Destituteness Revised: Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer

Abstract

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.