CONTEMPORARY PLAYS FROM IRAQ

The numbers, however, are inaccurate-Salih J. Altoma's seminal bibliographical study, Iraq's Modern Arabic Literature: A Guide to English Translations Since 1950 (published in 2010) lists seven more plays that appeared in English translation between 1977 and 2008 (Altoma 2010: 39-40). In a milieu in which a strict censorship code was imposed on every artistic creation, both the audience and the artists mastered a signification system that was ambiguous enough to bypass the regime's censorship, but at the same time, was subversive in tone and message and was only decipherable by an audience that shared the same context. [...]the first two plays both present the reader with semi-allegorical characters and symbolic stories that were the direct results of the artists' negotiations with a dictatorial regime. Kareem Sheghaidil's "Cartoon Dreams" is another attempt at expressionism, this time in a dark comedy in which a diverse group of Iraqis fantasize about leaving the country on a dream-like airliner, Happy National Airlines Flight 013.