Adel Kazem, celebrated writer and the ‘first man of Iraqi drama,’ dies aged 81
Adel Kazem, one of Iraq’s most renowned playwrights and screenwriters, died on Sunday after a long illness. He was 81 years old.
Kazem was known for writing a series of seminal Iraqi plays and television dramas, including Al Toufan (The Flood), Tammuz Yaqraa Al Naqouss (Tammuz Rings the Bell) and Al Ze’eb Wa Al Nisr (The Wolf and the Eagle).
The cultural richness of his material, coupled with his keen eye for the minutiae of Iraqi life, resulted in him being called the “first man of Iraqi drama”.
News of his death was announced by Iraq’s Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Antiquities. “We mourn the departure of the great writer Adel Kazem,” it said. “He was a distinguished and dramatic writer with a style that can express the local reality through a career spanning half a century in theatre and television.”
Kazem was born in Baghdad in 1939 and spent most of the first two decades of his life in the port city of Basra, where his father worked on government projects and taught at the local engineering academy.
Describing himself as a quiet child in a 2016 interview with Iraqi broadcaster Al Mada TV, Kazem recalled that his creative spark was lit by his brother, the acclaimed sculptor Nida Kazem.
“He was the instigator,” he said. “When I was young I would draw a lot and that is because I saw my younger sibling Nida doing the same thing.”
That creative passion eventually found its way to the written word and Kazem enrolled at Baghdad’s College of Fine Arts in 1962.
It was in his second year at the academy that his talent was spotted by teacher and mentor Ibrahim Jalal. The pioneering Iraqi actor and director chose Kazem’s play Al
Toufan as his next directorial stage effort.
Making its debut at the academy in 1966, the production was a critical success. Based on the Epic of Gilgamesh, Kazem used the 1800 BC Mesopotamian poem about a man’s struggle for immortality to question how Arab society can sustain itself when rife with injustice.
The play not only became a regional hit, with performances held in Bahrain and Kuwait, but also became the earliest display of Kazem’s literary style in which metaphor, folk tales and ancient history are used to unpack hard truths about everyday realities in Iraq and, in turn, the Arab world.
His follow-up play, 1971’s
Alka, found him taking aim at some of the feudalistic elements of his homeland, with a plot that focused on a farmer’s relationship with a cultivated piece of land that’s not his.
With his reputation sealed in the theatrical world, it was only natural for Kazem to transfer his talent to the small screen, where he found further success and a bigger audience.
In 1980, he wrote the script for Al Naser Wa O’youn Al Madina (The Eagle and the Eyes of the City), a 30-part TV series starring Khalil Shawky and Hind Kamel.
The series was followed by 1983’s Al Ze’eb Wa Al Nisr. Both shows are regarded as the high-water mark of Iraqi drama.
Kazem continued working through the ‘90s and 2000s and his last major work was the 2012 Ramadan drama Bint Al Maeedi, after which his health began to deteriorate.
Kazem, born in Baghdad and raised in Basra, had a keen eye for the minutiae of Iraqi life