Thursday 5 November 2026 at 18:00
Dr. Sayf Shems - Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB)
Lecture in English.
Lecture in room R.012, Rodestraat 14,
2000 Antwerp.
Free entrance.
Registration is not required.
For some twenty-five centuries, Jews lived in Mesopotamia; within a single generation, almost all of them were gone. How do we understand such a disappearance? This lecture turns to two novels by Iraqi Jewish women: Tova Murad Sadka's No Way Back (1984), set in the Baghdad of the 1930s and 1940s, and Mona Yahia's When the Gray Beetles Took Over Baghdad (2000), set among the Jews who stayed after 1951. Sadka reveals a community regulated by hospitality, family authority and honor; Yahia shows the family shrinking into a refuge under surveillance. Read together, the novels trace the arc from a community managing its own norms to one fighting for survival. Their fiction preserves what archives and statistics leave out: how political fear entered daily life, and how exile lingers long after departure.
Sayf Shems is a researcher, writer and lecturer in Arabic language and literature at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). He holds a PhD from ULB, where his doctoral research examined Iraqi Jewish literature, identity, memory and cultural transformation in modern Iraq. His research focuses on Middle Eastern minority literatures, intercultural encounters, and the relationship between literature and politics. His articles have appeared in Middle Eastern Studies and the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, among others. He is also the author of two novels in Arabic. Originally from Iraq, he lives and works in Brussels.