Papa Sartre

Papa Sartre is a famous Arabic novel by Iraqi writer Ali Bader, it was originally published in Arabic in Beirut, 2001, and met warmly by the cultural critics and Intellectuals in Arabic world. An English translation was published in 2009, in AUC press, Cairo/ New York City. It was this book that earned Ali Bader many prizes. [1]

The novel opens with two charlatans commissioning a biographical novel. A starving academic is hired to write the life story of an Existential philosopher who died in the late 1960s and was acclaimed as the (Sartre of Baghdad). Father Hanna and his sexy consort, Nunu Bihar, are and clear from the very beginning: philosophy is a business and the narrator’s assignment is to create a larger than life Iraqi equivalent of the original Jean-Paul Sartre. The would-be narrator is introduced to a third party; the project’s funding supreme, Sadeq Zadeh, whose remit is to approve the version of the philosopher’s death. He is then handed dossiers of documents, photographs, diaries, letters and assigned a dubious research assistant, who looks more like a pickpocket, to accompany him on interviews with the remaining few friends of the late philosopher.

The charlatans demonstrate an amorality that fascinates the narrator, with their wide latitude for unconstrained heckling, irreverence and recklessness along with factual discrepancies. Not to mention the scandalously seductive nature of Nunu Bihar’s overt sexuality. A biography can, then, depict a life with all its flaws, weaknesses and baseness, thinks the narrator. This proves difficult for him at first, with collective memory being subject to strict cultural variables. He finds there were those who admired all the dead: servants overlooked and forgave mistakes, hesitated at admitting domestic scandals, attributing superhuman qualities in hagiographic proportions to those no longer living.

The philosopher’s friends, on the other hand, told another story, accurate but equally flawed. They decked him out like a Christmas tree. Glossing over a sense of shame, they assigned to themselves important roles, their talk of the 1960s sounded like an elegy for a lost Paradise that had expelled its most prominent philosopher with no recognition. A solipsistic gaze constructed the only life worth living. Existentialist of Al-sadriyah Documents prove similarly discouraging for the narrator: "All spoke a single character, a unique and towering figure, one that summarized for an entire society a tragic world and symbolized for an entire notion tragic anomie" Overriding these methodological obstacles, the narrator eventually succeeds in producing a candid account of the life of Abdel Rahman Sartre’s, the Existentialist of al-Sadriyah.

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