1 Irnest Hemingway in the Iraqi Novel for the Iraqi Jornal

Ernest Hemingway
In the Iraqi Novel

Najim A. Kadhim
Professor of Criticism, Comparative, and Modern Literature
College of Arts – University of Baghdad

Introduction
In the early Fifties, a scholar said:
The close and permanent contact between the Arab World and the West since the end of the eightieth century makes a new era in the history and civilization of the Arabs. How and where this contact took place, and whether it exercised any influence on the appearance development and form of the modern short story are questions which remain to be answered.(Abdel-Majid, p51)
If such questions were logical at the time they were made, they are, of course, not any more. The Western literary influence, exercised on the appearance and development of so many new genres and artistic forms in the Arab World in the second half of the ninetieth century and in the whole of the following century, has been unquestionable for quite a long time. The Arabic novel in all Arab countries, in all its forms and in all its manifestations shows the influence of Western novels. The Iraqi novel, for its part, received the Western influences during its developing and transitional stages. These influences, which were positively received and maturely exploited by the Iraqi writers, are obvious in what may be reckoned as shifting phases in the Iraqi novelistic march. In the next two decades, the forties and fifties, we find only a few novelistic attempts, which were influenced by the continuing popularity of specific Western writers like Goethe, Dumas and Lamartine, and some Arab writers such as al-Manfaluti.
Though the flourishing in fictional writing, which was obvious in the early months that followed the revolution of July 1958, soon waned if not stopped, it produced some good and distinguished relatively long fiction. Concerning the influence of the Western novels on the Iraqi novel, we must mention one of the major factors for the advanced artistic achievement of this generation, including that we have seen in the long fiction, that is, their wide reading of modern Western fiction. It was clear that this was being artistically exploited by them not only in the long fiction but also in the distinguished short stories for which the generation is known. The first of these long fiction pieces is Hayat Qasiya- Hard Life- (1959) written by Shakir Khusbak. In his story, Khusbak adopts Realism as he and other Iraqi and Arab writers knew it through Western fiction of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. They knew it as it had been embodied, especially by the Russian writer Anton Chekhov in both his short and long stories. The second and, undoubtedly, the most important long story to be written in Iraq in more than four decades is Al-Wajh al-Akhar- The Other Face- (1960) written by Fu’ad Al-Tikarly. In terms of artistic and fictional technique, this work achieved a significant shift in the process of the novel in Iraq during those four decades. It clearly adapts the fictional technique of the time- especially the stream of consciousness of Joyce and Woolf. The last notable relatively long fiction is Al-Ayyam al-Mudhi’a- The lighting Days- (1962) written by Shakir Jabir. At the time it was released, it was distinguished from other fictional works by its stylistic beauty. In all these three long works and in few others we can observe individual attempts to write in new fashions and about new subjects. However, these fashions and subjects are not important, except for the existential trend known to the Iraqis through some of works of Sartre, Wilson, Kafka and other which appeared clearly in the short story and left some of their marks on the Iraqi long fiction of the fifties.
As the sixties were marked by conflict, depression and fear, works of fiction dealing with the frustration appeared during that decade and in the early seventies were collectively known as “the writings of the sixties,” while the writers were known as (the Generation of the Sixties). Those writings were mostly colored by individual experiences, frustrations, experimentalism, and leaning towards no specific ideology, other than being influenced by modern trends of Western literature, especially French. The bulk of this fiction, however, appeared between 1964 and 1973. Among these novels there were Yasin Husayn’s Al-Zuqaq al-Masdud and Kama Yamut al-Akharun (1965), Al-Ruba’yya- The Quartet- (1970-1973) by Isma’il Fahd Isma’il and al-Washm (1973), by Abdulrahman Majid Al-Rubay’i’. While we must not skip the two novels of Yasin Husayn, of which one of the main things one can mention in favor is the mature exploiting of the stream of consciousness techniques, it is true that Al-Nakhla wa al-Jiran (1960) written by Gha’ib Tu’ma Farman, which is outside the basic trends of fiction of the sixties as it is a realistic novel, is the real practical beginning of the novel in Iraq. On the one hand, releasing Farman’s second novel Khamsat Aswat (1967) confirmed that the novelist deserved to be reckoned as the pioneer of the artist novel in Iraq. On the other hand, this novel and the publishing of another, that was Al-Zami’un written by Abdulrazzaq Al-Muttalibi, during the same year confirmed that Farman’s two novels were not an individual accomplishment, especially that these artistic beginnings soon followed by many works written by many other writers. Perhaps the best novels to be mentioned here are Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s Al-Safina (1970), Isma’il Fahd Isma’il’s first novel of the quartet Kanat al-Sama’ Zarqa’ (1970), Abdulrahman Majid Al-Rubay’i’s Al-Washm (1972,Uyun fi al-Hulum (1974), and Al-Anhar (1974), Farman’s Al-Makhad (1974) and Al-Qurban (1975), Jabra’s Al-Bahth ‘an Walid Mas’ud (1988), Farman’s Zilal ‘ala al-Nafida (1978), and the most brilliant accomplishment of the whole history of the Iraqi novel at that time, Fu’ad al-Tikarli’s Al-Raj’ al-Ba’id (1980). These bulk and various works also show us that the Western influences and their origins became more various.
Moving to the next decade, the eighties we are concerned with three things that one must mention. The first is the continuation of the generally good march of the novel. The second is the phenomenon of war literature, which appeared as a response to the Iraq-Iran war 1980-1988, giving us dozens of novels. The third and last important thing is the continuation and variety of the Western influences on the Iraqi novel.
Talking about the influence of the Western literatures in the whole period of the 1960s to the 1980s, one important point to be mentioned is that the predominant role which had been occupied by French literature in the period of the 1920s to 1940s was increasingly taken over by English and American literatures, while Russian literature kept its place. That; however, does not mean that French literature was not widely read any more. The French novel was merely second or third behind the English and the American. The Following foreign names became well known by the Arab readers and literati: Sartre, Camus, Dickens, Austen, Joyce, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Caldwell, Faulkner, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Gorki and Kafka. In terms of tendencies and trends, Realism, Existentialism, and Stream of Consciousness are predominant.

Ernest Hemingway
And the Iraqi Writers
American literature in general and the writings of some American writers in particular were among the most influential writings on the Iraqi readers during the period starting in the mid-sixties, continuing through the seventies and after. This expected phenomenon was due to the fact, as we stated in the introduction, that the American writers were among the most widely read writers during two of the three decades followed WW2, not only in Iraq but in the whole Arab World. However, the English language, being the first foreign language in Iraq and in most of the other Arab countries, is the most important factor contributing to the spread of the American novel and all other external literatures. This led to the propagation of the novel among the writers and other intellectuals in two ways, the first being the translation movement, and the second being the ability of many of those intellectuals to read works in their original English. It is interesting to mention here that the names of many American novelists and their works are found, in one way or another, in many Iraqi novels, short stories, and even poems. The titles of some of those Iraqi works are identical or similar in meaning, and partly in form, to the American and European works. This demonstrates how the Iraqi writers’ novels and stories are frequently based on the American works, among which those of Ernest Hemingway are the chief ones. However, it is certain that the most popular American writers in Iraq and the Arab World in the sixties-eighties period were William Faulkner, Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, and of these, according to the facts, to many critical studies, and to our own investigation, the most influential of these writers are Faulkner, Steinbeck, Caldwell, and Hemingway.
During his actively rich life, Hemingway wrote and published a considerable number of works of short and long fiction and nonfiction. Perhaps the most important and influential of the more than twenty works are: In Our Time, short stories, 1925; The Sun Also Rises, novel, 1926; A Farewell to Arms, novel, 1929; The Snows of Kilimanjaro, long short Story, 1936; The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories, 1938; For Whom the Bell Tolls, novel, 1940; and The Old Man and the Sea, novella, 1952.
Referring to his life, the astonishing fact about these and his other works is that most, if not all, are based on Hemingway’s life and real experiences and it is easy to determine that the main ideas and subjects represented or discussed by the writer in them and in all his works are: the war and its physical and psychological effects on the youth, love, the sexual relationship between man and woman, hunting, and fishing, death and violence, “the whole human race in its struggle for survival” (Gellens, p66) and the generation’s conflicts and suffering from things such as feeling of loss, illusion, and disappointment. However, this does not mean that Hemingway restricted himself to these subjects and ideas. His subjects, perhaps, are beyond the conclusive confinement. So it is understood that, when he is asked, “It has been said that a writer only deals with one or two ideas throughout his work. Would you say your work reflects one or two ideas?” he answered by saying, “Who said that? It sounds much too simple. The man who said it possibly had only one or two ideas”. (Baker, HHC, p37). Nevertheless, it is true that there is one idea or subject that repeatedly re-appears throughout the writer’s works. Killinger says, “The most obviously recurrent motif in all Hemingway’s work has been the subject of death, or of violence, which, as Fredrick Hoffman has observed, is only another form of death in which the victim (who is usually youth) survives. Because of this intense preoccupation with death in all its forms, the discovery of the role which death plays in Hemingway’s fiction is the most immediate key to the interpretation of his work.”(Killinger, Hemingway, p17-18). Referring to our previous discussion of Hemingway’s life, from which he drew all the subjects and ideas of his work, it is clear that Hemingway’s fiction is based on true events and stories. Accordingly, his characters seem to be real, ordinary, and familiar individuals as they behave and connect with each other. It is easy to feel that Hemingway’s heroes and other characters are of flesh and blood. As they connect with each other, this would mean something special for the writer.
Whether a critic or a regular reader, perhaps the first thing one notices about Hemingway’s style is that it is simple. One may even say, at least before going beyond the first impression generated after the first reading, that “Hemingway does not give way to lengthy geographical and psychological description. His style has been said to lack substance because he avoids direct statements and descriptions of emotion. Basically his style is simple, direct and somewhat plain. He developed a forceful prose style characterized by simple sentences and few adverbs or adjectives. He wrote concise, vivid dialogue and exact description of places and things. Critic Harry Levin pointed out the weakness of syntax and diction in Hemingway’s writing, but was quick to praise his ability to convey action.” (Rovit, 47) But that astonishingly means that from the very early years of his career he actually established a style that would be known as Hemingway’s style and would be imitated by so many writers both in America or elsewhere. It is a simple, modest and is made up of short sentences
The unusual experiences, a full life, and the precocious talent and ability are behind the rich writings, subjects and ways of dealing with them which Hemingway showed very early. Hemingway soon became an influential writer in American literature, and such an important a world writer that he would soon affect other writers. That is not only because of his artistic fulfillment but also because of his uncommon subjects and ideas and his special treatment of them. The Russian critics of the thirties found that “the more inexorably seizes upon the temptation of death, that again and again he writes only of the end- the end of relationships, the end of life, the end of hope and everything… The war affected Hemingway even more strongly… Perceiving the senselessness of the war, he was shocked by the human degradation it involved- the destruction of the dignity of the individual and the feeling of moral and intellectual emptiness it left with those who had experienced it. (Baker; HAHC, p148). We can comprehend what this means in terms of the world-wide spread of Hemingway’s writings if we remember how closed Russia was at that time. Accordingly, we can imagine the size of his popularity and readability in the rest of the world.
Being a world writer certainly meant that sooner or later Hemingway would be known to the Arabs, and some of his fiction would be read by them mostly in Arabic and sometimes in its original English language. The volume of the works of any writer translated into any language indicates the readership of the writer among the people who speak this language. It is useful to look in Andre Hanneman’s ‘Ernest Hemingway, A comprehensive Bibliography to give us a practical idea in which to gauge the influence of this American writer would be practiced. The bibliography names many works of Hemingway that were translated in the fifties and early sixties. Among them were For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, To Have and Have Not, and many short pieces of fiction and non-fiction. (See: Hanneman, p175). Some other works, however, such as The Old Man and the Sea”, In Our Times”, “Men without Women” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” would also be translated into Arabic. Some of them were even translated more than once by different translators, either to achieve a better translation or for commercial reasons, a phenomenon which indicates the popularity of the writer and these works among the readership. More important for our study is that reading those works encouraged those among the readers who knew English language, especially the young writers and the educated ones, to read those same or other works of Hemingway in their original language and to read about him in both English and Arabic. As we need not elaborate this point more, we must mention that most of Hemingway’s works had a wide readership in Iraq. From the status of the writer in the Arab World referred to above and from the many interviews with Iraqi writes, which we will come to later, we find that the most widely read and popular of these Hemingway’s works in Iraq between the fifties and seventies were In Our Times, The Sun Also Rises, A Farwell to Arms, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea.
Since they were among the most popular and most widely read works in the Arab countries including Iraq, these works of Hemingway influenced many Iraqi writers during the period which started in the mid-sixties, and ended in the mid-eighties. However, minor influences might be found, prior to the mid-sixties, in the writings of Shakir Khusbak, Falih Al-‘Askari, Jiyan, Fu’ad Al-Tikarli, and Shakir Jabir. Other minor influences might also be found, later than the mid-eighties, in war fiction and other writings of Jasim Al-Rasif, ‘Adil Abduljabbar, Mahdi ‘Isa Al-Saqr, Faysal Hachim and ‘Ali Khayyun. The novelists most affected by Hemingway during this period were ‘Adil Abduljabbar, ‘Abdulrahman Al-Rubay’i, ‘Abdukhaliq Al-Rikabi, and, perhaps to some extent, Gha’bTu’ma Farman, ‘Abdulrazzaq Al-Muttalibi, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Abdulamir Mu’alla, Fu’ad Al-Tikarli and Khudhayyir ‘Abdulamir. Most of Hemingway’s characteristics, previously mentioned, appear, in one way or another, in some of these Iraqi writers’ works. But it is comparatively and critically important to say that these characteristics, or at least some of them, have been indebted not only to Hemingway but, on many occasions, to other American and non-American world writers. This of course is of the nature of the literary reception and influence which is usually active in the consciousness and unconsciousness of the writer and the artist in general. We are going to deal, in the next section, with ‘Abdulrahman Al-Rybay’i, who is undoubtedly influenced more than any other Iraqi writer by Hemingway. Then, the last section will be devoted to the other writers, in particular ‘Adil Abduljabbar and ‘Abdulkhaliq Al-Rikabi. However, let us dwell briefly before all of that, upon some the minorinfluences which can be traced in the writings prior to the mid-sixties.

The Early Influences of Hemingway
On Iraqi Novelists
Going back to the novelists and writers of short stories in the late fifties and the first half of the sixties whom I mentioned above as probably being influenced by Hemingway, I would like to examine briefly a few examples of which the first is Al-Ayyam al-Mudhi’a, The Lighting Days, a novella written by Shakir Jabir in 1961. The novella presents a group of friends who are university students in Baghdad of the fifties. Most of these friends are originally from remote rural and semi-rural areas, so they are in one way or another, strangers. The events take place in the shadows of their experiences of being far from their homes for the first time, their new friendships, their new life as students, their romances, politics and the common suffering of the people around them and of the various and contradictory feelings which stem from all that. Presenting this group of characters in such a situation, experiencing for the first time being strangers in the new environment around them in the big city and the different problems and the new challenges they face, the novel reminds us of Hemingway’s The Sun also Rises which was translated at the time of the publication of Jabir’s novella. Perhaps it would be interesting to mention, firstly, a very quaint allusion, in the text itself in which there is an almost explicit indication to Hemingway’s novel. The main character, as he is thinking, expresses his feelings towards his friend Zaki’s words the day before:
Zaki has not stayed but only a day and a night and here is the sun rises again. Everything is as it was yesterday, as it has been for thousands or millions of years. But I am not ever that person who was yesterday. It is as I have been created again. A feeling of my banality has been increasing, and the future is knocking on the doors of my life every second. The echoes of Zaki’s words are in my depth (A human being without goal means just a creature, lives like a mouse or an elephant. (p89)
It is difficult to know whether the writer here is influenced directly by Hemingway’s novel and some of its characters and their feelings towards the world and life in general. Nevertheless, the indication “the sun rises again. Everything is as it was yesterday, as it has been for thousands or millions of years”, I believe, is an explicit allusion to the American writer’s novel. Admitted that Mahmud is not in the same circumstances nor does he live through crises as Jake in The Sun Also Rises, but it is clear that there are a lot of common things in their feelings and sufferings and in the way they positively face the various challenges of life in their special circumstances. Jake, due to his impotence, cannot marry Bret, or any other woman. However, he is very close and a ready helper for his beloved. Revealing to him her sudden passionate love for the young matador Romero, she asks him:
“Do you still love me, Jake?”
“Yes,” I said
“Because I’m a goner,” Brett said.
“How?”
“I’m a goner. I’m mad about the Romero boy. I’m in love with him, I think.”
“I wouldn’t be if I were you.”
“I can’t help it. I’m a goner. It’s tearing me all up inside.” (p159)
Expressing an unusual understanding, responding to her request, and even accepting the role of a pimp, Jake introduces her to his friend Pedro Romeo, who joins them at their table when they go back to the cafe, then:
I stood up. Romero rose, too.
“Sit down,” I said, “I must go and find our friends and bring them here.”
“He looked at me. It was a final look to ask if it were understood. It was understood all right.
“Sit down,” Brett said to him. “You must teach me Spanish.”
He sat down and looked at her across the table. I went out. The hard-eyed people at the bull-fighter table watched me go. It was not pleasant.(p162)
We do not, of course, expect a character in Iraqi or Arabic fiction to go so far as Hemingway’s protagonist does even if this Arab writer is influenced by a foreign writer such as Hemingway. However, being unable to merry Madiha, whom he loves, because she is going to marry another man, Mahmud, in Al-Ayyam al-Mudhi’a:
In spite of the friendship that has developed between me and Bahjat, a psychological state haunts me whenever I see them walking together, despite being convinced that I must not think of marring her as they are certainly going to get married. (p90).
Moving to Gha’ib Tu’ma Farman, who is undisputedly the greatest figure in the Iraqi novel, we learn from him that Hemingway was among the first world writers to be read by him. Farman, more than that, and as he stated to me, was impressed by and attracted to the American writer. (Letter, June 1980). But does that mean that he was influenced by Hemingway? As the worlds of Farman’s novels are completely different from those of Hemingway, I think that it is not easy to confirm this. However, if there is anything in Farman’s novels, particularly his first one, Al-Nakhla wa-al-Jiran, (The Palm Tree and the Neighbors, 1966), to be mentioned here in the terms of the possibility of being influenced by the American writer, it would be the rain and its significance. It is not only because Catherine and her new born baby die while it is raining, at the end of A Farewell to Arms, that one can say that rain means something more than just a natural and climatic phenomenon. Rain, in some of Hemingway’s work, especially in this novel, is always associated with danger, suffering, fear, tragic accidents and death. In this novel, once it is raining, there is always fear and death. In fact the climatic and geographic phenomena, in his work, are seen especially by Baker, and many other critics after him, as of special significance. Catherine is even afraid of the rain as she sees herself dead in it.
Rain falls all during the retreat from Caboretto, it falls while Catherine is trying to have her baby in a Swiss hospital; and it is still falling when she dies and when Fredric pushes the nurses out of the room to be alone with her. (p200)
We feel some of this in Farman’s novel, when the rain forces Tamzir to be in her room alone thinking, as Husayn is still not capable of taking any serious action towards improving their ill situation. We must also mention here something that reminds us of Hemingway’s heroine. That is the symptoms of pregnancy had begun recently to appear in her. The rain also isolates the poor Mahalla (neighborhood) and affects its entire people. So the rain in Farman’s novel certainly means more than just rain, it means to the people of the poor neighborhood, in which the events take place, danger and fear:
It seems as if the sky is a huge goatskin getting torn. It remained Crying with heavy rain for two days. The people of the neighborhood remained during those two days wiggling like fishes in a muddy pond. They were isolated from the external world, and lived of getting drawn and of the collapse of their houses.(p194)
The interesting thing is that the rain as a disaster appears in Farman’s second novel Khamsat Aswat, (Five Voices, 1967). Because it is a disaster not for the characters in terms of individuality but rather for the Baghdadi people, perhaps it is not significant enough that we can like it to Hemingway’s rain.
John Killinger says,
Catherine Henry appropriately alters the old question ‘A coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one’ to ‘The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he’s intelligent’. So Hemingway will not let his Leanders([1]) come to shore, but must constantly throw them back into the Hellespont.” (Killinger, p27-28).
We feel that there is an ambiguity in this, especially as the writer goes deeper and deeper not with death itself, but with his chosen characters with it. Ironically, “it is the ambiguity of life itself that Hemingway has sought to render, and if irony has served him peculiarly well it is because he sees life as inescapably ironic.” (Halliday, in Weeks, p71).
Knowing some of Hemingway’s works and heroes and reading these comments on them, we recall here one of the greatest Iraqi and Arab fiction writers, namely Fu’ad Al-Tikarli, who more than once said to me that he liked many American writers among whom Hemingway was the main one. He read most of his main works in Arabic or in English. Whether influenced or not by Hemingway or any other writer, Al-Tikarly deals with death and the individual existentialistic crises. It is natural that to deal with such subjects certainly means the dominance of ambiguity.
As if neither the heroes themselves nor what they really do matter to the recipient, a very important question arises about some of the essential issues in Hemingway’s fiction. It is John Killinger who says,
Someone may ask, and justifiably, what are Hemingway’s heroes trying to prove? Why does Harry Morgan have to demonstrate continually the measure of his cojones? Why don’t the expatriates of The Sun Also Rises come back to the States and settle down? And Nick Adams? And Lt. Henry? And Robert Jordon? The answer is, they have seen real life, vital, authentic life, through the trauma of death, and they must continually retreat it. (Killinger, p27-28)
The real and essential understanding of life, death, existence, and the human being by Al-Tikarly is deeply expressed in his biggest and most brilliant novel Al-Raj’ al-Ba’id (1980), to which we will come in the last chapter. However, various understandings of these concepts, according to various individuals, who are the fictional characters, are also expressed, in one way or another, in his first novella, Al-Wajh al-Akhar (The other Face, 1960). Concerning this issue, the main difference between this novella and Al-Raj’ al-Ba’id is that this one does not present answers to the questions which arose in our human life. It rather raises question itself, especially by its protagonist,
How do we live in this world which is not ours, which we have never owned for a day, not for a moment? How do we live to die there in the end? Is there, with death, a life which is better than the other? (70)

Hemingway and Abdulrahman Al-Rubay’i
After this quick review of look at those writers who are less influenced, if at all, by Hemingway, one cannot say that they and those who will be examined soon or later are the only Iraqi writers who are influenced by him. However, we believe that if there were any, it would not affect the points of view which we are trying to prove. So let us move to the main writers who are thought to be influenced most by Hemingway, starting, in the next chapter, with Al-Rubay’i.
During the years of his youth Al-Rubay’I devoted much of his time to reading, writing, painting and working in the field of journalism. From his reading in particular, it is obvious that his literary education was derived from two main sources. The first was modern Arabic writing of the well-known writers of the first half of the twentieth century such as Taha Husayn, Salama Musa, Al-Rafi’i, Al-‘Aqqad and of course Najib Mahfuz, by whom generations of Arab writers and intellectuals have been educated and literarily affected. The second source is Western literature in translation especially the Russian and the American, chiefly Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gorki, Camus, Sholokhov, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner and others. As we are concerned with this last source, we will come to it soon. The early result of this artistic and literary education and reading in the sixties was the publication of his early attempts at short stories, poetry and criticism. One of the most important of these publications is his first collection of short stories Al-Sayf wa-al-Safina, 1966 which has been always considered as a major and prominent collection in Iraqi fiction. Since then he has led a life full of travels, of varied life experiences, of artistic, literary, critical and press activities and has published nearly forty books.
Throughout this long career Al-Rubay’i has published twelve collections of short stories, three novellas and four novels. He has also published many books of poetry, criticism and biography. “Once a good writer has written five or six books, there is always a pattern present. The pattern can be observed in its simplest terms merely by watching for recurrent themes, or in a more detailed fashion. The important thing is obviously the writing itself, as a specific thing.” (Schwartz/ in McCaffery, p115). Looking for such phenomena in Al-Rubay’i’s career, we feel that he derives most of his subjects and ideas from his own personal life and the socio-political reality of modern Iraq. His fiction usually deals with social and political experiences and issues; and conflicts and the predicament of individuals within them. This has not caused his whole works to be alike in terms of art and thought, though there is, of course, the pattern that a good writer has, as mentioned by Schwartz. There are, I believe, four factors behind the diversity and variety found in Al-Rubay’i’s fiction. The first is the fact that he is a good writer and has written numerous books, many of which have a good artistic and literary reputation. The second is the richness and fullness of his life, which is behind many of his works and achievements. The third is the unusual historical and social period of Iraq which itself is rich and full of events, conflicts and changes. The fourth is the writer’s deep desire, in his writing, for change, diversity and innovation. Knowing all of this and examining his literary career and the development of his style and art suggests four stages or groups of works. (See Kadhim, p106-107).
In the first stage Al-Rubay’i published three collections of short stories. The first of these collections, Al-Sayf wa-al-Safina (1968), became one of the most representatives of the so-called generation of the sixties. In the stories of this collection and of the others “the writer… adopted the educated and petty bourgeois.”The next two collections of short stories revealed that the writer was on his way to a new artistic approach. These two collections, the writer’s first novella Al-Washm (1972) and his second one “Uyun fi al-Hulum (1974), which is included in the second collection, makes up the second stage of his production. While we find, in these books, the new approach of the writer towards realism, we also still find some of the characteristics of the previous group- the shade of existentialism and experimentalism, and the rise of the ego. In his third stage the writer published three novels, the most important of which was Al-Anhar (1974), and three collections of short stories. In all these works Al-Rubay’i settled on one subject, which was the nationalist struggle and which by what we like to call nationalistic realism. The fourth and last stage of Al-Rubay’i showed a certain regression in his art and production as compared with his early writings. He published in the last three decades he published only two collections of short stories, a novel, and some other writings. We no longer find in these writings the brilliance and richness which find in his early writings.
Apart from being one of the main figures in Iraqi and Arabic fiction, there are three main factors that make Abdulrahman Majid Al-Rubay’i an ideal writer for any comparative dealing with intercultural and literary influence. He is even more ideal for such a study when it deals with Hemingway’s style, fictional world, and the way of writing. The first of these three factors is that he himself admits being influenced by other writers, of whom Hemingway is the main one. The second is the similarities between the lives, interests, experiences and careers of the two writers. The third, and the most important one is his literary texts as they show us, on many levels, the similarities with Hemingway’s work. Al-Rubay’i himself, and unlike most of the Iraqi writers such as Farman, Al-Tikarli and Al-Rikabi, self-confidently acknowledges that he has read and then fascinated and influenced by world writers, especially Hemingway. Al-Rubay’i, in a speech given by him, says,
From early on I knew many Arab and world writers… I read the American novel, and was attached to the works of Erskine Caldwell, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner.(Sorpon).
More than that, he adds, in an interview we made with him, “I admired Hemingway and William Faulkner very much, and read all their works… I re-read Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the sea, The Sun Also Rises, and all his novels and short stories.” (Our Interview).
It is important for critics or scholars to consider everything that a writer, whom they study, says about his/her literary education and readings. However, that does not mean that his/her acknowledgement of readings and admiration for other writers or being influenced by them can be trusted without examining his/her works. A comparative study of the writer’s work is our task in the next parts of our study. In doing so, it would be interesting to note the curious similarities, mentioned above, between Al-Rubay’i and Hemingway in term of their lives, career, personalities. Talking about Al-Rubayi’i’s life and activities, perhaps the only two things that were done by Hemingway that has not done by him are participation in warfare and hunting. Reviewing the fiction of the two writers and the similarities between them, I dare say if Al-Rubay’i had practiced those two activities he would certainly have done what Hemingway did and written about them. In fact his fiction seems to derive from his own personality, experiences and whole life. He says,
The first and closest person to me in all my writings is he who is shaped in me myself, not as a writer but as a human being with all my practices and experiences; in my pride and repression and recession; and in my triumphs and defeats. That is why I am keen to enrich this (self) of mine by reading, traveling, throwing myself in the experience and venture and entering the core of the world and not standing on its edges… the experiences would not come to the writers while they are spending their days by sterile talks. The experiences do not come to writers while they spend their days in sterile. Instead, they must go to those experiences and invade their fields… May we give examples for this such as Hemingway, Malraux, Laurence, Darrel and others? (Alrubay’i, Ru’a, 244-245).
In the careers matter, “first of all, both Hemingway and Al-Rubay’I began their literary careers writing and publishing poetry and short stories. Hemingway published a successful collection of short stories, In Our Time in 1924 which marked the real beginning of his career, and Al-Rubay’I published his first collection Al-Sayf wa-al-Safina in 1966, which very soon became the most famous collection of its time. With his first novel The Sun Also Rises (1926), Hemingway achieved great success. Al-Washm (1972), the first short novel of Al-Rubay’i, achieved a very noticeable advance in the development of the Iraqi novel. After his first success and the publication of his second successful novel A Farewell to Arms (1929), the American novelist entered a period of reverse, with the exception of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and published his big failure Across the River and into the Trees in 1950. As for the Iraqi novelist, the period of his artistic decline began after his second successful short novel ‘Uyun fi al-Hulum (1974), and this decline, with the exception of the moderately successful novel Al-Anhar (1974), reached its lowest point in Al-Wakr (1980). The art of Hemingway began to rise again with The Old Man and the Sea (1952).” (Kadhim, p181-182). While Al-Rubay’i began such a rise by publishing a new long novel Khutut al-Tul Khutut al-‘Ardh (19810, he did not carry on. In fact, he almost stopped after a few years.
Saying all of this about Al-Rubay’i’s similarities with Hemingway would mean nothing in terms of being influence by the American novelist unless we find some of them in his work. However, his passionate and enthusiastic fondness of Hemingway’s personality, experiences and writings would certainly have led him to be under such an influence. In fact, examining his whole fiction shows us that Hemingway actually exists in most of it whether in his style or subjects. He and his work are even mentioned, in one way or another, in some of Al-Rubay’i’s works. But it is important to mention that the similarities do not always mean that they are the results of Hemingway’s direct artistic, thematic or subjective influence. Some of them are rather the results of the similarities between the experiences of the two writers. However, dwelling upon the whole, we think that the works of Hemingway most mentioned and influential on Al-Rubay’i’s fiction are The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell Arms and, to some extent, To whom the Bell Tolls. These and their influences are found, on different levels, in the Iraqi writer’s Al-Anhar, ‘Uyun fi al-Hulum, and, to some extent, in Al-Washm, Al-Qamar wa-al-Aswar, Al-Wakr and Khutut al-Tul Khutut al-‘Ardh. The main areas in which we find a lot of common elements between the two writers are the themes and subjects, the language and dialogue, the style and the characters. They will overlap each other as they are being dealt with in the rest of this chapter.

The Influence of Hemingway on Al-Rubay’i
Being the starting point in writing any work of art and in any writer’s texts, the themes and subjects are our starting point here. Hemingway’s writing is no exception here. In fact, he is an ideal example. According to some Soviet critics, “his attitudes were first of all a product of his experiences in the First World War. Here was the genesis of the themes which were to run through most of his works to 1936; an obsession with death, and a consequent feeling of hopelessness, fatalism, and passivity; an attitude of disillusionment, characterized by a hurt, a defensive mistrust of ideals and a general skepticism; an attitude of political and social indifference, in which the only values are individual values; and concentration on the various means of flight from reality.” (Brown, in Baker, HHC, p146). Not rejecting death as being the central theme, we think that the consequence feeling mentioned by the soviet critics is more important. Such feeling is behind most of Hemingway’s heroes and characters and their psychological state and behavior. This is sensed by the reader of much of the writer’s fiction which we will deal with, such as The Torrent of Spring, The sun Also Rises, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Old Man and the Sea, and, to some extent, A farewell to Arms and For whom the Bell tolls. This obviously means that these characters were taken by Hemingway from the real people he had known, people who had been in his own experiences. In our opinion, Al-Rubay’i learnt the lesson from the writer he loved, the lesson. So being influenced in creation of his own characters does not mean that he imitates the characters of Hemingway. In fact we believe him when he says about his characters, “I pick them out of the real people whom I have known and lived with”, (Al-Rubay’i, Ru’a, p238). In fact, such a statement can be applied to Hemingway more than any other writer.
The first two of Al-Ruby’i’s works that show us the beginning of the influence of Hemingway characters are Al-Washm (The Tattoo, 1970) and ‘Uyun fi al-Hulum (Eyes in the Dream, 1974). The first adopts the stream of consciousness as the main technique for indirectly depicting its protagonist. As a former detainee, Karim Al-Nasiri has recently been released. However, he was not released before implementing the prerequisite, which he had been ordered to do- renounce his party. Doing so has put him in an emotionally and psychologically shaking state:
Karim Al-Nasiri has been released safe and sound, but there is something within which has been destroyed. This normal and grave frame is nothing but a mask to hide the remnants, and cover the irreparable destruction.(39)
This “irreparable destruction” is, in our opinion, the point from which the whole novel derives. It is behind the protagonist’s semi-ill state, behavior, relations, words, thoughts and feelings which are all, as an interior conflict, artistically expressed by the use of stream of consciousness and interior monologue. Together, this interior conflict and the use of this technique draw the novella and its protagonist near to some of Hemingway’s, such as the heroes of Torrent of Spring, The sun Also Rises and The Snows of Kilimanjaro. So in the last mentioned, and as he sinks more and more inside himself with his conflict and waiting for the very possible death, Harry feels desperate and loses the desire to write as he used to and that means losing the very sense of life,
You kept from thinking and it was all marvelous. You were equipped with good insides so that you did not go to pieces that way, the way most of them had, and you made an attitude that you cared nothing for the work you used to do, that you could no longer do it. But, in yourself, you said that would write about these people… But he would never do it, because each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all. The people he knew now were all much more comfortable when he did not work. (p65)
In this desperate situation which the story deals with the unconsciously or, perhaps consciously, looks for anybody whom he can blame for his anguish, and there is no one but his woman.
She shot very well, this good, this rich bitch, this kindly caretaker and destroyer of his talent. Nonsense. He had destroyed his talent himself. Why should he blame this woman because she kept him well? He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in. (p100)
But he keeps insulting her throughout the story. For his part in the aftermath of his release, Karim Al-Nasiri is very often cruel with some of the women he knows. To end his affair which he had had with Maryam after his release from prison, and as if
Blaming not himself but others, chiefly her, for his failure not himself, he thinks,
Can I begin with Maryam? I ask myself this question. But again I push the story all out of my head. It is a relationship condemned to death from the beginning. (p43)
And in the end,
She is my fall after I have risen up and my prison after I have been set free. (p43)
Moving not only on to ‘Uyun fi al-Hulum, but to of all Al-Rubay’i’s next five novellas and novels, we find that each presents a group of youths, most of whom are in some kind of predicament or interior anguish. In the first of them, ‘Uyun fi al-Hulum, the group of characters is in some kind of depression, disappointment, and with a feeling of loss and aimlessness. The story concentrates on one of them, Salim, and begins when he receives a transfer, as a teacher, to a remote village. From the first moment his feeling of loneliness, loss, and aimlessness seems as if it is going to increase. However, in his first few days with the poor people of the village and their little students the opposite is what begins to rise inside himself. An awareness and feeling of usefulness for the community around him begins to grow inside him. In this short transitive journey, Salim resembles many of Hemingway’s heroes and characters such as Jake in The Sun Also and Rises and Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms. It is interesting to mention here that on one occasion Salim, the narrator and the hero of the novel, says of a minor character, his friend,
‘Abduljabbar… longs to go to Spain to listen to the music of the Spanish people and to dance without reserve, ‘Hemingway has spoiled me’, that is what he says when his dreams take hold of him. (p93)
The direct connection between the story and Hemingway is clearly evident when explicitly refers to The Sun Also Rises in particular,
‘The country of the sun and love is there, beyond the sea, and I am here in this village!’
Nuri wonders, ‘what country do you mean, Abduljabbar?’
‘How strange! Have you ever looked at the map? Have you not heard of Spain? Read The Sun Also Rises and you will know’ (p96)
In fact, the group of youths of Al-Rubay’i’s novel embodies the mood of those characters from which Hemingway’s novel derives, especially the sense of futility and loss. The sign of this, which is especially felt by the characters of The Sun Also Rises, is shown in many of Al-Rubay’i’s short stories, novellas and novels and is possibly even more common in the majority of his works published before the mid-sixties. However, it is cannot be said that all the examples are definitely the results of Hemingway’s influence though it seem as if the author, particularly in ‘Uyun fi-al-Hulum, was “aware of Hemingway’s impact on him while he was actually writing his novel, and the American writer is even mentioned by name more than once by the characters”, (Kadhim,p184).
The presence of Ernest Hemingway, in the Iraqi writer’s work, is seen not only in The Sun Also Rises, but also in others such as A Farewell to Arms, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and some short stories. This presence continues in Al-Rubay’i’s other works. In Al-Wakr, (The Secret Meeting Place, 1980) for example, we again face the group of youth with same kinds of struggles and worries. While these struggles and worries are only partly similar to those which we have seen before, such worries and sense of loss, futility and aimlessness are very similar in the next novel Khutut al-Tul Khutut al-Ardh, (1981).However, let us dwell for a while on Al-Anhar since it is the most influential one;.
Talking about Heroism and protagonists, Jackson J. Benson says about the protagonist of The Sun Also Rises,
Jake learns the lesson that all Hemingway protagonists learn: to live with dignity requires that a man be hard on himself. If a man is lost, it is because he has lost himself by preferring illusion to reality, self-deceit to self-honesty. The battle that Jake fights with himself is only the first of a series of battles fought by the protagonist in every Hemingway novel that was to follow…
In Hemingway’s fiction the unit of ultimate moral responsibility is the individual. The beam of his attention is nearly always so sharply focused on the protagonist that other people, singly or in groups, seem to exist only in the reflection of his light, having their place only insofar as they work for or against the moral achievement of the protagonist. (Benson, p43)
While each of Al-Rubay’i‘s novellas and novels deals, as was mentioned before, with a group of characters, these characters do not always exist, as in most of Hemingway’s, only in the moral achievement of the protagonist. Actually the other way around can sometimes be said as in the previously discussed novella, Al-Washm. In it the protagonist’s state, conduct and commitment are judged by him himself and us, the reader according to the old friend and prison mate Hassun Al-Salman’s moral principles. However, some of the characters, whether in this same novella, in ‘Uyun fi Al-Hulm, Khutut al-Tul Khutut al-‘Ardh, or to some extent, in Al-Wakr, are like those of Hemingway, as described by Benson. Similarities can obviously be seen between most of these characters and those of The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and partly of For whom the Bell Tolls. In fact these characters of Hemingway in general are, we believe, the main influential elements of his novels on Al-Rubay’i’s works, particularly ‘Uyun fi al-Hulm, Al-Anhar and Khutut al-Tul Khutut al-‘Ardh, and above all in Al-Anhar. In fact, while the protagonists in these works all live, particularly in the beginning in the above mentioned state with melancholy feelings, they, all again, and in one way or another struggle to get out of that. However, if this can be said also about some other characters and sharing the protagonists their struggle and who might sometimes be even more positive than them, there are some others who show the negative side compared with the protagonists’ points of view. On the other side we might see the negativity in the protagonists themselves while ironically trying to practice the heroism. Looking at all these characters, we find that many of them are like many of those in Hemingway’s previous works. While we are going to deal with examples of such characters, we will, of course, concentrate on those who are found in Al-Rubay’i’s Al-Anhar and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.
Going back to a previously discussed point, in general the group of friends in Al-Rubay’i’s novel reminds us of those in Hemingway’s novel. Apart from two or three of them, they are university students in Baghdad, but most of them are originally from different remote parts of Iraq. The novel presents these students undergoing the various problems of youth and with their political activities, their love affairs, their sexual sufferings and crises and the natural disputes which all of these cause. The friends and the ways in which they spend much of their time and the moods and feelings prevailing at their meetings, especially in the cafes and bars, are similar to those of the characters in The Sun Also Rises and their meetings and conversations in the cafes of Spain. As there are differences between the main themes, the motives, and the main messages which obviously each of the two writers wants to express, one can still point out the influence of Hemingway on Al-Rubay’i. This appears in some of the characters, in the ways they present the characters in general, and the relationships between the main ones of them in particular. The relationship between Salah and Huda in Al-Anhar is compared in detail with the one between Jake and Brett in our Ph D thesis mentioned above. (See Kadhim, p185-190)
One of the minor characters who might indicate some of Hemingway’s spirit is Husayn ‘Ashur- a weak personality- who seems only to want to have an affair with a girl, but without success, until we learn at the end of the novel that he has had a short relationship with Huda. Remembering that Huda is the hero Salah’s girlfriend, we find a lot of similarities between Husayn ‘Ashur, his personality and affair, in Al-Anhar; and Cohn in The Sun also Rises. “I am sure,” says Jack of him, “he had never been in love in his life”, while we learn later of his brief relationship with Bret, Jake’s girl friend. However, If “Robert Cohn is the false knight” (Weeks, p127), in The Sun Also Rises, as Mark Spilka understands him, ‘Abdulrahman Al-Rubay’i might be trying to create such a character out of Isma’il Al-‘Imari in Al-Anhar. Khalil Al-Radhi, a friend of Al Salah says about –‘Umari who has been recently killed as a fida’i within a Palestinian organization,
Isma’il Al-‘Imari’s martyrdom was actually suicide. (p271)
“Romero’s face may be cut up, but his moral qualities have triumphed, as they do again in the bull-ring the day following the brawl. He has been ‘beaten-up like many other members of his generation. But not ‘lost’.” (Peterson, p87)
Al-‘Imari seems to me as if he was wanted by creator to be a kind of combination between Cohn and Romero, but Al-‘Imari himself behave against his creator wish.

The Influences Hemingway
On Other Iraqi Writers
Moving to the other main two writers who are influenced by Ernest Hemingway, we will start with the first of them, ‘Adil ‘Abduljabbar. Unfortunately there is not much information about the writer. As far as we know, he was born in Baghdad in the thirties, studied English and taught until he moved in 1973 to work in Al-Thawra newspaper as a literary and cultural editor where he remained until his death in the early nineties. He started his career and essayist and fiction writer in the mid-sixties. The first well-known work he published was his first novel Fi Yawm Ghazir al-Matar fi Yawm Shadid al-Qayz, (On a Heavy Rainy Day, on an Extremely Hot day in, 1973). In this work, he seemed to establish, or at least consider himself as a fiction writer. However, he did not write his second novel until 1979, and that was ‘Irzal Hamad al-Salim, (Hamad al-Salim’s Shade). Soon afterwards, ‘Abduljabbar would be among the most prolific writers of war fiction, and mostly novels. During the eight yearlong Iraqi-Iranian war, he wrote five novels, three novellas, many short stories and many essays and nonfiction. Like most war fiction, we hardly ever find, with these unusually prolific publications, a distinguished war work. However, it is still possible to find a few among them that relate to his early literary ability which appeared in his first novel, such as Jabal al-Nar Jabal al-Thalj, (The Mountain of Fire the Mountain of Snow, 1982), Sharqan fi Zaman al-Ahya’, (In the East is the Time of Those Who are Alive, 1984) and ‘Urs ‘Iraqi, (An Iraqi Wedding, 1987). Here we are going to dwell briefly on some aspects in these novels, where we find what we think it is an influence of Hemingway. The main one will, of course, be his first novel.
Knowing and studying English language, and as a writer of fiction, or at least a future writer of fiction, it is natural that Adil ‘Abduljabbar, at the time of his studies and afterwards, read English and American literature, in which Hemingway must have figured prominently. In fact, during the period from the early sixties to the eighties he read world literature and translated many western stories from English into Arabic. Being very famous, Hemingway must have been among those writers whom ‘Abduljabbar used to read. Looking for the influence of Hemingway’s works, of which his war fiction was very widely read in Iraq in the sixties, on the writer, we look for that firstly in ‘Abduljabbar’ war fiction. Surprisingly we find hardly any such influences in this fiction. However if there were any such influence, and one cannot be sure about this, it would be minor and superficial. By reading and examining more than fifteen pieces of short and long fiction, one can notice such minor influence only in Jabal al-Nar Jabal al-thalj, Sharqan fi Zaman al-Ahya’, and to some extent Al-Riqs alaAktaf al-Mawt. To understand this strange phenomenon, we must know how most of the war fiction of the eighties, was actually written. It was mostly written as propaganda, as so-called Literature of Political Mobilization to back the war against Iran. Nevertheless, there are now some artistic war literary works, though not many of ‘Abduljabbar’s.
Perhaps the first thing a corporatist can easily notice, concerning Hemingway’s and ‘Abduljabbar’s war novels, is that while the first presents war as naturally associated with violence, suffering, cruelty, and human psychological crises, the latter presents it as if it is normal human practice, in accordance with the Political Mobilization. In dealing with the war, ‘Abduljabbar’s novels seem sometimes even festive. But again one can find some minor similarities, some of which might be the results of Hemingway’s influence, even in the writer’s attitude towards the war. In a dramatic vital situation the protagonist of one of his novel says,
So, this is the end, with this pain the human being ends. How many times does he have to fall down? He stood up every time, stood up and kept going until he fell down inside a hole again. (p230)
Such a dramatic situation with such an idea is quite common in ‘Abduljabbar’s, and perhaps in other writers’ war fiction. The important idea about the end and death reminds us of Hemingway’s Catherine in A Farewell to Arms,
The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he’s intelligent.
Of the other similarities between ‘Abduljabbar’s and Hemingway’s war novels, there are the landscapes, the detailed description and the rain. These similarities are variously found, the previous novel, in Jabal al-Nar Jabal al-thalj and Sharqan fi Zaman al-Ahya’. However, as they are minor ones and in novels of less importance shall move on to the Iraqi writer’s major novel which is Fi Yawm Ghazir al-Matar fi Yawm Shadid al-Qaydh.
Apart from the group of friends, in Abduljabbar’s novel, which we think is modeled on Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises, the main area of influence concerns the feeling of loss and disillusionment.
It is your turn now to talk; you must find a starting point by which you go forward to restore the rubbles and restrict them. (p122)
The second writer we want to examine here is Abdulkhaliq al-Rikabi. He is undisputedly one of the three or four greatest Iraqi writers of the last three decades, though, in fact, he began to establish his name and reputation as a fiction writer even before that. He was born in Badra, a small town south of Baghdad, in 1946. Graduated of The College of Fine Arts at the University of Baghdad in 1970, he worked as a teacher of Arts for nine years before moving to the cultural sector in where he has been since. He began his literary career by writing poetry in the late sixties and early seventies, before he found himself in the world of narrative. Nafida bi-Si’at al-Hulm, (A Window as Wide as a Dream), 1977, was his first novel. Though it did not gain wide critical Interest, the novel clearly demonstrated its writer’s mature, technical, narrative ability that its writer had. In fact, when one reads the novel he/she easily senses the great writer that Al-Rikabi would be. Publishing four novels and a collection of short stories, in the following few years, and that was in the eighties, Al-Rikabi established himself as the writer that his first novel had heralded, and another four later novels would enhance that reputation. Here we want to mention something that many critics fail to admit, because it is associated with the war literature of the Eighties and Nineties and its negative literary reputation in Iraq for being mostly propaganda for the Iraq-Iran war of the Eighties. That is that Al-Rikabi has written some beautiful and distinguished long and short war fiction, among which are Ha’it al-Banadiq, Mukabadat ‘Abdullah al-‘Ashiq and Nafidh bi-Si’at al-Hulum. Actually we are going to deal with the last-mentioned here, which is the last. However this novel is concerned not with the above mentioned war, but with the previous Arab war. Although his fictional worlds are closest fo those of Gabriel Garcia Marquez more than any of other world writers, Al-Rikabi’s Nafida bi-Si’at al-Hulum displays details common to it and to some of Hemingway’s work, which might be the result of this writer’s influence. However, we are going to make a comparison between this novel and one of Hemingway’s, that is the long short story Snows of Kilimanjaro to determine whether the similarities in Al-Rikabi’s novel are the result of Hemingway’s influence or not.
The protagonist Hazim is a young former fighter now crippled. He spends most of his time, at least during the time of the narration, watching and thinking of his wife. In between thinking and watching, he recalls some past events either concerning his relationship with his parents and his wife Jamila before and after getting married or how he was wounded in the war. From this point, if not earlier, anyone who has read Hemingway’s works, The Snows of Kilimanjaro in particular may remember this story. One of the interesting things that Hazim, as a protagonist and narrator at the same time, daily practices is to tell us what he sees and hears of Jamila inside their home, and the outdoors through the window of his room.
He heard her wooden bed creak upstairs. He thought,
“She has finished her morning tour of her room”. He turn his face to the right and, through the oblong of the window, he caught a gray cloud slowly moving, leaving behind high white flakes of clouds. The rain was continually failing… (p9)
The Snows of Kilimanjaro is largely structured by such a narrative technique,
It was evening now and he had been asleep. The sun was gone behind the hill and there was a shadow all across the plain. (p64)
Now she came in sight, walking across the open towards the camp. She was wearing Jodhpur and carrying her rifle. (p67)
However, “Suffering from the crippling effects of the war, the Hemingway heroes and heroines are devotees of an Eros who rejects the traditional categories of good and evil. (Glicksberg, p93) On the contrary, Al-Rikabi’s hero has glimpses of hope. So at the end of the novel,
He heard the rustle of her feet on the stairs. In seconds the oblong of the forth window lights up… All four windows are always light in the depth of the quiet night. (p236)
We know that The Snows of Kilimanjaro ends when Harry’s girlfriend calls him but,
There was no answer and she could not hear him breathing. (p83)

Conclusion
Concluding our study, we can sum up the results as follows,
-Ernest Hemingway has always been widely read in The Arab World, particularly during the period from in mid-fifties to the mid-eighties.
-As a result, the writer has had an influence on many Iraqi writers.
-The main writers, who has been influenced by Hemingway, are ‘Adil ‘Abduljjabar, ‘Abdulkhaliq Al-Rikabi, Fu’ad Al-Tikarli and the most important is ‘Abdulraman Al-Rubay’i.
-The main Area in which Hemingway had had an influence on those Iraqi writers, and on Al-Rubay’i in particular, are the language and dialogue, the style; and the characters.
Finally, I must say that when I went back to what I said many years ago about the influence of Hemingway on Al-Rubay’i in particular, I discovered that some of my findings were not as they had appeared to me. This study one of two attempts to rectify that.

Bibliography
Hemingway’s Novels,
A Farewell to Arms, vintage, Great Britain, 2005.
The Old Man and the Sea, Book Club Associates, London, 1971.
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Jonathan Cape, London .
The Snows of Kilimanjaro, in The First Thirty Nine Stories, Jonathan Cape, London, 1952. P58-83
The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta), Arrow books, UK, 2005.
The Iraqi novels,
‘Abduljabbar, ‘Adil:
o Fi Yawm Ghazir al-Mattar fi Yawm Shadid al-Qayz, 1973.
oJabal al-Nar Jabal al-Thalj, Baghdad, Manshurat Wasarat al-Thaqafa wa-al-I’lam, 1982.
oAl-Raqs ‘ala Aktaf al-Mawt, Baghdad, Manshurat Al-Thawra, 1981.
oSharqan fi Zaman al-Ahya’, Baghdad, Manshurat Wazarat al-Thaqafa wa-al-I’lam, 1984
Farman, Gha’ib Tu’ma:
oKhamsat Aswat, Beirut, Dar al-Adab, 1967.
oAl-Nakhlawa-al-Jiran, Baghdad, Dar al-Ruwad li-al-Tiba’a, 1966.
Al-Tikarli, Fu’ad:
o Al-Raj’ al-Ba’id, Beirut, Dar Ibn Rushd, 1980.
oAl-Wajh al-Akhar, Baghdad, Manshurat Wazarat al-Thaqafa wa-al-I’lam, 1982.
Jabir, Shakir: Al-Ayyam al-Mudhi’a, Baghdad, Matba’at al-Jumhuriyya, 1961.
Al-Rikabi, ‘Abdulkhaliq: Nafida bisi’at al-Hulum, Baghdad, Manshurat Wazarat al-Thaqafa wa-al-I’lam, 1977.
Al-Rubay’i, Abdulrahman:
o Al-Anhar, Baghdad, Maktabat al-Thawra al-‘Arabiyya, 1974.
oKhutut al-Tul Khutut al-‘Ardh, Beirut, Dar al-Tali’a, 1981
o‘Uyun fi al-Hulum, Damascus, Manshurat Ittihad al-Kuttab al-Arab, 1974.
oAl-Wakr, Tunis, Dar al-Ma’arif, 1980.
oAl-Washm, Beirut, Dar al-Tali’a li-al-Tiba’a wa-al-Nashr 1982.
Secondary References,
Baker, Carlos: Hemingway and His Critics, an International Anthology.
Benson, Jackson J.: Hemingway, the Writer’s Art of Self-Defence, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1969.
Farman, Gha’ib Tu’ma: Personal letter to the writer, 1981.
Gellens, Jay (Ed.): Twentieth Century Interpretation of ‘A Farewell to Arms’, A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, Inc, Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1970.
Glicksberg, Charles I.: The Sexual Revolution Modern American Literature, Netherland, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hugue, 1971.
Hanneman, Andre, Ernest Hemingway, A comprehensive Bibliography, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1967.
Kadhim, Najim A.:
oThe Novel in Iraq from the Mid-sixties until 1980 and the Influence of American Novel”, University of Exeter, 1983.
oFi al-Adab al-Muqaran, Muqaddimat fi al-Tatbiq, Amman, Dar Usama, 1999.
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[1] ) In Greek myth, Leander fell in love with Hero and would swim every night across the Hellespont to be with her. Hero would light a lamp at the top of her tower to guide his way.