Muhammad Khudair … the writing that fears the skin

“My years come with side faces, volatile outlines that soon disappear, but my long life takes on its dark side just as it takes on the flickering face of life like a bright flash that lasts only a glance. This experiment collected no less than nine profile photographs, which appeared behind rotating lamps, in a place that resembles a natural museum, and soon they were removed and left overwhelming shadows. This is how the Iraqi narrator Muhammad Khudair (1942) launches his new book, “The Book of Contracts / Narratives”, which was recently published on “The Camel Publications”, in which the author of “Basriatha” and “Gardens of faces ”reveals their centuries-old faces, especially the“ The face imprinted in the mud of the rivers ”. And his reflections in mirrors that erase monuments, signs and faces, and where his biography and human experience are mixed with the experiences he had of orphans, people on the road, the Majdib, pottery, henna, drivers and firefighters … We are in a workshop full of gelled icons of the red mud of the river whose names are shown respectively: of Mem-Makari The narrator, the student, the juggler, the innocent murderer, the engraver, the traveler, the perfumer, the gardener and the copyist: Khudair presents his narrative sculpture workshop, which is more like Giacometti’s. But Giacometti’s minimalism doesn’t measure up to the amount of pain Khudair endures for his icons. It is the ceramic meme that “gives birth to the strangers of the country who burned their civil records, and renamed their children who resemble mourning, work, life and death with deaf letters that are inherited only to those who carry them. “

It is the language of Muhammad Khudayr that we have learned in “Dreams of Trash” and “The Black Kingdom” in which the narrative soul is mixed with those brilliant and deep poetic strokes that throw the text into the heart of fantasy: “I begin by the first statue, I prick it with my finger to speak and move, and he points with the amputated finger at his companions on the shelf, and gestures to himself first.
Throughout the two hundred pages of the book, we find ourselves before a narrative anthology that begins in the first decade when “Al-Wajh was born in 1943, the year of war in which Stefan Zweig committed suicide, but this no longer means anyone today, nor do the extra names mean “, and the way to the hut of the” camel midwife. ” »In the date palm fertilization season, to repeat the narrative rosary of the twenties, where the“ little man ”goes to see the lake and the moon until the nineties, where his children take him to a lower place than the land, and where the office manager opens a large register and “has registered my name, my age, the place of residence, the history of my illnesses and other things. Information shared by people who have turned ninety years old and were brought to this place »: These are the conditions of the shadows in their protagonism and eclipses, between joy and sadness, tranquility and fear, and the manifestations of the experience penetrated by reflections that embed the narrative, such as those that address the ideas of the Greek Thordakis on physical pain in the chapter “The Thirty” and Fantasy. A satirical poetry in a simulation of the atmosphere of a poetry festival in Basra in the chapter “The Forties”, where the poet “spider” hunches over the scene, sometimes inspired by the atmosphere of Edgar Allan Poe, or in opposition to Mayakovsky’s famous poem with a “sticky” poem titled “An hour in a pants”: “The river dotted with lights / The boats float And like a turtle upside down / Crabs cracking their jaws on my neck / Rise up, drowned souls / Tonight I will play my vertebral flute ”.
In the seventieth narrative decade, Muhammad Khudair weaves a historical miniature in which pain appears as a spear that left Abbasid Baghdad to settle in the present of Iraq, whose tyranny has turned its two arteries into bleeding and painful: “The administration penitentiary arranged the duties of the night of the execution in strict chronological order, without escaping from an emergency circle that is not considered as the emergency that entered the seventy corpses that lay in the quarry of Al-Aaiún. In the final episode of Wednesday’s session, the burials will miss the twelve zero souls who leaked them to the prison quarry before transporting them for two meals to their mass grave. What happened in the early hours of that night ended the unenforceable death sentences and turned the prison system upside down. The central prison was the base of the terrible barbarian pyramid, when the fateful incident was violated, its judiciary was cracked and the final trials were mixed with that sudden. We will call this strange intruder “Youhanna Al-Nuti” and attribute him to the Bakhtishush medical family who served in the bimaristan that Harun Al-Rashid established in Baghdad. The prison barbarians fell asleep, so the soul infiltrated the quarry and chose twelve corpses from the underprivileged classes, and the waiting ship mounted them on the Tigris and descended with them towards Wasit, with dawn. We will dedicate to these escape lines in the history of the Bakhtishuya family, who applied their research to treat insane and leper patients in Baghdad’s Abbasid Bimaristan.

A historical miniature where pain was a spear that was launched from Abbasid Baghdad to settle in the present of Iraq

If, as of today, a historian investigating the identities of the doctors who gouged out the eyes of the Central Jail inmates doubts his affiliation to the missing link in the history of barbarian rituals, he will not be mistaken by joining the noti saved to the group The Way of Evangelization. Umberto Eco also appears in the final chapter on death, sitting in his library and says: “As human beings, when we say ‘I’, we mean our memory. Memory is the soul. If someone loses his memory, he becomes like a plant and no longer has a soul. “The narrator who immortalized Basra in” Basriatha “, the book that demolished the aesthetics of his approach to the place” Dagestan my country “from the Messenger of Hamzatov and” El Camino al Greco “by Kazantzakis, and” Istanbul: The city and memories “by Orhan Pamuk, bears the seed of memory, experience and contemplation in the” Book of contracts “and bombs. the last sigh according to a clear formula: life ends when the story ends. On the last page, he expresses his wish in front of the angel of death: “You know, my girlfriend, I don’t want more … If I had to ask, just I would ask for what my grandfather Abu Dawood asked me. He told the angel who asked him when he came to hug him for what he wanted: head to head. Muhammad Khudair’s writing was flayed and dressed as a series of hundreds of skins: “Perhaps a day was the singer’s dinar, or the wrong Tayes than the bird of the dead It carried it in its claws and threw it down from on high to cut its beautiful body into parts on the rocks and make it food for eagles and snakes. “

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