My teacher AbdulWahhab AlWakil

 




I shall, can never love a teacher like I did AlWakil who taught us Poetry in First Year University, October 1964. It was he who deflowered me in English literature. Love always belongs to the first lover, hence my love of teachers is always for AlWakil. AlWakil never taught, he didn't know to teach, he didn't take the trouble to teach, he simply gave hints and clues to literary works, and my "imagination would catch fire", to use Shaw's phrase, and Shaw was AlWakil's writer number one, and under AlWakil's influence, I loved Shaw. AlWakil would teach me in a couple of minutes what other teachers took a couple of weeks to do so. Like De Vinci creating a painting with a couple of strikes from his brush, AlWakil would fill me with a book by mere making a statement or two about the book


A biographic note

AbdulWahhab AlWakil was born in Hilla in 1930, finished school in 1951, went to Higher Institute of Teachers from where he got BA in English with high scores that made him in 1956 take a government scholarship to Manchester where he did his MA on Shaw, and his study for the PhD was called off due to a nevous breakdown which made him come back to Iraq in summer 1958 to be appointed lecturer in College of Arts, University of Baghdad. He died of a heart attack on Friday 5th May 1995

In a way that is never indelibe from my memory, AbdulWahhab AlWakil once in 1967 summed up Joseph Conrad's prose style as being characterised by long complex sentences using long words and elaborate phrases in order to arourse in the reader the sense of sea waves flowing, rising, falling then running to the sea because Conrad so loved the sea and all his novels were about the sea and he particularly loved the Malayan sea area