Jabra Ibrahim Jabra

Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (28 August 1919

In 1943, Jabra returned to Jerusalem, where he began teaching English at the Rashidiyya College as a stipulation of his British Council scholarship.[6] He also wrote a number of articles for local Arabic-language newspapers in Jerusalem.^[7]

In January 1948, Jabra and his family fled their home in Katamon in western Jerusalem shortly after the Semiramis Hotel bombing and moved to Baghdad. Jabra traveled to Amman, Beirut, and Damascus in search of work. In Damascus Jabra went to the Iraqi embassy, where the cultural attaché, 'Abd al-'Aziz al-Douri, who would later become an eminent Iraqi historian, gave him a visa to teach at the Teachers' Training College for one year.^[8] Jabra received an MA from Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge in 1948. The MA did not require any coursework or residence in England as per the "Cambridge MA" system, whereby holders of a BA may obtain an MA after five years and the payment of a fee. In 1952 Jabra converted to Sunni Islam to marry Lami'a Barqi al-'Askari.^[9] The same year, he received a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, arranged personally by John Marshall, to study English literature and literary criticism at Harvard University.^[10] While at Harvard between the fall of 1952 and January 1954, Jabra studied under Archibald MacLeish.^[11] In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Jabra translated his first novel, Cry in a Long Night, from English into Arabic and began writing his second novel, Hunters in a Narrow Street (1960).^[12]

Following his return to Baghdad, Jabra worked in public relations for the Iraq Petroleum Company and then for the Iraqi Ministry of Culture and Information. In Baghdad, he taught at various colleges and became a professor of English at the University of Baghdad.^[13]

Jabra became an Iraqi citizen. He was one of the first Palestinians to write about his experiences of being in exile.^[14] Jabra's home on Princesses' Street in the Mansour District of Baghdad was a meeting place for Iraqi intellectuals.^[15]

Much of his writing was concerned with modernism and Arab society. This interest led him to become, in the 1950s, a founding member of the Modern Baghdad Art Group, an artists' collective and intellectual movement that attempted to combine Iraq's profound artistic heritage with the methods of modernist abstract art. Although the Baghdad Modern Art Group was ostensibly an art movement, its members included poets, historians, architects and administrators. Jabra was deeply committed to the group's founder, Jawad Saleem and Saleem's ideals, and drew inspiration from Arab folklore, Arab literature and Islam.^[16]

Jabra's involvement in the artistic community continued with his becoming a founding member of the

Jabra was among the contributors of the poetry magazine Shi'r based in Beirut.^[20]

Bibliography

Novels

• Cry in a Long Night (Surakh fi layl tawil, 1955)
• Hunters in a Narrow Street (written in English; 1959)
• The Ship (al-Safinah, 1970)
• The Search for Walid Masood (al-Bahth 'an Walid Mas'ud, 1978)
• World Without Maps ('Alam bi-la khara'it, 1982; written with Saudi novelist Abdul Rahman Munif)
• The Other Rooms (al-Ghuraf al-ukhra, 1986)
• The Journals of Sarab Affan (Yawmiyyat Sarab 'Affan, 1992)^{[citation needed]}

Short story collections

• Arak and Other Stories ('Araq wa-qisas ukhra, 1956)^{[citation needed]}

Poetry collections

• Tammuz in the City (Tammuz fi al-madinah, 1959)
• Anguish of the Sun (Law'at al-shams, 1979)
• Closed Circle (al-Madar al-mughlaq, 1981)^{[citation needed]}

Autobiographies

• The First Well: A Bethlehem Boyhood (al-Bi'r al-ula: fusul min sirah dhatiyyah, 1987)
• Princesses' Street: Baghdad Memories (Shari' al-amirat: fusul min sirah dhatiyyah, 1994)^{[citation needed]}

Screenplays

• The Sun-King (al-Malik al-shams, 1986)
• Days of the Eagle (Ayyam al-'uqab, 1988)

Critical Studies

• Freedom and the Flood (al-Hurriyyah wa-l-tufan, 1960)
• The Eighth Journey (al-Rihlah al-thaminah, 1967)
• Contemporary Iraqi Art (al-Fann al-'iraqi al-mu'asir, 1972)
• Jawad Salim and the Freedom Monument (Jawad Salim wa-nusb al-hurriyyah, 1974)
• Fire and Essence (al-Nar wa-l-jawhar, 1975)
• Sources of Vision (Yanabi' al-ru'ya, 1979)
• The Grass Roots of Iraqi Art (Judhur al-fann al-'iraqi, 1984)
• Art, Dream, Action (al-Fann wa-l-hulm wa-l-fi'l, 1985)
• A Celebration of Life (Ihtifal-un li-l-hayah, 1988)
• Meditations on a Marble Monument (Ta'ammulat fi bunyan marmari, 1989)^{[citation needed]}

Translations (English and French into Arabic)

• Adonis, or Tammuz (Adunis aw Tammuz, chapters 29–33 of
  Sir James Frazer
  , 1957)
• Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man by Henri Frankfort
• Sight and Insight by Alexander Eliot (translated as Afaq al-fann)
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
• Camus by Germaine Brée
• The Writer and His Craft, Being the Hopwood Lectures, 1932–1952 by various authors (translated as al-Adib wa-sina'atu-hu)
• The Life of the Drama by Eric Bentley
• Axel's Castle by Edmund Wilson
• Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
• Shakespeare Our Contemporary by Jan Kott
• What Happens in Hamlet by
  John Dover Wilson
• The Tower of Babel by André Parrot
• Shakespeare and the Solitary Man by Janette Dillon
• The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde
• Dry September, a collection of twelve modern English and American short stories^{[citation needed]}