Hanan Jasim Khammas, Writing Through the Body: Iraqi Responses to the War on Terror (Edicions Universitat de Barcelona, 2023).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Hanan Jasim Khammas (HJK): I have written this book for three interrelated reasons. Firstly, the significant increase in the number of fictional works written about the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the aesthetic leaps these works are inducing in the history of fiction writing in Iraq, and the new excessive concerns for writing about corporeal experiences amidst the violence in one of bloodiest episodes of Iraq’s history were all phenomena worth careful examination. Secondly, most of the scholarship on modern and contemporary Iraqi literature is concerned with the political aspect of writing primarily. This has reduced the scope of Iraqi literature to minoritarian, provincial, and disconnected literatures. Only very few scholars trace the aesthetic developments and examine contemporary Iraqi literary works in terms of how they relate to world literatures. Thus, I felt the need to write about the way contemporary Iraqi literature of this period interacts with other literatures about the same period. Thirdly, on a personal level, writing this book was a way for me to understand my exile. Being a refugee in Europe after having lived under the Ba’th regime and US-led invasion and its aftermath showed me that Iraqi people of my generation are subject to so many levels of epistemic violence that it requires years of research and reflection to come to terms with our condition. I hope my book may help other Iraqis inside and outside Iraq to understand at least part of what they have undergone.
... the perception of corporeality in contemporary Iraqi fiction politically and aesthetically responds to the encounter between the discourses of power that led to the invasion and the destruction of the Iraqi state in 2003.
J: What topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
HJK: This work states that the perception of corporeality in contemporary Iraqi fiction politically and aesthetically responds to the encounter between the discourses of power that led to the invasion and the destruction of the Iraqi state in 2003. Thus, there are many issues at play here. Firstly, this book outlines a history of corporeality in Iraqi fiction since 1919 (a year known as the beginning of the Iraqi novel) to the present. Secondly, the book shows how the discourse of the war on terror in mainstream media and Anglo-American cultural production created a semiotic sphere that, in addition to the military operations, invaded the Iraqi cultural sphere, which was already dominated by the alienating Ba’th regime discourse. To demonstrate this, I analyze Anglo-American literature, veterans’ writing, television, cinema, and video games. The aforementioned encounter has had a major impact on the representation of bodies in contemporary Iraqi fiction, both in terms of aesthetics and in terms of writing about gender and sexuality. Here, I examine Iraqi novels written after 2003, focusing mainly on the works of Sinan Antoon, Hassan Blasim, Alia Mamdouh, and Ahmed Sa’dawi, among others.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
HJK: This is my first major publication, before which I had written a number of academic articles and reviews concerned with contemporary Iraqi fiction and body studies.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
HJK: Nothing would make me happier than knowing that Iraqi people, scholars or otherwise, have read this book. Many commentaries and studies on the war on terror have focused on the Ba’th regime’s legacy and the experience of the perpetrators, and many political, economic, and social aspects of the conflict have been worked on all over the world; however, studies that combine both angles are rare. I believe this book could be an asset for a just and an affective review of our history. I also hope an Arabic translation will be available sometime soon.
Other than that, I hope this book finds an audience among Islamic feminism; difference feminism; and feminist scholarship on ethics and violence studies. The book concludes with a reflection on the violence in the writing about violence and the way the politics of such writing intervenes in the perception and construction of corporeal identities. Anthropologists and sociologists interested in decolonial research in Arab and Middle Eastern studies may find this book helpful as it provides an analysis of the construction and perception of corporeal identities, considering sociopolitical, religious, and cultural factors.
Finally, I hope many people in the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, and Australia read this book, as parts of their history and the governments they voted for participated in the military operations in Iraq, and this book deals with the damage those operations caused, particularly the damage invisible to them.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
HJK: I am working on two different projects which both somehow relate to the book. In the first project, I am exploring other questions related to corporeality in contemporary Iraqi fiction, such as space, disability, and food. In the second project, I am working on African American female soldiers’ narratives regarding their participation in Iraq. I am sharing my research on these issues with colleagues at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona from both areas of Arabic and American literary studies.
J: What have been the challenges in conducting and publishing such research?
HJK: As with any multi-disciplinary and archival research, this one came with several challenges. Most of them were related to the personal implications of myself as a witness and others had to do with the material aspects of research. One of the major difficulties, for instance, was to reconcile antinationalism with anticolonialism. One of the problems in the political discourses in Iraq after 2003 lies in the dichotomy of, on the one hand, opposing the military intervention, which, in certain cases, implied arguments that can subscribe to a nationalist discourse (which I did not wish to be associated with)—and, on the other hand, opposing nationalist frameworks, which implied arguments that were already being used in favor of the invasion. I found the solution was in understanding the relations between orientalism and reversed orientalism.
Another challenge was the bibliographical support. Studying post-2003 Arabic fiction in general and Iraqi fiction in particular is a new field and there are not many books or critical works available in the common academic databases. As far as books in Arabic are concerned, I had to finance this research personally and rely on friends’ and family’s personal libraries. Some authors I contacted were generous enough to donate their books.
There was also the question of confidence in the knowledge this research was producing. I am referring, here, to the body of institutionalized interrogation and compulsively produced narratives which refugees go through to prove the truthfulness of their stories, in addition to the composition of the scholarly canon which marginalizes and hinders the knowledge produced on the other side of the Mediterranean. Luckily, Agamben’s development of the idea of “bearing witness,” as well as affect theory, particularly in postmodern feminism, make up a space within the categorical empiricism of scholarship for such research cases to see and trust the legitimacy of the knowledge we produce.
Excerpt from the book (from pp. 217-220)
Note: Citation references have been removed
The examination of both the history and the development of the body’s representation in fiction, having passed through the cataclysmic strategies of the discourse of the war on terror in terms of the body and sexuality, have shown that, at least in the examined works, there is a different concern for corporeality manifested in the grotesque body and the reassessment of gender and sexuality. This difference primarily entails perceiving the body as an instrument that fades in the private realm into the public. The Iraqi private realm used to be governed by feminine attributes which were culturally associated with vulnerability, shame, and repressed sexuality – as opposed to a public realm which was governed by patriarchal masculine values representing social and national pride. The body has now become a stage on which the traits associated with the private realm identify the Iraqi subject. The exhibition of corporeality which was seen as transgressive in the first semiosphere becomes central in the third (contemporary Iraqi fiction). The centrality of bodies in their crude materiality in post 2003 narratives by Iraqi authors indicates a desire and a will to show, exhibit and open the body up to the world to be looked at, discussed, and empathised with. On a certain level, it is possible to affirm that the exposition of corporeality, the exhibition of its materiality and sexuality indicates the willingness to challenge the long history of nationalist, religious and cultural censorship. Moving from the private sphere to the public, from the invisible to the visible, from the silenced to the outspoken, from the repressed to the celebrated, as expressed in the violence of the flesh, implies a necessity for the flesh to be seen and heard. To respond to this necessity is the first indication of a shift in the perception of corporeality in a semiosphere that has imposed the necessity of hiding the body. The question is, however, where did this necessity come from? Is it only the need to rebel against the years of censorship and deprivation? Or is it a necessity to bring forward something different and new? Rebellion is one way to interpret the deployment of corporeality, but I believe there is more to it.
On metaphysical rebellion in The Rebel (1951), Camus perceives rebellion as a process of self-evaluation by means of identification and rejection or negation. For him, rebellion is not merely protesting for rights, it is a cry for sovereignty over the self. […] The first instance of rebellion is thus the awareness of the self’s condition, and then the rejection of that condition. Camus specifies that this awareness takes place via an act of identification, in which the rebel becomes aware of being undermined or violated. This implies an identification with two images or mirrors: one is the ideal self as seen and/or imagined by the rebel himself, and the other is a humiliated self that the rebel identifies with but which he denies and rejects in order to assert the ideal self. This is why Camus insists on the idea that rebellion, paradoxically, is an expression of an urgent need for unity and coherence, a unity between the value with which he is treated and the values he demands to be recognised. Rebellion, then, is the rejection of an episteme within which the subject finds himself articulated because of a latent ideal self-image that is supposed to be the closest to the real self in the rebel’s frame of self-recognition. The grotesque body and the rewriting of sexuality, then, could be seen as rebellion against the stereotypical depiction employed by the religious nationalist and colonial orientalist discourses.
Camus’s views can be applied to the Iraqi case as, on the one hand, they come from a visionary who could articulate his views on rebellion from different positions in different semiospheres at a time of epistemological violence: he could see colonialism from the perspective of both the coloniser and the colonised. On the other hand, existentialism – Sartre and Camus in particular – inspired in the twentieth century a counterculture which became popular among Iraqi intellectuals. Muhsin al-Musawi writes: “Iraqi writers have found themselves since the late 1940s more at home with Camus and Sartre”. This counterculture emerged in the spirit of decolonisation to “promote individual and collective self-awareness, [to] call for the acceptance of responsibility for one’s circumstances, or [to] organize political action”. Existentialism among Arab intellectuals, and Iraqis in particular, suggested a decolonialised answer that resisted the nationalist and Baʿthist project of transforming the Arab self, which they considered a first step towards Arab imperialism. Existentialist thought, then, has taken part in the Iraqi tradition of decolonising intellectual history and with that rejecting both colonial and nationalist bigotry – against which contemporary authors are also writing today. I do not claim, however, that contemporary Iraqi fiction is existentialist as such; rather, I am suggesting that there may be a continuity of these decolonising and antinationalist discourses between those early existentialist intellectuals and contemporary Iraqi authors. That being the case, if early existentialists deployed sexuality (masculinity) in order to express political anxieties in their decolonising project, as Bahoora suggests, contemporary authors seem to go beyond sexuality by embracing corporeality in its utmost materiality as their stage of action.
Moreover, Camus’s view on metaphysical rebellion was often confused with collective revolution by many Iraqi authors, such as the Iraqi poet ʿAbd al-Wahāb al-Bayāti among others. Rebellion in contemporary Iraqi fiction, I argue, happens on a philosophical level that does not involve calling for a collective action; it is, rather, to dwell on the human ordeal in its pursuit for happiness in a fast-moving world and in a context tangled with multi-layered forms of coercion and the abuse of power. It is perceived in the personal and singular ownership of the body; to do with it, to write it and write about it what distinguishes it from the historical discourses that shadow it. Rebellion, then, is the enactment of the desire to transform the symbolic order, to dismantle the big Other interwoven with the construction of corporeality since the mirror stage. This shows that, in its essence, rebellion is a linguistic act, a dissolution of statements in the Foucauldian sense, the emergence of new signs at the centre of the semiosphere, pushing old ones towards the boundary as in Lotman’s theory of cultural semiotics. The rebel, in the new narratives, is the Iraqi corporeal subject who detaches himself from the constructions of sexed identity articulated in the rejected symbolic orders. This is what makes the body a sign; it pairs the subjectivity of the signifier with a rejected signified, and it is what makes the body abject: “It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object”.
The enactment of the discourse of the war on terror operates on the experienced corporeal reality as a mechanism of subjugation. The cultural reproduction of the three feminising strategies discussed in chapter III creates a perceptual reality in which Iraqi individuals – viewed through the body – find themselves passive, visible, and viewed as occupying an ontological status that corresponds to femininity in the semiosphere prior to 2003. By exposing the images of Abu-Ghraib and by relying on the visibility of the enemy, the discourse of the war on terror created what Žižek calls “a sublime body” – a body woven or “veiled”, as Yeǧenoǧlu would say, by ideological threads; a continually vincible, rejected, and despised body; a fantasy by which to support colonial (American) exceptionalism. In Remnants of Auschwitz, Giorgio Agamben describes Auschwitz as “the devastating experience in which the impossible is forced into the real”. The same can be said about Abu Ghraib and the strategies of representation enacted on the body of the Other in the discourse of the war on terror. They are not mere exploitations of “the Muslim prohibition against nudity, homosexuality, and masturbation in order to tear down the cultural fabric that keeps the integrity of these people intact”. Even if the images were intended to do this, they also forcibly violate the frames of recognition in which the people see and perceive themselves, as the images impose new frames by which “to frame” them. The materiality of the body, which was perceived as collectively private, hidden, and thus as maintaining the decency of the human being, is now publicly exposed, essentialised, reified, and framed as monstruous.
