# Jabra Ibrahim Jabra

Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (28 August 1919 – 12 December 1994) (Arabic: جبرا ابراهيم جبرا) was an Iraqi-Palestinian author, artist and intellectual born in Adana in French-occupied Cilicia to a Syriac Orthodox Christian family. His family survived the Seyfo Genocide and fled to the British Mandate of Palestine in the early 1920s. Jabra was educated at government schools under the British-mandatory educational system in Bethlehem and Jerusalem, such as the Government Arab College, and won a scholarship from the British Council to study at the University of Cambridge. Following the events of 1948, Jabra fled Jerusalem and settled in Baghdad, where he found work teaching at the University of Baghdad. In 1952 he was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities fellowship to study English literature at Harvard University. Over the course of his literary career, Jabra wrote novels, short stories, poetry, criticism, and a screenplay. He was a prolific translator of modern English and French literature into Arabic. Jabra was also an enthusiastic painter, and he pioneered the Hurufiyya movement, which sought to integrate traditional Islamic art within contemporary art through the decorative use of Arabic script.

## Life and career

Jabra Ibrahim Jabra was born in 1919 in Adana, which was then part of the French Mandate of Cilicia, to Ibrahim Yahrin and his wife Maryam. His mother's first husband Dawood and twin brother Yusuf had been killed in the 1909 Adana massacre. After Maryam remarried, her husband Ibrahim was drafted into the Ottoman Army during World War I. The couple gave birth to their first son, Yusuf Ibrahim Jabra, in 1915. The family survived the Assyrian genocide, fled Adana, and emigrated to Bethlehem in the early 1920s.
In Bethlehem, Jabra attended the National School. After his family moved to Jerusalem in 1932, he enrolled at the Rashidiya School and graduated in 1937 from the Government Arab College. Jabra won a scholarship to study English at the University College of the South West in Exeter for the academic year 1939–1940, and stayed on in England to continue his studies at the University of Cambridge, because of the dangers of returning to Palestine by boat during World War II. At Cambridge, Jabra read English and earned a BA in 1943 from Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where his censor was William Sutherland Thatcher.
In 1943, Jabra returned to Jerusalem, where he began teaching English at the Rashidiyya College as a stipulation of his British Council scholarship. He also wrote a number of articles for local Arabic-language newspapers in Jerusalem.
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. 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. 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. While at Harvard between the fall of 1952 and January 1954, Jabra studied under Archibald MacLeish. 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).
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.
Jabra became an Iraqi citizen. He was one of the first Palestinians to write about his experiences of being in exile. Jabra's home on Princesses' Street in the Mansour District of Baghdad was a meeting place for Iraqi intellectuals.
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.
Jabra's involvement in the artistic community continued with his becoming a founding member of the One Dimension Group, established by the prominent Baghdadi artist, Shakir Hassan Al Said in 1971. The group's manifesto gave voice to the group's commitment to both heritage and modernity and sought to distance itself from modern Arab artists, which the group perceived as following European artistic traditions. The One Dimension group was part of a broader movement among Arabic artists who rejected Western art forms and sought a new aesthetic, one that expressed their individual nationalism as well as their pan-Arab identity. This movement subsequently became known as the Hurufiyya movement.
Following his death in 1994, a relative, Raqiya Ibrahim, moved into his Baghdad home. However, the house was destroyed when a car bomb targeting the Egyptian embassy next door detonated on Easter Sunday in 2010, destroying much of the street and killing dozens of civilians. Thousands of Jabra's letters and personal effects were destroyed in this incident along with a number of his paintings.

## Work

As a poet, novelist, painter, translator and literary critic, Jabra was a versatile man of letters. He also translated many works of English literature into Arabic, including Shakespeare's major tragedies, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, chapters 29–33 of Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough and some of the work of T. S. Eliot. Jabra's own work has been translated into more than twelve languages, including English, French and Hebrew. His paintings are now difficult to locate, but a few notable works can be found in private collections.
Jabra was among the contributors of the poetry magazine Shi'r based in Beirut.