Ahmad Saadawi’s “Dogs”
by zunguzungu
Today I’m teaching Ahmad Saadawi’s (very) short story “Dogs,” which Jadaliyya introduces only by saying
“originally published in al-Aalem (Baghdad) in July 2010 following a campaign to exterminate stray dogs in Baghdad.”
If you’re reading this post, you should click over and read the story; it’s barely 600 words, and when’s the last time you read a story from Iraq?
The first thing to say is that even the New York Times understands that a campaign to kill stray dogs is rife with symbolic meaning:
BAGHDAD — While human beings in Iraq were killing each other in huge numbers, they ignored the dogs, which in turn multiplied at an alarming rate. Now stray dogs are such a menace that municipal workers are hunting them down, slaughtering some 10,000 in Baghdad just since December.
A stray peered out from a pile of corrugated metal in Baghdad, where feral packs have surged. Few Iraqis own dogs as pets. This is not exactly good news, but it does seem a measure of progress that Iraqis have the luxury of worrying about dogs at all.
Certainly the story lightly gestures towards a killing animals/killing humans distinction. But what the Times sees as a “turning the corner” index of progress, I think it’s fair to say that Saadawi is much more concerned with thinking long term, and there’s something distinctly unsettling about way the narrator urges us to be like dogs. Putting aside the fact that a dog is not usually a nice thing for a human to be — especially in this “public safety” framework, where a dog is bare life by reference to the human not-dog — what does it mean to be that kind of accepting? “It’s not good to spend life’s precious time thinking of a death that is impervious to thought.” Note the way the dogs lose their names.
From an interview with Saadawi:
The problem here is that I cannot escape “Iraq”. I mean, this is the place that I know, and it is the one place that primarily matters to me more than any other. I want to create a vision that is honestly constructed about what is going on. I believe that many of us in Iraq – artists, intellectuals, and average people – are still unable to comprehend the dramatic and monstrous events that took place since April 2003, and until this day.
I still believe that reaching the abyss of civil war and cheap daily massacres is the ugliest moment in Iraq’s modern history. Many of us still refuse to morally face this moment. We slaughtered one another in a cold and barbaric manner, now we must apologize from ourselves and from others.
Mario Vargas Llosa begins his Conversation in the Cathedral by mentioning a public health campaign to round up stray dogs, and I feel like I’ve seen that motif many times, though that’s the only example I can think of. But no wonder; such a rich trope: public order and the state’s power to kill, the line separating humans and animals, and of course, domesticity: pets/strays/”mad dog” and the varying levels and modes of sympathy. And there’s always the way the protection of animals — see here, here, and here — becomes a sign of Western benevolence, and, quietly, a sign of non-western savagery.
zunguzungu 
The only time dogs enter en masse into Japanese history is Shogun Tsunayoshi’s attempt to protect them which turned into a massive public relations failure (largely due to hostile political commentators and historians). I’m not sure that really matters to the modern anthropologically informed discussions you’re referencing, but I have to get it in there.
Actually…… I respect the muslim hermanos’ hatred for canines–ugly beasts– tho’….mass extermination’s a bit rash.
and remember–the real Rev. starts with Judy Buttler used as a public concubine, and a Lakofff playin’ a fiddle for the comrades, and like Johnny Searle tapdancin along. Whoop
Pretty common urban policy in the “developing” world.
http://www.eurasianet.org/node/63766
Think of Nietzsche throwing his arms around a horse that was being whipped: the physicality/empathy with the other — the breakdown of the animal-human divide — became ‘proof’ of his madness.
There’s that island in the sea of Marmara where the dogs of Istanbul were left to die. It’s history rather than fiction, though it’s a strange sad place, haunted by them still. Here’s a 1930s article from Time about them: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,931593,00.html
thanks for the link! jadaliyya is always so good.
and i think you’re absolutely right about the dog trope – all about Modernization as Public Health (in that classically ironic way where garbage-eating dogs may actually be key to preventing some kinds of disease)
the main example that comes to my mind is the highly mythicized campaign against feral dogs in istanbul, which seems to have involved occasional roundups after which the dogs were dumped on one of the Princes islands in the Sea of Marmara to starve or eat each other.
here’s a Time article from 1937 about it all (take it with a grain or two of salt – though not as many as the wikipedia page that claims the dogs were brought back after an earthquake): http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,931593,00.html
which isn’t to say that feral dogs in cities can’t be scary, and perhaps dangerous, though – i’ve had run-ins i wouldn’t care to repeat in salonika/thessaloniki and xela/quetzaltenango… carry a few pebbles in your pocket, though, and you’ll be okay.
The dog, yes, the dog. I’m writing on Batouala now and I’m always struck by the little red dog Djouma in the text.
“A Djouma, when he isn’t being beaten, is being eaten in a time of scarcity, unless for their amusement they prefer to castrate him or to cut off his ears.”
Your post makes me think I should spend a little more time on Djouma to figure out the African-Afro-diasporic thing.
To find your six-pack Imagine not drinking all day no drink, no water, no soda. At the end of an eight-hour shift, you shuold be pretty dry. This is exactly why you shuold start rehydrating immediately after a night sleep.
I think you are right about this being a common literary motif. I can think of a few examples. There is a story about a dog in A Canticle For Liebowitz that is used to argue against euthanasia. One of the stories in The Martian Chronicles, “There will come soft rains”, is about a dog devoured by a malfunctioning cleaning robot, which is a metaphor for a nuclear holocaust. More loosely, Saadawi’s story reminds me a bit of Moby Dick.
Rounding up dogs is the principal duty of Beijing cops in the great Ning Ying’s On the Beat.