Baudelaire in Baghdad: Modernism, the Body, and Husayn Mardan’s Poetics of the Self

Abstract

During a revolutionary period of cultural production and anticolonial political commitment in 1950s Baghdad, the modernist poet Husayn Mardan was put on trial for his “obscene” collection entitled Qasaʾid ʿAriya (Naked Poems). Heavily influenced by Baudelaire, Mardan's poetics provide a revolutionary paradigm focused on the gratification of the corporeal. This paper considers how Mardan's poetry, largely marginalized from the canonized modernist Arabic poetic tradition, registers resistance to an increasingly rationalized and bureaucratic social order through a transgressive poetics that displace the political onto the body. Lampooning social uprightness and middle-class sterility, Mardan's poems encourage sexual licentiousness, embrace the space of the brothel, and celebrate filth and germs. Through a consideration of Mardan's appropriation of Baudelaire, this essay theorizes the translation and transformation of Baudelaire's paradigmatic literary representations of modernity into the context of a modernizing Baghdad and therefore historicizes the appearance of modernist aesthetics in a non-European space.