Baghdad Existentialism

Papa Sartre (originally published in Arabic as Baba Sartre) is a short, energetic, sometimes convoluted novel about a biographer and his subject. At first glance, it appears to be a mock-biography, or perhaps an anthropological study of Baghdad in the 1960s, but the novel's genre is more complex than this. At its core, Papa Sartre is an ontological and epistemological detective story, a meditation upon identity, knowledge, and authority. Who are we, the author asks. And how can we be certain?

Ali Bader is an award-winning and much-imitated Iraqi writer. He's published nine novels in addition to several books of poetry and non-fiction; he's also a journalist and screenwriter. Papa Sartre, his first novel, is considered by many critics to be his most important and influential.

The novel's unnamed narrator is asked to write a biography of Abd al-Rahman, a minor philosopher who brought existentialism from Paris, in the 1960s, to his native Baghdad. The first few chapters are a frame story centered on the biographer, while the bulk of the text is the enframed story of the philosopher.

Called simply "the philosopher," or less often "the Sartre of al-Sadriya," al-Rahman is an obscure figure, and, among those who seem to have known him, there's much disagreement. The "facts" are murky, oblique, contradictory. As the biographer begins his research, he doesn't acquire knowledge so much as images, assumptions, gossip, self-serving anecdotes, half-truths, red herrings, and outright lies:

I searched for words that would put me on the right path, but to no avail. They embellished the philosopher's image with made-up stories as if decorating a Christmas tree with random shiny and colorful baubles. They meant well, yet what they gave me were falsifications, perhaps prompted by a desire to hide their embarrassment at having been so long ignored and estranged. They provided me with their information and histrionic comments, played roles, and incongruously arrogated importance to themselves….

The biography is commissioned by Nunu Behar and Hanna Yusif, two apparent charlatans. Their motivation is never quite clear. Behar admits, "'We're not paying you because you're an honest man. No, not at all…. We are all honest, but honesty does not put bread on the table.'" This statement seems far from truthful itself. One wonders if the biography of a minor philosopher would put bread on the table, even day-old bread.

Falsehood, or rather the elusiveness of truth, is at the center of Papa Sartre. The biographer meditates on the mysterious nature of the project and on his own dubious motivation:

I hadn't met Hanna Yusif or Nunu Behar before, but I realized that those two had intentions that went beyond commissioning the mere writing of the biography–in other words, something in the story that went beyond the biography itself. It was one of those things that one ignores for various reasons, and my reason was my desperate need for money. I was so destitute I couldn't hesitate or object. I had to act quickly and think later. I admit mine was not a very moral attitude, but I had never been obsessively moral….

To a large extent, the philosopher and his work—the ostensible narrative focal points—are marginal to the story. Bader is more concerned with other issues, such as setting. Baghdad of the sixties, which he animates very effectively for the reader, is a city trying hard just to get by. It's portrayed as crowded, makeshift, dirty, exciting, as labyrinthine and convoluted as the biographer's quest for knowledge. It seems amoral, too, like the biographer, too hungry to worry over the niggling concerns of virtue. Bader is at his best when evoking this sense of place:

The market was humid and stuffy, the ground was muddy, and water seeped from the badly paved street. The restaurant was located at one end of the market, a small place with a low ceiling, painted a cheap white and...