Abstract
In the last years, more and more literary accounts of recent and current wars in the Middle East have been published. In most cases, they are authored from a Western viewpoint and provide a narrow account of the Muslim world. This article focuses on Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer because it opens the scope. That is, it constitutes an alternative to the imagery of the American film industry. Moreover, as Antoon is a Christian, his account of contemporary Iraq is particularly peripheral and hybrid. To analyse the novel, this article makes use of Transmodernity, a concept coined by Rosa María Rodríguez Magda in 1989. Yet, instead of Magda’s Transmodernity as a neatly Euro-centric phenomenon of worldwide connectivity, Ziauddin Sardar’s version of the concept is preferred. Sardar’s Transmodernity adds to connectivity a message of reconciliation between progress and tradition, particularly in the context of non-Western cultures. This paper defends that Antoon’s novel opens the debate on Islam to challenge the prejudiced Western discourses that have ‘legitimized’ war. To do so, Sardar’s ‘borders’ and Judith Butler’s grievability are particularly useful. In a Transmodern context, novels like Antoon’s show that humans should never be bare lives.
Highlights
Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer [1] was first published in Arabic in 2010
There is currently an increasing corpus of novels and short stories which account for recent wars in the Middle East
Antoon being a Christian in a mostly Muslim country and an exile in the US explains the hybrid status of The Corpse Washer
Summary
Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer [1] was first published in Arabic in 2010. Three years later, the same author published it again in English in the USA. The piles of corpses in the streets force him to return to his family tradition of washing and shrouding the dead In this context of mass death and cultural emasculation, the protagonist must learn to mourn permanent losses to prevent an overall sense of melancholia the novel recalls. Dussel and Sardar approach Transmodernity from non-Western standpoints; the former from the Philosophy of Liberation [12,13] and the latter from Islam In both cases, the post-colonial discourse is reframed to accommodate a new sense of globalization that agglutinates rather than excludes. Sardar’s borders and Arkoun’s ‘the unthought‘ will be helpful Related to these concepts, I will make reference to Butler’s ‘grieving’—which she has theorised in relation to violence, liveability, recognition, precariousness and dispossession for more than a decade —to account for the way The Corpse Washer addresses loss resulting from war in Transmodern times.
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