Creativity as a Response to Chaos : Innovation and Imagination in Post-2003 Iraqi Literature and Art Farah Alrajeh




My study focuses on Iraq, and, more specifically, on the creative works of fiction and art that emerged in the years following the 2003 US invasion when chaos became a reality. Analysing these works will show how their emergence and flowering during the period after the war, as well as the decades of censorship and stagnation prove the existence of a viable connection between chaos, creativity, and knowledge. In other words, I will show how the violence and disorder in the post-war period stimulated creativity in two Iraqi authors and artists. [...] Their works show how imagination can spring from chaos to describe it, embrace it, or suggest certain ways to resist it.





Introduction
Chaos is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as a state of total confusion with no order. What gives chaos negative connotations is that it usually follows disasters, wars, and historical disturbances. Religious traditions from different parts of the world associate God with order and celebrate the victory over chaos in their rituals and myths. For example, in the ancient religion of Babel, the Mesopotamian creation myth Enuma Elisha (also known as The Seven Tablets of Creation), recounts the birth of the gods and " " the creation of the universe and human beings out of "undifferentiated water swirling in chaos" (Mark, 2018). It narrates events of a battle in which Marduk, the God of the sky, defeats Tiamat, a female god-figure associated with chaos, then divides her body to form the world. Tiamat has been interpreted as referring to an older impotent order of society and divine beings that is replaced by the new.
Chaos, or its female incarnation Tiamat, was defeated by the Babylonian king. However, the myth alludes to the fact that chaos can be a ground from which creative and new things spring. This is because the body of the goddess of chaos had been used to create an orderly system and new life: Marduk defeats Quingu and kills Tiamat by shooting her with an arrow which splits her in two; from her eyes flow the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Out of Tiamat's corpse, Marduk creates the heavens and the earth, he appoints gods to various duties and binds Tiamat's eleven creatures to his feet as trophies (to much adulation from the other gods) before setting their images in his new home (Mark, 2018).
Other religions encourage an acceptance of chaos or elements associated with it, such as negativity, unknowing, emptiness, and darkness.
For example, in the The Texts of Taoism, it is mentioned that in ancient China, early Daoist (Taoist) texts support mystical union with hun-tun (chaos) and identify hun-tun with the ultimate principle of Dao: "In the Grand Beginning of all things there was nothing in all the vacancy of space.
There was nothing that could be named. It was in this state that there arose the first existence" (Legge, 1962, p. 20). Similarly, along with the mainstream Vedic traditions of India, there are Upanishadic and Buddhist doctrines that encourage a unification with 'emptiness', another element of chaos (Omvedt, 2003 (2019) explains the relationship between chaos and the creation of the universe. He adds that chaos has been a motif for creativity, knowledge, and change: Everything in the universe arises from the struggle between Cosmos and Chaos. Just as surely as random mutation drives evolution, chaos drives creativity. To generate more truly unique ideas and to solve problems more effectively, get in sync with the universe. Invite chance, welcome randomness, embrace chaos.
The connection between chaos and individual creativity has been noted from a psychoanalytic point of view. Carlos Antonio Torre (2014) points out that "the brain needs to be chaotic in order to perform the problem-solving function for which it was designed [and that] through such chaotic dynamics, problem-solving efforts can evolve into novelty and creativity" (p. 186). Torre adds that any chaotic situation will "give birth to new ideas, new knowledge, the emergence of new patterns of interaction or forms of organisation" (ibid).
In the West, an extensive body of scholarship that focuses on chaos and deals with it as a separate field of knowledge has evolved and developed.
In Chaos and Order, the literary theorist Katherine Hayles (1991) elucidates how chaos has become "an emerging field known as the science of chaos" (p. 1). She adds that the new "paradigm of orderly disorder" (p. xiii), represented by chaos theory, signifies a conceptual revolution in modern culture. Chaos theory, thus, has found enthusiasm and full reception in the field of humanities and other scientific fields as mathematics and physics.
Arab/Islamic societies alternatively view chaos through a negative lens and consider it as a source of disorder and destruction. Generally, Muslims believe in the emanation of the universe from eternity, not from chaos, as other ancient religions suggest. According to Islam, the world was eternal but temporary in essence, and the will of God created it (al-Alousi, 1968, p. 179). In his Islamic Mythology, David Leeming (2005) points out that "Islam is a religion that is more concerned with social order and law than with religious ritual and myths" (pp. 207-211). Arab Muslim thinkers believe that chaos is a source of evil and corruption to society and culture.
For example, the Egyptian Islamic thinker Mahmood Shakir claims that "Chaos is a big evil, no wise can doubt this, and this evil cannot produce any good, as some people claim" (Jamal, 2003, p. 831). Shakir has not only negated the positive effects of chaos but concludes that the literature produced during the spread of chaos should be disposed of. The rejection of the idea that chaos can bring creative and unique knowledge explains the lack of Arabic literature and scholarship on chaos as a source of creativity.
Reviewing the Arabic and Iraqi scholarship written on the theme of chaos, I have not identified any study that looks at chaos as a source of creativity and imagination.
In this article, I attempt to fill the gap in the literature by identifying chaos as a motive for creativity and knowledge. To do this, my study focuses on Iraq, and, more specifically, on the creative works of fiction and art that emerged in the years following the 2003 US invasion when chaos became a reality. Analysing these works will show how their emergence and flowering during the period after the war, as well as the decades of censorship and stagnation prove the existence of a viable connection between chaos, creativity, and knowledge. In other words, I will show how the violence and Writers inside Iraq survived the wars and brutality of the regime either by resorting to silence, or by continuing to write but relying on allegory or mysticism. The characters were extracted from ancient history. Gilgamesh could be found walking relentlessly in the narrow alleys of Baghdad; Nebuchadrezzar, the warrior king of Babylon, returned from the ancient past to claim endless victories in the Iran-Iraq War (1980)(1981)(1982)(1983)(1984)(1985)(1986)(1987)(1988) Describing the suffering of Iraqi authors inside Iraq and the negative consequences of censorship and control on fiction, Salam Ibrahim (2012) explains: Under the dictatorship, the novelist at the instant of writing suffered from the syndrome of self-censorship. Words might lead to assured death, as was the case with the novelists Mahmud Jandari and Hasan Mutlaq. All this made the novel weak, treating everything unessential in the experience, preoccupied with unimportant details, old history, regular social worries that had nothing to do with the daily confrontations of death [...] All this impacted the structure of the novel, which emerged weak, confused and immature (p. 8).
Literature and art had to glorify the regime and valorise war to guarantee the safety of the author, including, for example, the series by Iraq's troubles, nevertheless, have energised its literary scene. Writing under the kind of relentless surveillance the country has suffered since the early 1970s gradually stagnates creativity, and it fell to events of historical proportions to help writing in Iraq escape the confines of mundane themes and treatments. National catastrophes are not necessarily beneficial to creative expression; indeed, they can be quite detrimental, but in Iraq, they have opened up new terrains, and narrative writing has flourished (pp. xiii-xiv). shows how he employs chaos as a theme and character: A young man walked into the morgue, Saadawi recounts, demanding to see the corpse of his brother, who'd just been killed by a bomb. The man in charge at the morgue led the grieving brother to a room filled with assorted limbs, casually pointing to one body part in the corner. The man wailed, asking where the rest of his sibling's mutilated body was, to which the desensitised morgue manager said while waving his hand around the rest of the room, "take what you want and make yourself a body" (Hankir 2018).
The monster can be seen as a metaphor for the chaos of the war and the concomitant sectarian violence, with its devastating consequences on Iraqi society. Saadawi explains: "Frankenstein in this novel is a condensed symbol of Iraq's current problems. The Frankenstein-esque atmosphere of horror was strongly prevalent in Iraq during the period covered by the novel" (Najjar, 2014). The misery, inhumanity and darkness of reality are manifested through the spread of cruelty, terror, exploitation and loss. These facts formed rich motives for the artist Mahmoud and pushed him to find lively artistic worlds that parallel this negative reality. He rejects negative restrictions and gave reality the familiarity and balance it needed.
The creative imagination reflected in Fahmi's works was driven by the artist's need to grasp the image of peaceful Baghdad while it was suffering the ravages of war. It was necessary for him to flee the unfortunate reality of his home to a world of imagination where the picture of Baghdad is as he wishes to see it. Fahmi, thus, creatively employs chaos, giving the girl sleeping on the roof of the house a size larger than the size of the house itself.
Her satin dress in bright pink; the city that lies very quietly under a bright daytime sun; the sky ornamented with flying birds; the blue car in front of the house; the white storks that feel the safety and peace as they return to their nests to enjoy the areas beauty and stability; and the dark pink flowers on the right side of the painting that reflect happiness and joy. All these beautifully blended elements show how the Iraqi artist can be imaginative and creative in response to chaos and disorder. war Iraq in an attempt to show how the chaos, violence, and war have motivated authors and artists to be creative, reorder their thoughts, and express the predicament of their people in new ways that would have been previously unimaginable (had their experiences not taken place). Iraq's writers, like Ahmad Saadawi, have been stubbornly productive and creative during the years of chaos. The creative works presented by Iraqi painters like Mahmoud Fahmi show how artists are aiming to experience a degree of regularity in the midst of disorder, in which they make an active effort to preserve the beautiful image of their homeland during the years of peace and prosperity. Their works show how imagination can spring from chaos to describe it, embrace it, or suggest certain ways to resist it.