Escaping the Testimonial Voice: Gimmick Narration and Failure of Taʾlīf in Two Novels by Murtadā Gzār

The literary work of Murtaḍā Gzār has been read as a continuation of the ‘Basra school’ of contemporary Iraqi literature, a current that is usually characterised in terms of non-novelistic forms, magical realism, and reliance on turāth. In her reading of Gzār’s third novel, al-Sayyid Aṣghar Akbar, Yasmeen Hannoosh (2013:146) focuses on the ways in which the text ‘accomplishes a rupture in linear accounts of the past through narrative strangeness’. Yet, while during the Baathist period such anti-mimetic poetics could be understood as ‘escap[ing] both the threatening reality of post-independence regimes and the Eurocentric tendencies of postcolonial theory’ (Caiani & Cobham 2019), the rise of traumatic fiction in the post-2003 period, with its inherent suspicion of linear accounts, raises further questions about the nature and aims of such ‘strangeness’. The paper will look at the issue of estrangement in Gzār’s fiction through a close reading of the author’s latest novels, Ṭāʾifatī al-jamīla (‘My Beautiful Sect’, 2016), and al-ʿIlmāwī (‘The Scientist’, 2018). To deconstruct the binaries introduced by categories such as magical realism and non-naturalness, we will look at the defamiliarizing features of Gzār’s narrative as gimmicks. Sianne Ngai (2020) defines the gimmick as an aesthetic object that is ‘simultaneously overperforming and underperforming’, that ‘strike us as working too little [...], but also as working too hard’. Both Ṭāʾifatī and al-ʿIlmāwI are constellated by extravagant devices that strike the reader as untimely and useless. Such narrative objects point to the overall paradox of Gzār’s narrative voice, the very complexity of which ‘puts any person seeking to analyze it at a comical disadvantage’ (Ngai 2020:9) and ultimately declares the failure of taʾlīf ‘composition/familiarization’. The discussion of Gzār’s narrative style will provide an opportunity to address broader issues of mediacy in post-2003 fiction: the construction of ‘underperforming’ narrative structures both reflects and reacts against the tensions of the Iraqi literary field, escaping the emphasis on testimonial narration of traumatic fiction.