Severed heads: Arab literary fantasy and terrible reality.

• Author: Freund, Charles Paul

"MY BLOOD FLOWED on the pavement. The head had separated from the body as though it had been chopped off by a sharp sword. I was sorry to see my body lying on the macadam only to be run over by some truck or lorry. I tried to order my hands to lift the corpse but soon realized that they were no longer subject to my command. The veins and arteries were gushing a jet fountain, spurts of blood spreading out, perhaps aspiring toward the final form of [al red pool."

So begins Mohammed Barrada's intentionally disturbing tale "The Story of the Severed Head." Before its adventures are over, Barrada's severed head will take flight and deliver a politically subversive message to an astonished populace: You may take solace in fantasies, the head announces, but those fantasies are the source of your oppression. Eventually, the head will be captured and judged by a ghost. First published in 1979, this short, surrealistic work by the distinguished Moroccan author lately has taken on an unhappy contemporary resonance.

The most obvious source of the story's renewed timeliness is, of course, the severed head itself. Originally a device intended to evoke antique horrors, it now evokes the disgust of daily reality. Beheadings or threats of beheadings have been in the news almost constantly, thanks to murderers acting in the name of Islamist political fantasies. Headless bodies are found floating in the Tigris; bodiless heads are discovered in Saudi refrigerators. Videotaped beheadings are posted on the Internet, their appalling images overwhelming any attempt to capture their savagery with prose.

Yet Barrada's bizarre tale is timely for other reasons too. His bodiless head lies at an intersection of terrible cultural and political forces in the Arab world, forces that not only shape the story's message of personal and political fantasy but also underlie the story's own origins.

Arab literary fantasy is a remarkable phenomenon. Despite the flights of imagination for which the Arab folk tale and epic are justly famous, fantasy remained rare in modern Arabic fiction until quite late. Such leading writers as Yusuf Idris and Naguib Mahfouz did use fantastic elements, especially in their short tales, but most Arab novelists remained faithful to an established tradition of social realism.

In the late 1960s, however, this situation changed. There was an explosion of Arab prose tales employing the fantastic, the surreal, and the marvelous. More than one Arab critic...