coprophilia

In one of his chats on his favourite topic, sex, our dear vulgar sex-maniac Monthir Habeeb remarked to me that sex begins with a noble emotion, develops into physical contact culminating in copulating. Monthir elaborated by saying that this is sex for conventional people, but those in the know indulge in exercises that lead to the final act of copulating and these exercises include heightening the sexual desire to its peak and the peak is to enjoy sniffing and ultimately licking shit of the sexual partner. My topic in this message, dear Ib, is neither to offend you with this filthy subject nor to arouse nostalgic reminiscencs of Monthir, but to tell you how flabbergasted I was yesterday to know that the great James Joyce and his protagonist in ULYSSES Leopold Bloom enjoyed this filthy indulgence, coprophilia


Following on coprophilia, and it seems that there is a lot more than we thought in our innocence and puristic way of thinking to this and related topics, and right now there is in your alma mater the University of Manchester a Department of Sexuality, Gay and Lesbian Studies, I say that in the 1994/5 MA program at Mustansiriyah University, when you taught Reniassance Literatre and I Drama, and our dear the late Kowther Al-Jazaeri was to teach Literary Criticism, but due to her hospitalisation for a surgery in the digestive system, I took up the Literary Criticism course and covered the first third of it until Kowther took over after her recovery. The textbook prescribed was David Lodge's 20th CENTURY LITERARY CRITICISM which contained a chapter which I didn't, nor did Kowther I think, teach, titled "The Excremental Vision" by Norman O Brown, taken from his book LIFE AGAINST DEATH: THE PSYCHOANALYTICAL MEANING OF HISTORY (1959). Here's how the chapter opens

Any reader of Jonathan Swift knows that in his analysis of human nature there is an emphasis on, and attitude towards, the anal function that is unique in Western literature. In mere quantity of scatological imagery he may be equalled by Rabelais and Aristophanes; but while for Rabelais and Aristophanes the anal function is part of the total human being which they make us love because it is part of life, for Swift it becomes the decisive weapon in his assault on the pretensions, the pride, even the self-respect of mankind. The history of Swiftian criticism, like the history of psychoanalysis, shows that repression weighs more heavily on anality than on genitality

 Shit, therefore, is an academic topic and an essential section in English literature, isn't it so in human existence? Pirandello remarked that there is a nerve cord that joins the brain to the anus and that is why as much as we find in the brain food for thought, we feel the pleasure of shitting. Walt Whitman in LEAVES OF GRASS says that the best smell he can enjoy better than the perfume of roses is the smell of his own shit, especially when shitting outdoors. In THE QURAN, the word shit is mentioned only once in the verse that says: None of you is created out of shit