Suja Sawafta

Bio

Suja Sawafta is Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies at the University of Miami. Her research focuses on exile/migration and eco-critism in Modern Arabic and Franco-Arab literature within the Arab World, Europe, the Mediterranean, and Global South. She is currently at work on her first book on the Jordanian-born Saudi-Iraqi writer Abdulrahman Munif, a petroleum-economist turned novelist most famously known for his epic novel Cities of Salt. Together with Khalid Lyamlahy (U of Chicago), she is currently co-editor of a forthcoming edited collection on the Turkish-born Palestinian-Iraqi intellectual and luminary Jabra Ibrahim Jabra.

Contributions

Cinephilic Life-Writing in An Iraqi in Paris

Peer Reviewed

Print Plus Exclusive

Early in Samuel Shimon’s first-person autobiographical novel An Iraqi in Paris ( ‘Irāqī fī Bāris), the young author-narrator has left his hometown of Habbaniya, Iraq on the eve of Saddam Hussein’s military takeover of the country. A child pushcart vendor now in his early twenties, Shmuel harbors a rags-to-riches dream of traveling to the US and making it big as a Hollywood director. While he hails from a poor Assyrian Christian family, he is detained and tortured in Damascus, due in part to his...

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film immigration