War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction PDF
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Ikram Masmoudi War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction e r u t a r e t i L c i b a r A n r e d o M y n na n i E s- eEl did ue e th Ss a hR gr: o r udit be ns e i dri e E S War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature Series Editor: Rasheed El-Enany Writing Beirut: Mappings of the City in the Modern Arabic Novel Samira Aghacy Autobiographical Identities in Contemporary Arab Literature Valerie Anishchenkova The Iraqi Novel: Key Writers, Key Texts Fabio Caiani and Catherine Cobham Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel Ziad Elmarsafy Gender, Nation, and the Arabic Novel: Egypt 1892–2008 Hoda Elsadda Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Home Matters in the Diaspora Syrine Hout War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction Ikram Masmoudi The Arab Nahdah: The Making of the Intellectual and Humanist Movement Abdulrazzak Patel www.euppublishing.com/series/smal War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction Ikram Masmoudi To Noureddine, my father . . . whose voice is still with me . . . © Ikram Masmoudi, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/15 Adobe Garamond by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9655 0 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9656 7 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0352 8 (epub) The right of Ikram Masmoudi to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents Series Editor’s Foreword vi Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1 The Iran–Iraq War and the Bare Life of the War Deserter 28 2 Postmodern War, the Gulf War and the Iraqi Soldier 85 3 Bare Life in the ‘New Iraq’ 134 4 Bare Life in the Camp 184 Conclusion 215 Bibliography 220 Index 228 Series Editor’s Foreword The Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature is a new and unique series which will, it is hoped, fill in a glaring gap in scholarship in the field of modern Arabic literature. Its dedication to Arabic literature in the modern period, that is, from the nineteenth century onwards, is what makes it unique among series undertaken by academic publishers in the English- speaking world. Individual books on modern Arabic literature in general or aspects of it have been and continue to be published sporadically. Series on Islamic studies and Arab/Islamic thought and civilisation are not in short supply either in the academic world, but these are far removed from the study of Arabic literature qua literature, that is, imaginative, creative literature as we understand the term when, for instance, we speak of English literature or French literature, etc. Even series labelled ‘Arabic/Middle Eastern Literature’ make no period distinction, extending their purview from the sixth century to the present, and often including non-A rabic literatures of the region. This series aims to redress the situation by focusing on the Arabic literature and criticism of today, stretching its interest to the earliest beginnings of Arab modernity in the nineteenth century. The need for such a dedicated series, and generally for the redoubling of scholarly endeavour in researching and introducing modern Arabic literature to the Western reader has never been stronger. The significant growth in the last decades of the translation of contemporary Arab authors from all genres, especially fiction, into English; the higher profile of Arabic literature internationally since the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Naguib Mahfouz in 1988; the growing number of Arab authors living in the Western diaspora and writing both in English and in Arabic; the adoption of such authors and others by mainstream, high-c irculation publishers, as opposed to vi series editor’s foreword | vii the academic publishers of the past; the establishment of prestigious prizes, such as the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the Arabic Booker), run by the Man Booker Foundation, which brings huge publicity to the shortlist and winner every year, as well as translation contracts into English and other languages – all this and very recently the events of the Arab Spring have heightened public, let alone academic, interest in all things Arab, and not least Arabic literature. It is therefore part of the ambition of this series that it will increasingly address a wider reading public beyond its natural territory of students and researchers in Arabic and world literature. Nor indeed is the academic readership of the series expected to be confined to specialists in literature in the light of the growing trend for interdisciplinarity, which increasingly sees scholars crossing field boundaries in their research tools and coming up with findings that equally cross discipline borders in their appeal. Iraq’s history during the last fifty-o dd years has been turbulent and often bloody: coups, violent struggles for power, ethnic and religious coercion, major prolonged wars, UN sanctions – all of which occurred mostly under the brutal dictatorship of the Baʿath Party and Saddam Hussein, who ruled the country from 1979 until his overthrow after the Anglo-A merican inva- sion of 2003. As is the norm in totalitarian regimes, the iron grip of author- ity in Iraq was not limited to high affairs of the state – politics, economy, security and so on – but extended to all aspects of intellectual and cultural life. Censorship was total and so effective through sheer terror that in effect there was nothing to censor: writers did not dare in the first place to write something that would have needed to be censored by the regime’s cultural agents. Nor was exile a licence for free expression: fear of the regime’s long arm abroad or reprisals against family at home did the censor’s job efficiently and comprehensively. So brutal was the regime that there came a time when it was dangerous to be a known writer and be silent. Silence was prone to be construed as disapproval: as a writer you had to speak out in support of the regime and in praise of the leader, or face the consequences. As a result, and since the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraqi writers, expe- riencing a measure of freedom of expression hitherto impossible for them, have been hugely engaged in a process of reassessment of their contemporary history, especially in fiction. A substantial number of novels by Iraqi writers viii | series editor’s foreword has come out in the last ten years, eagerly asking the questions they could not ask before and looking for answers. A great amount of soul-s earching is going on at present in Iraqi fiction, trying to understand and reinterpret not only the Saddam era, but the run- up to it since the independence of Iraq from British rule, and indeed the decade since the fall of Saddam Hussein, which ironically brought about not freedom and dignity but a brutal foreign occu- pation, collapse of law and order, violent sectarianism, ethnic strife and the daily reality of car bombs, suicide attacks and random death, which continues unabated until today. This surge in literary output has been running fast ahead of Western scholarship. Indeed the Iraqi novel as a whole, let alone its latest trends in the post- Saddam era, has largely found little favour with Western academia, where the focus has traditionally been on the more- established Egyptian and Syro- Lebanese scenes. And it is exactly this that makes the current monograph, War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction, a welcome and timely publication. It will, as if by design, pick up the narrative where it was dropped by an earlier volume of this series, Fabio Caiani and Catherine Cobham’s The Iraqi Novel: Key Writers, Key Texts. The study, utilising Giorgio Agamben’s notions of the ‘homo sacer’ and ‘state of exceptions’, has a contemporary relevance and immediacy that is self- evident and I imagine that it will have an appeal beyond literary scholar- ship, for example to scholars of Iraqi history as well as social and political scientists with interest in Iraq and the region as a whole. The author examines a wide range of authors and texts revolving around the central theme of ‘war and occupation’, mostly previously unstudied in English, though a few have already appeared in translation. Rasheed El- Enany Emeritus Professor, University of Exeter
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