The Ghosts of Exilic Belongings: Maḥmūd al-Bayyātī's Raqṣ ʿalā al-māʾ: aḥlām waʿrah and Post-Soviet Themes in Arabic Exile Literature

Raqṣ ʿalā al-māʾ: aḥlām waʿrah (Dancing on Water: Difficult Dreams, 2006) by Maḥmūd al-Bayyātī is among a number of Arabic post-Cold War exile novels that invite critical reflection on the loss of exilic belongings tied to the Soviet world. In the novel, an Iraqi poet, who has recently arrived in Sweden from Prague, Czechoslovakia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, finds a wallet containing a large sum of money. The poet (and narrator) re-imagines his new exile in Sweden through his search for the owner of the wallet and through the related question of how to distribute the money. As the narrative unfolds, the search begins to resemble the act of circling and pacing (ṭāf, yaṭūf ), a concept that frequently recurs in the novel. Ṭāf invokes both the haunting of the narrator's past exile and political affiliations, and ṭawāf, the ritual circling around an empty center. Read alongside Derrida's Specters of Marx the novel offers a compelling reflection on a critical juncture of Arabic literature. By comparing Raqṣ ʿalā al-māʾ to two other post-Soviet Arabic literary narratives of exile, Iqbāl Qazwīnī's Mamarrāt al-sukūn (Zubaida's Window: A Novel of Iraqi Exile, 2005) and Muḥammad Makhzangī's Laḥaẓāt gharaq jazīrat al-ḥūt (Memories of a Meltdown: An Egyptian between Moscow and Chernobyl, 2006), this article considers the multiple ways that literary narratives have made exile and Marxist political affiliations objects of mourning. The spectral qualities of Raqṣ ʿalā al-māʾ subvert many of the post-Cold War narratives on national identity and the death of Marxism that the narrator confronts and, in the end, produce an ambiguous yet engaging reflection on migration and exile in contemporary Europe.