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ABSTRACT
Unlike most American novels on the Iraq wars, which tend to be either celebratory or redemptive, Iraqi-born Sinan Antoon’s The Corspe Washer (2013) bears witness to the traumatic effects of destituteness from the perspective of the conquered. The novel recounts how the war prevents Jawad, an Iraqi is his twenties, from becoming an artist, and forces him to make his living as a corpse washer, as his ancestors have done for generations. By drawing on Esther Peeren’s notion of the living ghost, on Alain Badiou’s notion of destituteness, and on Judith Butler’s concepts of grievability and nonviolence, I argue that as narrator and focaliser of his story of displacement, Jawad expresses a liminal discourse on the reality that is at once his own and no longer his own. His narrative alternates between realistic and nonrealistic scenes to cope with his traumata in particular, and the devastating effects of war and globalisation on non-Western countries in general. As a “living ghost”—marginalised, invisibilised, ungrieved, and devoid of agency—Jawad undergoes an individuation process and gradually comes to accept his fate and that of his country, thereby gaining a new sense of agency and a new understanding of corpse-washing as an act of recognition of the other. Jawad’s stand against instrumental violence defies his state of destituteness and becomes a powerful plea for nonviolence and for recognizing our interdependence on the other as the common ground of human existence.
Notes
1. Peeren, Spectral Metaphor, 4.
2. Butler, Force of Nonviolence, 44, 47, 50.
3. Antoon, Corpse Washer, 108. Hereafter page numbers are cited in the text.
4. See Dussel, Postmodernidad y Transmodernidad; Sardar, Beyond Difference; and Rodríguez-Magda, “The Crossroads of Transmodernity.”
5. Rodríguez-Magda, “The Crossroads of Transmodernity,” 26.
6. Badiou, Our Wound, 14.
7. Ibid., 32.
8. Many European ultra-right parties as well as leaders like Erdogan in Turkey are making up fake identitarian discourses to neutralise the discontent of the underprivileged. When socioeconomic inequality takes the upper hand they appeal to a sentimentalised sense of belonging, no matter how farfetched or historically inaccurate it may be.
9. Badiou, Our Wound, 3.
10. Corcoran, “Introduction,” 1.
11. Badiou, Our Wound, 48.
12. Butler, Precarious Life, 20.
13. Peeren, Spectral Metaphor, 5, 11, 9.
14. Ibid., 22.
15. Ibid., 31.
16. Ibid., 32.
17. Peeren and Blanco, Spectralities Reader, 19.
18. Peeren, Spectral Metaphor, 22, 10.
19. Ibid., 31.
20. Butler, Frames of War, 1.
21. Peeren, Spectral Metaphor, 24.
22. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 1.
23. Ibid., 2, 3.
24. Scranton, “Trauma Hero.”
25. Butler, Force of Nonviolence, 6, 9, 24, 27–66, 56, 1.
26. Stock, “Face of Death,” n.p.
27. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 277.
28. Stock, “Face of Death,” n.p.
29. Arizti, “From Egology to Ecology,” 89–91.
30. Eisler, Real Wealth of Nations; Eisler, Nurturing Our Humanity.
31. Rifkin, Empathic Civilization, 42, 3.
32. Butler, Force of Nonviolence, 28.
33. Ibid., 10.
34. In Butler, Frames of War, 158.
35. Butler, Force of Nonviolence, 24.
36. Butler, Frames of War, 156.
37. Ibid., 160.
38. Ibid., 163.
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José M. Yebra
José M. Yebra, PhD, is lecturer in English at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. His current research interests include gender, queer and LGBT studies and transmodernism. He has published articles on various contemporary writers, including Alan Hollinghurst, and Colm Tóibín, as well as a monograph on Naomi Alderman, The Poetics of Otherness and Transition in Naomi Alderman’s Fiction (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020). He is coeditor, with Jessica Aliaga, of Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English (Routledge, 2019).