The Storyteller's Reverie: Muhammad Khudayyir's Basrayatha

In his genre shattering work Basrayatha Muhammad Khudayyir writes "Before Basra, there was Basrayatha". Basra is situated in southern Iraq between Iran and Kuwait, while Basrayatha resides in the hands and minds of its readers - it is the utopian reconstruction of a physical space which has been lost to war, dictatorship, and occupation, and this space exists in the daydream which is created by Khudayyir's masterful storytelling.
Basrayatha is marketed as a memoir/travel book, but such labels are misleading, for Basrayatha reads more like a compassionate retelling of a hidden or lost Borges novel. It is a fantastic world where myths, tales, memories, theories, diary entries, and short stories run free and without boundaries across its landscape.
It documents the life of both Khudayyir and his Basra. The narrative is constantly shifting between perspectives, modes of telling, and time periods, creating an impressionistic image of the child's Basra, as well as the war-shattered Basra of the Iraq-Iran war. The beauty of this work lies in its diversity. While one paragraph may detail the realities of the streets of Basra, the next might sit the reader next to an ancient storyteller who embarks upon a metaphysical journey. Each section of the book concentrates on certain aphoristic subject matters which are woven magically with memories, myths, folktales, hopes and frustrations.
Khudayyir is a universal storyteller - a collector of tales, myths, and memories. Basrayatha documents the power of the imagination in a world where exile is, and has always been, the fate of many men and women. Khudayyir breaks down the barriers which are often constructed between myth and reality, history and the present, and the imagination and the physical world. "There is no contradiction between the image of what is external and what is internal" says Khudayyir in his closing pages. What Basrayatha offers its readers is a mode of being which negotiates the so-called unrealities of reverie and the pragmatic realities of our world. Though the overwhelming powers which govern the world may be out of the reach of our influence, we have the creative power to construct our own experience which is not ruled by the tyranny of reality - an experience which is constructed from the storyteller's reverie.