Hassan, Reema
(2024)
Collateral Damage: the Body and the Environment in post-2003 Iraqi fiction.
Masters thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.
Abstract
This research maps an aesthetic turn/or shift in Iraqi fiction that occurred after the 2003 US-led invasion and the fall of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime. I class this as an experimental turn in the aesthetics of the Iraqi novel that builds on the social realism more prevalent in the pre-2003 Iraqi novel. Post-2003 fiction shares similarities with pre-2003 fiction in that it has been produced either during, or in the aftermath, of a long duration of coloniality/neocoloniality, and is oftentimes inflected, thematically, with the physical environment. Post-2003 Iraqi fiction builds on its pre-2003 forebears in its other-than-realist dislocations of pre-2003 Iraqi social realism, where narratives that are seemingly grounded within realism are punctuated with speculative tropes, as in Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, or with a fragmented narrative punctuated with moments of unreality, as in The Corpse Washer, by Sinan Antoon. These texts share similarities in their preoccupation with the environment and the body; “the body” in this instance signifies the corporeal body/body politic or national body/and the text as a body. In this context, the thesis reads the engagement with Iraq’s natural resources–trees, water and oil–in the two texts in terms of aesthetic and formal techniques of representing violence that impacts the body and the environment in interconnected ways.
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