Gentle breeze or impending storm? Mahdi Issa al-Ṣaqr’s East Winds, West Winds in its postcolonial context

It is remarkable that despite devoting two full chapters to Mahdi Issa al-Ṣaqr’s works in their book on the Iraqi novel titled The Iraqi Novel: Key Writers, Key Texts, Fabio Caiani and Catherine Cobham scarcely mention his late work Riyāḥ Sharqiyya, Riyāḥ Gharbiyya (English translation, East Winds, West Winds) at all. Clearly, this understated, carefully crafted novel deserves more attention than it has hitherto received. The present article accordingly attempts to fill this gap by presenting an account of the work in terms both of its thematic content and of the author’s fictional technique and attempts to ‘place’ it in the larger context both of the development of the Iraqi novel as a whole and of the Iraqi political situation that forms a backdrop to the events of the work.