Severed heads and the Arab world's foul predicament

By Charles Paul Freund
Special to The Daily Star
Saturday, August 21, 2004

"My blood flowed on the pavement. The head had separated from the body as though it had been chopped off by a sharp sword. I was sorry to see my body lying on the macadam only to be run over by some truck or lorry. I tried to order my hands to lift the corpse but soon realized that they were no longer subject to my command. The veins and arteries were gushing a jet fountain, spurts of blood spreading out, perhaps aspiring toward the final form of (a) red pool."

So begins Mohammed Barrada's intentionally disturbing tale, "The Story of the Severed Head." Before its adventures are over, Barrada's severed head will take flight and deliver a politically subversive message to an astonished populace: You may take solace in fantasies, the head tells its listeners, but those fantasies are the source of your oppression. Eventually, the head will be captured and finally judged by a ghost. First published in 1979, this short, surrealistic work by the distinguished Moroccan author and teacher has lately taken on an unexpected and unhappy contemporary resonance.

Of course, the most obvious source of the story's renewed timeliness is the severed head itself. Originally a device intended by Barrada to evoke antique horrors for his modern Arab readers, it may now evoke instead the disgust of daily reality. Beheadings or threats of beheadings are in the news almost every day, thanks to murderers who are acting in the name of Islamist political fantasies. Headless bodies are found floating in the Tigris River, and bodiless heads are discovered in Saudi refrigerators. Videotaped beheadings may be watched at any time on the internet, their appalling images overwhelming Barrada's or anyone else's attempts to capture their savagery in words. Barrada's quarter-century-old political horror story is now our daily reality.

Yet Barrada's bizarre tale is not timely merely because of the rise of beheadings as a tactic of terror and revulsion. Rather, this literary severed head lies at an intersection of terrible cultural and political forces in the Arab world, forces that not only shape the story's message of personal and political fantasy, but that may also underlie the story's own origins.

Arab literary fantasy is a remarkable phenomenon. Despite the flights of grand imagination for which the Arab folktale and epic are justly famous, fantasy remained rare in modern Arabic prose literature until quite late. While such important authors as Yusuf Idris and Naguib Mahfouz did make use of fantastic elements in their writing, especially in their short works, the great majority of Arab novelists remained faithful to the established tradition of social realism.

In the late 1960s, however, this situation changed dramatically: An explosion of Arab prose tales employing the fantastic, the surreal and the marvelous became apparent.

More than one Arab critic has linked this development to the deep cultural shock of Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser's catastrophic defeat in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. It was as if the crisis then faced by the Arab world, indeed by its dominant paradigm of pan-Arabism, was too profound to be addressed in realist terms. The Arab world's most pressing issues were not social or economic, this body of work suggests, but psychological and intellectual. What was required to address such a political nightmare was its literary equivalent: a literature of nightmare, of horror, of a world that seemed to have lost its bearings.

The oppressive fantasies of Arab nationalism whose collapse Barrada was addressing when he wrote his story a quarter-century ago have again led their adherents into crisis. But where previous pan-Arabist crises took the outward shape of political and military problems, the current situation - whether measured by the reaction to events in Darfur, or to the chaos in Gaza, or to the toppling of Saddam Hussein, or indeed to the spate of beheadings and bombings in Iraq - is at its heart a moral crisis.

These are forces that are adding a new layer of horror to Barrada's story beyond those invented by the author, because there is a sense in which Barrada's severed head is speaking again, and offering its compelling message anew.

Listen to Barrada's severed head as it hovers in mid-air and begins to address its astounded listeners. "O wretched, miserable, desperate, idle, deprived, scared, oppressed people! You, escapees from reality to words, you seekers of solace in fantasies while truth stares you in the eye. You lull yourselves with the legends of Antara and Abu Zeyd and dream of the lands of Waq al-Waq. You dream of buxom maidens who feed you their breast burning with desire and who promise you pleasures that conceal hunger, oppression and frustration."

Unfortunately, this striking speech could have been written yesterday. For too many Arab intellectuals, Saddam Hussein remains an admirable Antar. One Egyptian lawyer who has come forward to help represent Saddam at his upcoming trial has said on Iraqi television that to defend Saddam is to defend the honor and dignity of the Arabs, as if it were not possible to criticize the US occupation of Iraq while rejoicing in the overthrow of a butcher.

For too many pan-Arabist politicians, the possibility of foreign intervention in Sudan is a greater problem than the currently overwhelming humanitarian disaster in that nation - never mind the issue of whether Arab militias are actually fomenting genocide. Indeed, as Julie Flint wrote on this page, an audience recently offered Khartoum's ambassador in Beirut loud applause when he stated that allegations against Sudan were part of a worldwide conspiracy against all Arabs. Indeed, for too many Islamists throughout the world, martyrdom has become its own nihilist reward.

The seemingly permanent timeliness of Barrada's message, as delivered by the unhappily far-sighted invention of the severed head, suggests the circularity of Arab nationalist (and now also Islamist) politics. Its unwillingness to come to grips with its own failures only leads to greater failures. Yet each new crisis can be blamed on powerful actors intent on the destruction of Arab heroes and the victimization of all Arabs. That in turn validates anew the insecurities and frustrations that maintain Arab nationalism as a political force.

What happens when someone - or something - attempts to break this cycle? In Barrada's tale, the people react to the head's attempt to make them "call things by their name and embrace realities" in this way: They hurl abuse at the head. They speculate as to whether the head is a tool of a foreign power. They answer, "We don't have to put up with someone who insults us and reviles us."

The final judgment of the head is delivered at its state trial: Return the head to the corpse, orders a ghostly judge who has risen from the past, "and cut off the tongue."

Charles Paul Freund is a senior editor with Reason magazine in the United States. This article was written for THE DAILY STAR