Indexing War: The Craft of the Catalogue in Sinan Antoon’s The Book of Collateral Damage

Abstract

This article explores how Sinan Antoon's novel The Book of Collateral Damage (2019) brings Arabic literary history into unlikely conversation with US military jargon as it offers an alternative catalogue of the destruction incurred during the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and the violence that followed. First, by drawing attention to the novel's original Arabic title Fihris (2016), which can be translated as ‘index' or ‘catalogue', I consider the titular transformation the novel underwent by translation and unpick intertextual strands woven through the text, focusing in particular on the tenth-century compendium of Arabic books Kitāb al-Fihrist, compiled by Ibn al-Nadim, as a key intertext. I then interrogate how the concept of ‘collateral damage', which has been widely used to refer to the unintentional damage and deaths incurred during military operations including the 2003 Iraq War, is creatively redeployed in the novel. Rather than reading the text as an attempt to ‘write back to' or ‘resist’ the dehumanising rhetoric of collateral damage, I argue instead that Antoon repurposes the logic of this abstract term, which blurs human and non-human destruction, to expose its absurd politics of personification. Presenting readers with a chorus of uncanny narrators – both human and non-human – who each tell the story of their destruction, the novel forms a literary compendium of collateral damage. By bringing together Arabic literary history and contemporary military jargon in this way, I argue that Antoon creates a poetics of infinity which asserts the impossibility of ever indexing the consequences of war while also attesting to the writerly compulsion to record, however imperfectly, this destruction.