Ikram Masmoudi , War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction, Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Pp. 256. $120.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780748696550

Abstract

Ikram Masmoudi's War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction provides a timely and informed analysis of recently written Iraqi fiction, treating much of the past thirty-six years of war and violence that the country has endured. Masmoudi takes a thematic approach to Iraqi novels written since the fall of Saddam Husayn's Ba thist government and the US-led invasion and occupation of the country. She surveys a number of works published between 2006 and 2012 that deal directly with war and occupation, two subjects that have dominated Iraqi literature since 1980. To date, it is the most comprehensive study to examine post-2003 Iraqi fiction, which has garnered considerable interest in the Arab world and through translation into English and other European languages. In her approach to these contemporary Iraqi novels, Masmoudi persuasively argues that Giorgio Agamben's notions of bare life, the state of exception, and "the key concept of the homo sacer prove useful and illuminating for analyzing Iraqi novels and the thanatopolitics that they reflect" (p. 7). Undoubtedly, this will be the book's most important contribution to future studies of Iraqi literature and culture dealing with the past three and a half decades of violence, which, unfortunately, shows no sign of abating. In the book's four chapters, which focus on the figures of the Iraqi soldier, war deserter, suicide bomber, and camp detainee, Masmoudi demonstrates that Agamben's theories work well as a lens through which to view the literary representation of modern Iraqis, caught between the terror of dictatorship and the horrors of war and occupation. Although we might consider the character types that Masmoudi uses as case studies as extraordinary, within modern Iraqi literary production they have proven to be anything but exceptional. The chapters of the book unfold chronologically, from the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) to the US-led invasion and occupation of the country. Chapters 1 and 2 are focused on current writing that examines the wars that took place prior to 2003, when violence was unleashed. Here, the author discusses the continued interest of Iraqi writers in trying to wrest away the narrative of previous conflicts from Ba thist historiography and its representation in Iraqi literature produced in the late 1970s and 1980s. The Iran-Iraq War is the best example of this, as it produced a plethora of wartime fiction, poetry, and criticism that largely reflected the aims of the state during the conflict. While some examples of dissenting narratives exist, nearly all of those were written in the postwar period and mostly by writers living abroad. The partly autobiographic novels by Ali Badr, Nasif Falak, and Muhammad Hasan that Masmoudi examines in Chapter 1 give voice to buried narratives of desertion. These are nowhere to be found in the official literature written during the war and are emblematic of postwar novels and short stories that seek to rewrite the narrative of that war. Although Masmoudi's critical treatment of these relatively new novels on the Iran-...