Pain, Tears and Blood: Doubts about the Concept of Revolution in Ghāʾib Ṭuʿmah Farmān’s al-Makhāḍ

In 1974, Iraqi-born Ghāʾib Ṭuʿmah Farmān (1927–1990) published his novel al-Makhāḍ (Labor Pains. Baghdad: Maktabat al-Taḥrīr, 1974). Farmān had subscribed to Communist ideas since his youth, a leaning for which he was also arrested, yet in this novel, he bluntly expresses his disappointment with the 1958 Iraqi revolution’s consequences and his doubts about the concept of revolution itself. In this study, Farmān’s novel will be placed within the broader historical and cultural context in which Leftist Arab intellectuals became critical of the Iraqi revolutions of 1958, 1963 and 1968 alike. A close reading of the novel, published six years after the Baʿth revolution of 1968 and the rise of Saddam Hussein to power, reveals admonitions on possible future turns of events. To wit, the concentration of power in the hands of the state and the regime, persecution of political rivals, favoring regime allies, economic disparities, as well as the discord between the noble goals of the revolution and its contradictions in the preservation of the post-revolutionary order.