Conflicting Narratives: War, Trauma and Memory in Iraqi Culture

Moosavi, Amir

doi:10.29091/9783752000993

Cited by 5 publications

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“…In the face of the overwhelming war traumas of the twentieth and first twentieth centuries, a controversial issue has been whether the literary representation of the Iraqi traumatic experiences in Iraqi war fiction were confined only to the victims of war and causalities, who were exposed to extremely violent events, or to those people who suffered from prolonged periods of social repression, religious persecution, and the abolishment of the original identity that leaks into the future.. On the one hand, several critics (Bilal, 2018;Blasim, 2014;Hadla, 2020;Lewandowsky et al, 2005;Moosavi, 2015) claimed that traumatized cases in Iraqi fiction belong to the war trauma category in which people were exposed to body extermination and multination, on the other hand, others (Evans, 2003;Farid, 2015;Ghazoul;Hanoosh, 2013;Milich, et al, 2012) argued that the traumatic experience of Iraqi people resulted from prolonged socioeconomic crises and social injustice, religious bullying and intimidation, all of which are produced by wars. That is to say, war is not the main reason behind the traumatic experiences of the Iraqi people.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the Literary Representation of Trauma in Contemporary Iraqi Fiction from Socio-historical Perspective

Mousa¹,

Alhomoud²

2022

WJEL

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The present study aims to critically review the aspects of war in selected Iraqi war novels— Sinan Antoon, The Baghdad Eucharist (2017), Corpse Washer (2013) Zauhair Jabouri, The Corpse Hunter (2014)—that focus on depicting vividly the traumatic experiences of Iraqi, particularly after the US-led invasion of Iraq 2003 and how these novels could recur constantly to humanist themes and traumatized figures, the psychological suffering of minorities and the oppressed. In other words, it aims to make visible specific historical instances of trauma in Iraqi war fiction. The present study undertakes an in-depth investigation of the socio-political and historical dimensions of Cathy Caruth’s literary trauma simply because trauma experiences in Iraq were emanated from several causes such as social injustice, the oppression of minorities, political despotism, and the persecution of religious minorities, the displacement of Iraqis from the homeland, and the genocidal policies of jihadist. The study has found that Iraqi war fiction depends on the stylistic technique of repeating certain expressions, phrases, and lexical items to intensify the extraordinary events. It is a narrative of traumatic haunting known for its non-linear and circular style that often leads to ambiguity where readers are often unable to decode the authorial intentions, deriving its ambiguity from the traits of dreams and nightmares, the interpretations of which are continually and unredeemably haunted by the memory of loss.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the Literary Representation of Trauma in Contemporary Iraqi Fiction from Socio-historical Perspective

Mousa¹,

Alhomoud²

2022

WJEL

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Hassan Blasim’s God 99: Staying with Fragments, Designing Other Worlds

Gallien

2023

The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture

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Smugglers, Migrants, and Refugees: The Iran–Iraq Border, 1925–1975

Ahmadi¹

2020

Int. J. Middle East Stud.

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Due to the illegal movement of goods and people, the Khuzistan-Basra frontier, like many other borderlands in the region, represented a liminal space for border dwellers and the Iranian state. Although scholars have written about the migration that was endemic to the early nation-building period, the consequences of this movement in the latter half of the 20th century require further exploration. Well into the 1970s, Iranian migrants and border dwellers complicated citizenship, evinced by the Pahlavi monarchy's failure or refusal to offer them their rights. The Iranian archives prove that, decades into the nation-building project, local dynamics continued to exert tremendous influence on Iranians and even superseded national policies.

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Conflicting Narratives: War, Trauma and Memory in Iraqi Culture

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Exploring the Literary Representation of Trauma in Contemporary Iraqi Fiction from Socio-historical Perspective

Exploring the Literary Representation of Trauma in Contemporary Iraqi Fiction from Socio-historical Perspective

Hassan Blasim’s God 99: Staying with Fragments, Designing Other Worlds

Smugglers, Migrants, and Refugees: The Iran–Iraq Border, 1925–1975

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