative social values in the countryside, leads her to prostitution.

³² For a full treatment of Bakhtin's concept of the grotesque body, see Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1984), 303–436.Google Scholar

³³ Keith Booker, M., Joyce, Bakhtin and the Literary Tradition: Toward a Comparative Cultural Poetics (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1995).Google Scholar

³⁴ Bell, Shannon, Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1994), 43.Google Scholar

³⁵ Benjamin, Walter, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 157.Google Scholar

³⁶ Bell, Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body, 44.

³⁷ “Indictments of the first Arab bourgeoisie for having failed adequately to industrialize their respective countries take two forms. The first is that their accomplishments in this sector prior to seizures of power by the military were limited, and that subsequently, despite efforts by nationalist regimes to enlist their support in industrialization efforts, they remained recalcitrant, exporting their capital and frequently themselves. A second line of attack on the capitalist-led industrialization of this era is to claim that whatever success was achieved was due to special conditions, e.g., tax exemptions, protectionism, high prices, accumulation of capital surpluses during World War II.” Springborg, Robert, “The Arab Bourgeoisie: A Revisionist Interpretation,” Arab Studies Quarterly 15 (1993): 13–39.Google Scholar

³⁸ Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Philcox, Richard (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 98, 100–101.Google Scholar

³⁹ Watenpaugh, Keith David, Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 17, 19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁰ Watenpaugh writes, “To claim modernity, they incorporated into their daily lives and politics a collection of manners, mores, and tastes, and a corpus of ideas about the individual, gender, rationality, and authority actively derived from what they believed to be the cultural, social, and ideological praxis of the contemporary metropolitan Western middle classes . . . Moreover, excluded by customary practices and political theory from structures of power, this class contested its exclusion and asserted its right to equality, citizenship, and political participation in the idiom of modernity. By being modern, its members declared their intention to take a preeminent role in the production of knowledge and culture, not just for themselves, but for society at large. The dedication to these ideas, praxis, and politics marks that middle class as both a distinct component and an unprecedented innovation in the social and cultural history of the Middle East, as well as a vital subject in the question of modernity in the non-West.” Ibid., 8.

⁴¹ Mardan, Qasaʾid ʿAriya, 19–20.

⁴² Mardan's message to his reader is clearly modeled after Baudelaire's own invitation to his readers in The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal). Baudelaire's message “Au Lecteur” (To the Reader) begins: “Ignorance, error, cupidity, and sin / Possess our souls and exercise our flesh / Habitually we cultivate remorse / As beggars entertain and nurce their lice,” and ends “I mean Ennui! Who in his hookah-dreams / Produces hangmen and real tears together / How well you know this fastidious monster, reader, / Hypocrite reader, you—my double, my brother!” With references to Satan (“Who but the Devil pulls our waking strings!”), Baudelaire's interpellation of his reader provided the basis for Mardan's own lampooning of his reader. Baudelaire, Charles, The Flowers of Evil, trans. Mathews, Jackson (New York: New Directions, 1989), 1–2.Google Scholar

⁴³ Mardan, Qasaʾid ʿAriya, 46–47.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 123.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 43.

⁴⁶ Ibid.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 44.

⁴⁸ Ross, Kristin, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (New York: Verso, 2008), 152.Google Scholar