Zain Youssef
Photography: Mahmoud Raouf
To shed light on the experience of Absentee Tohme Farman in all its details, a seminar was held within the curriculum of the Iraq International Book Fair to talk about an absent exile under the title “Absent and Exile”, in which writers, Salam Al-Musafir and Youssef Abu Al-Fawz, participated and the session was moderated by the journalist Naseer Lazam.
About the experience of exile for the absent spoke Abu Al-Fawz, saying, “He was not absent from the writers of the diaspora as much as he is from the writers of exile, because the absence from the homeland was not of his choice, the follower of the biography of the absent knows that the first departure was to Egypt for treatment and returned after the July revolution and after the 1963 coup of the fascist Baath was forced to leave again, and in the mid-seventies also tried to return and did not succeed in that, it was not an option to live away from the homeland, absent like him Like hundreds of intellectuals who have the position and the word against the tyrannical authority, which he paid for and even the case that he was stripped of his Iraqi citizenship and had to live thirty years in exile away from Iraq.”
He added that “this exile could not uproot the absent Tohme Farman and keep him away from his first concern, which is Iraq, so the Iraqi intellectual, including absentees, was not their choice of exile, but because there is something harsher than him, but despite that they were able to continue and enrich the Iraqi culture with important products.”
And about the lack of interest in the absent Tohme Farman, Salam traveler spoke, saying, “Unfortunately in his life and even after his death, absent did not receive Iraqi or Arab attention or even Russian, unfortunately, and he worked for many years as a translator and spent a lot of his effort and memory to translate sometimes some of the works that he did not want to translate, and this is one of the factors that led to the absence was relatively less in writing, because he was working and if he did not work, he would not get his livelihood, and attention was not paid to With a writer like an absentee not from the Iraqi community here, especially the influential community here in the Soviet era, this matter played a big role in the fact that the memory of the Iraqi absentee began to dry up, absent was receiving Iraqis coming to Moscow to listen to them and smell through them the pulse of Iraqi life and Baghdadi in particular.”
He stressed that “absent is the one who received me at the airport when I arrived in Moscow, and the first question was when we rode together in the car after we arrived in the city, he asked me about people, and absent had a very attentive memory and I think this is because of the keenness of the internal absentee to keep the image that came out of Baghdad, which after he arrived in exile visited Iraq in the period of the National Front and was a short visit. ”
While about the exile of the culturally absent in Iraq, Abu Al-Fawz stated that “the absent was already an exile and his exile was overlapping, the first exile that he is far from his homeland and was an employee and lives in a small apartment, and does not have much luxury and the other exile is that he did not receive much attention, because absent as he said about him absent Al-Alawi that absent did not like the lights by the nature of his personality and was not a fan of sitting in the front rows, so he was an ordinary employee and imposed on him to translate Texts that he has nothing to do with, but he translated thirty important books and won awards for that translation.
The traveler concluded his speech about the blackout on the absent Tohme Farman, saying, “What eases the exile of absent, although now is not present among us, but present in our hearts and to give him his right first must name absent on one of the streets of Baghdad, and the issuance of the full set of works absent Tohme Farman, whether paper or on the Internet, and I hope that the Foundation adopt the range of this project. ”