Tracing the Shadows of War in Sinan Antoon’s The Book of Collateral Damage: Trauma and Memory

Abstract

As a literary text, The Book of Collateral Damage (2019) by Arab American novelist Sinan Antoon effectively represents the psychological impact of the Iraq War in 2003. This article utilizes trauma theory to explore how the war narrative in Antoon’s novel probes the event of this war to represent the experiences that Iraqi individuals had from living through it. By analyzing Antoon’s embodiment for the trauma of the Iraqis and their memory crisis, the impasse of survival for the protagonist, Wadood, as well as the symptoms and features of his traumatic experience, the article argues that Antoon significantly represents in The Book of Collateral Damage how the Iraqis were traumatized by both the experience and memory of the Iraq War. Wadood’s story accentuates that the novel focuses on representing history in connection with war impact through investigating how the lives of individuals in Iraq became caught in the shadows of the Iraq War that haunted them with bitter memory, which they faced a difficulty to cope with and foregrounded their traumatic experiences. These individuals ultimately realized that their lives were impacted not only by their individual trauma but also by the collective trauma in their homeland, intersecting with their trauma. Therefore, they were left with one option; either to collapse psychologically, or to handle the determining factors of their personal history and the history of their country.