Satanwebs and the Torch Bearer: reading Samīr Naqqāsh’s unreadable vernacular novel

Nzūlah u-khēṭ al-shīṭān (1986) is the great “vernacular novel” of the late Iraqi Jewish writer Samīr Naqqāsh (1938–2004). The novel, set in the 1940s–early 1950s, tells of the twilight of Jewish Baghdad. Vernacularity and hybridity are the hallmarks of the text’s difficulty, its supposed unreadability and untranslatability. Nzūlah manifests an extreme case of heteroglossia, as it is written in literary Arabic, but also in the Jewish and Muslim Baghdadi vernaculars, while also including hundreds of footnotes that affect and direct the act of reading. In this article, this seemingly inaccessible novel is analyzed through the lens of the theoretical concepts of “untranslatability” and “comprehensibility.” Besides being a lament for a lost homeland, Nzūlah calls for its readers to appropriate a seemingly dying idiom and, in so doing, perform a significant political gesture that resonates with the ways Naqqāsh’s work has been read in both Iraq and Israel since his death in 2004.