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As a renowned playwright (theatre, cinema and television), poet (considered to be one of the pioneers of the Arabic prose poem and free verses) and prose writer (fiction and non-fiction), the Syrian author Muhammad al-Maghut (1934-2006) was a prolific and versatile writer who pushed the boundaries between genres. In this paper I will focus on “sa-akhūnu waṭanī: hadhayān fī al-ru‘b wa-al-ḥurrīya” (I will betray my country: Hallucinations of fear and freedom), a collection of darkly humorous literary columns. In a language that is at once minimalist, simple, playful, profound and dense, al-Maghut mercilessly derides the Syrian and Arab political, social and cultural establishment and its clichéd language use. His satirical descriptions of the sufferings and the absurdity of daily life under oppressive regimes, as experienced by the Arab underdog, are tragi-comic and make the reader simultaneously laugh and cry. My analysis will zoom in on salient examples of wordplay (by means of homonyms, pleonasms, tautologies, etc.), double entendres and intertextual play (by means of the integration of sloganesque political language use, lyrics of popular songs and ordinary speech). The mixture of multiple registers and genres in combination with wordplay and sarcasm will be analyzed through the Bakhtinian lenses of polyglossia (Bakhtin 1981), the carnivalesque (Bakhtin 1984) and grotesque realism (Bakhtin 1993) in order to demonstrate how linguistic playfulness and sarcasm are deployed in order to tackle deadly serious issues. References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays. (tr. Michael Holquist), Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. (tr. and ed. Caryl Emerson). Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1993 (1941). Rabelais and his world. (tr. Hélène Iswolsky). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. al-Māġūṭ, Muḥammad. 2001 (1987). sa-akhūnu waṭanī: hadhayān fī al-ru‘b wa-al-ḥurrīya. Damascus: Dār al-Madā.