The City of Baghdad in Iraqi Fiction: Novelistic Depictions of a Spatiality of Ruin

Abstract

The Iraqi novel has contended with brutish forms of violence for the better part of the past century that have essentially reshaped the narrative experience unto space. Writers are confronted with the challenge of typifying a search for meaning in and amongst character-altering ruin. At the height of its maturity today, as various works convey spatial woundedness particularly in the city of Baghdad, there is a relationship between fiction and urban reality symbolizing an image of complexity. They play host to a fantastical blending of the real and unreal. They see through to the mediational potencies of absurdist violence, one that is acted out this performativity on the page a matter of survival. The selected works respectively depict the pre-revolutionary capital before moving into the bitter decades to follow. Many build worlds that are mired in the crippling present day engaging the normativity of the spatial wound to make sense of the nonsensical. The novels Hunters in a Narrow Street, The Corpse Washer, Frankenstein in Baghdad and Tashari and short story “The Corpse Exhibition” work towards that end. They critically ponder decrepitude and death as it joins life in the realm of the real, legitimate ruination of place as aesthetic in the liminal imaginary and create the conditions with which to imagine the spatial afterlife of destruction. The extracted articulations and thoughts around each are informed by the critical theoretical lenses of three landmark thinkers of space and place and how the latter equates to the emotionality of man. Keywords: Baghdad, Space and place, Literature, Fiction, Wounded identity, War, Ruination, Dystopia.