Reconsidering Dabashi's View in Anglophone Iraqi Poetry

Abstract

In Brown Skin, White Masks, Hamid Dabashi critically examines the relationship between race and colonialism re-questioning Edward Said’s concept of the ‘intellectual exile’. Said stood in defense of Arab intellectuals who lived in the West and wrote anti-colonialist literature. On the other hand, decades later, Hamid Dabashi saw the situation of post-colonialism from a different angle and took his own stance from those Arab writers of post-colonialism. He reverses the positive image of some exilic intellectuals in order to shed light on the negative role which they can play. Dabashi calls them ‘native informers’ since they denigrate their cultures in a way that serves the Western ideology. This paper explores Dabashi’s concept of native informers in selected texts of Iraqi poetry. It argues that the Anglophone Iraqi poets, who paraded as ‘voices of dissent’, employ their poetry, unintentionally, to propagandize the American strategy which needs to assure the world that they are the superior nation. It concludes that the three poets under discussion, Sinan Antoon, Hashim Shafiq, and Dunya Mikhail have an apocalyptic point of view toward what is happening in Iraq; therefore, they cannot be accused of being disloyal or conspiracies against their homeland since they criticize in the hope of reforming the political system. The paper implements an analytical approach to apply Dabashi’s theory on the selected texts.