Cinephilic Life-Writing in An Iraqi in Paris

Early in Samuel Shimon’s first-person autobiographical novel An Iraqi in Paris (‘Irāqī fī Bāris), the young author-narrator has left his hometown of Habbaniya, Iraq on the eve of Saddam Hussein’s military takeover of the country. A child pushcart vendor now in his early twenties, Shmuel harbors a rags-to-riches dream of traveling to the US and making it big as a Hollywood director. While he hails from a poor Assyrian Christian family, he is detained and tortured in Damascus, due in part to his Jewish name, on suspicion of being a Zionist spy. Upon release, he flees for East Beirut in hopes of connecting with a Christian missionary society and obtaining passage to the US. The year is 1979, in the midst of the Lebanese Civil War. Shmuel soon reaches East Beirut only to be detained once again, this time by Christian Phalangist militiamen who torture him even more ruthlessly.

When a man named Tony is assigned to kill Shmuel, Shmuel earnestly insists upon the apolitical nature of his mission: that he dreams of becoming a Hollywood director and had traveled to East Beirut for no other reason than to seek the assistance of a Christian society that would support his immigration to the US. To test the veracity of such an outlandish claim, Tony asks Shmuel if he knows about Jean-Luc Godard and the Nouvelle Vague (French New Wave). Unfamiliar with either, Shmuel fails the test. With his life on the line, he passionately rattles off a litany of Hollywood stars and directors about whom “I know everything!”[1] Amused, the would-be executioner tucks away his gun. Escaping with his life through a darkly comic test of his cinephilia, Shmuel recalls the words of Kiryakos, the man in his hometown who imparted his love for the movies to Shmuel: “God is the greatest scriptwriter [who] created this movie in which we all live” (Shimon, An Iraqi in Paris, 21).

This essay considers cinephilia as form in Iraqi author Samuel Shimon’s novel An Iraqi in Paris. While the bulk of the autobiographical novel is set amongst a pan-Arab community of exiles in Paris from the late-1970s onwards, the author-narrator’s childhood memories of mid-century Hollywood and Hindi films centrally scaffolds not only his most ardent fantasies, but also the form of what unfolds as a self-consciously modernist novel. Placing the novel and its structuring cinephilia in a longer genealogy of both modernist Arabic literature and “city” novels and films, our essay focuses on the figure of the flâneur-like exile who holds onto a rags-to-riches childhood dream of making it big as a Hollywood director, inspired by the plots of American Westerns and Hindi melodramas. Like its exilic protagonist, the novel’s plot meanders through a montage-like series of episodes that remain open-ended. The novel culminates in the author’s most ardent, yet conspicuously unfulfilled, aspiration: a screenplay for a film that he wishes to make about his own childhood. The screenplay embeds a flight of fancy that reveals the novel itself to be a compromise, ensuing from the material context of the author-protagonist’s itinerant and precarious wanderings.

First published in Arabic in 2005, Shimon’s autobiographical novel appeared in a translated English edition within the same year.[2] The novel was acclaimed by critics for its ability to blend adventure, humor, and misfortune, and for its cinematographic qualities. Recently published in a third English-language edition, An Iraqi in Paris fuses the story of Shimon the novelist and Shmuel the protagonist. Born to a deaf-mute father and Assyrian Christian mother, we learn that the author-protagonist came of age selling ice cream and sandwiches from a pushcart outside the school and the cinema in his hometown. In his circuitous journey west, via Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Cyprus, Yemen, and Egypt, Shmuel encounters a series of unfortunate events, all sparked by the suspicious quality of his name and his ostensibly ambiguous sectarian and national affiliations. After being captured first by Syrian intelligence officers and then by radical Phalangists, like a recurring nightmare, the same scene unfolds in Jordan where Shmuel, now the antihero of his own story, is captured and questioned by Jordanian intelligence officers. With each detour, the road to Hollywood and dream of directing a film that renders the story of his father grows more distant.

With few readily available options to eke out a living, Shimon makes his way back to Lebanon where, for several years, he settles for employment under the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). This detour, ironically, renders him in as stateless a position as the leaders of the organization he now serves. With his passport confiscated by the political group, Shimon obtains refugee travel documents and makes his passage to Paris. There, he finds comfort among the city’s disenfranchised and dispossessed. Although he is a homeless man living on the streets, he anchors himself within a community of bohemian dreamers and wanderers who share his affinity for humor, irony, adventure, and, quite often, drinking at various bars and cafes run by other émigrés. Although all of Shmuel’s comrades are distinguished by their distinct national and religious affiliations, with some even harboring resentment towards each other for age-old national rivalries, Shmuel readily befriends an array of fellow exiles in Paris, irrespective of their religious identities, national origins, or present living situations.

Indeed, such a cosmopolitan—even if far more urban—milieu is precisely what makes Shmuel feel so at home on the streets of Paris. His childhood memories feature a cast of similarly heterogenous characters in terms of their ages, ethnicities, class positions, religious identities, and abilities, from his father and mother—whose disability and religion are markers of social difference—to his wealthier Iranian Muslim neighbors, to his Greek uncle-figure, to an Indian man who manages a cinema in their locality.[3] Their love for Hollywood and Hindi films comprises a shared vernacular of joy and intimacy, particularly since Shmuel and his father have had to speak to one another in a language of images and gestures, rather than words. In the novel, a rejection of the stultifying homogeneity imposed by various nationalisms emerges as the very condition of hope within an open-ended, exilic modernity. As an Assyrian-minority refugee from Iraq, Shmuel is rendered at-once homeless by both Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and his refugee status on the streets of France. For Shmuel, cinephilia is not only a matter of life and death—when, for example, he was about to be executed in Beirut—but also a link between the home of his past, and the dream that he yet holds for a future beyond the pages of the novel: to still make it as a Hollywood director, in order to vivify the memories of a lost, childhood home through a moving-image medium that remains his most constant and beloved companion.

Through its exilic and cinematic worlds, An Iraqi in Paris engages—and in turn invites critical readings of—the legacies and histories of canonically modernist genres, figures, and themes. The novel’s title invokes the 1951 Hollywood film An American in Paris (Vincente Minelli), a lighthearted musical that was itself a tribute to American composer George Gershwin’s eponymous 1928 orchestral piece. While Gershwin’s composition “reflected his feelings as a slightly homesick but manic tourist in [Paris],” the 1951 film paid homage not only to Gershwin, but also to “Hollywood’s idea of modern art—which meant French art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.”[4]  This turn-of-century period saw the rapid industrialization of cities and the emergence of photographic and moving-image technologies. The contemporaneity of photography, moving images, and industrialization gave rise to “city” films, visual art, musical compositions, and literary works that, like Gershwin’s An American in Paris, cemented both the iconicity of the flâneur and the preeminence of cities like Paris and Berlin in modernist visual cultures.[5] A bohemian streetwalker, the flâneur captured urban wandering as a quintessential mode of inhabiting modernity through a range of affective states, from ennui and alienation, to intensified sensorial stimulation and perpetual locomotion.[6]

These turn-of-the-century legacies surface through An Iraqi in Paris’s melding of classical and “vernacular” modernist forms across divides of high and low culture, as well as through its emphasis on both the city street and cinema as constituting experiential, sensory encounters with modernity as a shock to one’s being (Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 82–91, 191).[7] On the one hand, World War I was a cataclysmic moment by which Europe irrevocably registered this shock of modernity through the scale of catastrophe wrought by the industrialization of warfare.[8] On the other hand, as many postcolonial theorists have pointed out, this shock of modernity had made itself apparent in many parts of the Global South through the longstanding psychological and material predations of colonial conquests, whose effects have continued to persist through an array of neo-colonial forms and reactionary hyper nationalisms.[9] Whether at the hands of colonial or postcolonial regimes, the most visceral brunt of modernity’s shocks have been borne by the dispossessed and displaced—ethnic and racial minorities, women, working classes, oppressed castes. Thus, even as Shmuel seems to inherit his father’s royalist nostalgia for the British colonial period and espouses an ostensibly apolitical dream of becoming a Hollywood filmmaker, he continually finds himself most at home in Paris among the similarly dispossessed, regardless of their nationality, ethnicity, or religion: that is, among other exiles and refugees who, with varying degrees of agency, have found themselves thrust into a kind of collective flânerie of perpetual wandering (Shimon, An Iraqi in Paris, 3rd ed., 122).

In An Iraqi in Paris, this exilic wandering is never resolved, as it instead becomes the author-narrator’s very form of living and writing. Shumel yearns to make it in Hollywood, on the one hand, and for home, on the other. Both destinations remain out of reach, and the novel unfolds in this gap that marks the author-narrator’s refusal to give up these desires and settle, in multiple senses. The autobiographical novel opens with “A Note,” which narrates the moment in which Shmuel and his mother reunite in 2004 in California, for the first time since Shmuel had left Iraq more than twenty-five years earlier. “You killed us with your Hollywood! It’s here, just a stone’s throw away,” his mother wryly notes (Shimon, An Iraqi in Paris, 3rd ed., 9). Their poignant reunion is bittersweet, heavy with the decades that have passed since Shmuel last saw his mother before leaving Iraq in his twenties. While Shmuel has indeed ended up a stone’s throw away from Hollywood, his rather quintessentially American dream remains conspicuously and ironically unfulfilled, as his proximity to Los Angeles is instead occasioned by the context of yet another upheaval back home: in the “chaos that engulfed Iraq after the US invasion in 2003 when it became possible to leave the country, [Shmuel’s mother] decided to visit her sister who had lived in Modesto, California, since 1973” (9).

An Iraqi in Paris is divided into three parts that follow this brief, opening description of Shmuel’s 2004 reunion with his mother in California. Through a highly cinematic mode of narration that proceeds through vignettes, “A Note” cuts to “Part One: The Road to Hollywood,” which ensues as a flashback that begins on the eve of Shmuel’s departure from Baghdad in 1979. In the earlier English-language edition, this section not only includes the subtitle “A Report for the French Refugee Department,” but also features a distinct, Courier-like typeface that visually emphasizes the bureaucratic conditions that demand and scrutinize autobiographical testimonies in order to consider applications for asylum.[10] By framing a literary mode of life-writing (an autobiographical novel) as a literal mode of survival (a report for an application for asylum), Shimon emphasizes the stakes of life-writing for an exilic subject. Cinephilia remains a crucial resource that structures this life-writing within and beyond the frame of the novel, given the role of references to popular Hollywood and Hindi films in Shmuel’s articulations of his memories and aspirations.  

The middle portion of the novel, titled “An Iraqi in Paris,” is divided into numbered subsections, which are strung together as a series of seventeen short sequences: each is a vignette of specific characters, conversations, affairs, or moments that punctuate Shmuel’s life after he arrives as a refugee in Paris. Shmuel’s identity in Paris becomes fused with cinema in a number of ways, including his steadfastness in holding onto his dream of going to Hollywood and becoming a filmmaker, to the extent that Shmuel’s close friends introduce him to others as an aspiring—even if momentarily homeless— filmmaker. On one occasion, he asks his Syrian painter friend Joseph to paint a sixty-year-old version of Robert De Niro, whom Shmuel dreams of casting as his father. Joseph reminds Shmuel that he’ll “need two or three years to finish the script, another five years to finance, and you can add another year or more for the studios to prepare casting and shooting,” by which point, Joseph surmises, De Niro will be closer to seventy (Shimon, An Iraqi in Paris, 3rd ed., 68–69). The exchange is heartfelt and wry: Joseph, like Shmuel himself, understands the unlikelihood of Shmuel’s dream, as well as the impossibility of giving it up when he has so little else that he can hold onto.

In a few conversations with friends whom he meets in Paris, Shmuel ends up mentioning his in-progress screenplay about his childhood, titled Nostalgia for the English Time. The final third of the novel is styled as this very screenplay about his childhood, though it is instead titled “The Street Vendor and the Movies: A Story of Childhood dedicated to the memory of John Ford.” A note appears below the title: “The dialogue in the following pages includes many titles of movies, mainly by John Ford” (Shimon, An Iraqi in Paris, 3rd ed., 169). This final section of the novel occasions the author-narrator’s insertion of a tender, autobiographical narrative of his childhood, which vividly captures a motley of characters amongst whom he grew up, with his cinema-loving father at the center. This period of innocence was soon to drastically change for Shmuel, among many others who stayed as well as left after Saddam Hussein’s ascension to power. Peppered with references to Hollywood and Hindi films, from Ford’s westerns to Mother India (Mehboob Khan, 1957), the section is a striking chronicle of cinema’s importance to the author-narrator’s sense of not only his past, but also his future: the section is framed as a memoir of Shmuel’s childhood that he wrote while wandering about Paris, staked upon a dream of making it big as a Hollywood filmmaker in a yet-to-arrive future.

Alongside the novel’s reliance on (vernacular) modernist and cinematic intertexts, An Iraqi in Paris engages with more specific modernist forms that arose from the postcolonial conditions of both the Arabic novel and Arab writers and readers. The novel’s temporal setting of the late 1970s and early 1980s coincides with a period of a general pan-Arab disillusionment with the limits of Arab cultural forms, which had first come into question in the post-World War II period. Following on the heels of the Parisian Left Bank’s intellectual circles, the renowned dean of Arabic letters, Taha Hussein, saw to the translation and publication of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1948 essay Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (What Is Literature?) and its subsequent dissemination among the Middle East and North Africa’s intellectual communities. Hussein urged his contemporaries to adopt the novel, specifically the Bildungsroman, as the premier medium of Arabic literature. This sought a departure from the foundational narrative form of poetry (the qasīda), and Hussein believed that the novel would carry modern Arabic literature to a universal and integrated platform of world literature. Hussein likewise espoused a doctrine that privileged a narrative aesthetic of beauty (al-jamāl).[11] For nearly twenty years, many Arab intellectuals—novelists, poets, playwrights, and painters—were thoroughly engaged in pan-regional endeavors of modernization. Many adopted the novel for engaging in synchronous themes that spanned an array of mediums, and they fused their elevated commitment to aesthetics with their politics of colonial emancipation in such a way that incorporated local content with global form.[12]

Yet, in 1967, the transformative growth of the Second Nahda, which focused primarily on narrative structure, beauty, and form, would be interrupted by a call to radicalization spearheaded by Ghassan Kanafani, a revolutionary Palestinian novelist exiled in Beirut. In the aftermath of the Naksa of 1967, in which the Arab states met their second major defeat against Israel, Kanafani called upon his contemporaries to push Arabic culture and its production to its revolutionary zenith by committing to an unwavering decolonial brand of both regional and transnational Third Worldist political ideology.[13] Modern aesthetics alone were no longer sufficient among Arab intellectual circles, and a debate surrounding the means to a modernist end was henceforth put into motion: would it be aesthetics, politics, or an amalgam of both? In their consideration of such questions, many Arab intellectuals were propelled into exile and, like Shimon, thrust into a perpetual state of flânerie across major cities in the imperialist metropole.[14] Within the Arab context, a state of nomadic wandering remained firmly modernist in status and possessed two primary modalities: either the wanderer was a Bedouin, or they were an exile/porter.[15] Shimon emerges squarely in the latter category, and like him, the constellation of characters who weave in and out of the autobiographical narrative of An Iraqi in Paris are victims of political regimes. They are all living in the aftermath of a missed opportunity, are in search of fulfillment, and/or aim to actualize a lifelong dream of cosmopolitan parameters, which does not subscribe to any singular nationalist identity. To become a director, a screenwriter, or a novelist, for Shimon, is to transcend the confines of his minority status as an Assyrian Christian from Iraq, one with a Jewish name and a Muslim disposition.[16]

In a 2006 interview titled “Writing is Dangerous Business,” conducted with British-Pakistani journalist Sarfraz Manzoor, Shimon confirms that his novel was the result of a perfect storm of coincidences—in part fueled by the aforementioned political and socio-cultural events of the age—and that “in Iraq, [he] never thought of being a writer; [he] always thought of being a film director” because “writing in Saddam’s time was very dangerous work. Poetry is much easier—you use metaphor.”[17] Yet, the question of cinema was never “a problem with the senior Iraqi regime, not at all,” for one thing that people were certain of when it came to Saddam was that he “loves cinema [and] knows all about the Al Capone character. He liked that character” (Manzoor and Shimon, “Writing is a Dangerous Business,” 160). In this way, An Iraqi in Paris is firmly nestled in the aesthetic and political debates surrounding the Arabic novel. It is a novel whose aspiring-screenwriter-turned-novelist-in-exile understands the absurdity of his lived experience through encounters with authoritarian personality cults and archetypal characters—both real and fictional—like Capone, Godard, Jean Valjean, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.[18] The irony of its metanarrative, then, is twofold: Shimon/Shmuel’s potential to achieve his dream of becoming a director was not possible in Iraq due to the lack of a major industry and sources of funding. By contrast, the immense difficulty of becoming a novelist in Iraq—that is, writers  could rarely escape the heavy scrutiny of Saddam Hussein’s censor—becomes the more tangible outcome for Shimon in his Parisian exile. As such, the novel and (unmade) film collide and integrate into a site of compromise: the outcome is that of an intermedial narrative that is not fully a novel, autobiography, or screenplay, but somehow all of them at once.