Copyright by Halah Salman Hadla 2020
The Dissertation Committee for Halah Salman Hadla Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Dissertation:
Endemic Trauma and the Cross-Cultural Gap: A study of Fiction about
the 2003 American-Iraqi War
Committee:
Evan Carton, co-supervisor
Heather Houser, co-supervisor
Martin Kevorkian,
Ann Cvetkovich,
Linda Ferreira-Buckley,
Endemic Trauma and the Cross-Cultural Gap: A study of Fiction about the 2003 American-Iraqi War
by
Halah Salman Hadla
Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
The University of Texas at Austin December 2020
Dedication
--For my husband,
Muthana,
--And my children, Rawan, Mustafa, Sarmad
iv Acknowledgements
I would like to express my sincere gratitude for the guidance and valuable criticism of my dissertation advisors, Dr. Evan Carton, Dr. Heather Houser, as well as my committee members: Dr. Martin Kevorkian, Dr. Ann Cvetkovich, and Dr. Linda Ferreira-Buckley for their suggestions and intellectual engagement. I would also like to thank the University of Texas English Department, and special thanks go to Patricia
Schaub. I would also like to thank the Higher Committee for Education Development in Iraq for helping me pursue my dream. I also want to thank my best friends, especially Hind Ithawi for their emotional support. I am grateful to my family: my brothers, Laith and Mohammed, and my lovely sister, Ghada, for believing in me. Special thanks go to my mother for her love, understanding and for always supporting my decisions; my children, who missed out on spending time with me than they should have while I worked on this project; and my husband, whose grace, love, and endless support help me get through the darkest times of my life.
v Abstract
Endemic Trauma and the Cross-Cultural Gap: A study of Fiction about the 2003 American-Iraqi War Halah Salman Hadla, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2020
Co-Supervisors: Evan Carton, Heather Houser
Trauma theories have acquired paradigmatic significance in the study of war and representations of violence and horrors. Theorists like Freud, Cathy Caruth, Shoshana
Felman, Kay Erikson and Judith Herman explore trauma through analyzing distinctions of victims-perpetrators-witnesses as well as themes of gender and female representations.
War literature shares with trauma theories this interest in studying the methodology of expressing war from various perspectives, whether individualistic or collective. My project studies these aspects through intersectional narrative representations of war- trauma literature. I focus on narratives that are written by American and Iraqi writers in relation to 2003 invasion of the US on Iraq.
In this study, I argue that positioning the events and the characters at an intersection between theories of psychological and cultural trauma is best in understanding cross- cultural traumatic connection resulting from war and violence. This study problematizes and recontextualizes the psychological, cultural, and cross-cultural relations of trauma in narrative. I attempt at demolishing cultural barriers through discussing analogous
vi premises and igniting empathy in dealing with the other through reading trauma and victimhood. Each of my chapters responds to a definite problem stimulated through intercultural and transcultural connections resisting, at the same time, Eurocentric representations of the other. Gender, space, and testimony manage to destabilize significant traumatic-derived assumptions that identify common thematic foundations in characterizing the texts under discussion.
vii TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One: Introduction……………………………………………………………………...... 1 History and politics……………………………….………………………………...... 1 The Theory of Trauma……………………………………………………………...... 16 Chapter Two: Gender Dynamics during War Time: A Study of Helen Benedict’s Sand Queen and
Inaam Kachachi’s The American Granddaughter………….……….………………..…36 Gender and War Trauma…………………………………………………….……...36 The Ideology of Sand Queen and The American Granddaughter……………………43 Gendering war Trauma and Feminine Disparity…………………………….….….49 Closing remarks…………………………………………………………….….…...75 Chapter Three: Space and the Politics of Displacement: A Study of Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long
Halftime Walk and Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer………...... …83 The Space of Trauma……………………………………………………….….…..83 The Ideology of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and The Corpse Washer...…….90
The Space of Atrocities…………………………………………...... 98
Closing remarks………………………………………………………………….128 Chapter Four:
Sharing the Pain: Recovery through Testimonial Narration in Redeployment by Phil Klay and The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories by Hassan Blasim………………………………………………………………………………..…132 Witnessing and Testifying…………………………………………………….....132
viii The ideology of Redeployment and The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories….139 The Rhetoric of Testimonies between Witnessing and Listening……………….148 Closing Remarks……………………………...…………………………………177 Conclusion……………………………………….……………………………………..183 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………188
ix Chapter One
There is a saying in the West that the Middle East is a region too important to the outside World to allow it to be governed by Middle Easterners. Emmit B. Evans, Iraq and the New American Colonialism
They know war and its bitterness, They should not revive that monster Which brings only woe and destruction Zuhays Ibn Abi Sulma (qtd. in Milich)
Introduction: History and politics
To understand the narratives representing the war of 2003 between the US and Iraq, we need to shed light on the complicated historical and political relations and recognize the epistemological path engulfing the experience of each side with a focus on societal disparities and incongruous cross-cultural connections. Such conceptualization of similarities and differences will categorize how critical and narrative interventions may highlight how to perceive the experience of the other, especially that of the traumatized and traumatization. Therefore, the 20 March 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched not as an introductory point but as an organized constituted historicipolitical concept. A concept that extends back to the 1970s.
In The Long Road to Baghdad, Lloyd C. Gardener states that "Richard Nixon had vowed in the first month of his presidency that there would be no more Vietnams; henceforth, the United States would rely on regional stabilizers, not American soldiers, to seal off threats to its assets in the far corners of the globe” (32) and this foreign policy seems to appeal to the US government afterwards. After the American hostage-crisis in 1 Iran in 1979, the toppling of Shah, and the establishment of the Islamic revolution, “U.S. officials implicitly and explicitly supported Iraq” (Dada 74). And being supported by his allies, the Americans, Saddam Hussein started a war with Iran on September 22 1980— an eight-year long war: “[the] Carter administration tacitly condoned and even encouraged the Iraqi invasion of Iran, and as the war ground on, the White House increasingly took the part of the supposedly ‘moderate’ and ‘pragmatic’ Saddam”
(Gregory 154). Kanan Makiya assumes that “the violence… [the war] unleashed did almost get out of control. Iranian advances on the battlefield in the early years would have unseated Saddam Hussain had the West not come to his aid” (xii). Having a common enemy, US officials “seek ways of improving American-Iraqi ties” (qtd. in Dada
75) and even media and “The publications also indirectly supported the Iraqi government and sought public sympathy. The New York Times [for example]…justified the actions of the Iraqi government and considered them? As being compassionate” (75). The Iraq-Iran war had geographical, religious and economical dimensions that benefited the US hegemony and created favorable conditions for other countries (Chomsky Imperial
Ambitions 126-9) and history proves that “the Iranian Revolution proved to be a crisis for the United States…no less traumatic in its effects on America's other Middle Eastern allies” (Al-Qaq 42).
This is because the new Islamic Iranian government attuned to the same policy as its predecessor, the Shah, taking advantage of weapons and trained soldiers in preparation to carry out regional expansion plans toward the Arab world (Al-Qaq 38-9, 107-8).
Accordingly, the new Shi'ite Iranian revolution inspired Shia minorities in other Arab 2 countries to rebel, seeking rights and justice, a problem that would provoke other disturbances in the region and to America’s strongest ally in the Middle East: Saudi
Arabia (Crockatt 83).
However, taking precedence over all these issues was the economic factor, which was based primarily on the region’s rich oil resources. Noam Chomsky indicates that oil is the leading motivating factor for war worldwide (Chomsky Imperial Ambitions 43-4). Fear that oil resources would be used contrary to US interests led the US government to seek to control oil resources in other countries, especially undeveloped countries. Henceforth,
US foreign policy was influenced by the economics of oil resources (43-4). A war with
Iran then would certainly exhaust the country economically and, consequently, might help topple the Islamic Revolutionary Government. However, such a long war consumed the sources of both countries, and “each side suffered horrific casualties…and the rest of the world seemed content to let each side grind the other down” (Gregory 153).
Indeed, an eight-year war exhausted both countries: “The Iraq-Iran war can be described as one of the most destructive events to take place between two countries since
World War II. To pursue this war, it was necessary for Iraq to mobilize large numbers of its young males” (Mokhif 5). This affected social relations and the demographics of Iraq with an increasing demand for women labor in the market in various positions (6-7).
Economically, depletion of resources led the Iraqi government to depend on subsidies from its allies, especially Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the US. Nevertheless, the Iraqi government did not consider such support a loan, since Iraq was protecting these allies from the Islamic Shi'a of Iran (Al-Qaq, 42, 44, 56). Culturally, people were afraid to 3 oppose Saddam because he wiped out whole villages and cities and deployed their sons in mandatory services in the army. If such a soldier escaped for fear of his life, he would be executed (Makiya ix-xv). After most resources were depleted, it became useless to continue the war. Therefore, the Iranian side accepted Security Council Resolution 598 on 18 July 1988; both sides ceased fire, and the war ended1 after “it took the UN Security
Council days to agree on a resolution calling for a ceasefire, which neither condemned
Iraq for its aggression nor called upon to withdraw” (Gregory 153-4).
The enormous debt that remained after the war left Iraq almost bankrupt. The governments of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and in some cases the United Arab Emirates started demanding repayment. They refused to decrease the amount owed or enter any negotiations. Moreover, they increased oil production, which reduced the price of oil and consequently damaged the economy of Iraq (155-6). Moreover, the Emir of Kuwait challenged Saddam on several occasions and provoked him, which, according to Keegan, were unnecessary actions. Saddam, Keegan states, made historical claims that Kuwait had been part of Iraq since the Ottoman Empire. Such tension between these neighboring countries were enhanced when on 25 July 1990 Saddam met the American ambassador,
April Glaspie, and asked her to deliver a letter to President Bush making it clear that Iraq intended to invade Kuwait if it would not cooperate. Glaspie's response was ambiguous, and it seemed that there was a misunderstanding between what she said and meant, and what Saddam understood. Keegan says, “Weakly, she [Glaspie] conceded that 'we have
1 For further reading, a chapter entitled, "Saddam's wars" by John Keegan in The Iraq War explains in detail the relations between Iraq, Iran, and the USA. 4 no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border dispute with Kuwait…we hope that you can solve this problem via [the Arab League] or President Mubarak [of Egypt]'''(74).
It seemed that Saddam assumed their conversation as a green light for not interfering in case he invaded Kuwait, especially after the Arab League failed to provide Saddam with satisfying solutions. Accordingly, on 2 August 1990, Saddam invaded Kuwait (Keegan
71-5). As a result of his attack, the UN Security Council passed a series of resolutions to urge the Iraqi government to withdraw from Kuwait, and also to impose several economic sanctions on Iraq. It also threatened that Iraq would be invaded if it did not withdraw from Kuwait by 15 January 1991 (75-6). By invading Kuwait, Saddam lost the support of his allies, the Americans, and “Iraq has suddenly become a threat to our [the
Americans] very existence and its neighbors” (Chomsky Interventions 8). Thus, George
W. Bush sent his men to the king of Saudi Arabia to ask him to “accept American military assistance to defend the kingdom against future Iraqi aggression.”(Gregory 157).
Based on the king’s approval, “Washington began to assemble an international military coalition” (157). Supported by his ally, the British Prime Minister, President George
Bush collected troops and called for the formation of a coalition of armies from all the countries opposing Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Eventually, forty-five countries contributed in various ways to the war, including Arab countries like Egypt and Syria.
Acknowledging that the US opposed his actions and after the failure of his last effort to negotiate with the US government2, Saddam changed his policy to win back some of
2 For more detail, see Mohamedou, Iraq and the Second Gulf War: State Building and Regime Security, 141-49. 5 his allies; he claimed victimization because “the politics of victimization is one of the most convenient methods of extracting externally derived legitimacy in undemocratic political system” (Ghanim 19). This “confrontation with the outside world, which was motivated by a perception of being victim to a constant conspiracy against the country…
[Was] to provide a source of legitimacy for its autocratic rule” (19-20). Further, Saddam alleged falsely his descent from Prophet Mohammed to win the Shia, and finally he launched Scud missiles at Israel to win the Arab nation. These attempts signaled his call to the Islamic-Arab world to help after the withdrawal of US support. However, all these attempts were unsuccessful and all governments sought an immediate retreat from
Kuwait’s territories which Saddam never accepted. Henceforth, as a consequence, the
“Gulf War” or “Operation Desert Storm” began on 16 January 1991 and for more than six weeks Iraqi cities were bombed, much of the Iraqi army destroyed, and most of the infrastructure of Iraq was damaged (Keegan 75-83). Susan Jeffords describes this war:
What distinguished the Persian Gulf War from earlier instances…is that the strategies of terror that are part of the death-world were used, not at the end of an already long brutal war (as the use of the atom bomb…) but as its initial strategy. In this way, the U.S. engagement in the Persian Gulf War moved warfare in the post-Cold War era into a distinctively different and more terrifying phase: the combination of the death-world and the technological world as a philosophy of war. (qtd in Norris 3-4)
Indeed, the structure and technique of war was changed only to create a more horrifying version of the destructive power of war. Paul Lewis remarked, “the recent conflict has wrought near-apocalyptic results upon the infrastructure of what had been until January
1991 a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society”; additionally, United Nations teams assured that the bombing had “relegated Iraq "to a pre-industrial age" and warn[ed] 6 that the nation could face "epidemic and famine” (Lewis “After The War”). Despite such atrocities, this war went, somehow, inattentive by the American narratives and mainstream media because:
After the very open reportage of Vietnam, the military imposed severe restrictions on press photography. This control of images effectively "virtualized" the First Gulf War through distanced, abstracted, and contained reportage (a trajectory outlined by Caroline Brothers). The U.S. military strategy in Iraq was to allow freer movement but to complexly embed the press corps. (Luckhurst “Fictionalizing Iraq” 715)
However, this war is peculiar in moving battles from frontlines into the inside of cities and vital civilian places, including bombing the noncombatant shelter of Amiriyah3. To how the US government responds to such atrocities on the Iraqi civilian, Defense
Secretary Richard B. Cheney once reacted by saying “while you still want to be as discriminating as possible in terms of avoiding civilian casualties, your number one obligation is to accomplish your mission and to do it at the lowest possible cost in terms of American lives” (qtd. In Gellman). Rendering Iraqi citizens as not significant as
American soldiers traumatized the Iraqis who felt that the US and the world had abandoned them, especially after their attempt to topple Saddam4 after the incoherent withdrawal from Kuwait. Makiya declares:
[The revolt] was not to be. For the insurgents stood alone, rejected by their fellow Arabs and by the Western leaders of the coalition that had expelled Iraq from Kuwait. They were crushed, and in the years that followed that wild,
3Amnah Almukhtar wrote, “In the morning of February 13, 1991, just before dawn, U.S. planes dropped two 2,000-pound “smart bombs” on a civilian shelter in the Amiriyah neighborhood of Baghdad, Iraq, killing at least 400 civilians. The Pentagon was fully aware that the facility had been used as a civilian shelter during the Iran-Iraq War and never made any announcements indicating that they considered the shelter’s protected status to have ended”. 4 The US gave permission to Saddam’s regime to use helicopters in the no-fly zone to crush the uprising revolt. 7 insurrectionary moment, the system responded by turning full circle on itself; it went back to a formula that had worked so well for it in its early days: public displays of extreme cruelty. (xiv)
Indeed, the “international coalition forces succeeded in liberating the Kuwaitis from the foolish adventure of Saddam, but failed to liberate the Iraqis” (Ghanim 1). Chomsky attributed this retraction from assisting the revolt against Saddam to politics and policymaking, which debated that “the people of Iraq must not control their country”
(Interventions 59). By this time, the people of Iraq felt that they were othered and humiliated, and that “the very brief but destructive Persian Gulf War of 1991 was a disturbing reminder that the death event was not only not put behind Western culture but had become commonplace and acceptable” (Norris 3). This harsh reality was followed by years of sanctions which proved to be harder on Iraqis who were alienated even more by the lack of worldly support and the absence of basic necessities of life.
After the withdrawal from Kuwait, Iraq was depleted with economic sanctions for more than a decade and the Iraqi collective community and individual character were targeted by these sociopolitical relations and unaccommodating governmental pretexts.
They were all traumatized: “the Iraqi people were not only dying from the unrelenting
‘post-war’ bombing. They were also dying…from the legacy of the war itself” (Gregory
172). Nuha al-Radi, an Iraqi painter and a diarist, kept a diary about the days of the 1990 war and the aftermath in the sanction years. She details how the Iraqi people felt about the war: "Bush is fighting a dirty war…he will continue to hammer us [the Iraqis] till the bitter end, he doesn't care how many Iraqis he kills” (38, 56). Though al-Radi described
8 Iraqis as survivors, she noted how, later on, the sanctions affected the entire society through maximizing the people’s sufferings:
The reconstruction process in what is left of Iraq has been dramatic- most utilities, factories, buildings and bridges…were bombed have been rebuilt with true Iraqi ingenuity…we did it ourselves with no help from the outside world. But the social system has suffered. Inflation, counterfeit money, poverty and hunger are the order of the day. There are shortages of everything- medicine, food, spare parts- …medical and social services are in a mess. (57)
The sanctions were so harsh on Iraqis that many countries called them genocide.
Therefore, Switzerland called for a meeting to discuss the humanitarian calamity occurring in Iraq; eminent countries attended except for the US government who refused even to join. In fact, the US government ignored all the reports and opposed even partial relaxation of the sanctions (Chomsky Hegemony and Survival 125-8). Such opposition indicated that the US government did not consider the physical atrocities and psychological damages inflicted on the Iraqi society, and Derek Gregory blamed Bush because “Bush was determined that they [the sanctions] would remain in place until
Saddam was forced from power. Yet he had refused to come to the aid of Shi’a and the
Kurds when they responded to his call to do exactly that5” (173). Al-Radi also stated:
“Bush says he has nothing against the Iraqi people. Does he not know or realize that it is only the Iraqi people who suffered? It's us, and only us, who've been without electricity and water- a life of hardship” (Al-Radi 56). Despite United Nations reports to dismantle
5 In a chapter entitled “Iraqi, the United Nations, and the United States,” Dilip Hiro explains; Bush calls for Iraqis to revolt against and topple Saddam yet he fails to support them. He also recognizes the atrocities inflicted by the sanctions on the everyday lives of Iraqis. 9 the sanctions because they were categorized as “genocidal,”6 these US and international sanctions lasted thirteen years until the invasion, the Second Gulf War, or the “shock and awe” campaign7.
In general, the American public was not aware of the atrocities happening to the
Iraqi people. To them, Iraq is a country on the other side of the globe where their troops won a war more than a decade ago. However, this changed with political complications surrounding an atrocity happening in New York on September 11 2001 that will alter power dynamics and global contentions and connections. A terrorist group called “Al
Qaeda carried out what has been described as the most destructive terrorist attack in history by using hijacked passengers airlines to destroy the World Trade Center towers”
(DeFronzo 110). The collapse of the World Trade Center and the death of almost 3,000
US citizens shocked the American people and caused public concern for the safety of people's lives. The rhetoric and narrative representation of this event constituted cultural trauma or what Luckhurst calls the “trauma paradigm.” He asserts:
9/11 conformed to diagnostic notions of an event outside the bounds of normal experience that produced not just large-scale death and wounding but an uncontainable contagion of traumatic secondary witness as a calculated media spectacle… The attack on the World Trade Center was intended to produce a distinctive aftermath, and this state of aftershock was eminently readable in the discourse of post-traumatic reaction, at individual, community, and national levels. (“Fictionalizing Iraq” 721)
6 As described by Denis Halliday, a UN humanitarian coordinator, who resigned in protest (qtd. in Chomsky Interventions p. 59). 7 Bob Woodward writes, “Rumsfeld, for the first time, introduced the concept of ‘shock and awe’ to the president. At this point it meant building up so much force and conducting various ‘spiking’ operations and bombing that it might in itself trigger regime change” (102). 10 Americans were traumatized and the victims’ families demanded investigations and sought actions. For the Bush administration, it seemed suitable to blame a country like
Iraq, especially with the tense long historical and political relations, even if Iraq had nothing to do with these attacks. Richard Clarke, a National Coordinator for Security, asserts that, on the day of the attack, Bush “in a very intimidating way left us, me and my staff, with a clear indication that he wanted us to come back with a word that there is an
Iraqi hand behind 9/11 because they have been planning to do something about Iraq far from before the time they came to the office” (Fahrenheit 9/11). Indeed, Bob Woodward, in his book Plan of Attack, explains in details how the American administration planned to attack Iraq far before 9/11 on suspicion of possessing weapons of mass destruction
(WMD)8. The Bush administration deliberately sought to mislead the American people about connections between Al-Qaeda and Saddam, and did so by manufacturing a convincing agenda to justify the invasion on Iraq. Accordingly, new vocabularies of retaliation on the “axis of evil,”9 the war on terror, and rhetoric of “us versus them” were established in response and in preparation for the 2003 invasion on Iraq. As Judith Butler indicates, this “us vs. them” binary leads back to “the same binarism… [of] an anachronistic division between “East” and “West” and which, in its sloshy metonymy, returns us to the invidious distinction between civilization (our own) and barbarism (now coded “Islam” itself)”(Precarious Life 2). This rhetoric of othering and binarism
8 Moreover, Chomsky thinks that the US government had a number of reasons to spread such propaganda. The government wanted to take over Iraq for several reasons. The economic reasons, which is the desire to control oil resources in Iraq, and a geographical reason related to a need to have access to the Middle East region with its political, cultural, regional and religious tension (Imperial Ambitions 3-9, 31-2). 9 “The axis of evil” are Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Plan of Attack (p.87-8). 11 alienated the atrocities Iraqi civilians faced during the war, governed the cross-cultural relations between the two nations and between the American soldiers and Iraqi civilians later on, and justified the invasion, the killing of civilians, the destruction of Iraq, and the complete traumatization of a whole nation that had suffered eminently for generations.
Jacques Rancière reinforces this idea: “Terror is precisely the name that trauma takes in political matters and is one of the catchwords of our time. […] To talk of a war against terror is to connect the form of these attacks to the intimate angst that can inhabit each one of us in the same chain” (qtd in Werner 50). This loss of articulation of trauma, cultural or collective, inspires a rhetoric of politics and war and encourages “a war that is not a war but instead a mechanism of infinite protection, a way of dealing with a trauma
[as] elevated to the status of a civilizational phenomenon” (50).
Despite this deception and stimulation to go to war, on 15 February, 2003, the largest global demonstration to prevent the invasion of Iraq took place. It was a historical moment that protesters around the world stood against the participation of their governments in the war. Regardless of such a huge opposition against the war, the US
Government decided to wage the war and, soon after, they announced the war on Iraq on
19 March 2003 (We are Many). This conflict in views for and against waging war complicates the relation that will be later established between the soldiers and their community. Unlike World War I and World War II, this war lacks credibility in its rationale, because it was based on deception, and into misleading young men and women into the war. As a matter of fact, waging the war on Iraq was what Richard Slotkin describes as a “savage war,” meaning a response to a collective atrocity on the nation 12 because of “the profound sense of rage… [they] feel when… [they] have helplessly suffered a terrible trauma” which is basically “at odds with the reality that [its] imperative can never be fulfilled” (qtd in Buchanan 4). Such political and cultural rage direct how
Iraq and its people are represented in narratives, mainstream media and communication technologies. Simply, most of such representations lack authenticity. Instead, they concentrate mainly on the experience of the soldiers and their agency as the only representation of war. Jim Holstun calls such representations “shoot and cry”10 and elaborates:
It differs from simple racism or the colonial “othering” … for it denies responsibility for the other’s suffering while appropriating it as an authenticating experience. Serious Iraq War film, fiction, and memoirs seldom affirm the war as a positive, patriotic good. Rather, they question its merits and parody a lost patriotic narrative, ultimately presenting the war as senseless or absurd. But instead of going on to analyze and attack the war as an imperial assault, they tend to bracket its moral and political status and assimilate it to an existential fate. Indeed, they reaffirm the narrative of duty, replacing anything like ideological reflection with a focus on the agonized loyalty among small groups of US soldiers. (5-6)
Such representations create a space of otherness embodied in Iraqi civilians regardless of their miseries. Consequently, the narratives generated in this respect overlook the trauma of the Iraqis and challenge any transcultural representations among noncombatant civilians. Luckhurst criticizes the confused articulation of Iraq war, trauma and victimhood:
The Iraq war existed in an odd stage of incompletion, at once a war, a civil war, and a postwar occupation, an intervention begun as an ostensibly symmetrical engagement between armies that mutated into asymmetrical guerrilla warfare, insurgency, and the classic violent aftermath of colonial withdrawal. The politics
10 Another example that falls into this category would be The Yellow Birds, by Kevin Powers. 13 of the war remains intensely divisive and, for the American public, the sympathies deeply confused. Fighting a war of vengeance in the rhetoric of liberation, a war ultimately premised on either fabricated or manipulated intelligence, American soldiers have been portrayed as victims of a merciless military-industrial complex or of a dastardly Arabic resistance, but also simultaneously as ignorant "grunts" and the perpetrators of uncountable deaths. (“Fictionalizing Iraq” 721)
Led by patriotism, retaliation for 9/11, and the need for money, young Americans volunteered for the US army to look after their country against terrorism. Soon, after the invasion and “when no WMD or connections between Saddam and Al-Qaeda and 9/11 were found, the US public’s support for the war declined rapidly” (Defronzo 128). David
Kay, who was hired by Bush as the chief weapons inspector in Iraq, said, "the United
State had gone to war to chase a mirage” (Gardner 195) and consequently most American soldiers renounce the war. This failure embarrassed the US government, which had to find another political reason to explain to the American people why their children and taxes had been spent in a war that was meaningless.
Such a shift in motivation traumatized the American soldiers who acknowledged that they were led into a pointless mission. Moreover, a revision in viewing Iraqis and the
Iraqi trauma came after the traumatic iconography of the post-invasion torture of Abu
Ghraib11. The images of this scandal questioned the ethical approach of the soldiers and challenged representations of military in foreign policies. They simply had “renewed the punctual language of trauma [that] much American cultural commentary on this curious phase of the war has been routed through the shock… [of] the images” (Luckhurst
11 See Philip Gourevitch’s The Ballad of Abu Ghraib describing the effect of this scandal. 14 “Fictionalizing Iraq” 722). Such images damaged the global image of the invasion and the language of liberation promoted earlier by the war. Graydon Carter, in his book What
We’ve Lost, acknowledged these flogging images and its effect on the American public:
We’ve lost our good reputation and our standing as a great and just superpower. We’ve lost the sympathy of the world following September 11 and turned it into an alloy of fear and hatred. We’ve lost lives and allies. We’ve lost liberties and freedoms. We’ve lost billions of dollars that could have gone toward a truly assault on terrorism. It could be said that in the age of George W. Bush, we have lost our way. (5)
In the same way Phil Klay, a former soldier, emphasized this point: “the gung-ho attitude that made our soldiers so effective in 1966,’67, was replaced by the will to survive. It’s not that those troops lacked courage, but that the ends shifted. We fought for each other”
(Two decades). Klay also criticizes the American civilians for denying a shared responsibility for waging a useless war. A concern that Roy Scranton imputed to their moral indifference: “Most people don’t want to hear the awful truths that war has taught him [the soldier], the political powers that be want to cover up the shocking reality of war, and anybody who wasn’t there simply can’t understand what it was like” because
American civilians “expect veterans to play out for them the ritual fort-da of trauma and recovery, and to carry for them the collective guilt of war. Such an expectation is the privilege of those who can afford to have others do their killing for them” (“The Trauma
Hero”). This creates an unbreachable gap between the American soldier and the civilian, who would never know the truth of war because he has never been into war. This breach destabilizes the collective memory of the American culture by rejecting the culmination of memories that exists outside the normal everyday understanding.
15 However, if both the civilians in the invaded Iraq and the soldiers in the invading US army are viewed as victims carrying the burden of their trauma inside their hearts and minds, who is to be blamed for their trauma? Can this trauma excuse their actions of othering the opposite side? If yes, will Iraqi soldiers be excused, when they had invaded
Kuwait, in the same way that American soldiers have been excused by being represented as victims, especially since Iraqi military services were mandatory? Also, do both sides suffering in the same way? And most significantly, can such trauma and its narrative representations connect both sides since they occupy the same place at the same time?
These questions form the basis of my study.
The Theory of Trauma
I.
In his article “Embedded Poetry: Iraq; Through a Soldier's Binoculars”, Sinan Antoon, an Iraqi poet and a novelist, criticizes narratives that promote the victimhood and traumatization of the American soldiers at the expense of the Iraqi native civilians by discussing Brian Turner’s collection of poems Here, Bullet. In the collection, the soldier appears to be struggling in an unknown land against severe circumstances and massive atrocities. Antoon asserts that such narratives neglect the experience of invaded civilians and the violence and trauma in which they are living the same way mainstream media and political discourse overlook the horror of war and the ugly practices done to Iraqis during the war. Antoon’s article demonstrates deontological ethics where the space between victims and perpetrators needs to move away from any narratives that deny 16 accountability in favor of casting the soldier in an occupying country as a victim. He especially points to Turner’s speech about editing the cover of the collection, which is a picture taken while he was in Iraq, by omitting all the surrounding images of victims and heavy metal weaponry. Simply, the poet and the publishers produce a more suitable image for the American public:
What remains [in the cover-picture] is the lone American soldier amid the harsh landscape. The result [after the editing] is a perfect fit for the national mythology. A white man taming nature to establish or extend civilization. The natives are conveniently absent. They could have been details in or part of the landscape, but the sandbags would have tarnished the image. (“Embedded Poetry”)
Despite being considered an anti-war collection, this book marginalizes the trauma of the
Iraqi civilians and alienates them from the atrocities of war. This disregard for the suffering of others is what Roy Scranton calls “the trauma hero myth”, an idea that is deeply rooted in American war fiction— with narratives that place emphasis on the experience of the soldier as the sole agent of representing war trauma which happens because the “truth of war, the veteran comes to learn, is a truth beyond words, a truth that can only be known by having been there, an unspeakable truth he must bear for society”
(“The Trauma Hero”). This truth that is unspeakable alienates the soldiers from their society, authorizes their experiences, and resists outside outcomes of the other, unless they enhance the trauma and victimhood of soldiers. However, such narratives need to open spaces for Iraqi voices, as suggested by Scranton, to create a balance in narrative representations and to highlight the atrocities left behind an invading army. Viewing
17 characters and events along a fiction of entangled events between soldiers and civilians are central to my study. Trauma theories are thus specifically well suited here.
It is also noticeable that such narratives promoting the victimhood and traumatization of soldier/civilian, disturb the victim/perpetrator binary. This confusion of binaries happens because the traumatic experience “disarticulates the self and creates holes in existence” (La Capra 41). In his essay “We Are All Victims Now,” Thomas Laqueur12 posts a significant question: “The question is not whether someone actually is a victim of trauma but how the criteria for deciding who is a victim come into being and who manages them…who can or cannot claim the rights of victimhood.” The DSM remarks that suffering victimhood and developing post-traumatic stress disorder may depend on
“the frequency, the variety and the intensity of the trauma – the initial stressing event”
(Werner 44). This means that in trauma, lines between victims, perpetrators and witnesses are blurry and not definite, and Laqueur understands this misperception as well:
any ‘recognizable stressor’ outside ordinary experience could render someone a victim of trauma, which meant in effect that Vietnam vets [and in consequence American Vets in Iraq], even those who had engaged in actions that would seem to be those of perpetrators not victims, could nevertheless be treated as victims and compensated. Whether their new status gained them much sympathy is debatable.13
This elusive orientation of victimhood and trauma between binaries sets the basis for this project which is in itself problematic since it explores such binaries in narrative
12 In this essay, Laqueur reviewed a book entitled The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood by Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman. The book traces trauma through history and stresses on the development of the word “trauma” to contain, loosely, new terms and conditions. 13 He concludes this from Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-III in 1980 18 representations of the two involved nations. Specifically, I explore how traumatic experiences of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians can create spaces of fictional transcultural traumatic representations.
Trauma manifests itself in sequences of mechanisms that somehow appear fragmented and repeated. In ancient Greek, trauma is an outside wound, mostly physical
(Laqueur) while in recent years, and especially as has been promoted by Freud, trauma is a cognitive wound (Caruth 3). Basically, to be traumatized is to be in direct exposure to an irrational event, whether as a victim, as a witness, or even as a perpetrator. Therefore, consistent features for such an arousal of trauma can be:
Intrusion symptoms (i.e. involuntary and repetitive distressing memories, dreams, flashbacks, fear)… avoidance (i.e. of related stimuli or people)… negative alterations (i.e. dissociative amnesia, numbness, negative view and emotions, depression, blunting, estrangement) and…arousal (aggression, self- destructive behavior, alertness, insomnia). Other criteria additionally require…the minimum duration of the symptoms as being longer than one month…the subject’s functional capacities to be significantly compromised and the assurance that…the symptoms were not caused by substances or medical conditions. (Werner 44)
When an individual faces an event that is outside normal understanding, these features act as a stimuli that distinguish the traumatized as a survivor. This is called “psychological trauma”. Fundamentally, Freud’s model of trauma, which lies at the heart of Caruth’s theory, is emphasized on an individual’s registration of a mental wound of unidentified experience. Caruth defines it as “a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available” (Unclaimed Experience 4).
To study psychological trauma, according to psychologist Judith Herman in her famous book Trauma and Recovery, is “to come face to face both with human vulnerability in the 19 natural world and with the capacity for evil in human nature” (7). Simply, it is an individual’s experience to an extreme event where sufferers face a mental breakdown that reacts to external traumatic event.
A correlative trauma that I would like to study as well is cultural trauma. Cultural trauma is the impact of a severe event on a group of people like war, slavery, or natural disasters. Sociologist Kai Erikson approaches the theory of cultural trauma through discussing catastrophes of native cultures like the Buffalo Creek. He distinguishes between psychological trauma which, to him, means “a blow to the psyche that breaks through one’s defense so suddenly and with such brutal force that one cannot react to it effectively” (187) and cultural trauma, or as he calls it collective trauma, as “a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bond attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality” (187). He argues that the effect of collective trauma also affects the individual, yet creates a “community of survivors” that
“can serve as a source of communality in the same way that common languages and common backgrounds can” (186). He suggests that the trauma an individual encounters can only be shared by others in the same group, which, in consequence, might isolate them from other groups or communities. In the same manner, sociologists Ron Eyerman and Jeffrey Alexander, in their book Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, also address the formation of a collective identity and the memories shaped after a traumatic event. They emphasize that “social groups, national societies, and sometimes even entire civilizations not only cognitively identify the existence and source of human suffering but
‘“take on board’ some significant responsibility for it” (1). A shattering shock that affects 20 the members of this group share a collective memory and an identity that is socially demonstrated. These two branches will be mutually enriching in addressing the trauma of the American soldiers and their relations to their society, as well as the trauma of the
Iraqi civilians with relations to each other and to the invaders.
I understand trauma here as an extreme unpresentable, unspeakable, and unsettling event that wounds humans psychologically as well as physically. Cathy Caruth defines it as a “breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world” (Unclaimed
Experience 4). The shock of the traumatic event overwhelms the normal understanding of the victim and transmits it cognitively to process it and since it is an event that lies between “knowing and not knowing” (4), the psychological wound of the victim becomes uncommunicable to the outer world and thus unspeakable; “we may not have direct access to others’, or even our own, histories, seems to imply the impossibility of access to the other cultures and hence of any means of making political and ethical judgment” (10).
While I am not interested much in the history and the politics of the traumatic event, I want to investigate the ethical judgment when accessing other cultures. Nevertheless, is creating an access or a shared moment possible if the event does not grant a direct access? Caruth grants access through two points; first, literary language because it is a language that defies “our understanding” (5). The wide scope literature offers is crucial in assimilating the traumatic experience and iterating its memories; Jefferey Alexander remarks, “memory residues surface through free association in psychoanalytic treatment, they appear in public life through the creation of literature” (6). In fact, the genesis of the relation between trauma and psychoanalysis can be traced back to Freud because he 21 “turns to literature to describe traumatic experience” thinking that “literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing”
(Caruth 3). Therefore, literature becomes the means by which trauma and traumatized people can express their experiences unreservedly. Second, through speaking, listening and, sometimes, responding to a traumatic event (Caruth 9), assuming that such features can originate a link between traumatized people, “trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures: not as a simple understanding of the pasts of others but rather, within the traumas of contemporary history, as our ability to listen through the departure we have all taken from ourselves” (Trauma Explorations in Memory 11). The origins of this link goes back to Freud as well who has accepted dreams as a belated notion of the traumatic event where “the actual traumatic experience had been rendered pictorial and timeless, and replaced by a fictional memory” (Werner 39) which is in process becomes
“a path for exploring the nature of the traumatic process in direct relation to the traumatic event” (46). Similarly, Shoshana Felman attests to the significance of speaking, listening and, narrative discourse in the process of testimony. She believes that when a witness to a trauma opens up and narrates the traumatic event, a listener shares the moment through the process of listening and responding. In the same way, literature of traumatic narration involves a testimonial encounter between the text- as a witness- and the listener- as a reader. Felman remarks, “texts that testify do not simply report facts, but, in different ways, encounter—and make us encounter—strangeness” (Testimony 7). Ruth Leys presumes “memory conceived as truth-telling is overestimated but that memory conceived as narration is crucial” (118). Fictional memory therefore addressing the 22 trauma of the victim can be communicated individually and culturally through “listening to the trauma of another… [That] contribute[s] to cross-cultural solidarity and to the creation of new forms of community” (Craps and Buelens 2).
However, while this might apply to times of natural disasters and communities that face similar experiences like slavery, the question here becomes: can trauma create such solidarity in times of war between the invaders and their invaded armies? If yes, as it is suggested above, how can cross-cultural representations promote these ethical engagements? These questions challenge the notion of cross-cultural traumatic connection only when we discuss spaces of war and relations between invaders and invaded. Likewise, I agree with Craps and Buelens who later assume that such solidarity is “exclusively concerned with traumatic experiences of white Westerners and solely employ critical methodologies emanating from a Euro-American context” (2). Trauma studies need to expand the scope of their understanding from the limits of Eurocentricity into acknowledgment of non-Western cultures. Michael Rothberg warns that “as long as trauma studies foregoes comparative study and remains tied to a narrow Eurocentric framework, it distorts the histories it addresses…and threatens to reproduce the very
Eurocentrism that lies behind those histories” (227). To avoid such “foregoing,” my project will discuss fiction that is written by American writers as well as Iraqis and will provide a cross-cultural understanding of narratives seen side by side in comparable representations.
The primary aim of this study is to contextualize new mechanisms for discussing and understanding cross-cultural experiences. This study includes six texts written by 23 American and Iraqi writers-- two from both nations are read against each other--Sand
Queen (2011) by Helen Benedict and The American Granddaughter (2008) by Inaam
Kachachi; Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012) by Ben Fountain and The Corpse
Washer (2013) by Sinan Antoon; and Redeployment (2014) by Phil Klay and The Corpse
Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq (2014)14 by Hassan Blasim. Through my readings, I noticed that trauma theories need to ameliorate their approach because dimensions of war expressions and connections have changed and new spaces have been created between individuals and nations and even between genders. The 2003 war on Iraq is not defined by conventional rules as it is no longer happening in frontlines nor is it restricted to male soldiers, besides, its motives are ambiguous and misleading. This establishes cross- cultural connections between soldiers, male and female, and civilians, male, female and even families, and produces chains of unprecedented connections. Nonetheless, because war services are no longer mandatory in the American army, this war also challenges ethical representations of soldiers and of these intersectional connections in narratives of trauma. My project aims at generating an entry point to these new relations, an itinerary text for trauma studies to trace newly-established intercultural and transcultural networks.
The relation between gender, space, and testimony in the three chapters I am discussing in this dissertation follow the line of how trauma theories fail to cope with developing new rhetoric and vocabularies to match the need of expressing psychological and cultural trauma in recent war. As this project is a ground base for studies yet to come discussing
14 The dates of publication of the Iraqi texts are actually the dates of the publication of the translated versions. 24 trauma and cross-cultural relations during recent war, it certainly draws on what might be a theory for further understanding the trauma between narratives of the invader and the invaded and the complicated representations of victim/perpetrator. Nevertheless, despite theoretical limitations, I work with these invariable theories to adopt an understanding of the treatment of such cross- cultural trauma.
II.
Being an Iraqi who lived her whole life in Iraq and bore witness to all the events described in the first section grants me credibility in approaching the trauma of the civilian other and familiarizes me with the culture presented in Iraqi texts this study will discuss. However, because trauma texts tend to de-familiarize the readers in strange ways, empathetic readings replicate the notion of agency of trauma and victimhood and marks the readings of the American texts unprejudiced. I tend to follow Derek Attridge in conceiving ethical readings when encountering the other; he asserts, “I do not treat the text as an object whose significance has to be divined; I treat it as something that comes into being only in the process of understanding and responding that I, as an individual reader in a specific time and place, conditioned by a specific history, go through” (qtd. in
Metz 1024). He also considers how reading the trauma of the other might be “disruptive, but [at the same time] constructive, reading moments that reinforce the humanity and self-understanding of the reader even as it affects his consciousness in potentially unforeseeable ways” (1024). This means that he foresees potential trust in humanitarian approaches towards the other, which I seek from the readers of the texts under discussion 25 here. It is not to flatten the characters and their choices in these texts nor to engage in
“empathetic unsettlement” (41), as described by Dominick LaCapra, as much as it is an ethical identification and a legitimate alignment of cross-cultural trauma as well as asking logical question of relations between victims and victimizers. I seek a globalized audience in order to mitigate the thwarting forces of misrepresentations.
Therefore, I argue that positioning the events and the characters at an intersection between theories of psychological and cultural trauma is best in understanding cross- cultural traumatic connection resulting from war and violence. This study problematizes and recontextualizes the psychological, cultural, and cross-cultural relations of trauma narratives between the invader and the invaded. Here, the word “intersection” lies at the heart of this project. By doing this, I attempt to demolish cultural barriers through discussing analogous premises and igniting empathy in dealing with the other through reading trauma and victimhood. The word “intersection” also defines the relation of trauma and victimhood in these texts as it blurs the lines between victims, perpetrators and witnesses.
American soldiers lie between the binary of victim/perpetrator because they inflict violence on Iraqi civilians as invaders, yet are caught up in a meaningless war, “as puppets of the political, military, and economic concerns invested in justifying the war”
(Williams 530). This fraught status render them eligible for this binary. On the other hand, as Iraqi civilians bear witness to the violence inflicted on them and their fellow civilians, they are caught up in the binary of witness/victim. Both sides suffer trauma and negotiate spaces between surviving and victimization among relations that weigh heavily 26 with morality, ethics, guilt, violence, or even heroism. However, as Herman assumes,
“war and victims are something the community wants to forget” (Herman 8), because the society is not ready to take accountability for the atrocities of others--a fact that enhances the need to remind the readers, and the community behind them, of these marginalized groups and the war experiences that alienate them.
In this project, I use the term “endemic trauma” in the title to describe how trauma affects nations not as an individual incident but as a continuing enigma that annihilates any constructive formations of the culture as well as the individual. Iraqi writers realize this unique representation of trauma and thus promote cultural trauma representations more than concentrating on individual images. They advocate representing trauma as an endemic that disturbs the sociohistorical and cultural politics of the society, as well as the individual, with all the harms inflicted on the Iraqi community. It is a trauma that is generational, inherited, and continuous. American texts, on the other hand, tend to shift the tension from a particular violence done in war by soldiers to a cultural alienation where soldiers suffer the trauma of collective identity. These texts reveal how the soldiers’ community live inside bubbles leaving them to suffer alone far from the awareness of the society which originally sends them to war. Simply, American writers are more concerned with methods of handling and understanding individual trauma of soldiers and their connection to their communities after returning home. Most of these writings still have myopic attitudes to the atrocities inflicted by these soldiers or to the other harms these soldiers face during enlistment.
27 In her book War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction, Ikram Masmoudi traces the history and development of Iraqi narratives since the British occupation. She argues that during
Saddam’s regime, only narratives that glorify the government could be published, distributed, and celebrated; even exiled writers feared writing against the regime for fear of backlash against their extended families living back in Iraq (Masmoudi vii, 11-12). I believe that most narratives of Iraq and war which are written after 2003 represent the collective and the nation that encounters the horrors and devastations of wars for more than a generation. In this, I agree with Yasmeen Hanoosh who denotes, “The sense of nonchalance, doubt, or naiveté that marks the perspectives and actions of several of these texts’ [ Iraqi texts written after 2003] protagonists transform the narratives into parodies of the Iraqi events, concepts, individuals, and histories they depict. By so doing they prompt us to rethink our own understanding of modern Iraq as well” and any nuanced reading and knowledge of Iraq’s trauma in contemporary history would define these writings as “the best metaphor for the incongruity of modern Iraq’s cultural and political history, and a shrewd reminder of the cyclical nature of the country’s collective calamities” (“Beyond the Trauma of War: Iraqi Literature Today”). This results from the intersection of the political and historical calamities in the lives of Iraqi people for more than a generation such that it, sometimes, becomes hard to separate the individual from the collective.
In addition, Hanoosh reads the voice of these Iraqi writers as authentic in embodying the Iraqi voices despite being dislocated physically from Iraq. Though all the Iraqi writers
I am discussing in this study live in exile, their narrative productions expose the atrocities 28 suffered of the individual and the collective living in Iraq. . Most Iraqi writers who live in exile negotiate their positions as outsiders refusing this marginality. For example, Iraqi novelist Ali Badr shares the absurdity of being considered an outsider:
I had now become one of the overseas intellectuals: I, who had been recognized just two years before as being one of ‘the inside intellectuals’. It all seemed to be part of an absurd game of place – nothing more than that – a game that marginalized people by using the idea of place, temporarily dislodging them from their positions, and labeling them as insiders or outsiders. Thus this game being the result of war, it is the war to which I owe my endless skepticism. (qtd. in Masmoud 12)
In view of this, one can conclude that characters and events in these texts represent binaries of the collective and the individual, and the inside and the outside as they depart from the collective to the individual to dismiss simplistic understandings of the entangled relation of the self, the nation as crucial concepts in readings of war trauma and victimhood. Most of the Iraqi narrative writings after 2003 take advantage of the political changes to represent the nation and its atrocities, this domination of the collective over the individual, somehow, neglects the sufferings of the individual and the atrocities he/she has to endure. Moving from the sufferings inflicted by a tyrannical ruler and severe censorship to a violent invasion and an aggressive occupation, Iraqi community has gone through the ideology of politicizing a citizenry which, in turn, substitutes individual calamity in favor of the collective. This, somehow, affects fiction writing, especially after 2003. It is apparent that when dealing with trauma, narratives written by
Iraqis prefer discussing political and historical collectivity to reflect upon the violence and the atrocities of the nation.
29 Contrastingly, American texts represent the soldier’s struggles and agonies in a disengaged society. The narratives of war are mostly introduced by soldiers who try to convey an individualistic experience of what they have faced during enlistment. In an all- volunteer army, the American soldiers lose the collective engagement and the cultural support of previous war. Therefore, the soldiers encounter a psychological trauma because they cannot engage with a conversation about the war with their society. This affects American literary production of this war such that “no defining literary texts have emerged from the overlapping contexts of the invasion, the Iraqi civil war, or the occupation” (Luckhurst “Fictionalizing Iraq” 713), which is resulted from the insistence on the “cliché of the returning soldier, consigning Iraq to a red herring and exploiting our stereotype of veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder” (719). Luckhurst assumes that post-2003 war narratives lack the “political statement”, the “dramatic pathology”, and the
“philosophical production” of the Vietnam War with narratives like “Norman Mailer's
Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) or Tim O'Brien's If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1975)” (719) and he attributes this to two points: the rich construction of documentary production visualizing the war, from the American perspective, and more significantly, the ambiguous and conflicting reflections of a society towards the endless military involvement in Iraq. “This military, political, and ethical quagmire, without foreseeable end, has not made for easy narrative contours or crystallizing representations” (722). Because of this, the American soldiers are alienated from the collective and the cultural trauma the American society encounters during 9/11, leaving the soldiers’ community to suffer alone away from a welcoming nation. Jan 30 Assman indicates that, "cultural memory reaches back into the past only so far as the past can be reclaimed as 'ours'” (Communicative and Cultural Memory 113). Assman relates cultural memory to the identity combining the culture and the individual, a bond that is missed between the soldiers and their community since "ours" does not include the whole of American society anymore. In a sense, they become outsiders with all the burden they carry from the war with no receiving place to unload it. However, concentrating on the
“trauma hero myth” and the soldiers’ sufferings only and neglecting the horrors done by these soldiers or the atrocities of the other, basically the civilians in the invaded country, create blind spots in the American narratives about the war. This dismantling of the other creates a gap in cross cultural communication since it only focuses on the victimhood of the soldiers with no accountability. Simply, these narratives perplex the claim of victim/perpetrator in favor of victimhood only.
III.
Each chapter in this study analyzes two texts, American and Iraqi, and works through their separate ideologies to examine the central concept of intersecting themes of trauma.
Paying particular attention to the way each chapter handles individual and cultural trauma, I have organized the chapters around three main ideas; gender, space, and testimony. These divergent themes reveal a tendency to create a connection in which both
American and Iraqi narratives perform strategies of trauma specified to each texts.
Chapter one addresses the only two novels in this study that are written by women. It is also worth mentioning that both of these texts are preliminaries in opening up cross- 31 cultural conversation during war time away from the “hero trauma myth” and the
Western approach. Benedict’s Sand Queen and Kachachi’s The American Granddaughter challenge ideological structures of male dominated cultures through exploring not only female identity in literary texts but also questioning intersectional and intercultural female relations during wartime. This chapter creates connections between gender and identity during war-time. It discusses self-identification, and nationality in relation to certain collective definitions such as army, family, and belonging. I argue, that women’s existence at war, specifically the 2003 American-Iraq war, registers a traumatic misogyny that renders any female cross-cultural connection a failure because of the political male dominance and the dissociated womanly voice. Simply, women, soldiers or civilians, face marginality and denial. Their voices are silenced and their traumata are ignored in an attempt to “discredit the victim or render her invisible” (Herman 8). Benedict introduces two protagonists: a confused young soldier with identity problems, being a woman or a soldier—following the masculine standards; and a female civilian in the invaded Iraq and the agonies of war inflicted on her. Benedict’s novel provides a conceptual framework for female trauma, as a soldier or as a civilian, as well as demands an understanding and sympathizing with the other women of the invaded culture. Similarly, Kachachi’s protagonist faces an internal conflict in identity from being a female soldier as well as an immigrant who returns to her country of origin, Iraq, with the invading army. For all the characters in these texts, traumatic experience is as much a result of their failure to define themselves during war time as the result of military bureaucracies promoting masculine authority and male patriarchy and render female war experience traumatic. In these texts, 32 I address the dissonance between female individuals and their relation to their surroundings as well as the possibility of establishing cross-cultural connection out of the agonies of female soldiers and civilians.
In chapter two, I study the space of trauma by addressing Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s
Long Halftime Walk and Antoon’s The Corpse Washer. Here, I discuss the relation between recognized sites of war and familiar urban/domestic spaces and how they are re- mapped through fictional representations. The protagonists are enmeshed in intersectional relations of individual and collective trauma representing marginalized people of the group of soldiers in the invading army and the civilians in the invaded country. However, despite inhabiting the same space at the same time, accounts favor one side over the other depending on positionality and military domination. The trauma here is established from de-familiarizing normal external places and alienating them from the protagonist, which causes an internal rupture and a shift towards displacement. The sites of trauma like sites of war, monuments, arenas, stadiums, places of washing the dead, and familial geographical territories are all invoked in the memories, dreams, and flashbacks of the characters and linked through representations of victimhood, a sense of othering, and— sometimes—a sense of guilt. Therefore, I argue, the spaces of war represented in these narratives epitomize the protagonists’ experience of spatial de-familiarization; accordingly, I also investigate individual‘s aptitude to fit within previously identified collective spaces and register responses to cross-culturalism. I divide the encounter with space into three points; spaces of invader and invaded, spaces established between the protagonists and structures of power, and interior spaces where the characters feel 33 alienated from their familiar spaces. Traumatic spaces here sometimes appear political with a historical agency towards situating violence that originates in cross cultural connections in spaces between the invader and the invaded.
In chapter three, I study testimonial narration and its relation to recovery in Klay’s
Redeployment and Blasim’s The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories. I believe that literary testimonies are fundamental remedies for the individual as well as the collective trauma in the war of 2003. It is an enigmatic structure since representing the traumatic experience is engulfed by a belated missing event. Witnessing then is a process that demands listening or reading and sharing of the original experience in order to establish the bases for recovery. In this chapter, I ask questions that relate testimonies and witnessing to recovery and victimhood. Klay’s and Blasim’s approaches to testimony differ, for while Klay shares the horrors of war that soldiers face with a disengaged society, Blasim’s testimony announces the horror and violent experience of the Iraqi civilians. I argue that the connection created between the narrator and the audiences in these texts provides an avenue through which individuals and communities can articulate their suffering, acknowledging the victimhood of anyone involved, and somehow search for remedies. I also articulate how the other is depicted in a way that deconstructs any cross-cultural relations.
Each chapter will also be divided into four sections; the first will analyze the problematic relation between the concept I am choosing for that chapter in relation to both trauma theory and my argument. In the second section, I will discuss the writers’ approach in writing their texts since I believe that a personal life affect/is affected by the 34 contextualization of narrative production. The third section is the main body of the chapter, in which I discuss the two texts side by side. The last section highlights my final remarks on the themes discussed in the chapter.
Representing cross-cultural trauma during war time is critical since it is dealing with divergent cultural premises that can be immersed by the complications of its community.
Literature, and specifically texts that engage in war representation, provide vibrant avenues for cultural and cross-cultural engagement and trauma studies.
35 Chapter two
Gender Dynamics during War Time: A Study of Helen Benedict’s Sand
Queen and Inaam Kachachi’s The American Granddaughter
While we can choose a position in a Discourse…it means something Different for a woman to ‘speak Like a man’ than for a man to do So. It is heard differently” Carol Cohn, “Wars, Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War.”
I. Gender and War Trauma In her introduction to Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy
Caruth invokes Freud’s discussion of Tancred, the epic hero in Tasso’s romantic poem that was written in the mid-sixteenth century.15 Freud concentrates on the uncontrolled traumatic reenactment some may experience, emphasizing Tancred’s unintentional killing of his beloved, Clorinda, and the subsequent repetition of this action when he thrusts his sword into a tree not knowing that this tree possesses his beloved’s soul. While
Caruth illustrates this reenactment with the same method as Freud, she recalls this story in her book in an attempt to focus more on the faint voice of Clorinda’s pain, considering it the “voice that cries out” of the wound. She approaches this reading by acknowledging trauma as “the story of the wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us
15 Dominick LaCapra, in Writing History, Writing Trauma, provides another reading. He discusses the victim- perpetrators relation and neglects all other elements. 36 of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available” (Unclaimed Experience 4). Both
Freud and Caruth examine the enigma of the compulsory belated reenactment of the traumatic event; however, Caruth adds to the theory by describing the voice of Clorinda as an “enigma of the otherness”, where the voice “witness[es] a truth that Tancred himself cannot fully know” (3). Caruth explicates the traumatic event as a twofold experience, the ‘unconscious act’ of Tancred and the belated crying out of Clorinda which she calls the “sorrowful voice that cries out, a voice that is paradoxically released through the wound” (2) but while Caruth reads Hiroshima mon amour16 as an encounter between a man and a woman in a love triangle, she fails to distinguish Clorinda as a separate human being with a distinctive identity. Caruth limits the existence of Clorinda to a faint voice that enhances the traumatic experience of Tancred, neglecting completely that Clorinda is a female warrior17 who chooses to fight her lover in a battle only to defend her principles, as described in Tasso’s poem. Though I agree with Caruth’s formulation of the “enigma of otherness,” I believe that her discussion of Clorinda overlooks gender distinctions in the effect of and response to trauma, focusing instead on a more generalized physical and psychological response of the self and the other18. This chapter not only explores female identity in literary texts but also questions intersectional and intercultural female relations during wartime. Ultimately, I argue, that women’s existence at war, specifically the 2003 American-Iraq war, registers a traumatic misogyny
16 Later on, Caruth provides a full analysis of this movie in her book. 17 In her book Trauma: A Genealogy, Ruth Leys criticizes Caruth for failing to discuss female and gender issues. 18 In fact, Caruth articulates male/female issues in her theory but not based on cultural or gender discrepancies as much as she tackles love and emotional relations. 37 that renders any female cross-cultural connection a failure because of the political male dominance and the dissociated womanly voice. Even if these female characters long for the “enigma of otherness,” their connections are affected by females’ affinities, power dynamics, and positionality as being invaders or an invaded. The confusion of identities of womanhood and soldiering and even immigration reconceptualize the idea of war trauma and its relation to women and gender issues in war zones. Moreover, embedded masculine and hierarchy military models, gendered cultural vocabularies, and immigrant identities require exploring new vocabularies of narrative representations. In the two novels I am handling in this chapter, female characters confront binaries of womanhood and soldiering. In Sand Queen both Katy and Naema negotiate their relations in accordance to their positions as women and in accordance to the binary of soldier/civilian. In The American Granddaughter, Zeina has to tackle her identities of a women, a soldier, a binary of an invader or an invaded, and also an immigrant. All these relations are highlighted by the pressure of war and the political transitional connections.
Unfortunately, trauma studies are deficient in discussing recent gender problems created in recent wars. Beyond sexual assault, the problems women face when becoming soldiers or as female civilians in occupied countries, are problems of identity and otherness. Women suffer a lot through the politics of war and the masculine representation, even in narratives, that need to be addressed far beyond old forms of analyzation. This is because it is “We in the West [that] are heirs of a tradition…that consist of culturally constructed and transmitted myths and memories.” (Elshtain 4).
Because of this tradition and despite being laced through most war narratives, women 38 used to be depicted mostly as victims—the wife who is waiting for her husband to come back; the raped, innocent girl; the mother who is taking care of her children while her husband is fighting at war—or as villains—the girlfriend who fails to support her lover when he comes back from combat; the one who betrays her lover while he is defending the country. These representations have been challenged recently by actual experiences of women in combat as they have proved themselves qualified to have a voice to express themselves—writing memoirs and autobiographies like I’m Still Standing: From Captive
U.S. Soldier to Free Citizen by Shoshana Jonson and Love My Rifle More than You by
Kayla Williams. Such books expose the confused reality of war through the lenses of female combatants and negotiate women’s existence between duties and responsibilities, and between their identities as soldiers and as women. They also depict the sufferings and the trauma as a response to their psychic agony and inner pain of being mistreated or sexually abused by their follow soldiers or by their commanders. The US department of
Veterans Affairs acknowledges that two19 out of four traumatic stressors a female veteran encounters is feeling lonely, that is not being supported by her fellow soldiers, and the threat of military sexual abuse, a fact with which women has to deal along with other normative formulation of war stressors. Laura S. Brown indicates that female existence is always marginalized in a male dominated society, thus, women feel alienated and traumatized internalizing their interpersonal encounter and rendering their experience unspeakable: “The private, secret, insidious traumas to which a feminist analysis draws
19 The other two traumatic stressors are: worrying about family members, and the stressful experience of combat operations. 39 attention are more often than not those events in which the dominant culture and its forms and institutions are expressed and Perpetuated” (102). This internalization of trauma and estrangement produces another problem that Melissa Herbert explores in her book
Camouflage Isn’t Only for Combat: Gender, Sexuality, and Women in the Military: the gender identity of women soldiers and her relation to male-dominated hierarchal communities such as the military. After interviewing more than three hundred women serving in the military and conducting several surveys, she poses an important question about female identity: “can one truly be a soldier and a woman and not be viewed as deviating […] from what it means to be a woman?” (10). Here, Herbert questions the ability of women to negotiate their soldier-female identity while still in the army and considers how women need to perform gender appropriation with respect to their internal identity and social behavior only to fulfill the expected assets of the army and to avoid being marginalized.20 Most of these sufferings happen due to “the masculine point of view,” as put by Susan Jeffords in her book The Remasculinization of America. She states that “the arena of warfare and the Vietnam War21 in particular are not just fields of battle but fields of gender, in which enemies are depicted as feminine, wives and mothers and girlfriends are justifications for fighting, and vocabularies are sexually motivated" (xi). In the same way Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott criticize “the binary structures that it originally put in place: peace and war; home (female space) and front (male space);
20 In her memoire Love my Rifle More than You, Kayla Williams explains the struggles of women at war zone with sexual abuse and with being excluded and marginalized. 21 S. Jeffords discusses war culture and war narrative through concentrating on the Vietnam War. 40 combatant and civilians” such that “women’s inclusion as participants in wars . . . has blurred distinctions between gender roles” (xi). This simply means that gender roles motivate war actions and control them. Besides, signifying the amount of pressure put on women during war time not only as soldiers in invading armies, but also as civilians in invaded countries.
Female civilians in invaded countries are always viewed as the victims of war, and actually they are. In The Curious Feminist, Cynthia Enloe investigates “the gendered effects of US patriarchal militarization” (9) concentrating on how forms of masculinity during war times disturb male/female relations as well as cross cultural relations. She examines how masculine patriarchy politicizes the experience of female-civilians in the invaded countries into victimhood. However, she asserts on the importance on not “to push women’s vulnerability back into the shadows; rather, it…[should] roll back the canopy that discourages observers from taking a close look at women’s varied experience of nationalist conflict” (104). One of the many examples Enloe provides is the situation of Iraqi women after the 2003 invasion through the lens of three Iraqi women. She discusses that with a focus on the fear these women carry to the future of Iraqi women among the chaos and violence escalating after the invasion, she remarks “it appears that
US occupation authorities, their superiors in Washington, and the members of the Iraqi
Governing Council all deemed women’s future relationships to the state to the law, and male citizens well cared for in the hands of a small group of ethnicity, religiously, and ideologically competitive men” (300). Such masculinist practices have increased the traumatic reality Iraqi women have been living for decades because of wars and sanction. 41 Likewise, Nadje Sadig AL-Ali examines the devastating relation of Iraqi women to trauma in a country with more than a war, international sanctions, and an abuse of human rights in general. However, she fends off the allegation of the emancipation of women after the invasion not in an attempt to belittle the harms done by the Ba’ath regime, but to highlight the victimhood of women in post-invasion era, in addition, she proposes that
“military intervention and occupation have failed to liberate Iraqi women…they have instead produced a deterioration in women’s circumstances and position” (What Kind of
Liberation 1). This has taken place because of the lack of security and the increase of violence that make US soldiers22, gangs, and political parties targeting, eroding, and carrying sexual violence, abduction, and marginalization against female Iraqi civilians
(157-9). Gradually, for fear of their life, Iraqi women became invisible rendering their traumatic experience as unspeakable. As Judith Herman remarks women in such cases suffer “repression, dissociation, and denial [which] are phenomena of social as well as individual consciousness” (9). In this case, one may understand that the position of women in the invaded country, presumably Iraq, are located in a worse position to their counterpart of female soldiers in the invading army, the US.
Nevertheless, both dichotomies of women face marginality, denial, silencing, and trauma during war time. Both writers in this chapter, the American Helen Benedict and
22 In a briefing paper of International Educational Development presented to The United Nations entitled “Sexualized Violence against Iraqi Women by US Occupying Forces,” humanitarian Lawyers Kristen McNutt describes the sexual abuse, humiliation, and marginality Iraqi women encounter by the US. She also addresses how women are detained by the US army only because they relatives suspected insurgents.
42 her prominent novel Sand Queen (2011) and the Iraqi Inaam Kachachi, with a provocative story entitled The American Granddaughter (2008), bifurcate male/female, internal/external, and national/cross-cultural issues that dominate war culture and promote prerogative Militarism. The characters in these texts are young women negotiating their military or cultural positionality through shifting between cultural and international complexities that might arise in the process. This raises the question of the possibility of cross-cultural connections between these women if the agonies are one despite political, historical, and personal barriers. Caruth addresses the voice that cries out as “the story of the way in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another, the way in which trauma may lead, therefore, to the encounter with another”(Unclaimed Experience 8). Given that one’s own trauma is tied up with other’s traumas in similar positions, Can women cross these barriers into othering the male dominated society that is controlling and manipulating their existence? Can they speak the “unspeakable”? If yes, can they acquire an authorial voice in such a male dominated culture? Such questions establish the basis of my chapter here which I will explore in the narrative representation of these two novels. Questioning frameworks of womanhood and soldiering can be so confusing during war time.
II. The Ideology of Sand Queen and The American Granddaughter
The ideological structure of the novels this chapter discusses challenges the transgressive notions of male dominated cultures and not only explores female identity in 43 literary texts but also questions intersectional and intercultural female relations during war time. The thing that distinguishes this chapter from the other two is that both novels are written by female writers. Both authors are considered pioneers in engaging in issues of female/male and female /female cross-cultural connections during wartime through creating spaces of transcultural and diagnosing feminine trauma.
Notably, both writers started writing novels after long careers in journalism.
Journalism opens new cultural dimensions because it requires observation and listening skills, and this listening to the atrocities of others is a central theme in Caruth’s trauma theory (Unclaimed Experience 9). Caruth reads Lacan’s interpretation of the dream of the burning child as a "plea by an other who is asking to be seen and heard, this call by which the other commands us to awaken… constitutes the new mode of reading and of listening that both the language of trauma, and the silence of its mute repetition of suffering, profoundly and imperatively demand" (Ibid 9). Feeling for others through listening and then translating this agony into a text to be read is exactly what Benedict has done. In an interview, Benedict explains how, after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, she was shocked and overwhelmed by the amount of violence and horror of war enacted on women; accordingly, she interviewed dozens of American soldiers and Iraqi refugees and listened to their agonies about the war in her attempt to “explore the effects of war on the human heart” (Nixon) as Caruth affirms “this listening to the address of another, an address that remains enigmatic yet demands a listening and a response” (Unclaimed
Experience 9). Benedict’s response to the listening of the atrocities of others was her famous non-fiction book The Lonely Soldier (2009), where she laid out the challenges 44 women face during their enlistments. However, the book seems lacking an interpretation of the internal hurt war might cause a human being. She finds more space in fiction to express these interpretations and explains how the process of listening to others led her to write fiction:
But even though the veterans and refugees I met were willing to tell me their stories, sometimes, during our interviews, they would fall silent, hands shaking, eyes filling with tears, unable to bear to recount or even think about some of their memories, so painful were they. This moved me profoundly and led me to understand that the true story of what war does to the human heart lies within those very silences; the private, internal world that has always been the territory of fiction. This led me to write Sand Queen, a novel set in Iraq, and its sequel, Wolf Season… Nonfiction may have a wider audience, and lead more directly to legal or social change, but with fiction, I can go where nonfiction never really can and reflect what I found in the silences. (Nixon)
Because “at the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force,” (Herman 33) silence becomes an accepted outcome. Herman, further, explains the meaning of “unspeakable” as “Certain violations of the social compact [that] are too terrible to utter aloud” (1). This silence and the emotional distress that Benedict attempts to capture in her fiction is the traumatic construction of gender that shapes the war experience of women. The process of listening to the unspeakable encourages Benedict to address the physical, psychological, and cultural trauma of women during war time. Her novel provides a conceptual framework for female trauma, a soldier or a civilian, as well as demands an understanding and sympathizing with the other women of the invaded culture. She pioneers in touching upon these issues and in exploring gender roles and male domination. Equally significant is Kachachi’s novel in approaching such issues even prior to Benedict’s.
45 For Kachachi, fiction writing is an internal process that goes hand-in-hand with her journalistic profession. In an interview after publishing her other novel, Tashari, she explains the relation between fictional and non-fictional writings according to her terms:
The best of these journalistic assignments have allowed me to travel around the world, experience diverse things, and encounter characters that I could never have dreamed of meeting had I gone into another career. Several of these experiences and characters appear in journalistic content, and some of them remain captive, half-forgotten in notebooks and in office drawers until the moment comes to release them into novels. (Marin)
This recalling of characters belatedly, from her notebook, is not random. She recalls her past and registers it in her writings for future generations:
My main concern in writing fiction is to make use of the past and record its details as a kind of legacy, one that I may leave to my children and those who come after us. My two children were raised in France. They don’t believe that I was in Baghdad when I first read Sartre, Nabokov, Simone de Beauvoir, Camus, Rimbaud and [Louis] Aragon, that Baghdad was where I watched the movies of Costa-Gavras and Claude Lelouch, where I listened to Dalida, Mirielle Mathieu, Charles Aznavour, and Léo Ferré. We read the classics, 1001 Nights, political theory, economics. We read hundreds of novels translated from English, French, Russian, German, and Turkish. This is the Iraq that I carry with me as a sort of amulet in my writings. I strive to draw the features of its protagonists, both the good and the evil. (Marin)
Through her writings, Kachachi attempts to rewrite history; the legacy she wants to record springs from the struggles against the global misrepresentations of Middle Eastern women. In this, Kachachi is similar to Caruth who suggests that rewriting history is an inevitable production of a trauma that resituate individual’s understanding of history:
“through the notion of trauma…we can understand a rethinking of reference is aimed not to eliminate history but at resituating it in our understanding, that is, at precisely permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not” (Unclaimed
46 Experience 11). Despite the fact that rewriting history becomes a shared understanding between trauma and Kachachi’s writings, this does not necessarily implies that Kachachi is traumatized herself as much as it suggests her internalization of the issues about which she, notices, registers, and writes. Together with trauma issues, her writings reveal the search for identity, nationality and the idea of ‘home,’23 immigration, displacement, alienation, and the struggles of gender roles.
Kachachi has Chaldean24 origins in northern Iraq, just like Zeina, the main character in the novel. When Kachachi was young, she immigrated to France just before the 1980
Iraq-Iran war. She has never discussed her story of success as a journalist in France or the struggles she faced during her transition from one country to another; however, the impetus of her decision to write fiction was the 2003 invasion of Iraq, because she is
“preoccupied with giving voice to the Iraqi people in their dilemma” (AbdelRahman 2).
The violence and trauma experienced by the Iraqi people motivated her to start writing fiction, and encouraged her to resituate history as she has seen and lived it. Her plots revolve around Iraqi characters, mainly females, in their struggle to re-identify themselves and the world around them.
23In her other novels, Kachachi discusses the same issues. Sawaqi al-Quloob is a story, similar to her life as an immigrant, but of a male who immigrates to France just before the 1980 war and then transitions to being female. Tashari is about a single family scattered globally across generations. Her most recent novel is The Outcast, a real story about an Iraqi journalist in the 1940s who refuses to follow the social restrictions on females and finally settles in France as well. Except for Sawaqi al-Quloob, all her other novels were long- or shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF). 24Chaldean is an Eastern Catholic group, the largest population of which is settled in Iraq. They were persecuted under Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime, causing most of them to flee the country. 47 This notion of exploring gender roles and female orientations characterize not only Kachachi’s writings but most of other Iraqi female writers. These writers believe in women’s emancipation and equality and adopt this idea in their writings, either through condemning the idea of ‘doing gender,’25 by challenging old traditions, or through defying the stereotypical ideas of the suppression of Middle Eastern women, by depicting how Middle Eastern women enjoy their freedom and emancipation. Fiction and non- fiction writers like Haifa Zangana, Nadje Sadig Al-Ali and others focus on similar themes of displacement, identity, and female empowerment with the goal of introducing the world to real, powerful Middle Eastern female characters. In her book What Kind of
Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq, Nadje Sadig Al-Ali blames the invasion of Iraq for the deterioration of women’s situation there, saying, “It is not Islam or
‘culture’ that has pushed Iraqi women back into their homes. Instead we blame specific and rapidly changing political, economic, and social conditions as well as a wide range of national, international actors” (2). Nevertheless, Iraqi women, she assumes, are never passive or victims, because they “continue to negotiate the challenges of the war and occupation” (Ibid). It is worth mentioning that Benedict shares Al-Ali the same idea when she creates a powerful Iraqi character, Naema, whose life has deteriorated drastically after the war. Katy, the American soldier, and Naema, the Iraqi civilian, together reflect the need to address female issues before and after the war. Similarly,
Kachachi’s character, Zeina, negotiates her Iraqi identity as a woman, as a soldier, and as
25 This idea of ‘doing gender’ was proposed before Judith Butler; figures such as Candace West and Don Zimmerman expressed that culture is responsible for constructing gender roles and in consequence the male and female identity. 48 an immigrant. These issues go along with representing the violence and horror of Iraqi experience with the war--an internalization of Iraqi problems and agonies that signal her preoccupation with identifying herself as an Iraqi figure even though she left the country years ago. In an interview about her recent novel, The Outcast, and her ability to portray the Iraqi dilemma and Iraqi problems despite writing from a distance, Kachachi responds,
I feel that the distance could be both positive and negative. It’s positive, in that it allows the writer to watch the “hot” scene from a quiet place and write without anxiety. But it’s also negative, because writing demands living experiences and interactions. But for me, it’s not necessary to put my hand in the fire to express its pain. What hurts my people hurts me. (Hosny)
Describing the Iraqi people as “my people” means that Kachachi identifies with the Iraqi people. She empathizes with the atrocities happening in her country of origin, which leaves her heartbroken, and despite her physical displacement, she still develops an internal attachment to her origin and her birth country.
Intriguingly, the center themes of both novels revolve around female identity during war time. The texts unfold intersectional contradictory relations emerging from internal and external connections between the two nations.
III. Gendering War Trauma and Feminine Disparity
Benedict has taken on the challenge of exploring traumatic experience, initiated by sexual abuse, the patriarchy, and the domination of male society and its influence on the female psychological behavior and relations between cultures. Her protagonist, the nineteen-year old Kate Brady, has several experiences that influence her 49 national/international relations and internal identity. Kate endures a lingering gender struggle even before joining the army. Her authoritative father wishes for a son, and her boyfriend believes she has too mild and sweet a personality for a war and that the army is not a place for girls (41-42). Both of her father and her fiancée represent the traditional male perspective as criticized by Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry: “women are not supposed to be violent” (2). This leads Kate to challenge these ideologies and enlist in the army: “he [her boyfriend] never understood that’s exactly what I wanted. I was sick of being the kind of girl people patted on the head ……the girl everybody smiled at but nobody listened to” (40). Kate resistance to marginality and voicelessness instigates her decision to enlist in the army by which she assumes overcoming that meek female identity when, in the summer boot camp, she plays tough and shows strength. This girlish dream will soon be crushed by the gender binary after joining the army because army culture is a masculine institution condescending to females in general. As Cooke and
Woollacott note, “A culturally produced activity that is as rigidly defined by sex differentiation and as committed to sexual exclusion as is war points to a crucial site where meanings about gender are being produced, reproduced, and circulated back into society” (ix). While at her military unite, Kate attempts to form a friendship with the only two girls in the platoon, Third Eye26 and Yvette, since she cannot count on her fellow male soldiers because of their sexual remarks and constant harassment. Kate suffers lots
26 Kate explains the reason behind this nickname: “Third Eye got this name because of this nasty black bump that appeared one day in the middle of her forehead” (54). Third eye’s real name is Lynette McDougall. In her memoir, Love My Rifle More Than You, Kayla Williams acts in the same way as Third Eye but was also assaulted and sexually harassed. 50 of abuses without complaining till the attempt of rape executed by her commander, but when she attempts to report it, she is transferred to another place, a problem that causes the death of her friend who wanted to help her. Not being able to handle stress, Kate collapses.
To produce a balanced viewpoint, Benedict created an Iraqi character called
Naema Jasim. She is a sophisticated medical-school student whose teenage brother and father are arrested by the American army with no definite charges. Naema seeks Kate’s help to look for the men of her house and Kate, at first, is willing to help because she wants to do the right thing. Both experiences of the two girls structure the traumatic scar inside their minds and outside with the outer world.
To Kate, as well as to all female veterans, War and military service generate aggression and violence against women in particular; thus, female soldiers have to fight two battles: one against the enemy, and one against the antagonism and, typically, sexual abuse generated by their male counterparts. The male soldiers in Kate’s unite exercise their masculine power in every possible way. They call her ‘pinkass’ or ‘tits’, they leave her alone at the check point, and tease her in the tent with their sexual comments.
Nonetheless, Kate’s physical and psychological struggle begins specifically after the rape attempt by her superior, Kormick. Literary scholar Jacqueline E. Lawson discusses female harassment during enlistment, declaring: “war is the sine qua non of maleness, the agency of legitimized violence and the stronghold of undisputed male power where men are free to exercise/exorcise the thinly veiled fear of women that lurks beneath the surface of patriarchal culture” (17). It seems that Kormick understands his power as a male, given 51 to him by the society, and as a commander, given to him by his institution, and, thus, allows himself to exploit his male authority and official position and attempt to rape Kate and, later on, his actual rape of Third Eye. When Kate threatens to shoot him if he touches her in the shack, he responds, “put that thing down or I’ll slap you with an
Article 91…insubordinate conduct toward an NCO. Not mentioning threatening me with a weapon, tut-tut. That can get you in serious trouble, Tits, didn’t you know that?” (79).
Given that such behavior exists in the military, feminist writer Cynthia Enloe criticizes the military institution that allows such conduct: “there is a widespread belief that soldiers’ sexuality is determined by uncontrollable ‘drives.’ Any military’s fighting effectiveness, this theory holds, is jeopardized if those soldierly sex drives are not accommodated” (The Curious Feminist 119). Such uncontrollable drive leads Kormick, one day, to drag Kate into a shack alone, away from her squad, and attempt to rape her with his assistant, Boner, until she is pulled off by another male soldier, Jimmy Donnell,
‘just in time.’
Kate’s life in the army has long before the attempt of rape been in chaos. She is placed as a prison guard in the desert with not even qualified bathrooms for women, and due to sexism, she cannot relate to other troops. The chaotic situation makes Kate ask a similar question as Melissa Herbert’s about maintaining a female/soldier identity. For example, as Kate searches a scared Iraqi woman at the checkpoint, she says, “I try to smile and act friendly…she still has to deal with the fact that I’m a soldier, and ‘friendly’ is not what soldiers do. She could leave friendly me one minute and get shot by someone who looks just like me the next” (37). The use of the two ‘me’s here indicates the internal 52 struggle of identity of Kate who might perceive herself as a considerate woman who wants to help civilians but also as a soldier with bigoted qualities because she is wearing a military uniform. Manly features seem to be a requirement for a female soldier to be considered part of the military domain, an assumption that is considered a norm in military service and a veiled requirement that Kate lacks because of her benign features.
On how females should look like or behave in the military, Sharon Friedman indicates that “both men and women enter into masculinized subject positions within a hierarchal institution that employs gendered norms and rituals to discipline soldiers” (qtd. in
Haytock 3). Thus, Kate assumes that being tough in the summer boot camp might signal her conformity to these military rules, a distinction destabilized by the rape attempt, challenging her previous psychic perception and beliefs. It is a conceptual struggle in which she must navigate what she imagined she would be before enlisting and how she is actually perceived, as a sexual object, by other male soldiers. When later she states, “all day long I try to act like a hard ass, but it just isn’t me. I can’t be convincing” (57), she is actually referring to the same societal stereotypes she has always denied and fought against, behaviors that made her ‘the girl that no one listens to.’
On the same level, Kate negotiates her international relations as a soldier and as a woman. While she smiles at the scared Iraqi woman to comfort her in the above example, she resents the attitude of the Iraqi people at the gate of Bucca prison, who come to look for their loved ones detained by the US army. The moment they realize she is a woman, they start gathering around her, shouting and cursing the US army for taking their children, shoving pictures of their detained loved ones in her face hoping she might 53 recognize them; one woman even shoves her choking baby into Kate’s chest asking for medical help. At this moment, Kate thinks, “these people never do stuff like this to male soldiers” (24). She notices that Kormick “always gives [her] the job of talking to these people. He’s got the idea that the sight of a female will win hearts and minds. We’ve just pulverized their towns locked up their men and killed their kids, and one GI Jane with sand up her ass supposed to make it ok?” (80) This quotation indicates Kate’s scuffling to position herself as a soldier in an invading army. The realization of her complicated national and international position as a female soldier early on in the novel destroys her earlier perception of herself as a strong, manly figure she wished to become before enlisting by exposing her vulnerability and fragile situation as a female soldier. Despite the fact that Benedict produces a narrative structure that positions the rape attempt at the heart of Kate’s traumatic experience, Benedict manages to create subversive situations that fixate the gendered trauma of a dominated masculinity, a national experience originated by her fellow soldiers and the rape attempt by her commander and an international one where people are recognizing her delicate situation as a female soldier.
In a sense, Kate faces aggression and trauma that fractures her identity, as a woman and as a soldier, and shakes her beliefs in herself and in the people around her.
The dilemma of identity here is the disparity between her external uniform and the interior figure. It seems that people in her national and international relations focus more on the body of her as a women than the uniform she wears. This causes a confusion that will follow Kate till the end of the novel. Here, Benedict succeeds in reflecting upon this
54 conflict through substantial interpretation of spaces of negotiations and encounter that
Kate will face during and after her enlistment; as a soldier, and as a woman in general.
In addition, Benedict discusses another female connection apparent in military institutions, namely, the relatively complicated relation of female-soldiers in the army.
Most of them show resentment and distance themselves from other female soldiers during their enlistment, which might be due to the small number of female soldiers in one place, a circumstance that puts female soldiers in a weaker position and shakes their sisterhood
(The Lonely Soldier: The Private 223-32). Therefore, female soldiers lack the brotherhood/sisterhood that soldiers develop during their enlistment, and Kate essentially mentions that: “whatever happened to the band of brothers and sisters we’re supposed to be at war, I don’t know. In my company we’re more like a band of sneaks” (103). Indeed, with only two other female soldiers, Third Eye and Yvette, in the whole platoon, Kate has little emotional support. Third Eye detaches herself from the other girls and acts in a masculine, mean way, relying on such behavior to protect her from sexual harassment.
Later events prove this is futile, as she is raped by the same two men who attempted to rape Kate (139). She blames Kate for not making her signals clear, referring to her as a weak person, and asking her to be meaner or pick a boyfriend so he can protect and defend her against any harassment (56-7). Such pressure from another female intensifies the pain and the trauma inside Kate, especially as Third Eye excludes herself from any sisterhood even after she is raped, and she ends up committing suicide after returning home. On the other hand, Kate finds a real alliance in the company of Yvette. This tiny
Latina soldier shows genuine concern for the mental and psychological state of Kate after 55 the rape attempt and demands action against the incident. This shift in the narrative from a lack of hope and trust to the creation of a connection and a bond of sisterhood in which
Kate and Yvette can rely on each other strengthens Kate. Thus, Yvette convinces her to report the rape incident and even offers to go with her to a female lieutenant, Sara
Hopkins27, thinking this female authoritative figure will help. Instead, this lieutenant ignores Kate’s suffering, expecting her to continue working with her rapist, which is also how Third Eye was treated. Moreover, in retaliation, she transfers both girls to a more dangerous mission that results in the death of Yvette. The female lieutenant follows the same military bureaucracy that focuses on masculine needs and that disregards for female victims.
It seems that bureaucracies of military culture, in specific, and the society, in general, adhere to same ideology of silencing women. Simply, violence against women should be ignored as Judith Herman acknowledges:
The real condition of women’s lives were hidden in the sphere of the personal, in private life. The cherished value of privacy created a powerful barrier to consciousness and rendered women’s reality practically invisible. To speak about experiences in sexual or domestic life was to invite public humiliation, ridicule, and disbelief. Women were silenced by fear and shame, and the silence of women gave license to every form of sexual and domestic exploitation. (28)
Earlier, Kate reports the rape attempt to another male officer, Henley, but he implicitly threatens her not to press charges against Kormick, blaming her for discussing the issue with him: “Soldier, in case you forgot, we’re at war…we have a common enemy, and that
27 In Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army, Kayla Williams describes how some female soldiers and officials act in unfeminine ways to prove their ability to act like men and be worthy of being called soldiers. 56 is the hajji. We can’t waste time or diffuse our energies on internal strife, and especially not on whiny snivelers like you” (151-2). These behaviors alienate Kate from her mission as a soldier, weakens her ability, and shaken her perception of a female soldier. She is forever traumatized.
The disruptive fact in such scenes is that both male and female officers dismiss the harm that a rape attempt may make on the mental health of a young female. Cynthia
Enloe states that “patriarchal systems are notable for marginalizing the feminine” (The
Curious Feminist 15). As a community, the military institution fails to embrace this young female in destitute. In fact, the army contributes to increasing the sorrows and sufferings by sending these two young women into a truck convoy, where they are routinely attacked and blown up by IEDs. Kate’s connection to Yvette is the ray of hope she relies on to bear the difficulties of her enlistment. After the girls’ arrival to the new place, mortars strike the camp three times, and Yvette dies in one of these attacks. Kate holds herself responsible for the death of Yvette because the transfer was an indirect result of Yvette’s help to report the rape attempt. With the death of Yvette, Kate loses her last connection to a community and falls in deep aggressive traumatic situation.
This traumatic consequence of Kate concentrates on the dichotomy of self representation and the other’s recognition, and of national and international relations.
Judith Herman explains such a condition:
Traumatic events call into question basic human relationships. They breach the attachments of family, friendship, love, and community. They shatter the construction of the self that is formed and sustained in relation to others. They undermine the belief systems that give meaning to human experience. They violate the victim's faith in a natural or divine order and cast the victim into a 57 state of existential crisis. Traumatic events destroy the victim's fundamental assumptions about the safety of the world, the positive value of the self, and the meaningful order of creation. (51)
In the attempt of rape and the death of Yvette, Kate faces violence and tastes blood. But though in the rape attempt the blood is hers after the hit she received from Komrick, in the second, she tastes Yvette’s blood when hugging and protecting her during the mortar strikes. Furthermore, the violence and hostility inflicted on Kate by her comrades on one hand and by the locals on the other destroy her social structure, making her a ‘victim of existential crisis’ and disconnect her from all her surroundings. As a result, Kate becomes completely numb, suffers a shock, and turns into a violent person. Unlike Naema and
Zeina, Kate exhibits more violent external behavior after the death of Yvette and a numbing of her mental neuroses because she cannot cope with the atrocities inflicted on her, whether from her superiors or from the locales. On the way back to Bucca camp,
Kate shoots at a donkey walking beside a little boy and confesses, the same day, that she was actually aiming at the boy. Now, she believes Iraqi people deserve to be killed because they are the reason she lost her last hope in creating a sisterhood in the army. She does not even care when she is informed by Jimmy that American soldiers had already shot and killed Naema’s brother because he tried to escape. In her state, Kate declares,
“those people killed Yvette. They tried to kill all of us. They’re stinking animals and I don’t give a damn what happened to any of them” (283). She later adds, “It’s true. I’ve hurt so many people…there’s other people I’m going to kill too! Starting with fuck face
Henley” (Ibid). These two quotations reflect the combination of emotions resulting from the violent events that have damaged Kate’s mental state and announce her traumatized 58 as a female soldier. As she announces, “I feel hard and tough and cold inside. I feel like a soldier now. A real robot soldier. I know who I hate and I know who I want to kill. All the rest is bullshit” (Ibid). However, this notion of ‘knowing the enemy,’ in her mental state, is questionable. Not surprisingly, Kate is consumed with a desire to revenge and to inflict harm and do violent acts, especially to those who have hurt her. She suffers ear buzzing and is given many drugs to help her overcome her pain, but nothing works. This dark transformation ends, during the enlistment, with her shooting at an Iraqi prisoner who used to harass her and masturbate in front of her; she then faints from dehydration and falls off the platform, injuring her spine.
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On the other hand, Kachachi creates a more complicated situation for her character,
Zeina. Besides being a female soldier, Zeina needs to navigate her immigrant identity and settle her inner conflict. Her trauma springs from negotiating spaces of identity as a soldier, as woman, and as an immigrant. The reader cannot really pinpoint a physical traumatic event that tips the scales; rather, it is an accumulation of events that ruptures her soul and renders her traumatized. However, her decision on returning to her country of origin, Iraq, as a soldier in the American army marks a start point for all her eventful complications of her inner self and external relations, especially with people from her past.
59 Her family emigrates from Iraq because her father was imprisoned and tortured by the
Ba’ath party28. Coming from a family of immigrants, Zeina does not live a luxurious life.
Rather, she lives in the ghettos of a Detroit neighborhood, her brother is an addict, and her parents get divorced; thus, she decides to join the US Army, as an interpreter, for the money. She counts on the salary the Army is offering to enhance the lifestyle of her family and help her brother recover. In addition, Zeina assumes the invasion a significant step toward freeing the people of Iraq from the dictator and the Ba’ath regime, which in itself an additional motivation for her to offer services that will help her country of origin.
However, this belief is disrupted by an in-field encounter with Iraqis and with her grandmother, Rhama, who still lives in Iraq. Rahma is Zeina’s encounter with the past and its memories, and with the other self that negates the invasion and its horror. Rhama represents everything that is Iraqi, the traditions, the rules, the folklore, the old-style of life that unifies people under one heritage and, thus, she rejects the occupation and the
American uniform Zeina wears. As an immigrant, Zeina used to appreciate her life.
Before becoming a soldier, Zeina enjoys a third space29 resilience in having the power of choice between the two nationalities. The moment she decides to join the American army and returns home on a tank becomes her moment of truth, understanding, and trauma.
Zeina’s dual appearance as a female soldier is actually tied up with her claiming a certain national identity, and it all begins with the 9/11 attacks. Zeina considers herself an
28 Her father was a TV presenter who, one day, said something that did not appeal to the Ba’ath party and thus was imprisoned and tortured and his teeth were broken. This led the family to decide to emigrate. 29 According to Bhabha’s idea of hybridism, a third space is a positive space that is originated from having two different nationalities. 60 American citizen; therefore, like thousands of American people, she is shocked by the
9/11 attacks. In her words, “it was like an electric shock sending its energy through the bodies of all my friends and neighbors. We turned into creatures that shook and trembled, emitting sounds of panic” (11); she later adds, “America was on fire before my eyes, and
I could smell the ash” (12). This provocative image of the sense of smell and fire is compatible to the descriptions about bombing Baghdad. She declares, “I collapsed into myself as I watched Baghdad being bombed and the columns of smoke rising after each
American attack. It was like watching myself use my mom’s cigarette lighter to set my own hair on fire” (15). In both images, Kachachi aligns the fire of America and bombing of Baghdad to Zeina’s smelling fire or putting herself into fire only to announce Zeina’s shattered personality as well as her inner struggle, especially in war time. Bombing Iraq becomes the cornerstone of deciding her affiliation and deciding her national identity.
One can notice this in the shifted narratives Kachachi introduces through originating a self-reflective character called the “other self,” a persona Zeina likes to call ‘the writer’.
It seems that this internal self resents the Americanism Zeina inhabits in favor of an Iraqi identity:
Why couldn’t I sit still for five minutes? I told that other who was also me that there were terrified children and innocent civilians dying in Baghdad. I told her those children could be the children of your classmate from school, and the dead civilians could be the sons of your uncles or the daughters of your aunts. (15)
This rupture in the immigrant identity recalls the struggle of “me’s” identity of Kate. In the same way, Zeina’s writer and her other self represent her alter ego and the breach in her character that she cannot overcome. Together with her grandmother Rahma, this alter
61 ego articulates her traumatic responses that are entangled in people from the past. This is because her alter ego, the writer, demands acknowledgement of her Iraqiness. Therefore,
Zeina asks herself, “was I a hypocrite, a two-faced American? A dormant Iraqi like those sleeping cells of spies planted in an enemy land and lying in wait for years? Why did I suddenly go all Mother Teresa…over the Iraqi victims?” (15). The language Kachachi used to describe these two contradicting mentalities is intricate in exposing, early on, the relation that might be built up when Zeina arrives Iraq. She is confused between the ‘cells of spies’ and ‘Mother Teresa’ which ultimately proposes the psychological conflict and the struggle of identity and of making choices, which also reflect Zeina’s perceiving
Iraqis as a representation of both enemies and saviors.
This dilemma is inevitably apparent in the images of military-uniforms representations and the contradicting experience to which Zeina is exposed. The first time
Zeina realizes that her American uniform prevents her from celebrating her Iraqi identity is when given orders to stay mute and not communicate with Iraqi people. She states, “I resented my army uniform that was cutting me off from my people. It made me feel we are crouching in opposing trenches. We were in fact crouching in opposing trenches” (7).
Describing Iraqi people as ‘my people’ reflects her willingness to embrace them and embrace her Iraqi identity as well. However, her internal assimilation is gradually disrupted by discouraging gestures of Iraqis who are not willing to embrace her back because she, in her American military uniform, does not represent them:
I hadn’t given much thought to how Iraqis would receive us. What I’d seen on TV wasn’t discouraging. These were people eager for regime change, dreaming of freedom and welcoming to the arrival of the US army. Why, then, were the 62 black eyes looking out from behind the abayas overflowing with all that rejection? There was no friendliness in those eyes or joy. (39-40)
Her military uniform holds an agency that is ideologically different from the Iraqi culture as she does not understand that even if Iraqi people are eager to get rid of the dictator and his regime, they are not willing to replace him with an occupation. This is expressed by one of the Iraqi characters in the novel, Muhaymen, who later tells Zeina, “you
[American army] drove King Kong out of the city and claimed the whole of Iraq in return” (168). Soon Zeina realizes the reason behind the rejection as she bears witness “to the abuse of basic human rights and humiliating treatments” (Masmoudi 160) and elaborates:
Breaking into the houses of innocent Iraqi people and breaking their doors, the soldiers are ‘like panthers’, according to Zayna. They are armed to the teeth, using their weapons to terrorise the women, the kids and the elderly, humiliating them and abusing them when no one is proved guilty of anything; only suspicions based on wrong intelligence data hover over them. (161)
This awareness is amplified by the emotional pressure her grandmother, Rahma, practices in her attempt to reeducate Zeina to embrace her Iraqi identity again. One significant incident here is when Zeina visits her grandmother on Armed Forces Day in
Iraq, January 6. It is her grandmother’s tradition to celebrate the memory of Zeina’s late grandfather, Colonel Youssef Fatouhy, by repeating the rituals he used to do on the same day each year after he was discharged. Rahma takes his military uniform from the cabinet and starts cleaning it, brushing it and polishing the bronze buttons, an action Zeina describes as a “reliving” of memories. During this ritual, Rahma recites heroic stories of the colonel’s appointments in wars he fought in during the 1960s and 1970s in her
63 attempt to share the moment with Zeina. She deliberately makes Zeina wear the military jacket and beret of her grandfather, symbols of Iraqi identity and military service. For a moment, Rahma succeeds in increasing the identity confusion in Zeina’s mind by forcing a comparison between her first experience wearing the American uniform to that of her wearing her grandfather’s. For Zeina, both experiences are overwhelming. She describes her American experience as follows: “I felt certain I was going on the mission that would finally earn me my American citizenship. It was my chance to repay the country that had embraced me since my adolescence and given me and my family a home” (81). She remembers this while trying on her grandfather’s beret and gold stars jackets. Kachachi gives the scene a solemn atmosphere:
She [Rahma] stepped back to look at me from a suitable distance as if contemplating a painting. I could not mistake the meaning of that look in her eyes: what crazy times did we live in, if the dress uniform of an Iraqi colonel could give birth to a bulletproof vest that was made in America. (82)
This image confuses gender binary and disturbs hybrid distinction. Here, Zeina is the soldier and thus she is compared to her grandfather. She is no longer the girl her grandparents used to embrace as she grows up to be a soldier30 and between the Iraqi uniform and the American vest, Zeina negotiates the impossibility of such a combination since she is the occupied and the occupier at the same time. Still, the suggestion of the deteriorated military rank from a colonel uniform to a soldier with a vest also explains the subsidiary situation Zeina occupies in the military in accordance to her grandfather with his heroic battles. In this sense, she no longer portrays the dominant characterization of a
30 Since there are no female soldiers in Iraqi army, the idea of soldiers is always connected to men. 64 soldier. Therefore, Zeina is not fulfilling any expectations as a women, or as a soldier, not even as an immigrant with a hybrid third space spirit.
Another notable aspect of this uniform scene is that it is a silent descriptive scene illustrated entirely without dialogue between characters. This recalls Herman’s connection of trauma and the “unspeakable.” Zeina here becomes speechless because she is navigating her erasure options of a certain identity and the infeasibility of inhabiting both nationalities, especially that both nations are at war and she chooses to return to her country of origin with the occupier. She understands that Rahma refuses her American military uniform, a realization that prevents Zeina, at the beginning, from telling her grandmother that she is a soldier in the American army. Her awareness that pleasing her grandmother happens when Zeina celebrates her Iraqi identity not only as a memory but as a present reality makes Zeina speechless and traumatized--losing her resilience and obliterating her grandmother’s hidden request. This powerful long scene visualizes the connection between trauma and the unspeakable to enunciate the failure of hybridity of a female soldier with two incompatible nationalities.
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In Sand Queen, this enigmatic relation of trauma and the unspeakable places an emphasis on the web of patriarchy her commanders, male and female, enjoy when preventing Kate from speaking and reporting the rape attempt. The consequence of her speaking is retribution, punishment and the death of her friend Yvette, as I discussed earlier. This gender ideology affects how trauma is internalized and how female identity during war time is masculinized beyond any recognition because “gender is not 65 important” (Enloe Curious Feminist 135). A society that is militarized in such a way will never detect the harms inflicted on female civilians as well. Therefore, when Naema attempts to defend her father and brother the minute American soldiers are arresting them, they ignore her. To them, she has “no voice…no existence” (16). Nevertheless, this limited agency of a female civilian in an invaded country is considered a privilege since
“rape…is facilitated by an officially condoned industry that serves up women’s sexuality as if it were fast food…it is around so many US military bases, turning local women into exoticized game” (Enloe Curious Feminist 120). Indeed, gender, during war time, has been configured as unspeakable for women, soldiers or civilians.
Because her silence is dominated by patriarchal relations, Kate could not avenges on those who hurt her. Instead, she decides to practice her power as an American soldier in an invading country against the male prisoners. After the rape attempt, the death of her friend, and all the psychological pressure around her, Kate’s gentle character transforms into an aggressive, bloody one who wants to inflict harm on herself as well as on others.
This is shown through her patronizing behavior as a soldier with a weapon over unarmed prisoners, an action that satisfies her hierarchal inner-self in addition to dehumanizing the other.
The American psychologist Philip Zimbardo recognizes such moral degradation and failures of humanity in war time, with Abu Ghraib exemplifying a fulcrum for such abuses, and clarifying Martin Buber’s dehumanized relations: “Over time, the dehumanizing agent is often sucked into the negativity of the experience and then the ‘I’ itself changes, to produce an ‘It-It’ relationship between objects, or between agency and 66 victim” (The Lucifer Effect 223). This means that in certain situations, a human being, acting from a hierarchal standpoint, loses her/his sense of humanity and changes mentally into an “it” who is approaching a victim as an “it” as well, having become a
‘dehumanizing agent’. This idea is related to Judith Butler’s concept of the acceptance of the other as having a precarious life because we recognize her/him as a human: “to say that life is precarious requires not only that a life be apprehended as a life, but also that precariousness be an aspect of what is apprehended in what is living” (Frames of War
13). In Kate’s case, the ‘It-It’ relation is the outcome of the trauma of her negative military experience. She is fully aware of her physical, mental, and psychological downfall. Thus, in the hospital she says, “there is something wrong with me” (132). The text also suggests this by generalizing Kate’s experience and calling her ‘the soldier’ after she returns home with lots of flashback memories, and physical and psychological trauma, as if referring to the universally unique traumatic experience females face in the army and the ‘it’ agency/identity they acquire afterward.
The traumatic stressor structures how Kate articulates her returning home after being discharged from the army. She refuses the same old gentle attitude of her parents and refuses Tyler because he does not understand her mental change. Simply, she becomes more violent in refusing their old ways of treating her as a weak girl. She becomes angry rejecting everyone, even the medical help offered by the hospital. In one of her rage fits, she unintentionally hurts April, her little sister because she attempts to protect April from an imaginary danger. This act she recalls later when April calls her at the hospital:
67 She came home from war broken and hurting, unable to stop the faces and blood [the image of blood of Yvette on her body]. How she took her dad’s gun from its sacred place in the sideboard and shot out the dining room windows because those faces were staring in. Kormick’s face, the jerk-off’s face, Mr. al-Jubur’s face [Naema’s father]. How April huddled in the corner, screaming, because she didn’t understand that her sister was only trying to protect her. (213)
This speech summarizes most of what is going on in Kate’s life because she comes back from war physically and psychologically injured. Thus, she is referred to by Benedict in a separate section of the novel as ‘the soldier’ with no identity or personality or even a title for that section. This happens because the faces haunting her are of people who either hurt/ be hurt by Kate and it seems that all of them are males.
Judith Butler remarks that “specific lives cannot be apprehended as living. If certain lives do not qualify as lives or are, from the start, not conceivable as lives within certain epistemological frames, then these lives are never lived nor lost in the full senses”
(Frames of War 1) such people Butler calls ungrievable because they are politically unrecognized, especially during war time. In her search for herself as a women and as a soldier, Kate realizes the other is ungrievable to the US army which is why she attempts to establish a cross-cultural connection with Naema thinking she is “doing the right thing.” However, after the rape attempt and the death of her friend Yvette, only because they refuse to be silent, Kate finally realizes that they are, as female soldiers, ungrievable in their patriarchal society of military. At Yvette’s funeral, Kate expresses “we soldiers are nothing more than work and killing machines” (275), then she declares:
Fuck valor and honor. Yvette was killed in the middle of writing a frigging e- mail, for Christ’s sake, because the Army was too damn cheap and disorganized to have installed a siren system in the MWR, let alone a mortar-proof bunker for us to shelter in. she was killed because that shithead Henley is buddies with 68 Kormick, and Kormick wanted revenge on me for reporting his sick, perverted ass. Valor and honor? Shit. (275)
Kate loses her faith in the army, in herself, and in humanity in general. Therefore, she retains a “robot” status, from within which she struggles to navigate current priorities surrounding her recent events, simultaneously demonstrating a gradual shift into a more aggressive outlook toward any representation of gender and hierarchal relations. This constructing/ reconstructing of a young female soldier challenges her presumptions made before enlistment and criticizes naïve expectations of cross-cultural connections between women inclined mentally on opposite trenches. Kate reaches this conclusion after recognizing, in her ungrievable situation, the ‘It-It’ relation.
On the other hand, Naema’s precarious situation and the “It-It” relation is originated from her oscillation between her desire to achieve something as a strong woman standing stalwart against the atrocities of occupation and the imprisonment of her father and brother, and the paralyzing situation of women in an occupied land. Her awareness of her recent situation under the occupation is heightened when describing the moment of arrest of her father and brother: “Hideous in their bulky uniforms, their faces obscured by goggles and helmets, their huge guns thrusting, voices roaring fury and insults. They pushed me aside as if I were nothing . . . ‘Stop, please!’ I begged in English. ‘He is only a child!’ But they did not hear me. I had no voice to them, no existence” (15-16). This non- existence is the ungrievable situation Butler recognizes: “the epistemological capacity to apprehend a life is partially dependent on that life being produced according to norms that qualify it as a life or, indeed, as part of life” (Frames of War 3). Simply, Naema and
69 her family are dehumanized and deemed ungrievable and such a position provokes her fury: “I felt the anger grow over me like a skin. That is when I become merciless and numb” (17). This incident enhances Naema’s detachment from the American presence in her country and reduces the chances of building a cross-cultural connection, not only with
Kate but also with the American occupation as a whole. When she goes to the prison the next day to ask about her father and brother, she describes the place:
As I look, it occurs to me that, to the soldiers, this is not a prison but a protection. They have barricaded themselves in here, safe and blind behind their wire and checkpoints, while the rest of us, sisters and daughters, parents and grandparents, are out here in the real world, suffering the real world’s suffering. (18)
This barricade alludes to the physical and psychological distance between the two cultures. Apparently, it is the same political binary of ‘them’ and ‘us’ produced, here, from a Middle Eastern perspective where ‘them’ is far and blind, while ‘us’ are human beings, a distance that dismisses any intention to build a connection with Kate or any other American soldier because they are invaders, or she describes them, ‘creatures of destruction’. She clearly sees them from an “it” perspective, as she is developing an inner recognition that the lives of her father and brother are unrecognizable and thus their death would also be ungrievable to the Americans occupiers. However, the “It-It” relation in her case is complicated, since she and her family are the occupied/victims in this dehumanizing situation. This leads to the question her ability to assume the “It-It” relation, since her life, as well as that of her family and Iraqis in general, is not considered precious and thus cannot be recognized as a life.
70 In spite of this, to Naema, the lives of her father, brother, and all Iraqis are precious and are recognized as lives. She never gives up marching to the prison every day with other Iraqi women to ask about their loved ones. This means that Naema perceives herself differently from the setting in which Americans imagine her (or other Iraqis) because they have contradictory perspectives. It is also ostensibly that the Americans lack knowledge of the lifestyle of the Iraqi people which might originate misunderstanding between the two sides. Kate is surprised to learn that Naema is in medical school because she thinks all “Iraqi girls weren’t allowed to do anything except get married” (73). This is a stereotypical international construction that springs from a political standpoint. It is referred to by the Iraqi blogger Riverbend in her day-by-day memoir about the war:
The first reaction–usually from Americans–is ‘you‘re lying, you’re not Iraqi.’ Why am I not Iraqi, well because, a. I have internet access (Iraqis have no internet), b. I know how to use the internet (Iraqis don’t know what computers are), and c. Iraqis don’t know how to speak English (I must be a liberal). All that shouldn’t bother me but it does. (Baghdad Burning 6)
This hierarchical American perspective enhances Butler’s perspective of the ungrievable positioning of the other, especially during war time, besides, the need to, fundamentally, comprehend the other as a complete “livable life” (Butler Precarious Life xiv-xv).
However, by the end of the novel, neither Kate nor even Naema succeeds in embracing this egalitarian perception of the enemy. But because of differences in power dynamics and hierarchal relations, Kate, as a female soldier in the occupying American army, can be seen as more privileged in making choices and choosing sides, such as accepting the war or fighting against it, while Naema, a female civilian in the occupied country, can be considered on the defenseless side, with no authority and no power to choose. Though 71 Kate and Naema represent two different national identities that are put together because of war, their cultural encounter offers an advantageous position for Kate. This sets up a clash, since this vantage point is refused by Naema, as she believes she has the right to defend her perspective as long as she is living in her land and among her people.
Benedict succeeds in creating tense situations between two women lying mentally, and ethically on opposite banks. Similar to Benedict, Kachachi’s strained condition produces the same disparity within the self and reflects the cultural identity Zeina should inhabit during war time. In fact, Zeina embodies the psychological and social structural experiences of Kate and Naema combined, for though her public representation is the
American uniform, her internal affiliations are a mixture of both nationalities, the
Americans and the Iraqis. In a sense, she is the self and the other, the perpetrator and the victim at the same time. This exhausts her psychologically which makes her confess, by the end of the story: “I could not belong to anything anymore. Not even to my own name” (178). This quotation arises from her disappointment to reconcile her national binary opposition simply because her nostalgia for Iraq and her memories is weaker than her westernized identity which she acquired after her immigration. However, her choice traumatized her, she declares after returning from Iraq “miserable, that’s what I’ve become. A dressing table turned upside down, its mirror broken…it’s as if I have to repress any possible joys or fleeting delights. I came back feeling like a squeezed rag, one that we use mop the floor. A floor cloth. That’s how I returned” (1-2) an intriguing reaction that challenges her sense of belonging. The last sentence of the novel also
72 reflects her confusion: “I just repeat after my father: I’d give my right hand if I should ever forget you, Baghdad” (180).
This reformulation of Zeina’s inner self and the continuity of unforeseen presence of
Iraq in her mind and soul feeling is reinstated through the ‘educational project’ her grandmother Rahma undertakes when she finally acknowledges Zeina an American soldier. Rahma is aware of this prevailing American identity of Zeina’s and thus determines to win her back. She explains her intention to reeducate Zeina to Haydar31 after visiting Zeina in the Green Zone: “We will bring her up from scratch, this ignorant girl…we won’t leave her to her ill manners” (64). Rahma imagines she will influence
Zeina by invoking memories of the life and history of the family; and thus starts reciting stories from the family’s past to reconnect Zeina with her Iraqi inheritance. This mechanism can be seen as Rahma’s defense against the American identity and occupation in general; it is her means of defending her Iraqi identity and restoring her beloved granddaughter. Rahma’s voice is strengthened by the voice inside the mind of Zeina, the reflexive voice Zeina refers to as ‘the writer.’32 No authority or advantage is granted here, since Zeina and the writer engage in a literary and psychological struggle by standing on opposite margins: the writer pushes Zeina to be patriotic by embracing her Iraqi identity and ceasing to betray her Iraqi heritage, whilst Zeina cannot renounce her American identity. This changes by the end of the novel, as Rahma and the writer manage to make
31 Haydar is Tawoos’s son who lives the American dream and wants to travel with Zeina to the United States. 32 This novel narrates the complex situations and voices of first- and second-generation immigrants and touches on the differences between the ideas of ‘exile’ and ‘home’, which are more relevant to a study of the representation of language and translation in the novel. 73 Zeina not only navigate her identity but also reject the invasion and the injustice brought upon the Iraqi people. Zeina refers to ‘the writer’ in third person singular; just like the way this writer wants to draw Zeina’s attention to the breaches of human rights done by the occupation: “The writer opened her desk drawer and brought out a bundle of newspaper cuttings and human rights reports that she tossed in my direction. ‘Read these’ she said” (90). It seems that Rahma and this inner self disdain the assimilated-American- soldier character Zeina obtains and thus fights against it. Later, Zeina narrates, “My grandmother wanted me to inherit her memory. And the writer was happy with the decision because it served her novel” (91). This opposition between the narrator and the writer inside her, which is enhanced by her grandmother Rahma, works as a symbolic representation of the political overlap between the two nations; an intersection that finds its resolution with the death of the grandmother and consequently the death of the writer inside her. With such a loss, Zeina announces that she has lost ‘part of herself’ (178). The death of the writer is a metaphorical death associated with the physical death of her grandmother to announce the collapse of her third space and the creation of a traumatized one. Zeina necessitates the death of her writer by declaring:
I’m tired. And my laptop is tired of me and of my writing alter ego who would have followed me to Detroit if I’d let her she would have liked to record my downfall, then got up from her writing table…clapped in delight and poured herself a drink to celebrate her victory over the American granddaughter. (177)
Here, this conclusion brings us back to title of the novel, The American granddaughter, which summarizes the complexity of her internal conflict: is Zeina the American figure who fulfilled her role as a soldier even after meeting her grandmother again and
74 recognizing her Iraqi heritage, or is she the granddaughter who assumed an American identity after immigration and exile? Previously, and exactly before enlisting, Zeina faced no issues in adopting her hybrid identity and her third space she enjoys, reading Arabic poetry and practicing her language when gathering with other Arab friends. As a character, Zeina does not reject her Iraqi history and heritage; she is simply incapable of identifying with it. Accordingly, Zeina asks, “How are we supposed to preserve the living memories of the dead? If we let their experiences go with them to the grave, they’re lost to us for good” (177). The implicit jeopardy in presenting both identities and celebrating both increases Zeina distress and uncertainty. She negotiates her national identity, her sense of belonging, and her ethics and values. This causes her trauma and announces her defeated, she declares “I confess I returned defeated, laden with the gravel of sorrow” (2) a women that is “bearing a cemetery in her chest” (1) and acknowledges that hereafter her life in the US “tasted like vinegar” filled with “a sadness like pure honey” (176).
IV. Closing remarks
One significant feature in this chapter is the representation of male figures and masculine attitudes. Despite the fact that military bureaucracies promote masculine authority and male patriarchy, this does not mean that all male soldiers take advantage of and exploit females. In Sand Queen, Jimmy and DJ form a strong alliance to stop the sexual assault against Kate, and Jimmy is ethically authentic in offering his support if
Kate decides to report the attempt. Gradually, Kate and Jimmy develop a romantic subplot, especially after Jimmy confesses his love to her after the death of Yvette. His 75 intentions are genuine and he sincerely wants to help Kate. He says, “I love you, and I want us to help each other when we get home” (285). However, Kate is already consumed by her robotic position, unable to build a relationship from the ruins of her life.
Therefore, she refuses his offer and his love: “I don’t want to be the person I am with you, Jimmy. I hate who I am here. I hate who I am even with you” (286). This psychologically complicated situation Kate is experiencing is normal for trauma victims.
Judith Herman asserts:
Trauma impels people both to withdraw from close relationships and to seek them desperately. The profound disruption in basic trust, the common feelings of shame, guilt, and inferiority, and the need to avoid reminders of the trauma that might be found in social life, all foster withdrawal from close relationships. But the terror of the traumatic event intensifies the need for protective attachments. The traumatized person therefore frequently alternates between isolation and anxious clinging to others. (56)
In her mind, Kate expects Jimmy to wait for her to recover mentally or at least to help her overcome her tragedy, even after she turns his offer down. Kate acts as a traumatized person, alternating, as Herman describes, between fearful avoidance of close relations and continuing to be open to connections. This instinct drive leads her to leave her family, her fiancé, and even the hospital where she is treated for her spinal injury to go limping to Jimmy’s house. She is looking for safety and connection. Though he has a girlfriend now, he offers Kate a room in his house to stay in and recover, just like he did earlier with other soldiers, his girlfriend remarks “you people keep coming around here.
It’s like Jimmy’s a magnet for broken soldiers.”(292). Despite being bothered when seeing his girlfriend, Kate settles with the safety and a warm bed he offers. It seems that this is the only ray of hope Benedict offers Kate in terms of healing from her trauma. This 76 is obvious with the title “Kate” Benedict offers for the section of soldier; the room Jimmy offer is Kate’s only reconciliation, she states “it makes me feel safer than I’ve felt in months. Or maybe it’s only knowing he’s so close.”(303) and closeness is the key here.
One of the ideas this novel promotes is the idea that trauma victims, especially female soldiers, cannot handle close relations as ordinary people do, Kate wants to be close enough but not to have a relation. It is hard for them to establish normal relationships when their minds are broken, and they are struggling mentally. Therefore, a resilient connection needs to be established to help the traumatized overcome her experience of war, which is why Kate chooses Jimmy: he understands her circumstances as an injured soldier, physically, and as an agitated, broken woman, psychologically.
Comparably, as a female soldier with binary immigrant identity, Zeina’s interaction with men and masculinity in her life complicates her situation further. She falls in love with an Iraqi young man despite the fact that she has a boyfriend back in America,
Calvin. This Iraqi figure is her milk brother,33 an Iraqi character named Muhaymen,34 with strong political and national identity. He is a Muslim working with the active resistance against the occupation. He infatuates her with his Iraqi identity, his eloquence and love for Arabic poetry and passion for Iraq and thus becomes part of her new interest in the Iraqi identity. Accordingly, when Zeina offers him to go with her to the US, he refuses considering emigration a captivity that “suspended between two lives” (130) and
33 In Islamic tradition, a milk brother is a religious bond created when babies are breastfed by the same mother, and hence, romantic and sexual relations between them are considered taboo. 34 Another son of Tawoos who was imprisoned by Iran during the Iraq-Iran war and returned after the invasion. He opposes Zeina politically, since he belongs to the Mahdi group, which challenges the American presence in Iraq. 77 lectures Zeina on how emigration creates “a rupture in the migrant’s spirit” (Ibid). Their relationship remains unsettled because it blurs the relation between the perpetrator and the victim.
In addition, unlike Kate, Zeina maintains decent relations with her male soldiers and interpreters. The texts seem to promote simultaneously the strength and vulnerability of human relations, especially during wartime. Though Zeina retains civil relations with her fellow soldiers, she rebukes them for any indecent remarks they make in reference to
Iraqi identity, religion, and history. For example, when soldiers mock an Iraqi Shiite’s ritual, Zeina communicates her anger and rejection of their actions. Gradually, her anger turns into confusion, since ‘acts of resistance’ challenge the American existence with bombs and explosions, creating a “vicious circle of mutual violence” (AbdelRahman 7), and defy Zeina’s values and sense of belonging, which amplifies her disillusionment.
Because Kachchi “realizes that national identity in the setting of this conflict remains the most important frame of reference” (Naguib 175), she makes her protagonist play the role of a confused mediator in the game of war. This reaches a pinnacle with the revelation of the photos from and torture in Abu Ghraib prison. Kachachi problematizes mutual relations between nations and highlights the rhetoric of ‘us’ and ‘them’ through this incident by portraying the vulnerability of human values in the face of inhumane practices, among which is patriarchy, as emphasized by Zeina, who thinks, “military honor was no longer just a male issue. There were women offenders too, and that made my anger more bitter. How did that bitch who was dragging a prisoner behind her like a dog on a leash, get into our army?” (139) The notion of the purity of “our army” 78 exoticizes the idea of occupation until Zeina remembers her father and imagines his sufferings:
The real protagonist wasn’t pain; it was humiliation. I thought about my father at Saadoun Security Complex, and imagined Private Lynndie England tying him by his neck with a dog leash and dragging him naked behind her. The gorge rose in my throat and my nose. How would I be able to face my dad? (139-40)
The similarity between the atrocities of Saddam Hussein and the American army put them, relatively, in the same position in accordance with the Iraqi figure, and Zeina realizes that the occupation is replacing “torture with torture” (140), an idea that exacerbates her inner conflict and challenges her ethics, idealistic values, and the idea of liberation she carried when joining the army, especially since one of the perpetrators is a woman. In this case, the typical gender roles are switched, as the perpetrator is a woman and the victim is a man, which explains in part the power dynamics of the relations between the two nations and their ability to transcend gender if political strategies take charge.
After this experience, Zeina returns to the US with a shattered identity and disturbed mind. She confesses she was defeated: “even my laughter has changed. I no longer laugh from the depths of my heart like I used to” (1). This inner shattering of both Zeina and
Kate lies at the heart of trauma theory. Caruth designates such “shattering of a previously whole self” (Unclaimed Experience note 131) as one of the focuses of trauma theory.
Both Zeina and Kate are young women who had idealistic values of war before enlisting, yet both of them suffer a ‘shattering of self’ after living the real experience. It seems that each character attempts to shape her war experience to match her ultimate ethical values,
79 relying on agency to defy the social and psychological strategies of war. These beliefs, however, are fragile and shift in response to, in Kate’s case, sexual violence, and, in
Zeina’s case, power dynamics and a dual national identity. These limitations of the empowerment and agency of these two women necessitate new perspectives of the damages, aggression, and violence war inflicts on soldiers, especially women, and perhaps this is the main theme in these two novels. Other female characters in the novels, such as Naema and Rahma, serve as passive figures that lack any agency. Ironically, both of them are Iraqi people representing the Iraqi perspective, groups that belong to the casualties of war whether as victims or as resistants—and implying that all in the occupied countries are traumatized individually and collectively.
Both Kachachi in The American Granddaughter and Benedict in Sand Queen explore humanitarian and idealistic ethics under the violence of war, through the perspective of women. Their writings complete each other in reflecting the wide scope of female experience during enlistment. Benedict holds war responsible for the destruction of mutual relations, and in consequence, she connects international relations to an individual’s ability to function positively. Before her enlistment, Kate had an idealistic humanitarian perspective of army life; she thinks that she is going to be “lifting the downtrodden, casting the wicked to the ground. That’s what soldiers are for”35 (44). After the rape attempt and the death of Yvette, Kate cannot bear the brutality and violence anymore. In accordance, she loses her empathy with the other and the humanitarian
35 This is a quotation from the Psalms, and the whole situation refers to the Catholic upbringing Kate received. 80 notions which she previously held; she shoots at the donkey and at the masturbating prisoner and even tortures Naema’s father by mistake, probably to his death. However,
Benedict holds war and violence responsible for Kate’s condition. This is certainly emphasized by Benedict’s choice to describe Kate’s situation in the epigraph of the book as follows: “perhaps if she curls up very small, she won’t hurt anyone ever again.” This retreating to herself is the product of her new ability, which she acquires in the army, to inflict harms on other humans, a confirmation that her current condition is the outcome of war. Kate’s failure to protect herself or her friend, Yvette, mutilates her psyche and shatters her notion of doing “the right thing” and thus breaks all cross-cultural connections that might be created between her and Naema. Furthermore, the last part of the novel, which is titled ‘War,’ shifts the narration from actual violence during war to the consequences of these violent acts after returning home. Benedicts suggests, “War is not just combat…but also the material and psychological damage each side inflicts on the other” (Haytock 344). Despite the fact that Benedict is following the same writing process of following a soldier during war experience until the ultimate traumatic fall, her meticulous treatment and gradual development of the characters grant her another perspective, especially after empathizing with the other through the character of Naema.
By the same token of Kate, Zeina fails to inhabit both of her identities because celebrating one identity denies the other—preventing any integration of the two nationalities during war time. In a sense, Kachachi also blames war more than Zeina herself for the impossibility of integration, the unpleasant consequences, and the circumstances that led Zeina to such a vulnerable and confused state. Through her 81 protagonist, Kachachi condemns war, calling it “a rotten onion” (129), and seeks a globalized connection through human sufferings. This is shown through the empathy of a mother of a dead American for the pain of Iraqi mothers over losing their sons; she asserts her “empath[y] with the grief of Iraqi mothers that she saw on the news…weeping over the children they lost in the streets of Baghdad” (128). This female association and feeling for others’ sufferings across national boundaries reminds us of the “enigma of otherness,” described by Caruth, earlier in this chapter which springs from the shared cross-cultural trauma produced by war, a trauma that transcends place and politics through sharing human misery.
Both writers succeed in portraying different traumata of female soldiers and the gendered suffering they experience to represent and assimilate reality as they perceive it.
While their approaches differ in exploring the mental and emotional difficulties of women in handling the aggression of war, both writers highlight numerous conditions that limit options for women in wartime and reflect misogyny and gendered relations: defective relationships, subordination within the military, objectification, psychological blockage, and the inability of forming cross-cultural relations.
82 Chapter Three
Space and the Politics of Displacement: A Study of Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer
“The anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with Space.” Foucault, Of Other Spaces
I. The Space of Trauma
When in 2007 Wafaa Bilal assimilated the experience of the Iraq War through his project “Domestic Tension”, or “the paintball project”, he was attempting to connect spaces that were physically separated. At FlatFile gallery in Chicago, he built a paintball gun manned by a robot that could be controlled by online viewers, who would shoot at him as their target. Despite the physical distance between him and the viewers, they managed to inflict harm on him by shooting more than sixty thousands paintballs at him in a thirty day span, which left him psychologically devastated and “physically debilitated”. He later described the situation as follows: “While it was certainly not a true representation of life in a conflict zone, where one hit would mean death or serious injury, the stress and manipulation of one’s every movement to avoid being hit did characterize both my experience in Domestic Tension and the common experience of those who live under fire” (4). His work opened up new spaces for expressing war trauma previously unavailable within the acknowledged public domain. When later Bilal transformed this performative art into narrative in his memoir Shoot an Iraqi, he also aimed at unifying the spaces and memories from his past in his hometown, Kufa, Iraq,
83 with those of his small lodging at the gallery because of the “intense need to connect
[his]…life as an artist in the comfort zone of the United States to the terrors and sorrows of the conflict zone in which [his]…family and so many others were living out their daily lives” (1). Placing himself at the intersection of the private and the public, Bilal’s personal encounter reproduces the physical space of war alongside the trauma of marginalized people within the dimensions of the sites of war. While Bilal’s intention is aesthetic as well as political, his experience reenacts the physical site of trauma and raises questions of the relation between private and public, outside and inside, central and marginalized spaces and the possibility of cross-cultural connections during times of war.
Foucault assumes that “we live inside an ensemble of relations that define emplacement that are irreducible to each other and absolutely nonsuperposable” (178).
Though I am not discussing Foucault’s theory of heterotopia, in which this statement appears, I would like to emphasize the notion of the “ensemble of relations that define emplacement” as it relates to trauma and traumatized people. Bilal creates a space that questions this emplacement when he connects to the audience through physical violence.
Actually, his experience defines displacement more than emplacement if we recount the relations established through his experiment. Bilal’s experience forms an illusion of a connection between people and a similitude of a site of war where distinctions between spaces of Bilal and the viewers are clear. These distinctions are significantly larger in reality, despite the fact that the spaces of physical connection between people, especially during war time, are smaller, in a sense that they are either buddies in the same army or prisoners in conflicting ones. In the novels I discuss in this chapter, I build upon a 84 significant relation between recognized sites of war and familiar urban/domestic spaces.
The protagonists of these novels are placed at intersecting spaces where the trauma of the individual reflects the trauma of the collective, especially of marginalized people such as soldiers and occupied civilians. Both of these groups are alienated through their internalization of the site of trauma and the de-familiarization of spaces they once knew.
Both of them inhabit the same place at the same time, so the question here becomes if these two marginalized group can create cross-cultural relations through the spaces they inhabit. I argue, since pretexts of trauma, privileged implementations, and political ideologies differ according to their positions and relations to the site of war, in these novels, the land of Iraq, their traumata differ as well. The spaces of war represented in these narratives epitomize the protagonists’ experience of spatial de-familiarization. In this case, the experience of both protagonists trap them within the space of their traumatic site such that they fail to identify themselves with a community outside the boundaries of their interior traumatic space. Accordingly, I also investigate individual‘s aptitude to fit within previously identified collective spaces and register responses to cross-culturalism.
Despite the fact that War creates a traumatized “ensemble of relation” moving the characters from emplacement to displacement, an act that is embedded in the ethos of marginality, both of these groups fail to originate such an ensemble. However, narratives handling such beliefs probe the victimhood of their characters and promote a negotiation of identity stretching beyond the limits of the traumatic site and into a repository of memories.
85 By space, herein, I mean the place, the time, and the integrated geographical environment of the traumatic event—the moment when the traumatic figure shifts to a sense of discontinuity. The spatial conceptualization of trauma is the “the borderline between outside and inside” (18), as described by Freud. That is, the external traumatic event de-familiarizes territorial relations, which, in turn, cause an internal rupture and a psychological shift, leading to a displacement of the “ensemble of relation”. In his book
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud reads a game that a child plays when his mother leaves him as a spatial encounter. The “repetition compulsion” impels the son to repeat throwing a ball against the wall and waiting for its return, just like he waits for his mother to come back. It is an unconscious resistance to the mother’s departure. Freud explains this compensatory game as a “position in space” and claims, “What consciousness yields consists essentially of perceptions of excitation coming from the external world and of feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which can only arise from the system” (18).
Essentially, an outer event triggers an inside response. In an earlier article entitled “The
Uncanny”, Freud concentrates only on the horror of spatial encounter, for example, the estrangement an infant encounters in childbirth. This feeling arises as the familiar is de- familiarized due to an external encounter or when the “-Heimlich- (homely) is…transformed into the frightening -Unheimlich- (uncanny) [unhomely]” (Bouville 29).
This estrangement within the traumatic space is the lost encounter between the outer event and the psychological response that is reflected by an internal displacement.
Nevertheless, psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche criticizes Freud for neglecting the complexity of the moment of the spatial encounter within the traumatic site: “There is the 86 implantation of something coming from outside. And the experience, or the memory of it, must be reinvested in a second moment, and then it becomes traumatic. It is not the act which is traumatic, it is the internal reviviscence of the memory that becomes traumatic”
(26).36 Simply put, Laplanche suggests that within the space of trauma, there are two moments: the first is the traumatic event which occurs outside the boundaries of the self, and the second is, basically, the memory of it, that is essentially an internal experience which causes the trauma and displacement from previously inhabited spaces. One should recognize that both theories have similarities: the idea of the internalization of the traumatic moment, the de-familiarizing of the spatial encounter, the repetition compulsion strategy, belatedness37, and the temporospatial “wound of the mind– the breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world” (Caruth Unclaimed
Experience 3-4). The fact that Laplanche depends on a spatial model to define a traumatic event, just as Freud does, makes his interpretation seem like an extension of Freud’s theory. In a sense, trauma lies either in the lost moment between the external and internal, as Freud assumes, or in the bouncing back of the internal to the external, as Laplanche believes, and both these encounters are spatial.
In both cases, this spatial wound that lies between the external and the internal ruptures identity and makes coping with trauma difficult. According to Justin Edwards, survivors, in this case, suffer a dislocation of memories that increases their flashbacks
36 Though Jean Laplanche concentrates on Freud’s theory of seduction in this section of the essay, he is discussing the spatial encounter in Freud’s theory of psychic trauma. 37 Laplanche claims that the word “Nachtraglichkeit” should be translated into English as “afterwardsness” rather than “belatedness”. 87 and nightmares (132-35). Generally, memories summon the spaces of the traumatic event because of the “fixation to the moment at which the trauma occurred” (Freud Beyond
Pleasure 7). At the same time, the horrors of the event might blur the distinction between the real and the imaginary, demonstrated by distorted memories, bleak nightmares, unpleasant flashbacks, especially with the fractured, unstable identity that is newly created after the traumatic incident (Edwards 146). Because trauma dislocates the previous instantiation of the self, it resists any cohesive form that is coextensive with the memory, causing a shift from familiarity to de-familiarity, or from homely to unhomely.
In this case, the spaces of the traumatic event prevent a stable formation of the new identity because of the repetition compulsion--a symptomatic response that is recognized by the haunting memories and recurring nightmares.
Similarly, Kai Erikson argues, “The traumatized mind holds on to that moment, preventing it from slipping back into its proper chronological place in the past, and relives it over and over again in the compulsive musings of the day and the seething dreams of night. The moment becomes a season, the event a condition” (185).
Apparently, the rift within the previously constructed self is occupied by the repetition compulsion of the dominating memories of the spaces of the traumatic event. In this way, the spatial distancing produces a sense of discontinuity and an internalizing detachment of familiar surroundings. This phenomenon offers inventive avenues for narrating the spaces of trauma by focusing on the repository of the self and the collective-- as an entry point for the narration of the trauma within the structure of space. In the war literature I discuss in this chapter, Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Sinan 88 Antoon’s The Corpse Washer, sites of trauma are linked by hegemony, subverted representations of victimhood, a sense of othering, and—sometimes—a sense of guilt.
Here, the site of trauma plays a preeminent role in these novels because it relates the individual to the collective, in another word, shared personal experiences merge into collective national identity. Erikson remarks, “The tissue of the community can be damaged in much the same way as the tissues of mind and body” (185). Upon returning from the site of war, soldiers find it hard to assimilate their experiences with their society’s experiences; this challenging adaptation causes a rupture in the tissue of the community between the memory of war in the mind of the soldier and that of the collective society. In this case, the soldiers are alienated from their society through their internalization of the spaces of trauma and the de-familiarization of spaces they once knew. On the other hand, civilians in the occupied land suffer a process of acculturation which produces resistance against de-familiarization of and estrangement from previously inhabited spaces. In another way, living in the site of trauma for a long time creates a collective mode of resisting the hardships, a shared resilience and an adjusting response. In such a case, the trauma of these civilians springs from refusing de- familiarized spaces brought by the occupier and from militarizing their normal, everyday habitation. Either way, inhabiting the same sites of war, by occupying soldiers and occupied civilians, generates spaces of trauma which consequently disorients individuals and occludes possible cross-cultural connection.
Both protagonists in the novels of Fountain and Antoon negotiate their life choices in relation to their surrounding spaces after being haunted by spaces of their traumatic 89 event. In this chapter I will examine the challenges these characters encounter after they experience the de-familiarizing of normal spaces and the incoherence brought about by cultural dissimilation. I also examine cross-cultural representations of spaces of the other during wartime. In addition, I explore images of sites of war, monuments, arenas, stadiums, places of washing the dead, and familial geographical territories. Such spaces often depict internal, psychological experiences and move towards articulating victimization and symbolizing the tension between the internal and the external. In fact, the spatial depictions in these novels reflect upon the ethics of the boundaries of two different cultures and of each culture and its individuals. In these narratives, the traumatic space is a major character that denotes the boundaries between the past as a historical moment and the present as a coherent experience. In another sense, the spaces of trauma fracture identity, confuse memory, and impact the individual’s relation with his settings.
II. The Ideology of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and The Corpse Washer
When Fountain was asked about Billy Lynn38, he summarized the main points by saying the book is “about football, cheerleaders, sex, death, war, capitalism, the transmigration of souls, brothers and sisters, parents and children, the movie industry,
Destiny’s Child, and the general insanity of American life in the early years of 21st
38 Hereafter, Billy Lynn. Billy Lynn won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. The book also won the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. The novel was adapted into a 2016 movie directed by Ang Lee and produced by Albert Ratner. 90 century” (qtd. in Buchanan 97). The most intriguing thing about this statement is that
Fountain does not center the experience of war, instead making it one of the many themes of the novel, despite the fact that the story is about war and veterans. Fountain’s strategy in not identifying his novel as a war novel might be due to the fact that he was never a veteran. Thus, he got his information from the soldiers he thanked at the end of his story and other sources. He admits he got his inspiration for writing the novel "after watching a
Dallas Cowboys game on Thanksgiving in 2004; the halftime show anticipates the events of the story:
It was just such an insane mash-up of the very worst of American culture,” he says. “It was like militarism and triumphalism mixed in with the fluffiest kind of pop culture and soft porn. I’m just sitting there thinking, I can’t believe what I’m seeing. The really amazing thing was: it’s normal. (Crain)
His debut novel Billy Lynn is one of the first to be written by a civilian about the war in
Iraq (Buchanan 96). In an interview, Fountain explains that writing about war is more about handling moral issues than it is about authority and credibility. In an interview, he talks about his process of writing about soldiers and war despite not being a veteran:
“Going on faith that, maybe, at some point, you will have, by virtue of doing it correctly and diligently, you will have earned the right to write a book like this” (“Intelligence
Squared”). His distance from the space of war seems to make Fountain uncomfortable when addressing war issues; consequently, he states, “it’s an important thing and a necessary thing as a writer to always be reaching outside of yourself. They say write what you know. But what you know is rarely enough. You need to know more” (qtd. in
Buchanan 37).
91 Such a dilemma also preoccupies Antoon, who considers himself an insider writing from outside since he was displaced from Iraq long before the war. In an article about the fifteenth anniversary of the invasion on Iraq, Antoon expresses his attitude on the process of writing from outside the country: “These were novels I had written from afar, and through them, I tried to grapple with the painful disintegration of an entire country and the destruction of its social fabric. These texts are haunted by the ghosts of the dead, just as their author is” (“Fifteen Years Ago”). Antoon’s perspective on Iraq is that of an insider in all of his writings in which he speaks about the horrors of war, the sanctions, the invasion, and the life of Iraqi people during these dark times. In this
Antoon aspires to an inside overview of Iraq, like most Iraqi writers in the Diaspora.
Nadje Al-Ali and Deborah Al-Najjar discuss this issue in their book We Are Iraqis:
Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War. They assume that “dislocation and displacement do not stop someone from identifying with, feeling for, and hurting about Iraq” (xxxi).
Iraq, to these writers, is more of a space than a place, meaning, they are displaced physically but, psychologically, they are still living within the boundaries of Iraq’s space and its anxieties. Born in Baghdad to an Iraqi father and an American mother from a
Christian family, Antoon traveled to the US after he finished college. In the United
States, he earned his master’s degree at Georgetown and his PhD. At Harvard, specializing in Arabic and Islamic studies. He then became a professor at New York
University. He left Iraq after the 1991 US-led invasion and went back to visit in 2004 to direct, with other American-Iraqi scholars, the first documentary about the trauma of
Iraqi people, entitled About Iraq. In this documentary, he narrates the story of Iraqis by 92 interviewing several people and visiting historical sites like monuments; and also expresses his feelings and thoughts about the deteriorated situation of the country after the invasion, he remarks, “This is a nation of…traumatized [people], and I as a writer and just as a person who is connected to this place think that we need to go back and talk about it and relive the past somehow.” Antoon is always an avid presenter of Iraqi problems, as he was one of the protesters against the invasion of Iraq:
I was one of about 500 Iraqis in the diaspora — of various ethnic and political backgrounds, many of whom were dissidents and victims of Saddam’s regime — who signed a petition: “No to war on Iraq. No to dictatorship.” While condemning Saddam’s reign of terror, we were against a “war that would cause more death and suffering” for innocent Iraqis and one that threatened to push the entire region into violent chaos. Our voices were not welcomed in mainstream media in the United States, which preferred the pro-war Iraqi-American who promised cheering crowds that would welcome invaders with “sweets and flowers.” There were none. (“Fifteen Years Ago”)
This distancing never caused him to deviate from his target: “In teasing out the embodied tension of living and working in the country that occupied his homeland, and [in] talk[ing] of the sense of estrangement when witnessing the horrors of a protracted conflict” (Farid). Because of this, one may understand why all his novels are basically written in Arabic and then self-translated into English39. In an interview, he once expressed his passion about Iraq, its culture and language, which he misses and tends to articulate in his novels. For example, in The Corpse Washer, he meticulously describes the method of washing the dead in the Shi’ite tradition where the personal life of the washer imitates the country’s situation during consecutive years of war, sanction, and
39 In the same article, Farid discusses how Antoon has “recently won the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for his novel The Corpse Washer… [and how] London-based pan-Arab newspaper Al Hayat dubbed it ‘the Iraqi novel par excellence’”. 93 occupation. In an interview, Antoon said that he was inspired to write this story after he had read an article about a corpse washer who was making lots of money because of the number of corpses he was washing after the invasion, yet he was attempting to leave the country because he was psychologically destroyed and wanting a better future for his children. Antoon elaborates on this idea with a literary flavor to produce a story about a corpse washer whose life projects Iraq’s recent history where events follow him from his teenage years into maturity (Ali).
Jawad Salim, the protagonist of The Corpse Washer, resists his family’s profession of washing corpses to pursue a more evocative dream of becoming a sculptor. He succeeds in joining the Academy of Fine Arts despite his family’s refusal. However, when he attempts to become an artist, the war with Iran, the death of his older brother in the war, the sanctions, the invasion of the US army, the loss of his two girlfriends, and the death of his father all prevent him from pursuing his ambition. The 2003 invasion debilitates his desire to sculpt and limits his future to only survival and safety. An urban war increases the number of mutilated dead bodies since violence becomes the norm, and surviving as an artist becomes impossible. Jawad must return to the same place he had spent his whole life avoiding, the place of washing the corpses. His struggle springs from denying his place in his family profession, because it represents death while art and sculpting represent life and eternity. The novel demonizes the invasion through the character of Jawad and outlines the vicissitudes of the spaces of the invaded land. In fact,
Jawad’s experiences reflect the space of contemporary history and the radical changes brought about by war and political fluctuations. Space in Jawad’s case varies between 94 the literal site of trauma to the psychological space of internalization and de-familiarizing the inner mental space to that of the external familial one.
The physical spaces Jawad moves in throughout the story are within the boundaries of
Iraq because he is not allowed to travel outside40 while the story of Billy Lynn takes place primarily between Texas and Iraq. Billy lives in the US, but his flashbacks are from his deployment in Iraq41. The main events of the story occur during the forty-eight hours before his redeployment to Iraq, but the flashbacks extend back as much as a month earlier. With his Bravo squad, Billy fights in a fictional place in Iraq called the Al-
Ansakar Canal, where the ten men in the squad are engaged in a firefight with Iraqi insurgents. The squad wins by killing all the insurgents within four minutes, with only two casualties on their side. This battle is recorded by a fictional Fox News reporter and displayed across US media channels. As a result, the squad is granted a two-week Victory
Tour to travel the US and enjoy being treated as celebrities for a short time. The squad is accompanied by a movie producer who is trying to secure a movie deal about their heroic experience by approaching Hollywood companies and rich investors who might be interested in making the movie. On the last day of the tour, which is also when the main event of the story occurs, the squad is invited to attend a football game in the Dallas
Cowboys stadium on Thanksgiving Day and participate in the halftime performance featuring Destiny’s Child. The owner of the stadium and the Cowboys is a fictional
40 When the Iraqi people were suffering bombing and sectarian terrorism, many Iraqis decided to leave the country. The only point of exit was the Iraq-Jordan border. However, the Jordanian side refused to allow unmarried, single men to enter their lands because they were suspicious of them. 41 As readers, we also understand that the Bravo squad has been travelling around the country because of the victory tour. 95 character called Norm Oglesby who offers a pitiful deal to produce a movie about the squad and its bravery.
Billy becomes the hero of the footage when he dashes out and rescues his wounded sergeant from the insurgents. As a nineteen-year-old white man, Billy tries to find his place in life and make sense of his experience. He describes his encounter with the civilians during the tour:
Being a Bravo means inhabiting a state of semi-celebrity that occasionally flattens you with praise and adulation. At stage rallies, for instance, or appearances at malls, or whenever TV or radio is present, you are apt at some point to be lovingly mobbed by everyday Americans eager to show their gratitude, then other times it’s like you’re invisible, people just see right through you, nothing to register. (28)
This diversity of reactions highlights people’s inability to properly treat these soldiers who become, by chance, hero-celebrities. Brian Williams believes that the rhetoric used to compliment and integrate these soldiers into the society as hero-celebrities affects them negatively and displaces them more from their society: “Support attempts to placate and regulate the threatening presence of combat veterans by restricting individual contact or communication between civilian and soldier” (525). The rhetoric used in this novel displaces Billy and his squad from their community and traumatizes them through empty gestures of support and exploitation by corporate media. Billy represents how young soldiers are torn between patriotism and capitalism. At a certain point, they compare the trauma of their experience in Iraq with the experience they face in their homeland, specifically in the Dallas stadium. Ultimately, by the end of the novel, they resist the hero-celebrity positioning because they realize it does not represent them as soldiers.
96 Jawad and Billy are similar in resisting the spaces created around them.
Significantly, both of them oscillate between public/private, outside/inside, and central/ marginal domains. Jawad’s fragmented pieces of life can be disclosed through three territorial zones; the erasure or the reshaping of urban districts in Iraq, the non-material change in the maghassil 42, and Jawad’s mental and personal spaces represented by the
Academy and the small garden outside the maghassil. These pieces are joined together to argue into othering this Iraqi character in his own land, especially after the invasion.
Combined they are typical mediums to criticize the wars and invasion and to record the sufferings of Iraqis who endure trauma for generations. On the same level, Billy’s three fragmented, territorial spaces are: his uninviting homeland of America, the exploitative people of the stadium, and the idea of “home” in shaped in a girl. Fountain portrays Billy and his fellow soldiers as scapegoats of America’s capitalism and victims of media and bureaucracies. They are treated as othesr by a detached society. Notably, such comparable dimensions of spaces surrounding both protagonists suggest victimhood as both sides suffer othering and displacement. These tense, spatial narratives promote a discriminatory wartime relation that decreases human, cultural and transcultural, relatability yet deepens the traumatic experience. They also add dimensions that encompass historical, political43, cultural and psychological trauma which appear in the
42 In Iraqi dialect, the place where people are washed, purified and prepared to be buried is called the maghassil. There are certain rituals a maghassilchi, the person who washes the dead body, needs to follow, which are explained in detail in the novel. The maghassilchi is a solemn, respected man, and people think that God honors him with such a job. 43 Though I am not really interested in historical or political trauma, I find it necessary here to touch upon some of its elements as long as they serve my study. 97 repetition of memories, flashbacks, and nightmares that occur because trauma is unresolved. This happens because these characters internalize the de-familiarized, external space after the protagonists become “possessed by an image or event” (Caruth
Unclaimed Experience 5), a possession that increases the trauma of displacement.
Actually, the two novels seem to complete each other in that the soldiers describe life in the space of Iraq as unrecognizably other, and Antoon explains in details how this could be possible after the invasion. Exploring traumatic spatial encounters in this chapter then locates Billy and Jawad at the intersection of contrasting featuring.
III. The Space of Atrocities
The spaces that disturb the protagonists’ national and international relations are the
Dallas Stadium in Billy Lynn and the maghassil in The Corpse Washer. Both these places reveal the power dynamics and the transcultural connections developed after the war.
Billy expresses his feeling in being at the stadium:
Years and years of carefully posed TV shots have imbued the place with intimations of mystery and romance, dollops of state and national pride, hints of pharaonic afterlife such as always inhere in large-scale public architecture, all of which render the stadium of Billy’s mind as the conduit or portal, a direct tap-in, to a ready-made species of mass transcendence, and so the real-life shabbiness is a nasty comedown. (14)
The place is crowded with people, fast-food restaurants, and expensive shops. It is a place of entertainment, consumerism, and power since it is connected to American football.
Interestingly this game is always associated with military vocabularies and violence
98 because “Football… [is] a metaphor for war” (Weeks). Francis A. Walker links the game to “something akin to patriotism and public spirit” (qtd in Weeks). This stadium represents the American society minimized to one place with various types of people that are occupying the same space. Billy’s relation to the space renders him alienated and he retreats to a safer place to him as a soldier, the site of war. In accordance, symbolically and metaphorically, the power dynamics of this place represent the power of the West and the power of the invader as opposed to the modest, humble place of the maghassil that Jawad occupies, which represents the invaded. Just like Billy, Jawad is also alienated by his familial place. The stadium and the maghassil both represent their nations while at war and reflecting the binocular from which each nation react to its individuals and to transcultural relations.
Three main relations are established between the spaces narrated in both Billy Lynn and The Corpse Washer. The first is between the spaces of the invaders and the invaded, who occupy the same place at the same time. The second is the relation of characters with the structures of power, as symbolized by monuments and stadiums. These two narratives demonstrate political and historical agency. The third is an exploration of the interior spaces of the protagonists after the de-familiarization of their familiar, familial spaces and the creation of a sense of estrangement between them and their cultures, it is more of a metaphorical space. This, as Laurie Vickory remarks, “produce[s] a sometimes indelible effect on the human psyche that can change the nature of an individual’s memory, self-recognition and relational life” (p. 11). In a sense, both Billy and Jawad fight against their surroundings because these spaces do not represent them. These spaces 99 demonstrate how trauma is enacted in detached spaces that are shaped by war and transformed into narratives of destruction and horror.
The first relation between the spaces of the invaders and the invaded appears in Billy
Lynn’s representation of Iraq as a place of extreme violence and crude, with little recognition that the invasion changes Iraq into a site of war. However, between the two novels, Iraq moves between the real and the fictional, the interior and exterior, through the representation of victimhood and traumatization. In Billy Lynn, Iraq is desolate, not worthy of human habitation, and a serious threat to the soldiers. Billy remembers Iraq when he goes to the restrooms of Texas Stadium: “Billy finds the men’s room and takes his time. Everything is so clean. Iraq is trash, dust, rubble, rot, and bubbling open sewers, plus these maddening microscopic grains of sand that razor their way into every orifice of the human body” (68). Ironically, Billy’s memory of how trashy Iraq is happens in a public restroom, an act that provokes a question of how would a bathroom in Texas
Stadium really be that clean? No matter how clean it looks, it’s dirty. It is perhaps
Fountain’s way of comparing the misery American soldiers confront that even a public restroom in the US could be better than the life in Iraq. This idea is also enhanced when
Billy designates the place of the battle where they fight the insurgents as a “tiny hamlet of
Ad-Wariz on the Al-Ansakar Canal…a back-water even by Iraqi standards, a loose collection of mud-wattle huts and subsistence farms44” (125). Beside inaccuracies in
44Being an Iraqi myself, this image does not fit anything in my country even the mud houses in faraway, poor villages. I believe Fountain could take advantage of a simple search of the topographical structure of the country that might help constructing his image more properly. I think this image is more suitable to the American reader since it portrays countries of Southeast Asian inhabitants like Vietnam.
100 describing the geography of a place in Iraq, Fountain portrays Billy in a superior position when he asserts the inferior positioning of Iraqi spaces. This expected hierarchical perspective of an invader also appears when the squad is asked about the challenges soldiers face while they are in Iraq:
Crack tells them about the camel spiders, A-bort talks about the horrible biting fleas, then Lodis gets off a free-associative riff about his skin problems…we call Iraq the abnormal normal, ‘cause over there the weirdest stuff is just everyday life. But based on what we know of Hollywood so far, that might be the one place that out-abnormals Iraq. (135)
Comparing a fictional space like Hollywood to Iraq may suggest that Iraq is just as fictional in Americans’ mind; American civilians confuse reality with fiction and the footage to movies. To them, the footage is a revengeful act of 9/11 that no American civilian asked about the destiny of the Iraqi civilians and the destruction inhabiting the territories of Iraq. These three reflective examples of the soldiers about their sites of war isolate the readers from the atrocities done by the soldiers in these distant places. The purpose of such disparaging narratives is to produce a distant space of “otherness” where the soldiers can claim victimhood--a disturbing representation of victimization that transmits roughly the experience of the site of trauma to American civilians who cannot identify with the reality of war since they are far away from harm. Conversely, by doing so, Soldiers are attempting to define their traumatic wound by registering the space of their traumatic site. Therefore, despite inflicting psychological harm on the soldiers, Iraq here is reduced to a marginal place with no distinct identity or nationality.
101 Such narratives of otherness are mostly associated with unfamiliar spaces to ensure positive public responses, that is, the soldiers have made the right, ethical choices, and therefore, “violence is doubly distanced from the majority of American society: socially and geographically” (Deer 54). This image is emphasized by Billy’s sense of guilt, as everyone is celebrating him and no one is calling him a baby-killer (38), and this guilt follows him until the end of the novel that: “he wishes that just once somebody would call him baby-killer, but this does not seem to occur to them, that babies have been killed” (219). In this image, Fountain concentrates on Billy as a victim who is caught in an incomprehensible place with a constant feeling of guilt. By avoiding interpretations of the reason behind Billy’s remorse, Fountain is also excluding Billy’s evil actions or any reference to him as a perpetrator. The novel suggests that the soldiers who have to live and endure such a horrible place would suffer indelible internal damage. Likewise, it emphasizes the emotional and geographical remoteness of the American civilian from the reality of war. The public space of the American citizen is constructed in part to ignore the needs of their soldiers and the harms these soldiers inflict in remote spaces. In such a case, any ethical responsibility to preserve the lives of others is absent (Williams 527-8).
This framing of the other side as ungrievable is a necessity in wartime, as explained by
Judith Butler in her book Frames of War: “the epistemological capacity to apprehend a life is partially dependent on that life being produced according to norms that qualify it as a life or, indeed, as part of life” (3). Indeed, a life cannot be grieved if it is not framed as human or if it is degraded to a lower position; thus, the lives of Iraqi civilians are not comprehended as lives. This is evident in one of the cheerleaders’ reaction at Texas 102 Stadium who, disgustingly, articulates her impression of Iraq from an earlier tour: “that’s some hard living over there, just how dry it is, all that wind and sand. And those people, the Iraqis, their houses? All those dirt huts, they’re like something Jesus might’ve lived in” (142). Far from the religious connotation, this cheerleader portrays Iraqis as primitive to other them and to belittle their existence to a lower position and this is necessary as described by Butler; “the derealization through which dehumanization is accomplished.
This derealization takes place neither inside nor outside the image, but through the very framing by which the image, but through the very framing by which the image is contained” (Precarious Life 148). The image in which the cheerleader framed Iraqi people is not that different from Billy’s, the squad’s, or the other US citizens’ in the novel.
Narrating images of degraded exotic spaces grants a superior positionality that gives
Americans the right to kill based on the intensification of the hierarchy of the Western invader over the marginalized, othered Eastern invaded. Kwaku Larbi Korang45 claims that:
In the spatial sense, "postcolonial[ity]" refers to the configuration of the post- encounter world after its more or less successful restructuring along the lines of a hierarchy determined by the West's material, political, and cultural power. Hence the world after the encounters discloses a spatial relationship between superordinate Western (imperial) centers and (their) subordinate (colonial and/or neocolonial) peripheries; between dominating (First World) metropoles and dominated (Third World) margins. In metropolitan space is to be found the Western Self, while the periphery is occupied by those that this Self, through its compelling institutional and discursive power, has determined, and relates to, as it’s others. (39)
45 Though this scholar is describing colonialism and post-colonialism in Africa, I find some of his ideas intriguingly similar to American-Iraqi situation. 103
Simply put, Korang designate how “hegemonic cultures of imperialism” has produced a global system dividing the world into central and marginal where third world countries always occupy peripheral spaces. Consequently, cultural, political, and historical ideologies of the central should dominate any of the marginal ones. In the same way,
Billy Lynn provides such an encounter between the center as the US with its structure of power and Iraq as a marginal other that has to yield to the will of the center, or as one character in the novels puts it, “either we fight them over there or we fight them over here, that’s the way most Americans see it” (88).46 The “racial othering”, as it is called by
Buchanan, “is a difficult feature of American war culture” (4).
The racial othering is veiled by the US invader who inconsiderately dominates other cultures, imposes his rules, and practices his hegemony. Compelled to the new spaces generated by the invader, invaded citizens of Iraq negotiate their new spaces to re- identify new cultural and political vocabularies. This spatial discourse in war culture is embedded generally in most American war narratives and specifically in fiction describing the 2003 invasion on Iraq. These narratives position the West and the East47 as centers and margins, an idea that is strongly recognized in Billy Lynn, as discussed earlier, as well as is The Corpse Washer.
46 This speech recalls President Bush’s speech “We'll fight them there so we don't have to face them in USA”, an address delivered to the 89th Annual National Convention of the American Legion on August 28, 2007. 47 For more information about “otherness” and the relation between the West and East, see Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism by Edward W. Said. 104 In The Corpse Washer, Antoon invites the reader to trace the historical and political trauma experienced by Iraqis in recent history by following the hardships of Jawad’s life.
However, Antoon approaches the spaces governing the relation between invaders and invaded by showing how “the Americans would be so irresponsible and inept” (85) and by emphasizing that their actions are not alleviating the situation in Iraq as promised. One significant example happens ten days after the 2003 invasion. Jawad’s father dies after his heart stops when a bomb is dropped near their house. They have to take him to another city, Najaf48, to bury him. The long scene describing the situation along the roads leading to Najaf city reflects the characters’ powerlessness and marginality in their own land. Jawad, his neighbor, and the father’s assistant, Hammoudy, put the coffin on the top of the car and head to Najaf where they encounter an American military convoy. The platoon stops them, insults and humiliates them, opens the coffin of his father to check it, makes them get down on their knees, and prevents them from speaking. After confirming that Jawad and his company are peaceful, the convoy moves slowly leaving them alone. Jawad reacts:
We stood up and shook off the dirt from our clothes. I realized that we’d just survived death. A slight move in the wrong direction would have resulted in a shower of bullets. / Hammoudy said, “Man, we could’ve all died. God saved us.” / …as we got our car back on the road, Hammoudy said, “Looks like these liberators want to humiliate us.” (68) Politically, the narrative implies the control of the West, represented by the US, outside
their territories and inside the other’s land, the East, represented by Iraq. The novel
suggests that in the Iraq of 2003 an act as simple as honoring a dead person is a violent
threat to the civilians because they are in an occupied territory. Such spatial proximity,
48 Najaf is considered a blessed place in the Shia tradition because it is the place where the prophet’s cousin and his biggest supporter, Ali, is buried. Therefore, Shiites bury their dead family members there. 105 as suggested by the writer, makes the spaces of everyday life sites of ongoing trauma
because of the sense of “personal and political humiliation” (LeVine 264). Mark
LeVine continues, “The American occupation added a superstratum of national
humiliation that with hindsight clearly provided the spark for the insurgency already
spreading” (264). Humiliation becomes the space that defines the relation between the
invaders and the invaded. The novel suggests that this idea of humiliation governing the
relation between the countries is not recent, as emphasized in Jawad’s reflection on the
historical relation between the two countries since the first Gulf War. When Jawad had
to do his mandatory military service in the Iraqi army in the 1990s, he was assigned to a
unit in Al-Samawa49. In this beautiful landscape, Jawad thinks he may find tranquility
and peace because of the exquisiteness of the place and the clearness of the sky at night.
However, this feeling does not last for long:
American fighters hovered over our unit all the time. We heard in the news about antiaircraft batteries being bombed after the no-fly zone was imposed in northern and southern Iraq after 1992. The no-fly zone was supposed to prevent the regime from oppressing citizens, but these fighter jets would kill innocent civilians and even herders. I never knew whether it was out of sheer idiocy, or whether it was a game, using Iraqis for target practice. (58-9) Politically, this passage also suggests the spatial vacancy the Iraqi government occupied on its own land after the 1990 war and the ongoing threats Iraqis have faced since. The landscape becomes a site of trauma, especially after the killing of Jawad’s best friend,
Basim, in one of these attacks. Such an example in the novel positions the trauma as
49 A city in Iraq that lies southeast of Baghdad. 106 political and historical in the lives of Iraqis and differentiates them from their American counterparts, who live far away from the war zone.
The differences between the discourses of the two novels lie in the methods by which each represents the place of trauma, which in turn depend on the memories and positionality of the protagonist. Here, the spaces of the invader and the invaded pertain to soldiers, as in Billy Lynn, and civilians, as in The Corpse Washer. One noticeable example is the description of sand/dust images which occur in the above examples of both novels. While the soldiers in Billy Lynn complain about it in Iraq, Antoon proposes it is the soldiers that cover the Iraqi in dust, probably, as a sign of mourning or humility,
Masmoudi presumes that “the defenseless Iraqi citizen ends up as bare life in the new
Iraq, with only a desire for life but without any protection or rights” (181)50. The recurrent image of sand/dust in both novels generates a sense of ignorance between the action and its consequence. It also might imply that the dirt made by the invader is unrecognizable in the first place because of the superior-inferior relation. However, each writer uses trauma to traverse space and boundaries to claim victimization for its own people in order to make the readers empathize with the trauma the protagonists are facing. Therefore, portraying Iraq’s space as “bare life” is a fictional necessity in the narrative of the invading soldiers to justify violence. Butler believes:
if state killing is justified by military necessity, then any and all sorts of state killing can be justified by this norm, including those that kill innocents, introduce fear to everyday life, violate private purposes, render public spaces insecure, and produce infinitely coercive precautionary measures.” (155)
50 She discusses Agamben Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995) in relation to Iraqi writers and texts. 107
Since the US military applied such justification in killing Iraqi civilians, no perpetrators can be judged, not even the soldiers who committed violent deeds. Consequently, despite the fact that both sides share the same traumatic site, the land of Iraq, both claim victimization and traumatization by the experience-this absence of a perpetrator might render a cross-cultural connection impossible: “Although the invaders and invaded share space and time, no trans-connection is possible. In fact, only death joins ones and others together” (Yebra). This truthful unpacking first-relation between the invader and the invaded enhances the psychological trauma of those who are involved, and put into question the agency of the structure of power who augments the idea of othering, the trauma of the individual, and enlarges the cross-cultural gap.
This first relation between invaders and invaded is marked by violence and aggression. These spaces mark political approaches and “West” and “East” ideologies that are necessary in fictional writings to claim victimhood through distancing and othering the invaded. This first relation between an invader and an invaded renders any cross-cultural relation a failure because spaces here are governed by political ideologies and traumatic relations that make any connections impossible. Therefore, the second and third relations will be more measured by the relation of the protagonists with spaces within their domain, whether social or individual.
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The second relation established is between the characters and symbols of influence and structures of power around them, such as monuments in The Corpse Washer and
108 Texas Stadium in Billy Lynn. These places are parts of a heritage. They identify the place culturally and historically in the sense that they are symbols of their cultures. In The
Corpse Washer, this relation is proposed clearly through the visit of an uncle who is living in exile because he is a communist who fled Iraq earlier during the dictatorship for fear of his life. When Sabri, Jawad’s uncle, visits Iraq, he is surprised to be greeted by an
American soldier at the border51. His memories of the beautiful spaces in Baghdad are disrupted by new sights that are foreign to him; images of dust and trash that are related to the US invasion:
I was very happy to see you all…but my heart was broken…It’s shocking…even right here in Karrada52. Wasn’t this the most beautiful neighborhood? Look at it now. Then you have all this garbage, dust, barbed wires, and tanks. There aren’t any women walking down the street anymore! This is not the Baghdad I’d imagined…Even the poor palm trees are tired and no one takes care of them. Believe me, these Americans, with their ignorance and racism, will make people long for Saddam’s days. (96)
Sabri is lamenting the alteration of his previous urban city into a site of war. As pointed by Mansour, the US invaders controlled the spaces of the cities by shutting down some roads and places, conducting search missions and night raids, and constructing cement barriers and checkpoints. This territorial restructuring of the place is condemned by Iraqi people since it changes the city’s construction and limits the movement of people (xx-xxi,
24, 141). Consequently, Sabri’s memory of familiar urban, domestic places from his past is replaced by the harsh, de-familiarized images of the present. His traumatic encounter,
51 In “Operation Iraqi Freedom: A Military Geographical Perspective,” Palka, Galgano, and Corson explain the mistakes behind the lack of border protection made by the US army after the invasion and its effect on the stabilization of the country. 52 A wealthy and famous district in the city of Baghdad. 109 in Freud’s belief, is the unhomely present that deviates from his memories about the place. Therefore, the new portrayal of the area annihilates Sabri’s previous image of the city, which, accordingly, makes him long for the memories of the beauty of this urban place, a sign marking the failure of the present moment as compared to the past.
Such failure of the present moment leads Sabri to long for a visit to the Martyrs’
Monument53 in Baghdad, which was built in commemoration of the Iraqi martyrs of the
Iraq-Iran war. However, when Sabri and Jawad encounter the significant American presence, with its vehicles, barracks, Humvees, and guards, near the monument54, they develop a sense of a spatial marginality in the context of the expansive military presence.
Jawad says:
I was deeply offended and angered when I saw American soldiers and armored vehicles occupying a place which symbolized the victims of war--victims such as my brother and thousands of others. My uncle said that it was a premeditated insult, calculated for its symbolic significance. It was not a matter of logistics” (95).
This place has a sacred connotation in the life of Iraqi people that Antoon describes in his article Monumental Disrespect as a place where people take off their shoes before stepping inside the hall that carries the names of the dead soldiers55 (30). Their interaction with American soldiers in the monument enhances the two men’s feeling of the failure of the present moment, and establishes a paradox between the present moment
53 In his documentary film About Baghdad, Sinan visited this monument, and some of the details presented here in the novel can be traced back to that film. 54 In Baghdad at Sunrise, Peter Mansour describes incidents where cheerleaders perform at the monument and pose for pictures with soldiers (262). 55 Antoon describes, with images, how the hall where the names and ranks of the Iraqi soldiers are inscribed is filled with signs of parking spaces, dance times, workout distances, trash, etc. 110 and the past, which causes a radical rupture that alters the symbolic meaning of the monument in the way Arrhenius describes: “[s]patial operations participated not just in constituting the monument but also in changing its significance…it is shown how the monument, through spatial intervention, is transformed from an instrument of power into an object of knowledge and finally into a site of sentiment56” (qtd. in Bartelson 48). The symbolic meaning of the Martyrs’ Monument has changed after the intervention of the occupied military forces with which all that Jawad and his uncle is left becomes lamentation and expressing remorse and anger. Such mourning of an emblem is extended to the streets of Baghdad; as they drive around, Sabri notices the spatial emptiness of what used to be vivid, crowded streets. To Sabri, the material change of these spaces alters the identity of the place, which leads him to mock the whole situation, especially when they visit al-Sha’b Stadium. He asks Jawad about the indoor Sports Hall, and Jawad tells him that it used to be called “the Saddam Indoor Hall” (94). Sabri wonders, “What will they call it now? The Bush Hall?” (94). Despite his sarcasm, Sabri is actually referring at the change in power accompanied by the change in discourse and naming. He is suggesting that spatial politicization remaps the place and erases the history of Iraq, an opinion that he states plainly:
This was a process of erasure. Dictatorship and the embargo had destroyed the country. Now we had entered the stage of total destruction to erase Iraq once and for all. He took out his passport and said that even the name of the state no longer existed. The stamp simply read, “Entry-Traybeel Border point.” As if Iraq had been wiped off the map. (86)
56 Thordis Arrhenius portrays spatial territories and monuments after the French Revolution, 111 Here, Sabri’s character comments at the change of the identity of the spaces of a country drowned in trauma for several decades: that history becomes “a struggle of status and monuments” (103), an illusion to those who seek to rewrite history by destroying significant markers only because they contradict their own ideologies. Moreover, the novel provides abundant examples of topographical changes after the invasion, with checkpoints inside cities, barracks and barriers inside neighborhoods, tanks and wires, and the establishment of the green zone. These signs of spatial power function as a political barrier, reflecting how new transitional spaces in this urban area are displacing people from their heritage—a framework that depicts the socio-cultural trauma of the city or a trauma that “has a social dimension” (185), as described by Erikson.
In Billy Lynn, this social dimension of trauma works among the soldiers of the Bravo squad who, far from their country, cannot assimilate into foreign spaces. The squad
“share a traumatic experience”, which leads them to “seek one another out and develop a form of fellowship on the strength of that common tie” (Erikson 187). This isolation comes from their transition from soldiers to heroes to celebrities, which situates them within a narrative of political trauma that is subsequently marked by displacement and consumerism. Indeed, Billy’s team suffers isolation when connected to structures of power, represented by Norm and the rich elite, because the squad’s fame is “temporary and embedded in networks of power and control” (Williams 525). When Billy examines what his team looks like among Norm Oglesby’s entourage, “Americans, he says to himself, gazing around the room. We are all Americans here…but they are different, these Americans” (114). Despite occupying the same place, cultural spaces distance 112 Billy’s team from these wealthy people. However, while Billy cannot identify himself with these wealthy businessmen, they consider their professional practice a means of defending the nation and compare their work to soldiers fighting in faraway spaces. One of these people is the owner of an oil company. He approaches the squad, thanking them for their service and saying, ‘it’s a personal thing with me, boosting domestic production, lessening our dependence on foreign oil. I figure the better I do my job, the sooner we can bring you young men home” (64). Such businessmen point out that there is no difference between capitalism, heroism, and patriotism; all three of these notions are intertwined. In fact, this scene leads them to question how there can be heroism if what is being defended is, blatantly, the US interest in oil-not liberty or democracy or other
American ideals. Dime, the squad’s leader, understands the overlap thinking of these people, hence, he wants to correct this man by separating capitalism from patriotism “it’s a war…all I can tell you with any confidence is that the exchange of force with the intent to kill, that is truly a mind-altering experience, sir.” (65) The cultural spaces dividing capitalism and heroism are similar to the mentality dividing this man from the squad, a rhetoric that is not comprehensible by most of the civilians in the US because they are far from the site of war. This owner of an oil company, besides Norm and his entourage, introduces the structure of power and the dominance of capitalism; to them war is money and oil with no consideration to people’s lives. In fact, applauding the courage of Billy’s team and thanking them for their service is an investment, which is especially apparent in the advantage taken of their performance in the halftime show.
113 Edward Soja claims that “the organization of space is a social product filled with politics and ideology, contradiction and struggle” (243). The social space of the stadium reveals the struggle of the squad to position themselves within the boundaries already set for them. For example, at the press conference, Norm delivers a speech praising the
Bravo squad:
I’m sure…everyone is familiar by now with the Bravos’ exploits, how they were the first to come to the aid of the ambushed supply convoy, they went straight into battle with no backup, no air support, outnumbered against an enemy who’d been preparing this attack for days. They didn’t think twice about the odds stacked against them, they even suspected it was a trap, and yet they went right in without hesitating…fortunately for us, a Fox News crew was embedded with the group. (129)
Here, patriotism and heroism derive from capturing the footage on camera, not from the action itself, for people can only recognize these soldiers because they see them on TV.
Therefore, “the American populace welcomes these heroes by transforming them into full-blown celebrities” (Williams 530). Such a view strengthens the American sense of patriotism, despite the fact that their patriotism, as described by Patrick Deer, is “a patriotism without seeming cost or consequences, except to the young men paraded before the stadium crowd and schmoozed in the VIP boxes and lounges” (71).
Furthermore Norm, with his movie-like scene and bombastic attitude, wants to make the ultimate profit out of their story by turning it into a movie. He publicizes it by bringing these soldiers into the stadium, announcing their names on the jumbotron in bold letters, and putting them on the stage in the halftime show to appear in the performance by
Destiny’s Child. On the other hand, Billy and his team enjoy the food, their welcoming reception by others, the genuine and the empty, and the luxurious Thanksgiving meal 114 with the elite. However, when Billy is about to appear on the stand for the squad’s performance, he feels the social distance between his team and the festal setting around him because the show is a “porn-lite out of its mind on material dope” (235) and thus
Billy expresses his fear: “he’s scared. He knows this is a bad place to be. They love to talk up God and country but it’s the devil they propose, all those busy little biochemical devils of sex and death and war that simmer at the base of the skull, punch up the heat a few degrees and they rise to a boil, spill over the sides” (235). All this confusion makes
Billy question the morals behind such a show and complicate the relation between what is real and what is fake drawing a distinctive line between the spaces of militarization and celebration offered to him in the performance of Texas stadium. Billy, later on, also recalls the moment before being paraded in front of the audience: “he looks to his right and sees more Bravo similarly positioned, and at this instant he wishes he was back at the war. At least there he basically knew what he was doing” (238). Billy, here, resists the celebrity status bestowed on him by the structure of power around him because, as a soldier, he does not belong to the space of celebrity nor to show business. This is emphasized at the end of the story when Crack, one of the Bravo team members, tells their limo driver, “Take us someplace safe. Take us back to the war” (307). The irony in his statement lies in the bleak image of the urban space revealed through the interconnection of political and sociocultural power represented here by Texas Stadium.
Geopolitical factors displace these soldiers from their homeland to such an extent that they feel more at home in spaces of war, or in Freud’s concept, their country becomes
“unhomely” to them because of the de-familiarizing effects of their surroundings. The 115 temporary situation of their fame-reality comes to an end at the end of the day, and thus, the soldiers are taken back to war, a place with which they are familiar. Their struggle to identify with the structure of power causes a dissonant traumatic response that necessitates an identification with the place of war more than their native country.
It should be noted that the disconnect Billy perceives from his American identity and the empty praises is a frequent complaint of soldiers suffering displacement after returning home. Fountain realizes this distinction and dissonance between the soldier and the community and succeeds in drawing a gradual mechanism of understanding to a nineteen-year old protagonist, especially after he comprehends what Fountain calls the
“homeland dream” (306):
For the past two weeks he’s been feeling so superior and smart because of all the things he knows from war, but forget it, they [smiling, clueless citizens] are the ones in charge, these saps, these innocent, their homeland dream is the dominant force. His reality is their reality’s bitch; what they don’t know is more powerful than all the things he knows, and yet he’s lived what he’s lived and knows what he knows…To learn what you have to learn at the war, to do what you have to do, does this make you the enemy of all that sent you to the war? (306)
Because of the footage, the soldiers as well as the people in their nation share a similar memory, or think they do. During the tour, the public transforms the squad from soldiers into heroes and celebrities—a temporary reactive behavior to the heroic acts of the soldiers, as Brian Williams assumes. This celebration and the footage generate a shared memory between the public and the squad, and the public assumes this gives them the right to claim part of the experience of war: “One nation, two weeks, eight American heroes” (4). However, here, collectivity is created through the nation’s manufacturing an illusion of knowing. Eventually, the only truth that stands out is that the squad, being 116 soldiers, must be redeployed to war in Iraq, a harsh reality that is augmented by their being beaten up harshly by the stage crew because of a silly misunderstanding. After all that he has experienced at Texas Stadium, Billy realizes that he is alienated from his nation, as the bond between them is, somehow, weakened. As Kai Erikson claims, “the tissues of community can be damaged in much the same way as the tissues of the mind and body” (Trauma 185). This quote of Billy suggests a gap between the squad and the public; and posing such a question of being the enemy of people who sent him to war and yet deny this reality heightens the trauma Billy feels within the boundaries of his country.
Brian Williams believes that “Knowledge of ‘the Real’ transforms Billy into someone cut off from his homeland, a bearer of wisdom that he struggles to articulate. Fountain specifically uses language of exile and disconnect” (536). This happens because the homeland becomes another site of trauma and the soldiers are de-familiarized that they prefer to return to the site of war, which is, at least, more comprehensible to them as soldiers.
The rhetoric of both novels acknowledges a relation between the characters and the structure of power represented by unfamiliar urban spaces to which they fail to assimilate. Elaine Scarry assumes that war has the ability “to alter… human tissue, as well as to alter the surface, shape, and deep entirety of the objects that human beings recognize as extensions of themselves” (64). Therefore, where these places are connected with some kind of trauma, a rupture from the norm and from a heritage caused by a political factor entails victimhood and displacement and a shift toward lamentation and mourning of this new space. It is also notable that both narratives resist an optimistic 117 perspective of what could be the future of the relation between these characters and any cultural connections. In this, the public, external traumatic relation becomes a private, inner one that adds a burden to traumatized characters who already face psychological displacement from their normalized settings.
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The third spatial relation is created between the external world of the character and his inner self after a traumatic event. Sometimes, it is a metaphorical space. The spaces of trauma and the memory it invokes are demarcated by the encounter between the self and the threat-filled external world in Billy’s case or by the spatial displacement and the struggle against familiar, friendly dimensions in Jawad’s.
In “Theorizing Trauma Romantic and Postmodern Perspectives on Mental Wounds,”
Christa Schönfelder claims that “The obsessions with memory and with trauma reinforce each other; a mania for memory is particularly likely to arise at moments of crisis, at times when memory comes to be felt as fragile and threatened – a frequent after-effect of trauma” (28). Embedded in Billy’s memories of family and the war zone, the novel accumulates its details and moves through this one day at Texas Stadium, while the readers are provided with flashbacks that presumably articulate the circumstances that create an equivalence between the self and the external world. Billy’s trauma derives from his action of valor, which allows him to receive a medal of honor but that occurred on the same day his leader, Shroom, died; he says, “It is sort of weird. Being honored for the worst day of your life” (149). It is as if “Shroom’s death might have ruined him for anything else” (218). Despite that, Billy does not remember the event exactly: “the Fox 118 footage shows him firing with one hand and working on Shroom with the other, but he doesn’t remember that” (61-2). Instead, Billy is looking for any action that can “numb the mind” (68), which is normal for traumatized heroes. Caruth asserts that “In trauma…the outside has gone inside without any mediation” (Unclaimed Experience 59). The moment of Shroom’s death is initiated outside the psychic space of Billy, but its violent influence has penetrated his interior space. In a sense, his traumatic encounter invades his inner self, initiating a nonlinear narrative with a repetitive remembrance of the site of trauma, as it is not fully recognized at the time of its occurrence. Or as Caruth asserts, “the
[traumatic] event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it” (Trauma 4). The crisis of facing the death of Shroom is a shattering experience for a nineteen-year-old boy, and it returns repeatedly to haunt him as flashbacks. Thus, “traumatic experience, beyond the psychological dimension of suffering it involves, suggests a certain paradox: that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the form of belatedness” (91-92). Billy cannot experience his trauma or express it because he is celebrated by the nation; still, this action abstracts his emotions and postpones his traumatic reaction—a thing that makes him consider withdrawing from the army, as advised by his sister, Kathryn, especially after he meets Faison, the cheerleader.
Flirtatious eye-contact between Billy and Faison at the press conference develops later into a sexual attraction; this encounter ignites Billy’s belated emotions of the horror of war, his pending redeployment and possible death. This happens because “their [Billy 119 and Faison] encounter somehow altered his brain chemistry,” (163) such that he thinks of
“HOME” during their encounter realizing that the body of Faison becomes “a safe shelter” against “the stimuli of the external world” (Freud Beyond pleasure 34). This feeling of safety sparked by his sexual encounter is replacing the trauma of the death of
Shroom and the experiences of war and of homecoming; thus he starts thinking of a possible future between himself and Faison: “maybe there’s hope for his love life after all. Maybe it didn’t end with Shroom.57”(224) Billy starts thinking seriously about
Kathryn’s suggestion of running away from the army and taking shelter with an anti-war group located in Austin, Texas. He envisions a normal, peaceful place for him with
Faison: “the vision yaws and stutters until Faison materializes at his side, and then it all unfolds in gorgeous HD, he and Faison living quiet in their secure location” (260). For
Billy, safety thereby becomes a spatial concept that he locates within Faison, even if it is only a temporary vision. The temporariness here is not only because he is being redeployed soon but also because of Faison’s reaction to his suggestion of running away together. When Faison hugs him and says goodbye, Billy expresses his inner feelings:
“‘Girl, I’d just about run away with you.’ She lifts her head, and with that one look he knows it’s not to be. Her confusion decides it…fear of losing her binds him firmly to the hero he has to be” (305). To Faison, Billy is the hero soldier who is protecting them. In this, she represents all Americans in the abstraction of Billy’s feelings and emotions.
57 Though the novel, there are some examples that may refer to homosexual encounters, for example, before each mission, Shroom tells every one of his team “I love you” and make them reply in the same way. Also, at some point, Dime kisses Billy in a strange way. However, the events of the novel suggest that these actions refer more to the vulnerability and brotherly relations formulated in the strange place of war. 120 Billy struggles between the wish of his sister to quit the army and Faison’s celebration of him as a hero. At the end, he does not listen to his sister, Kathryn, and decides to keep the image of the hero Faison, and the nation behind her, celebrates. On the other hand, the relation Jawad establishes between the two girls in his life prove to be a failure as well because they are compelled by political ideologies and intertwined connections with trauma. Reem, his fiancé and the love of his life, becomes an image that recurs in his dreams and nightmares as being raped or killed by the American soldiers. This sexual symbol of a military representation reflects the internalization of violence and the implicit endorsement of hegemony. It also renders normal life in the land of occupation inaccessible that people can only live through memories. When Reem leaves Jawad for good because she has cancer and had to take off her breast, she sends him an apology, long letter that her keeps for years. In it she expresses her situation in full and asks him to forget her, she says “I will carry you in my memory. My body will carry your scents and pores in its memory. Please forgive me” (114). Choosing to leave turns Reem from reality into sensual dreams and all is left is her memory and the trauma of her leaving.
However, the space of sexuality continues with his second lover, Ghayda. She is a young girl whose father has been killed and her mother resorts to Jawad’s house for safety. Though the relation between them becomes sexual and intimate, Jawad gives her up easily and she, and her mother and brother, immigrate to her uncle. Jawad’s refusal to marry and settle is his mental resistance against his life. It seems that the sexual spaces are impotent in facing his trauma. He is not satisfied with his job, and his life in general, and thus confused boundaries between his sexuality and trauma resulted in him rejecting 121 marriage and love in general. These mental, metaphorical, spatial trauma that Jawad and
Billy encounter through their sexual need are employed as a locus of trauma in relation to political and social norms.
In reality, sexual encounters are not the only traumatizing relation if we to describe the inner self of both protagonists. For Billy, his main trauma springs from the idea that his his homeland and the site of war are two separate locations. He cannot share his memory with his fellow US citizens because they only know what they have seen on TV. Such a distinction is far from the reality of Jawad, since his homeland becomes the site of war after 2003. Readers follow Jawad from childhood to the present, seeing at the same time the unfolding of Iraq’s history and culture, which changes radically after the invasion.
Radwa Mahmoud suggests that “The Corpse Washer is a ‘trauma novel’ on two levels.
First, in an individual sense, it is a narrative of the trauma its characters experience.
Second on a broader historical level, it is the cultural product of a country with a traumatic history” (51). As a character, Jawad reflects the collective trauma of a country that has endured generations of war and destruction, where death rates are high and bodies are mutilated, a situation that affects the number of dead bodies Jawad encounter every day. His individual trauma springs from having artistic tendencies not in harmony with his family’s profession. Specifically, the place where he carries on his family business, where dead bodies are being washed and shrouded before they are buried, is
Jawad’s site of trauma, one that he attempts to avoid his whole life but that the
122 circumstances of war oblige him to return to every time. In short, his familiar place is
“unhomely”58 to Jawad.
Antoon’s meticulous, lengthy description of the place vivifies the space of the maghassil, with its clean, marble bench, verses from the holy Quran hung on the wall, and camphor and lotus smell, a place that does not need a sign to define or identify because it is not a shop or a store, as the father indicates. To Jawad, such details are overwhelmed by the “death traces—its scents and memories—[that] were present in every inch of that place” (11). It is a modest, clean place yet very old because it has been the family business for six generations. Jawad recalls his reaction to seeing a dead body for the first time: “I was afraid and felt a tightness in my chest” (18). This triggers his psychological wound and an inner trauma, leaving an internal scar on his mind. Because he encounters such a feeling in early ages, Jawad decides to resist becoming his father’s apprentice by creating art, especially after his art teacher in school teaches him how to celebrate life through art (30-1). This motivates Jawad to defy his father’s will and enter the Academy of Fine Arts with an aspiration to be a great artist. This place provides the freedom Jawad seeks from the maghassil, and for a while, he thinks he can practice drawing and sculpting. However, when Iraq is invaded in 2003, his Academy is bombed, destroying the only inspiring place he enjoys away from the dead bodies of the maghassil, and Jawad’s dreams of becoming an artist vanish. His nightmare of the disintegrating statue in his hand (141) finalizes his relation with art by situating Jawad at
58 In her essay "Iraqi Short Fiction: The Unhomely at Home and Abroad”, Ferial Ghazoul approaches Freud’s theory of the uncanny through the lens of Homi Bhabha and discusses the “unhomely” mode in the writings of ten Iraqi short story writers of the 1990s. 123 the locus of the maghassil. Upon awakening, Jawad realizes the impossibility of becoming an artist anymore, and with the increase in the death rate, Jawad has to support his family by reluctantly taking over the maghassil. Despite being drained emotionally by the place, Jawad succeeds in normalizing the spaces of the maghassil and suppresses his internal displacement--a state of mind that disconnects Jawad from his surroundings.
Nonetheless, this numbness during the day disturbs Jawad, causing his daily ugly life to be reenacted in a repetition compulsion of nightmares that exacerbate his trauma.
These recurring nightmares are formulated from the first day he enters the place and sees a dead body in the summer59 of his ninth grade. This is the day that his nightmares start. He describes his situation that night: “the dead man’s face kept gazing at me that night, but he had no eyes, just hollow sockets. I didn’t dare tell mother or father about the nightmare I kept having that entire summer” (22). Jawad’s memory preserves his spatial encounter, which accordingly stimulates traumatizing nightmares; thereafter, all his nightmares seem to occur in the maghassil. Antoon presents Jawad’s nightmares in distinctive scenes where, usually, the reader is unaware whether the described events are real or not, perhaps because life and death intersect in these nightmares along with horror, violence and blood. These dreams also suggest a similarity between the spaces of Jawad’s reality and that of his dreams because they all are governed by death and violence, he denotes that: “death is not content with what it takes from me in my waking hours. It insists on haunting me even in my sleep. Isn’t it enough that I toil all day tending to its
59 This is the same summer that he starts drawing in his sketchbook. 124 eternal guests, preparing them to sleep in its lap? Is death punishing me because I thought
I could escape its clutches?” (3)
These recurring nightmares denote the repetitive compulsion of Jawad’s trauma, which is enhanced by the non-linear narrative and flashbacks, an indication of an outside action that is internalized. This is consistent with Erikson’s statement of traumatized people: “trauma involves a continual reliving of some wounding experience in daydreams and nightmares, flashback and hallucinations and in a compulsive seeking out of similar circumstances” (184), and this happens because “our memory repeats to us what we haven’t yet come to terms with, what haunt us” (Erikson 184). Actually, the novel opens with a nightmare in a timeless, unrecognizable place with an unidentified narrator. In the dream, the long-loved beloved of Jawad, Reem, is asking him to wash her just like he does the dead bodies60. On a marble bench, similar to the one he uses, the narrator attempts to use the rain to wash her, but he is stopped by American soldiers, who drag
Reem away and behead him. The narrator wakes from this nightmare and declares that he works as a corpse washer in a place that he wishes he could “escape without feeling guilty” (3). This scene sets the tone for the whole novel and anticipates the psychological trauma this narrator suffers just as Freud assumes that the traumatized person is “fixated to his trauma” and elaborates “dreams occurring repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident from which he wakes up in another fright” (Beyond Pleasure
7). Between sleep and awakening, Jawad suffers agony and depression with bleak
60 As part of the ritual of washing and shrouding dead bodies in the Shi’ite tradition, dead men are washed by men and dead women are washed by women only. 125 realities and dark nightmares. His awakening from nightmares is terrifying as well, he remarks on awakening, “I woke up panting and sweating. I wiped my forehead and face.
The same nightmare had been recurring for weeks, with minor changes” (2). Though the spaces of these nightmares are not real, they overwhelm Jawad in his reality; after waking up he claims, “the image of Reem being dragged away by her hair keeps returning” (4).
In another dream, he describes the number of bodies he encounters, saying, “Their numbers multiply and they fill the entire maghassil, leaving no place for me. I go out into the street, but throngs of living corpses are surrounding the place, filling the streets and sidewalks. I start to suffocate, then bolt awake” (138). This image of suffocation and the recurring incident of the first dream follow Jawad throughout the novel and mark his relation to the maghassil, especially after the escalation of the numbers of mutilated, dead bodies as a result of bombing and acts of terror. This makes Jawad states, “death’s fingers were crawling everywhere around me…now death is more generous, thanks to the
Americans” (104). The only break from all the madness and disconnection around him happens when he visits the small garden attached outside the maghassil, with its large pomegranate tree, a familiar place that never changes through the years.
The pomegranate tree stands alone in this tiny garden with its beautiful branches that are watered by the water used to wash the dead bodies through a small drain. This place becomes Jawad’s solitude and the tree his lonely acquaintance after he loses everyone to war: his brother is a martyr, his father’s heart stops because of the war, his first beloved has breast cancer and travels away, his second beloved emigrates with her family after the killing of her father, and his friend dies by an American bomb. Jawad recalls his 126 special relation to this place, “I’d been sitting the last few months on the chair I’d put in front of it [pomegranate tree] to converse with it. It has become my only companion in the world” (183). One example of his long relation with the tree happened when he was a teenager and began drawing the dead people in his sketchbook; his father scolded him for disrespecting the dead by drawing them, but Jawad found solace in his pomegranate tree after he complains to it his agonies: “I apologized [to his father] and never did it again. I felt ashamed and humiliated and went out to the little garden and sat next to the pomegranate tree, tending to my wounds” (30). Jawad accepts his fate, the trauma of his life and the de-familiarization around him when even his last act of resistance to leave the country and travel away from such a place and such a profession fails. As a singular person, Jawad is prevented from crossing the borders to Jordan, and this marks the final stroke, as it causes a complete surrender to the de-familiarized spaces as well as a refusal to accept any norms and familial suggestions such as love or marriage. This is because, just like any traumatized person, Jawad has “withdrawn into a kind of protective envelope, a place of mute, aching loneliness, in which the traumatic experience is treated as a solitary burden that needs to be expunged by acts of denial and resistance” (Erikson
186). In a sense, all Jawad’s surroundings become unhomely except for the pomegranate tree in the small garden. Through the years, this place and the tree are transformed from an aesthetic place where Jawad used to draw the branches, fruits, and the serenity of the surrounding spaces of the tree to a living object to which he shares his inner thoughts and deepest sorrows, a place where he finds solace under the branches of the tree. It is his sanctuary from the death that is suffocating and unbearable, or the political and cultural 127 deterioration that disturbs individual’s ambitions and dreams. The novels ends with a final realization that life and death are inseparable spaces: ‘I had thought that life and death were two separate worlds with clearly marked boundaries” (184).
Together with Billy, Jawad faces a displacement from his communality and a sense of detachment represented by the end of both narratives; Billy prefers to go back to the site of war and Jawad resorts to a small garden that is attached to the maghssil. Despite being alienated from their normality and surroundings, these characters cannot originate transcultural relations because they are burdened by historical and political trends succumbing to psychological and cultural pressure.
IV. Closing remarks
In this chapter, I have discussed the various relations between spaces of trauma.
Moving from the political, historical, the cultural collective to the individual, the chapter establishes a spatial structure that explicates the marginal position of the soldiers in the invader’s army and the civilians in the invaded land. Jenny Edkins writes, “What we call trauma takes place when the very powers that we are convinced will protect us and give us security become our tormentors: when the community of which we considered ourselves members turns against us or when our family is no longer a source of refuge but a site of danger” (Trauma 4). The narratives of the experiences of both protagonists make trauma an emblem of displacement, dispossession, and de-familiarization. Unable to locate themselves, both Billy and Jawad agonize about their displacement from their familiar spaces through a rupture between the external and the internal, a trauma that is 128 partly unprocessed because of the denial of the trauma of the other, even though both occupy the same place at the same time.
The similarity in the ways both narrators describe the Americans as giant animals eating everything or destroying everything shifts the focus to the victimization of the soldiers of the invading country and the civilians in the invaded one, putting both in a similar space of victimhood. When Billy visits the players’ locker room at Texas
Stadium, he is impressed by the extravagant embodiment of the sports industry, and thinks, “Any other country would go broke trying to feed these mammoths, who blandly listen as Norm speaks” (173). Likewise, Jawad describes the American Humvee they encounter on the road to bury his father as: “the Humvee continued to approach, looking like a mythical animal intent on devouring us” (66). However, while Jawad deals with
Americans as occupiers of his space and soldiers as representative of the whole country,
Billy makes a clear distinction between the American civilians and the soldiers. Fountain, as well as many other American writers, makes the soldiers victims, positioning them on the same level as the citizens of the invaded country. Such an act is totally rebuffed by
Iraqi writers, especially Antoon who articulates this idea when he criticizes the poem of
Brian Turner, discussed in the introduction of this study, as he thinks the problem:
Is [with] humaniz[ing] the soldier (in a volunteer army) and presents him as a victim, at the expense of civilians (Iraqis). Or, at best, they [American writers] posit an equivalence between soldiers and civilians. This is quite problematic since being a civilian in a war zone in not voluntary, but being a soldier in the US’s war machine is” (“Embedded Poetry”). Despite building up similar spaces of trauma, displacement and victimization, Fountain and Antoon cannot share a similar perspective. Because Fountain depends on a
129 generalization of the idea of war without any specificity, only acknowledging that it is an
“immoral war” (“Ang Lee Took the Idea”), the contextual narrative space of “the war goes on… [but] culpability is left floating somewhere in the air above Texas Stadium, adhering to neither the soldiers nor the citizens” (Buchanan 99). Actually, Fountain is holding the American society accountable for sending young men to war and directing the attention to American society, with its capitalism and consumerism, more than he is focusing on the war and its horrors—that even the Bravo squad shares the public’s consumerism when negotiating how much money each deserves for selling the story of their heroic act or who is going to play their roles in the much-discussed movie.
Both narratives resist closure, however, leaving the reader ill at ease, questioning the morality of war and the space between soldiers and civilians in deciding to wage a war.
On the other hand, Antoon holds the occupation liable for dehumanizing the Iraqi people.
His message is load and clear, and he declares it plainly, “I tried to show ... that this encounter between an occupying military and civilians, is going to be humiliating and horrible and traumatic, if not violent and deadly, irrespective of any of the slogans or the intentions of the people carrying it out” (“In Civilian Snapshot”). Antoon is against any narrative that marginalizes the spaces representing the Iraqi character or that repudiates his agency. Unfortunately, the spaces of narrative representation of the protagonists in war stories converge through the denial of the other’s victimhood and trauma.
The similarity between the situations of Billy and Jawad arises from challenging the unhomely cultural and social positioning set forth by a disengaged community. The protagonists’ resistance fails to accommodate to these external circumstances and both 130 characters are unable to free themselves from the subversive actions of a constrained environment; hence, they accept their destiny as traumatized and follow the expected rules of their society, and this acceptance enhances their internal displacement.
131 Chapter Four
Sharing the Pain: Recovery through Testimonial Narration in
Redeployment by Phil Klay and The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories
by Hassan Blasim
Testimony is “a discursive practice, as opposed
To Pure theory…As a performative speech act, Testimony in effect addresses what in history is Action that exceeds any substantialized Significance, and what in happenings is impact That dynamically explodes any conceptual Reifications and any constative delimitations” Felman, Testimony
I. Witnessing and Testifying
Elie Wiesel declared, “if Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle and the
Renaissance the sonnet, our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony” (qtd. in Felman and Laub 5-6). Indeed, since the Holocaust crisis and the need to express the survivors’ experience, literary testimonies have been a helpful means of creating a psychological and historical account of catastrophes. For Shoshana Felman and Dori
Laub, “contemporary works of art use testimony both as the subject of their drama and as a medium of their literary transmission…Testimony has become a crucial mode of our relation to events of our times” (Testimony 5). While their theory encompasses literary testimonies for the atrocities caused by major wars, such as the destruction wreaked by
132 the atomic bomb and the Holocaust, I believe that literary testimonies are fundamental remedies for the individual as well as the collective trauma in the war of 2003. Texts that testify, they are simply “bearing witness to a crisis of trauma” (1), suggesting an interchangeable connection among literary texts, traumata, and testimonies. However, the epistemological structure of witnessing a traumatic event, predominantly, embodies a discursive statement of the event and an arbitrary representation of the self because the moment itself is basically missing. In reading The Fall by Albert Camus, Felman describes the traumatic event as “a moment of a missed encounter with reality, an encounter whose elusiveness cannot be owned and yet whose impact can no longer be erased” (167). The question raised here is how literary texts can work as testimonies if the main event has been missed.
Cathy Caruth suggests that traumatic narrative grasps the traumatic event belatedly, stating, “at the heart of the […] stories is thus an enigmatic testimony not only to the nature of violent events but to what, in trauma, resists simple comprehension”
(Unclaimed Experience 6). Earlier, Felman exemplifies a similar claim:
Testimony seems to be composed of bits and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not settled into understanding or remembrance, acts that cannot be constructed as knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our frames of reference…testimony is, in other words, a discursive practice, as opposed to a pure theory. To testify—to vow to tell, to promise and produce one’s own speech as material evidence for truth—is to accomplish a speech act, rather than to simply formulate a statement. (Testimony 5)
To Felman, the “missed encounter” that exceeds human understanding can be captured through pieces of a memory and then expressed and transmitted as evidence through
133 literary testimonies. Such texts, which have the function of ‘witnessing,’ navigate between the unattainability of the “missed encounter” and the necessity of representing it, while also needing to reflect the violence and destruction of the traumatic event with credibility and reliability. These texts relate to an audience the experience of the ‘missed encounter’, as Felman asserts: “texts that testify do not simply report facts but, in different ways, encounter –and make us [the readers] encounter—strangeness” (7).
Asserting the necessity of an audience, listeners or readers, in the process of recovering trauma, here, war trauma, establishes a bond through sharing the experience of the traumatic event that might become part of the collective memory, history, and psychology of a community. In a sense, texts that bear witness to war and traumatic events testify to the sufferings of an individual and transmit these atrocities to a community, nationally or globally, during war time.
The purpose of witnessing is to allow the listener to be a “participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event” (57). Simply, trauma generates a communication between the witness/speaker and the listener/audience. According to Laub, “the listener…has to be at the same time a witness to the trauma and a witness to himself” (58). Therefore, Laub divides the position of witnessing into three levels: “the level of being a witness to oneself within the experience; the level of being a witness to the testimonies of others; and the level of being a witness to the process of witnessing itself” (Ibid 75). In this case, witnessing is a commitment that rediscovers the missing reality of the original traumatic event. Bearing witness to a traumatic event then signifies the truth with reference to a historical framework to ultimately enable the traumatized to find justice and peace, 134 because “survivors [do] not only need to survive so that they [can] tell their story; they also need […] to tell their story in order to survive” (Ibid 78).
Processing such issues within the frame of the Holocaust, as Laub does, might be feasible if we recognize the division between perpetrators and victims, but how can we recognize the validity of testimony and witnessing if both conflicting sides, in the 2003
US invasion on Iraq, claim victimization? Can narrative testimonies from both opposite teams be validated in terms of witnessing and testifying since they revolve around the same event? If yes, how authentic can these testimonies be in addressing the other? Or do these literary narratives represent a subjective self of the writer-witness, or retain adequate, reasoned characteristics? And, particularly, can literary testimony facilitate a recovery or a healing outcome through the process of witnessing? In this chapter, these questions along with the relation between witnessing, testimonies and remedies adhere to a fundamental ideology of the discussion of the selected texts.
To acknowledge this ideology, we have to put in mind that recovering from a traumatic event is controversial. Theorists are divided on the possibility of recovering from a traumatic event. Felman, Caruth and others embrace the anti-therapeutic stance by neglecting the healing theme in favor of “the new mode of reading and listening that both the language of trauma, and the silence of its mute repetition of suffering, profoundly and imperatively demand” (Unclaimed Experience 9). To these theorists, narrating a traumatic event and engaging in a listening process are ends in themselves, accordingly when survivors testify to their traumatic event, recovery is established and the traumatized can feel that they are being saved. On the other hand, critics, like Judith 135 Herman posit this same engagement between narrating and listening as curative through offering reconnection with the community. Herman supposes an embracing community willing to share the memories and testimonies of the traumatized experience is a step towards healing. She describes three stages of recovery, namely: safety, remembrance, and reconnection: “in the course of a successful recovery, it should be possible to recognize a gradual shift from unpredictable danger to reliable safety, from dissociated trauma to acknowledged memory, and from stigmatized isolation to restored social connection” (155). The two texts examined in this chapter, The Corpse Exhibition and
Other Stories by Hassan Blasim and Redeployment by Phil Klay, place different emphasis on these two approaches depending on the purpose and aim of the writer.
Blasim testifies to the horror of war and trauma for the sake of testifying. He transmits the collective and individual violent experiences of the Iraqi people into a shocking story to exemplify the horrible events happening for more than a generation. Klay rather tells a story to testify to the society about the psychological needs of soldiers after returning home. Klay’s approach is more didactic and therapeutic in its effect to narrate the methods by which soldiers might mingle and share with a society the experience of war that is unapproachable to it.
Witnessing then is an interactive process between the listener and the audience where the listener “comes to be a participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event” (Testimony
57). This sharing puts a moral responsibility on the listener, mostly represented by civilians, and in consequence demands an active response and a shareable accountability.
It is “the ethical act of witnessing,” as described by Emanuel Levinas: “To be oneself, 136 otherwise than being, to be dis-interested, is to bear the wretchedness and bankruptcy of the other, and even the responsibility that the other can have for me. To be oneself… is always to have one degree of responsibility more, the responsibility for the responsibility of the other” (qtd. in Metz). Felman calls such responsibility “the medium of realization of the testimony” (Testimony 3), where witnessing comes with a moral responsibility that a witness, or a listener, needs to recognize. According to Felman, there are some rules the listeners have to follow to maintain their position, and to establish a link into the heart and mind of the traumatized. Felman calls such a relation “the contract of testimony” (72) by which the survivor feels safe to share his moment of trauma. It is not an easy task since traumatic testimony is fragmented and marked by discontinuity which leads the listener “to protect himself from the offshoots of the trauma and from the intensity of the flood of affect” (73). In this case, the listener needs a mechanism of “listening defenses” to sustain his position as listener yet without affecting his own mentality, and these mechanisms might include:
A sense of total paralysis…a sense of outrage and anger unwittingly directed at the victim…a sense of total withdrawal, and numbness…a flood of awe and fear…foreclosure through facts, through the obsession with fact finding… hyperemotionally which superficially looks like compassion and caring. (72-3)
In this case, when listening to a witness, listeners fluctuate between being outsiders or insiders or what I like to call--a temporal dimension, which distinguishes the listener/reader in two ways; either he is a genuine listener using these mechanisms as a defense or he is disengaged emotionally in the witness’s narrations, for example, audiences the witness meets randomly in public places.
137 When Lanzman directed Shoah about the Holocaust, he interviewed many witness with different views and narrations technique in his attempt to significantly capture the
“fragmentation of the testimonies—a fragmentation both of tongues and perspectives— that cannot ultimately be surpassed” (Felman 223). In the same sense I intend to view the short stories of the two collections in this chapter. Various perspectives may open up a dialogue between the characters and the readers and transcend national and international relations in the same way these writers are treating their inside- the-texts audiences.
However, each one of these writer has a different approach and perspective into the witness-listener relation. While Klay asks for a recognition from a disengaged society where the soldier is “othered,” Blasim’s perspective addresses the global where he demands an acknowledgment for a society that has been treated as other and neglected by the international forum. The discourse of both collections vary according to the perceived audiences and the needed reactive response of the listeners/readers. In a sense, in both collections, narrators testify to what they witness during the traumatic event, whether they are American soldiers or Iraqi civilians; and listeners need to respond according to their own interest, position, and relation to the event as well as the traumatized.
By putting the two collections of short stories into conversation with trauma theories, I explore the ways in which these literary representations function as testimonies to the catastrophic events that shaped the 2003 war and its consequences for the communities involved. In particular, I examine the stories’ use of various narrators and audiences as an attempt to capture the traumatic moment of the individual and of the community as well. The short stories also depict ideological projection of witness-victim-perpetrator 138 relations to stimulate the readers’ interaction with the stories. Representing the impact of violence on their characters, both writers employ visionary images and realistic/fantastic projection to bear witness to the destructive power of war. Together, their collections bear witness to the mental and psychological damages caused by war, thereby providing a means by which the community can speak about its agony. I argue that the connection created between the narrator and the audiences in these texts provides an avenue through which individuals and communities can articulate their sufferings, acknowledging the victimhood of anyone involved, and somehow search for remedies. I also articulate how the other is depicted in a way that deconstruct any cross-cultural relations. The traumatic narratives in this chapter enunciates the calamity of war through bearing witness to the traumatic event and testifying the horror of the experience to the community.
II. The ideology of Redeployment and The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories
Phil Klay and Hassan Blasim epitomize the relation between writers who bear witness to the same historical moment and traumatic event. Together, Klay and Blasim reflect upon the violence and destruction of war from different standpoints, and, equally, their short stories carry the burden of witnessing and sharing with a variety of audiences inside and outside the texts. However, while Klay represents a small percentage of American society—the soldier community during and after the 2003 American-Iraq war—Blasim demonstrates consecutive atrocities endured by the Iraqi people in contemporary history.
One of the main differences between the two writers lies in the idea of ‘collectivity’. Klay 139 undertakes the mission of educating his whole community about the sufferings of its soldiers, simply because the war was waged far from the shores of his country. He attempts to resituate the damaged memory of the soldier within the collective. His stories exemplify Feaver, Kohn, and Cohn’s argument that “a ‘gap’ in values or attitudes between people in uniform and civilian society may…become so wide that it threatens the effectiveness of the armed forces and civil-military cooperation” (Feaver et al.).
This is a problem Blasim has never faced, since, after the 2003 US invasion, his homeland suddenly became a battlefield where separating war from normal everyday life is impossible. Thus, his writings mark a collective as well as an individual trauma; he condemns the invasion not through signifying the atrocities inflicted by US army but through an indicative result, his stories pinpoint the new sociopolitical affinities resulting from the occupation as a separate ethnic trauma. In a sense, after the 2003 American occupation of Iraq, the collective memory of wars, sanction, and trauma that constructs most of the Iraqis’ memories and national identity was remapped onto a sectarian collectivity. This remapping dislocates people physically and psychologically and complicates relations of nation-people and people-people, besides, generating confusion about what constitutes the best representation of their psychological and historical collectivity. Blasim seems to be aware of these problems and therefore chooses magical realism in his stories to represent a community that faces various political, religious, and social changes within a relatively short span of history. In this regard, Blasim remarks that he uses fantasia and black humor because “It reflects the environment the stories emerged from. A car explosion in a market, where children die, is a fact but it is also a 140 horror story.”(“Writer Hassan Blasim on Magic, Horror, and his Journey”) this indicative shocking result is Blasim’s technique to castigate the invasion and the horror of war.
Both writers are firsthand witnesses to war and its horrors because Klay served as a public affairs officer in Iraq’s Anbar Province from 2007 to 2008. After he was discharged from the army, he got his MFA from Hunter College and wrote his first collection of short stories, Redeployment (2014). This book won the National Book
Award for fiction in 2014 and many other awards (The Soldier-Citizen 30). Since then,
Klay has become a family man with a wife and kids, to whom he always refers in his interviews and essays. Nonetheless, his writings focus primarily on his experience as a soldier, concentrating on the gap between the life of the soldier and the life of the citizen.
Klay asserts, “As a former Marine, I’ve watched the unraveling of Iraq with a sense of grief, rage, and guilt. As an American citizen, I’ve felt the same, though when I try to trace the precise lines of responsibilities of a civilian versus a veteran, I got all tangled up.” (Ibid 7). This fusion of sentiments, mixed with his distinction between the responsibilities of a solider and those of a citizen, lies at the heart of his short stories and is established through the strategies of the different narrators experiencing the trauma of war and the reactive audience, whether engaged or not. In his essay “The Warrior at the
Mall,” he compares his life during and after enlistment to highlight the difference between the life of a soldier and that of a civilian: “There’s something bizarre about being a veteran of a war that doesn’t end, in a country that doesn’t pay attention. At this point…I haven’t lost my certainty that Americans should be paying more attention to our wars and that our lack of attention truly does cost lives” (Citation). His awareness of this 141 distinction positions him as an advocate for his fellow soldiers and a political activist, as revealed in his published essays. Actually, his patriotic political opinions mostly aim at bridging the gap and improving the relations between returning soldiers and their surrounding communities. He wishes to share the experiences of soldiers by telling their stories, with all their atrocities, physical and psychological transformations, and the trauma they face while at war. To stimulate the public to connect with the soldiers, Klay places the soldiers in a witness-victim position, neglecting, somewhat, their roles as occupiers and perpetrators and also neglecting the representation of the other. This happens because his work as a journalist in the army gives him a keen insight into the sufferings of other soldiers, which he reflects upon in his stories. Klay’s aspiration is to create a shared memory where soldiers’ experiences are integrated into the collective history and memory of the community. Thus, for Klay, telling soldiers’ stories is like offering a testimony that needs to be addressed, recognized, and dealt with (Kalinowski); therefore, his narrators in this collection of short stories encounter moments of human suffering, devastating truth, and moral challenges.
Blasim’s narrators face equivalent ethical challenges; however, his stories expose vulnerable, violent situations. He bears witness to the violence and atrocities impacting the Iraqi community and Iraqi individuals since the 1980 Iraq-Iran war. Born in Baghdad in 1973, Blasim had a free spirit that did not approve the oppression of the Ba’ath regime; hence, he has spent most of his adult life persecuted by the political system. As an astute writer, filmmaker, and poet defying the dictatorship through his films and writings,
Blasim, at a certain point, had to leave Baghdad. He settled in Sulaymania under a new 142 name for fear of his life and the life of his family back in Baghdad. He eventually decided it was not safe even there and he immigrated, illegally, to Finland. His exilic journey took him three years through borders, where he suffered humiliation and torture, a journey that he describes extensively in some of his interviews and in his stories as well (comma press). His stories were translated into English by Jonathan Wright, and both won “the
2014 Independent Foreign Fiction prize for his first collection of short stories entitled
The Iraqi Christ (2013) (Ashfeldet). Before this collection, he published another collection of short stories, The Madman of Freedom Square (2009), and then borrowed stories from both these collections to create The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories from Iraq (2014), which is my focus in this chapter.
Like Klay, Blasim’s life experience construct his writings. However, his literary production expresses his resistance to political, religious, and even literary constraint because he wants his literature to bear witness to the travesties occurring in Iraq: “Iraq has been a maelstrom of violence and destruction for more than five decades. Literature is one form of human cognitive defiance. It’s like life, which violence cannot stop, however vicious it might be. We can’t just sit around watching and waiting. We have to get on with it” (Ibid). Projecting the horror of war on Iraqi people more than focusing on writing in a refined, standard Arabic generates some critical objections to his writings, to which he responds, “They [Arabic linguists] talked about the beauty of language and the poetic quality of sentences, while people in Iraq were being slaughtered every day. I don’t want to think about language and form. Everything I write just bursts out from inside me unplanned” (Ibid). Part of his revolt against the violence of war is his revolt 143 against formal Arabic rules of writing. He uses fragmented representations and discusses taboo subjects like religion and politics in his stories. “His taboo-breaking starts with grammar and diction and extends to an unsentimental depiction of behavioral and moral filth; he's as troubling to mainstream Arabic literary culture as Joyce once was to the west. For a long time his writing was only accessible to the Arab world online” (Yassin-
Kassab). Because of this attitude, I consider his literary fiction a testimony to the mayhem occurring in Iraq in recent history stretching back to before the 2003 American occupation. Both Blasim and Klay bear witness to war and its horror, no matter how different their perspectives are. Being witnesses to the atrocities of war, both writers amplify specific moments they have witnessed, mostly traumatic moments, and fictionalize them in the lives of their narrators
Blasim holds a more globalized perspective of violence than Klay. In an article, Helen
Benedict describes how she attended Barnes and Noble celebration of the launching of
Blasim’s collection by inviting him in the US. She reports his questions, which reflect his attitude towards war, the ethical misperception, and of the ability to enact violence on others:
All the time, I hear American soldiers say they are proud,” he said, shifting restlessly in his chair. “But how can you carry a weapon and invade another country and call yourself proud? ... Everybody needs to feel proud, of course. American soldiers are proud of what they have done in Iraq. Iraqi insurgents are proud of killing American soldiers because they were defending their country. Even jihadists are proud of something. But, again, how can you carry a weapon that kills people and call yourself proud? (“The Moral Confusion of Post-War America”)
144 Though Blasim’s stories discuss Iraq and its people, they transcend boundaries and nationalities into criticizing the horror and moral wrongdoings of war in general. His concentration on arguing against war makes him ignore the “difference between a killer who comes wearing the uniform of the US army, and a killer who wears the uniform of
Saddam’s regime” (Benedict). His stories testify to the destruction occurring to Iraqis, and then transfer that witnessing to a broader global audience.
Just like Kachachi and Antoon, Blasim has the background necessary to testify to the horrors of war himself, even though he lives in Finland. In the same way he considers himself, psychologically, an insider:
The cultural point of reference that dominates their core experiences. We cannot overlook the fact that several of the contributors to this issue belong to Iraqi generations that witnessed firsthand Saddam Hussein’s regime’s obsession with an accelerated and blunt attempt to strategically link the past with the present. (Hanoosh)
Blasim earns his authenticity by concentrating on the issues of Iraq in his stories. The experiences Blasim has witnessed give his voice credibility and entitle him to be described as belonging to the “transnational cartography of literature” (Löytty 74).
Much like Blasim, Klay is entitled to address soldiers’ issues as an insider. As described by Scranton, Klay embodies “the moral authority of a veteran”61 (The Trauma
Hero). His work as a journalist in the army opens the door for him to speak to as many
61In an article about the liability of a writer writing about war, Tedrowe declares that even writers who have already gone to war might have the same ‘insecurity around authority’ as Klay. A strange situation revealed Klay’s anxiety. During a public reading of a serious story about the second battle of Fallujah, someone started laughing loudly. This made Klay nervous because, at that time, he was already out of the army. He thought that the man was ‘scoffing him’ because “he’d gotten it all wrong”. 145 soldiers as he can and reflect upon their experiences in his writings. In an interview, Klay asserts:
When I came from war, one of the things that happened was that people would ask me what it was like, and how the war is going. And I generally felt empowered to answer them. After all, I’d been there. And yet, each person has such a small piece of war, and that piece will be powerfully shaped not only by when they were there and where in Iraq they were, but also by what job they did. So rather than writing a unified novel about the experience of war, I wanted twelve different voices—voices that would approach similar themes but from very different perspectives. (Rubenstein)
Through being an eyewitness, Klay has the ability to register the anxiety, sufferings, fear, and even guilt the soldiers felt and then transfer this apprehension to his narrators. His focus on the individual is deliberate as he states, “My intent was that that would open a space for the readers to come in and critically engage with the sorts of claims the narrators are making” (Rubenstein). In fact, through victimizing the soldiers, Klay’s stories ask for an empathy readers that reflect the need to bridge the gap between soldiers and the public through the politics of witnessing and listening. He holds the society responsible for sending young men to war and thus asks them to approach the soldiers rigorously and sincerely.
Therefore, these writers expose human vulnerability and sufferings through the process of testifying and engaging in process of response. Klay asserts, “If we fetishize trauma as incommunicable then survivors are trapped—unable to feel truly known by their nonmilitary friends and family” (“After War, a Failure of Imagination”). In this,
Klay insists on the communicative bond between the soldier and those around him as a shared responsibility in the decision-making of going to war. He then adds, “Veterans
146 need an audience that is both receptive and critical. Believing war is beyond words is an abrogating responsibility”. This may lead us to assume that, through testifying to the memories, agonies and sufferings of these soldiers, Klay shares their experiences of war to obligate the community to become actively involved in what he calls “the bargain between citizen and soldier”. He describes this bargain as follows: “when someone joins the military, they entrust themselves to the care of the US. Body politics. US. citizens elect the leaders who order soldiers to war, and they pay for the war with their tax dollars, so they damn sure better bring those soldiers home” (“Still Wanted, Dead, or Alive”).
The narrators of Klay’s stories act as a medium of testimony to the unfulfilled bargain by the US citizen, in the same way Felman describes the testimony of a witness as: “the testimony is addressed to others, the witness, from within the solitude of his own stance, is the vehicle of an occurrence, a reality, a stance or a dimension beyond himself”
(Testimony 3). Likewise, Blasim positions himself as a medium to testify to the violence occurring in Iraq: “I put myself in the stories, by looking at myself from outside. They all reflect me in some way” (Heath). Afterwards, he adds, “I look at what happened in Iraq and feel that I must tell the story” (Ibid). Blasim recapitulates the horror he witnessed, when prosecuted by the government and during his journey, by shocking the reader with graphic images that produce more awareness of the influence of war on human mentality.
Both writers address the reader by initiating a bond between the narrator and the audience, listeners or readers.
147 III. The Rhetoric of Testimonies between Witnessing and Listening
Blasim’s narrative technique disorients the reader through gruesome setups where the narrators might be dead, as in “The Iraqi Christ” or a jinni-like human, as in “The Hole.”
Because Blasim thinks that “violence in the city is like a nightmare. It’s real and not real at the same time” (Heath). Accordingly, his texts witness and testify to the violence occurring in Iraq and transfer this feeling to his readers, a feeling of strangeness, as suggested by Felman. Felman argues that, through this encounter, the reader somehow re- experiences the unimaginable, unjustified horror and the unthinkable actions pervading the witness of the traumatic event, presumably, here, Iraqi recent history, concentrating on the alteration of the collective community after 2003. Critic Haytham Bahoora proposes that most Iraqi authors have chosen to write in a magical, horrific mode since
2003 because “realism, which depends on verisimilitude in rendering an accurate representation of reality to the reader, cannot adequately convey the violence Iraqis have experienced” (190). Noticeably, in the first story of the collection, an interviewer is explaining the unique job of a killer to an applying interviewee who wants to join the gang, and Blasim addresses the reader directly. The narrator in this story, “The Corpse
Exhibition,” is the interviewee who is listening throughout the story while the manager of the cult of slayers is explaining the magical beauty of killing. The manager portrays the aesthetic methods for killing and displaying the bodies of what he calls “the clients”:
“after studying the client’s file you must submit a brief note on how you propose to kill your first client and how you will display his body in the city” (3). Except for the nicknames of the agents of the cult, the story identifies nothing about name, place, or 148 time. Delivered as a soliloquy, with the frequent repetition of ‘you’, the story denotes the involvement of the reader as the narrator communicates what the experience of violence and killing will be like, an implied, cognizant message that this might happens to “you” as a reader since violence is global. Van Reet decrees that “by the end of the tale, the…reader has been praised, sickened, threatened, and… slain”. The narrative compromises a continuous address to a reader who is listening without reacting, a silent figure complicit in his or her own death. In this case, silence and not acting against the violence leads, at the end of the story, to end the life of the listener who is simply transformed from a silent witness to a victim. Judith Herman believes “all the perpetrators ask is that the bystander do nothing” (Trauma and Recovery 7), and in this case, “witnesses as well as victims are subject to the dialectic of trauma” because they simply “invite the stigma that attaches to victims” (2). A staggering fact pertaining to the apprentice in a listener/victim situation, which is proved by the last sentence of the story when finally the interviewee speaks: “then he thrust the knife into my stomach and said,
“You’re shaking”” (10). Killing “you” at the end of the first story of the collection raises apprehension with unimaginable possibilities at what to expect of Blasim’s ideology. The narrative representation of fictional killers who care more about artistic demonstration than human life is Blasim’s depiction of the violence, especially against the Iraqi people62. It is the witnessing of disastrous events, a bleak condition that Iraqi people has been agonizing for generations, “you must understand that this country presents one of
62 As an Iraqi person, I understand that Blasim here is referring to Iraq after 2003 especially with fanatical Islamic groups and their agents, the way of bombing, and the way of slaughtering people. 149 the century’s rare opportunities” (6). Through testifying to the violence occurring in Iraq,
Blasim is addressing the worldwide to take action and prevent aggression because of his cross-cultural standpoint. Here, the global humanitarian perspective is depicted through the muteness of the reader in the face of the violence and horror of war. At a certain point, the manager in the story asserts “our work may not last long. As soon as the situation stabilizes we’ll have to move on to another country” (6). The presence of violence and suffering in the first story of the collection is a preliminary testimony to the violence the reader should expect throughout the text, the narrative violence that binds all the characters, and the events. This gruesome depiction of war is inscribed through the indifference and negligence of the reader who cares more for the artistic representation of the story, just like this group of killers in the story.
The first story in Klay’s collection addresses the reader in the same way as Blasim’s.
The first two sentences in the story, which are set in one separate paragraph, are: “We shot dogs. Not by accident. We did it on purpose, and we called it Operation Scooby. I’m a dog person, so I thought about that a lot” (1). This testimony to a degrading action defines the narrator at this point and labels the mental pain he has experienced during war. Cathy Caruth remarks: "what returns to haunt the victim…is not only the reality of the violent event but also the reality of the way that its violence has not yet been fully known” (Unclaimed Experience 6). Here, reality prevails through the interwoven scenes of home and battle and the shift between memories and the present state of the narrator.
Through the character of Sgt. Price, the story highlights the mentally damaging experience of war and the effect of witnessing violence even after returning home and 150 becoming presumably safe from danger. Klay switches to the use of ‘you’ when describing the experience of the soldier who might be ‘you’, with all the psychological struggle entailed in enlistment and returning home: “the problem is, your thoughts don’t come out in any kind of straight order. You don’t think, Oh, I did A, then B, then C, then
D. You try to think about home, then you’re in the torture house” (2). He places the reader in the soldier’s position to trigger an ethical self-awareness during the recounting of the soldier’s experience. The story is about a homecoming experience in which Sgt.
Price shifts his attention to his emotional cognition after returning from enlistment.
Moreover, he portrays his voluntary choice to put down his dying dog, Vicar. However, whilst shooting his dog, he places the reader in the position of the target, forcing the reader to imagine himself /herself in a witness/victim position—“If I were to shoot you” and “if I shoot you” (16). This hypothetical position weighs heavily on the reader, suggesting a shared acknowledgment of an experience that was missed before by the reader.
Besides this sharing, Klay communicates with the reader how a soldier struggles mentally when he shows how Sgt. Price intermingles his experience visiting the mall with that of patrolling with his fellow soldiers when he has been an enlistee:
So here’s an experience. Your wife takes you shopping in Wilmington. Last time you walked down a city street, your Marine on point went down the side of the road checking ahead and scanning the roofs across from him…In Wilmington, you don’t have a squad, you don’t have a battle buddy, you don’t even have a weapon. You startle ten times checking for it and it’s not there. You’re safe, so your alertness should be at white63, but it’s not. (12)
63 Lt. Col Jeff Copper, who was a WWII Marine, developed a color code in which the colors white, yellow, orange, and red denote different levels of alertness to danger. This is explained further in an essay by Kurt T, “The Cooper color code and threat assessment”. 151
This excerpt reflects the detachment of the soldier who cannot identify with any of his previous surroundings. The end of the story suggests the same isolation. After shooting his dog, he expresses, “I stayed there staring at the sight for a while. Vicar was a blur of grey and black. The light was dimming. I couldn’t remember what I was going to do with the body” (16).
This dark image of the dead body of his dog creates a lonely mood detaching the soldier further from his surroundings and rendering him traumatized, which makes us wonder if the title of the collection refers to the sergeant’s redeployment in the army or rather to redeploy as a figure in the society, a figure that can only blend in their community through sharing experiences, memories, stories, and history. An idea that is emphasized by the following stories in the collection, most of which concentrate on the relation between the soldier and the civilian and the responsibility of both in waging war and sending soldiers overseas.
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Notably, when the audiences within the short stories are shaped by a temporal dimension, which they are either using defensive mechanisms or listening without genuine relatability or shared accountability, narrators in these stories negotiate their word–choice and use of language to communicate their experience in accordance. This happens because this temporal dimension distort the memory instigating a personal misperception. An example of a detached audience can be a group of people in a bar, detached family members, or even a wife/girlfriend who abandoned her lover during/after
152 his enlistment. In Klay’s story “Bodies”, in which the unidentified narrator collects the remains of the dead bodies of US soldiers as well as Iraqis, the narrator subjectively recites stories of war differently each time depending on the mood of his transitional audience, especially his listeners in bars:
Here are two ways to tell the story. Funny or sad. Guys like it funny, with lots of gore and a grin on your face when you get to the end. Girls like it sad, with a thousand-yard stare out to the distance as you gaze upon the horrors of war they can’t quite see. Either way, it’s the same story.” (53)
Simply, the narrator tells stories that grant him a temporary connection that might fictionalize his traumatic event to keep people away from his inner wound. Here, language mediates the witness-listener relation depending on the gender of these temporal audience. In this, the narrator is aware of the superficial connection between him and these audiences and Klay translates this bogus connectivity into an isolated mood running through the whole story with a constant desolate feeling described by the narrator: “I didn’t fit at Mortuary Affairs, and nobody else wanted to talk to me” (55).
The narrator did not fit into the community around him before enlisting in the army either, “Some people love small towns. Everybody knows everybody, there’s a real community you don’t get in other places. If you’re like me, though, and you don’t fit in, it’s a prison” (55-6). Klay names every character in the story except the narrator because of the failure of this character to identify himself with his surroundings. The only character to whom he cares and feels connected is his girlfriend, Rachel, who left him after he joined the army. By doing this, Rachel enters the temporal dimension just like anyone else and hence the narrator loses his desire to connect to any person, a group, or
153 even a community, in a sense, he protects himself from “being listened to,” (58) as suggested by Felman. He describes the relation he had with Rachel earlier as sincere because she was a genuine listener: “I won’t pretend she was especially good-looking, but she listened, and there’s a beauty in that you don’t often find” (55). After losing
Rachel, he loses his connection with his surroundings and thus establishes new, temporary relations in bars with people he barely knows. Thus, it becomes his choice to enter this temporal dimension with audiences and listeners. He says, “I went out drinking with a few friends from high school. They weren’t close friends. I didn’t have close friends from high school. I’d spent all my time with Rachel. But they were good guys to share a beer with” (69).
This subjectivity impacts the relation he has set up with an audience through narrating, witnessing and listening, and in so doing, he does not reveal the traumatic experience to which he actually bears witness, with all the bodily remains, the blood stains, and the dead flesh. Instead, he establishes a transitory construction that increases his guilt and renders him separate from his community because he has lost the only honest listener he had when he enlisted in the army. He continues: “As the night wore on, more and more people came into the bar, and it got be a regular high school reunion. I kept wondering if maybe Rachel would show, but of course she didn’t. I drank more that I usually do. It made me start wanting to tell stories” (Ibid). Frustration from losing his solitary listener provokes a need for telling his story, and thus generating a temporal relation with audiences who are willing to listen, even if it is for a short time.
Klay is manifesting how losing a sincere listener may create counterfeit connection. 154 Testifying to a disengaged audience can be as devastating as losing a sincere listener.
Felman remarks “for the testimonial process to take place, there needs to be a bonding, the intimate and total presence of an other.64” if this other fails to identify with the witness’s traumatic event, the whole process of testimony disintegrates and this is exactly
Sarah reacts in the “War Stories.” Noticeably, her character seeks to meet Jenks and listen to his story so that she can incorporate it into a play, and later shares it with the
New York community to protest the war. Though she seems considerate, the course of conversation reveals that she is pursuing an accessible narrative structure that can help her build the story of her play in a consumable way. Her intentions in protesting the war might be decent, but her approach is questionable. Jenks, a former Marine engineer, tells the story of an IED blast that left him so physically mutilated that even when he makes faces, it is “hard to tell what it means” (213). After asking him “Do you remember the explosion itself?”(225), he testifies to his traumatic event through fragmented memories of sensations like flashes of lights and the smell of sulfur and through drafts of twenty papers helping him recall the ‘missed encounter.’ Despite listening and taking notes,
Sarah reacts coldly to Jenks’s story about the horror of the blast and his recovery process
(235). Her constant interruption while he is expressing his experience emotionally and psychologically reveals her interest in the narrative style, the details and sequence of the story than the actual devastating fact of the experience, she notes: “At your own pace…Whatever you think people should know” (223). All her facial expression, selected
64 Here, the other does not imply the alienated, international agency as much as it refers to an attentive, engaged listener in the process of testimony. 155 words of conversation, and insensitive behavior indicates that “Sarah’s all business”
(223). Wilson, Jenks’s friend who served with him in the Marines suspects the futility of the whole idea of narrating the story of war to a civilian listener. He basically refers to the irony of the process since Sarah is only interviewing Jenk because of his physical damages rather than paying attention to the psychological damage of them as a group of soldiers, including Wilson. This inner psychological wound is emphasized in the memories Wilson retains of Jenk’s incident that Jenks points at him; “he’d remember the
IED better than I would” (223). Likewise, when, at the end of the story, Sarah asks
Wilson about Jenks, “What was he like, when you first met him?” (236), Wilson’s answer indicates the similarity of the situation for both Jenks and Wilson, despite differences in physical appearance: “He was like me, I think. But that’s what I tell her…to be perfectly honest, he was a worthless piece of shit. No subject for a play, that’s for sure…good thing he caught on fire, right?” (Ibid). This quote remarks the similarity of both men’s situation except that Jenks’ physical injury testifies to his trauma physical and psychologically, and thus, Sarah seems more interested in him. Caruth asserts that
‘extreme trauma’ creates a ‘second self’ (Trauma: Explorations in Memory 137), and she explains this second self as a traumatized witness of the event who ultimately remains
“possessed by an image or event” (Ibid 4). Both characters, Jenks and Wilson, are dually possessed by the blast, Wilson as a witness and Jenks as an actual participant in the event.
However, the focus is on Jenks, who is not sure “what’s real memory and what’s my brain filling in details” (225) only because his physical disfigurement becomes an emblem of the mental distortions, and thus can be recognized easily by any tidy narrative 156 written by Sarah. In this case, only those who are physically mutilated are seen as victims of war. It is obvious that Klay uses irony to mock this ‘dis-interested’ in the agonies of soldiers, layered by Wilson’s refusal to tell Sarah the story because “if he gave this girl his story, it wouldn’t be his anymore” (225). Testifying, in this case, becomes a burden, and Wilson is not ready to share it with a civilian, especially a civilian whose interest is motivated by her own interest. Klay here is criticizing people like Sarah whose intention might be respectable yet holds no significant pretentions. Both “Bodies” and “War
Stories” exemplify a temporal dimension of a testimony that might be created between a witness and a listener or an audience. In them, Klay is informative in projecting what should not be done during the process of testimony.
Blasim replaces these realistic situations with his magical realism to create this temporal dimension. Unlike Klay’s approach, the listeners in most of Blasim’s stories are not only temporal with no distinct agency nor orientation, they are more of inactive participants. He is not much concerned with establishing a relation as much as he seeks listeners. Through these inactive listeners in his stories, Blasim is actually obligating the outside reader to listen, read, bear witness, and take a moral responsibility. Therefore,
Blasim produces fragmented narrations, “a fragmentation both of tongue and of perspective” (Felman 223) with brutal, supernatural, and macabre images that define
Iraqi identity after the occupation. In “The Song of the Goats,” Blasim discusses the relation between bearing witness and storytelling. The story is about a contest set up by a radio station called “Memory Radio” that involves ordinary people telling their own stories of suffering after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The contest, which is 157 entitled “their stories in their own voices,” has simple rules: “to select the best stories and record them as narrated by the people involved, but without mentioning real names; then the listeners would choose the top three stories, which would win valuable prizes” (139).
People are both victims of and witnesses to their own traumatic events, where internal recognition of the event and the public manifestation defined by the character doing the storytelling are, to put it in Felman’s terminology, “an appointment to transgress the confines of that isolated stance, to speak for and to others” (Testimony 3). This mediation allows the reader to engage in the story as one of the listeners. In a sense, the figural narrator depends on the reader’s perception as much as he depends on his audience inside the story. As readers, we never hear the story of the narrator or know who won the contest because our narrator is telling the stories of other contesting people. Balsim provides only two stories where the narrator witnesses their testimonies in the same way as the readers but in a different atmosphere, inside the story, “the lights gradually dimmed and the hall fell silent, as if it were a cinema. Most of the contestants lit up cigarettes, and we were soon enveloped in a thick cloud of smoke. We started listening”
(141). Intriguingly, neither the listeners inside the story nor the outside reader meet the actual narrators of the stories, as both become witnesses beyond the physical recognition of the narrators. The fact that no one in the story is defined or named indicates Blasim’s concentration on the narrative mood, as acknowledged by a character in the story: “what mattered was authenticity and the style of narration” (Ibid). Like Klay and through a temporary dimension, Blasim is mocking the ‘dis-interest’ in the agonies of the civilians in favor of language and storytelling. This is made apparent through the sudden, arbitrary 158 ending of the story and the negative reaction of the listeners to the witnessing of the first story told by a woman whose husband was killed and his body mutilated.
Nonetheless, the second story, which reflects the title, marks the “missed encounter” or what Caruth calls the ‘crisis of life’:
The crisis at the core of many traumatic narratives… often emerges, indeed, as an urgent question: Is the trauma the encounter with death, or the ongoing experience of having survived it? At the core of these stories, I would suggest is thus a kind of double telling, the oscillation between a crisis of death and correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival. (Unclaimed Experience 7)
This means that outliving trauma is a crisis itself, because ‘the missed encounter’ becomes perpetually a distinguished piece of the survivor’s being, accordingly, ‘normal life’ becomes unreachable. The narrator of the second story articulates how he drowned his brother when he was only three years old and has lived with the consequences of that event all his life. In fact, his whole family suffers; his mother becomes numb, rejecting him as well as all her surroundings, and his father, despite being described as an angelic person with one leg and no testicles, sometimes mentally breaks down even in front of strangers. The story of this family is a microcosm of the sufferings Iraqi families experienced from the start of war with Iran in 1980 until after the occupation 2003. At a certain point, the narrator describes his situation, saying:
Against the horrors of my life I unleashed other nightmares, imaginary ones. I invented mental images of my mother and others being tortured, and in my schoolbook I drew pictures of enormous truck crushing the heads of children. I still remember the picture of the president printed on the cover of our workbooks. He was in military uniform, smiling. (146)
159 The alignment of the two images of the tortured people and the smiling military leader reflects Blasim’s intention to connect what was happening behind closed doors to the general atmosphere of his society. It is a shared communality that defines the collective, as described by Kay Erikson, who assumes that “trauma shared can serve as a source of communality in the same way that common language and common cultural background can. There is a spiritual kinship there, a sense of identity, even when feelings of affection are deadened and the ability to care numb” (“Notes on Trauma and Community” 186).
Narrating and bearing witness in this story define the trauma of the collective, who are waiting to tell their stories, whose individual members are all survivors. Though gathering for the contest is only temporary, the group of traumatized people convened in this story share an understanding of what it means to be traumatized; their “estrangement becomes the basis for communality” (Erikson). The inside world of this contests is filled with sorrow and misery and numb feeling; strangeness, as Felman states earlier, here, acts like a tie connecting the external reader of the story to the testimonies of inside narrators and listeners. Notably, temporal dimension in this story cannot be measured easily since it involves a reader and his empathetic attitude.
However, this authenticity of a narrator may be challenged here by the lack of the process of testimony between a witness and a listener. Simply, with no physical appearance, truth might be questioned of his authenticity, creating what Felman calls a
“crisis of truth.” From a psychological perspective, Felman believes subjectivity might overcome facts when testifying to the traumatic experience. In this vein, Felman describes how the testimony of an old woman was considered ‘fallible’ only because she 160 was not accurate in numbering the blown up chimneys at Auschwitz: “She was testifying not simply to empirical historical facts, but to the very secrets of survival” (Testimony
62). Felman later adds, “She had come, indeed, to testify not to the empirical number of the chimneys, but to resistance, to the affirmation of survival, to the breakage of the frame of death” (Ibid). This indicates that her idea of a ‘crisis of truth’ correlates with the idea of survival. At the same time, she differentiates it from a ‘false witness’,65 which she defines as a misrepresentation of a disaster by an outsider who claims to have knowledge of the traumatic experience as an insider (Testimony 261, 265-6). From a historical perspective, Felman asserts the importance of differentiating between a witness who is facing a ‘crisis of truth’ and a ‘false witness.’ For the purpose of this research, such a distinction is also significant since each character assigns cognitive agency to the calamity of his own group of people. However, the narrator in one of Blasim’s controversial stories, “The Reality and The Record,” complicates such a distinction. The story’s unnamed narrator seeks asylum after the occupation by telling his story to the refugee officer. Logically, the story reveals how terrorism and sectarianism are related through the violence they enact on human beings. This is especially clear when, one night, this late-thirties family man, an ambulance driver, is kidnapped by a certain sectarian group while on duty. His task was to transport six severed heads of unknown people, believed to belong to a certain sect, from a crime scene beside the Tigris River to
65 Robert Jay Lifton, the famous American psychiatrist and author, assumes that traumatic experience shatter one psychologically, especially if it involves witnessing death. At that point, witnessing death becomes a state of victimization, and the witness becomes a survivor. To him, ‘false witnesses designate a shift to ignore one’s own trauma through designating others as victims’. His theory also includes patriarchal representations and victimization (Trauma 128-47). 161 the hospital. During the man’s captivity, he is asked to perform a certain scripted scene for a video, threatening and intimidating people for the benefit of a sect. The success of the video promotes the group to sell the man to another group, and thus, the man moves from one group to another, performing acts that serve the religious and political purposes of each group:
They shot video of me talking about how I was a treacherous Kurd, an infidel Christian, a Saudi terrorist, a Syrian Baathist intelligence agent, or a Revolutionary Guard from Zoroastrian Iran. On these videotapes I murdered, raped, started fires, planted bombs, and carried out crimes that no sane person would even imagine. (168)
The end of the story takes a supernatural turn when the man is released, after a year and a half, only to be told by everyone around him that it is still the same night he transported the heads to the hospital, which means he was never kidnapped.
Actually, the story is not as simple as that. Blasim complicates the relation between the man and the reader by hinting at the inaccuracy of the man’s story right from the beginning. The first sentence of the story reads, “everyone staying at the refugee reception center has two stories—the real and the one for the record…they merge and it becomes impossible to distinguish between them” (157). This leads to an assumption about the unreliability of the narrator and his whole story of pretending to be insane, especially because, at a certain point, he affirms, “in fact I don’t know exactly what details of my story matter to you for me to get the right of asylum in your country” (161).
Nonetheless, this suspicion is clarified with the last sentence of the story: “the ambulance driver summed up his real story in four words: ‘I want to sleep.’ It was a humble entreaty” (170). By implying that this is the real story of the man, Blasim negates the 162 importance of whether the story told to get asylum is real or not, since he is a surviving refugee who is fleeing from a country roiled by political disturbance and is only seeking peace. This story of the unnamed narrator grants a metaphoric agency to all refugees who seek asylum. The ‘false witness’ here is challenged by the victim’s ‘crisis of truth’, because “the truth of the event may resides not only in its brutal facts, but also in the way that their occurrence defies simple comprehension” (Caruth “Recapturing the Past” 153).
While the refugee officer assigns the man to a psychiatric hospital, the end of the story leaves the reader with the dilemma of sympathizing and empathizing more than antipathizing and condemning because of this man’s simple plea.
It is also notable that the narrative technique in “The Reality and the Record” disturbs the distinction between reality and fiction so that it is not clear when story ends and the other begins. As readers, we are confused for what story the narrator tells is real and which one is not. This is because sharp divisions are not always apparent; like in Klay’s story “After Action Report,” where a ‘false witness’ manipulates this distinction by complicating the relation between the internal listeners and the external readers where the readers are more knowledgeable and judgmental. In this story, Timhead and Suba are caught in a nearby IED blast and a fire fight; Timhead shoots a teenager and kills him, then asks Suba to claim he is the shooter and the killer of the boy. Suba respects
Timhead’s request to renounce responsibility for the shooting and starts assuming the story and the shooting as if they were his. However, since Suba becomes the first soldier to kill “the dumbshit hajji” (32) in their squad, all the other Marines keep asking him for more details about the shooting, and he alleges, “I told the story, it felt better. Like I 163 owned it a little more…I told and they sort of sat together in my mind, the stories becoming stronger every time I retold them, feeling more and more true” (35). Klay creates a gap between the knowledge of the listeners inside the story and the knowledge of the external reader in terms of truth and the memories established through the shooting incident. This falsity in narration generates a trust issue and simultaneously calls into question the moral status of the narrators of war stories. Soon, Suba becomes an agent of
Timhead’s feelings when he talks with the Catholic chaplain and the Staff Sergeant, attempting to assimilate what Timhead felt during and after the shooting. At the same time, Suba slips into his account of the reality of war as he has experienced it and indirectly asks for help for himself: “I knew how I was feeling. I wasn’t sure about
Timhead. I decided to speak for myself” (45). Despite the unreliability of Suba’s narration and the trust issue, the reader cannot but sympathize with his situation, especially after recognizing the difficulty of adjusting to the horror of war:
On the roads I was scared all the time. Maybe not pure terror. That’s for when the IED actually goes off. But a kind of low-grade terror that mixes with the boredom. So it’s 50 percent boredom and 49 percent normal terror, which is a general feeling that you might die at any second and that everything in this country wants to kill you. Then, of course, there’s the 1 percent pure terror, when your heart rate skyrockets and your vision closes in and your hands are white and your body is humming. You can’t think. You’re just an animal, doing what you’ve been trained to do. And then you go back to normal terror, and you go back to being a human, and you go back to thinking. (42-3)
One cannot deny that Suba is a ‘false witness’ concerning the shooting of the boy. The morality of a witness who did the shooting is in doubt here, not the morality of a witness to the shooting. Like the old lady who testifies incorrectly to the number of chimneys,
Suba is testifying to the “way of being, of surviving, of resisting” (Testimony 62). 164 Narration here becomes a technique of adjusting and of resisting. This idea is emphasized at the end of the story, when one of the soldiers, Harvey, starts bragging about the scar he got from a sniper who miraculously left him alive. Timhead believes that Harvey is arrogant; Suba, in contrast, accepts Harvey’s speech because he knows such narration helps them survive. The conversation between Suba and Timhead goes as follows: “‘what do you want him to say?’ I [Suba] said. ‘He got shot in the neck and he’s going out tomorrow, same as us. Let him say what he wants.’ I could hear Timhead breathing in the dark ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Whatever. It doesn’t matter.’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t’” (52). This type of narration that Klay adopts complicates the relation between a ‘false witness’ and someone who is suffering “a crisis of truth,” leaving the reader to act as an eyewitness and a judge. Furthermore, this positioning of the reader as an omniscient witness to the story raises a question regarding the importance of authenticity in telling a story if life is in danger. In this story, the vulnerable situation of the soldier attenuates the reader’s psychic refusal of the ‘false witness’—with a gesture that makes the reader a witness to the testimony of the traumatic moment, accepting the morality of such a story and such a narrator. Both stories of Blasim and Klay prove that distinctions like “false witness” and a “crisis of truth” can be sometimes blurred by the violence of war and the need to survive.
However, acceptance of falseness in testifying comes after acknowledging narration as a defense strategy against the horror of war, which in turn is a recognition of the narrator as moral despite his lack of authenticity in narration. Then again, the narrator in
“Psychological Operation” acquires his authenticity by testifying to his own disingenuous 165 attitude, mediating the truth of war through the use of degrading language. In a sense, manufacturing language permits access to the world of the enemy. It is a different kind of narration where truth and authenticity testify to the immoral act of the narrator, and, at the same time, record the reactive response of various listeners. Here Listeners, fluctuate between temporal dimensions to genuine ones with compassion. The narrator states, “I was supposed to tell the Iraqis how to not get themselves killed. And I actually spoke the language, so it was me on those loudspeakers, not a translator” (190). In this way,
Waguih, the narrator, who served with the PsyOps team in Iraq, uses insulting and humiliating language to win the war. When he is later asked by Zara, the listener, how the soldiers kill people, he answers, “the insult…and everything we did, that got the most satisfying feedback” (202). Insulting the civilians, their religion, families and daughters and calling them horrible names lead them to react with violence, a deliberate plan that makes American soldiers kill more people. A Coptic66 immigrant with a Middle Eastern origin, Waguih uses language to reflect violence and to reveal the madness of war between the two fighting sides: “It was horrible. There was gunfire and explosions and the mosque blaring messages and Arabic music and we were blaring Drowning Pool and
Eminem. The Marines started calling it Lalafallujah. A music festival from hell” (201).
Throughout the story, Waguih testifies to Zara how his father humiliated him while growing up. One distinct example happens after emigrating from Egypt. Waguih did not feel that he fit in the American society, represented by the elementary school in which he
66 Waguih defines Coptic as “Orthodox Church. Egyptian Christianity” (173), and describes his family as religiously conservative that he was not even allowed to curse. 166 was enrolled, and consequently, he was bullied constantly. Instead of helping Waguih get through the situation, his father started to blame and hit him (193). However, though the father became proud of his son after enlisting in the army, their relation kept on being distressed. Waguih recollects his father’s reaction after knowing of his son’s decision;
I was there because of him. When he hugged me and told me how proud he was of me—which he didn’t even do at my high school graduation—I took it in. Graduation from basic’s a big deal. All this pageantry. Uniforms and flags and everybody over and over how brave we were, how patriotic, and what great Americans we were. You can’t resist hundreds of people feeling proud of you. You can’t. And then my dad, like it was just an offhand comment, he asks me, ‘So, when you signed up, why didn’t you pick infantry?’ and the feeling popped like a bubble. (198-9)
Subsequently, Waguih tells the story of how the humiliation of one of the Iraqi leaders,
Laith al-Tawid, who fought against the Americans, on the loud speaker draws him out of his hiding place and causes his death. It was all Waguih’s idea:
All this guy’s men were hearing him being disrespected. Humiliation. For an hour. This was a violent time. There were a hundred little insurgent groups, a hundred little local chiefs trying to grab power. And I was shaming him in front of everybody. I told him ‘you think fighting us will win you honor, but we have your daughters. You’ve fucked with us, so you’ve fucked your children. There is no honor. He didn’t have a choice. And I never saw him die. I never saw him at all. I just heard the Marines shooting him down. They told me he led his little suicide charge. (210)
Waguih, who has become a student at Amherst College in Massachusetts since being discharged from the army, narrates the story of Laith al-Tawid to two people: his father and Zara, a Black American woman studying at the same college, who has recently converted to Islam. With this story, the high moral standards of a war hero who faces the dilemma of survival under the pressure of combat collapses, and Waguih subjectively testifies this truth to his listeners. However, the temporal dimension of the two listeners 167 vary and consequently, Waguih’s response differ as well. In Narrative and the Self,
Anthony Paul Kerby connects self-representation to expressed language by asserting,
“self-narration is the defining act of the human subject, an act which is not only
‘descriptive of the self’ but ‘fundamental to the emergence and reality of that subject’”
(qtd. in Eakin 21). Therefore, despite his immoral behavior in the army, testifying to his father empowers Waguih to achieve self-realization, to stand up for himself in a father- son relation that has been tense for many years. Waguih reflects on his emotions about his father to Zara: “I wanted to hurt him. I was angry” (205). He later adds, “I was standing over him [his father], shouting insults in his face-[the kind he told in the war], and he couldn’t see his son any more than I—standing over him and letting my rage wash out—could see my father ”(211). Waguih gains a sense of self through expressing his antagonism. While testifying the truth to his father helps him overcome his fear of his father, it degraded the father to a weaker position: “His hands trembled, his eyes were downcast. There was gray in his mustache. He looked old. Beaten. I’d never seen him that way before” (211). It seems that the father cannot bear witness to such a horrific fact about war, and the shock of listening reduces him to a state of pain and silence that suspends any future father-son communication. Felman remarks “the listener has to let these trauma fragments make their impact both on him and on the witness” (71). The failure of the father to embrace that breaks the process of witnessing and listening and render their relation doomed.
Zara, on the other hand, compromise her position as a listener adequately that Waguih lays out before her his whole story with all his inner sufferings as an immigrant, as the 168 son of a detached father, and specifically as a soldier in the army. She becomes a mediator to his fragmented narration. Then, despite his claim that he feels good about what he has done in the army, with respect to his immoral behavior, the tense narration and his angry, irritated, cursing expressions manifest his mental struggle, especially when narrating the Al-Tawid’s story. Zara listens carefully and because she cares, Waguih not only shares his story, but also “unload[s] it” in his attempt to create a connection. Unlike his father, Zara becomes more tolerant and bears witness to his dishonest act:
[s]he reached out and put her hand on my shoulder, her touch light and warm. Even though her face was calm, my heart was beating and I looked up at her as though she were passing down a sentence. There was an unearthly quality to her then. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you can talk about it….Maybe we’ll talk another time’” (212).
This possibility for a future conversation declares Zara’s acceptance as a listener, though it does not declare her approval of his behavior. It is a step toward healing and bridging the gap between soldiers and civilians, even if malicious deeds were done.
Felman believes that “to bear witness is to take responsibility for the truth” (Testimony
204). The truth of Waguih’s testimony is ugly and reveals the humiliated attitude in dealing with the other during war time. He wants a genuine listener to bear witness to this truth. With both testimonies, Waguih replicates his experience of bearing witness to an immoral behavior, in which truth becomes a burden that his father could not handle. He tells Zara that his father prefers that Waguih “shot them in the face. In his [the father] mind, that is much nicer. So much more honorable. He’d have been proud of me, if I’d done that” (210). Somehow, this story of the damaging relation between the father and the son becomes the point where Waguih and Zara meet, since she is rebellious against 169 the bad treatment of her father67 as well. Therefore, building such a bridge of communication helps in understanding between Waguih, the witness, and Zara, the listener. This means that Waguih feels responsible for the damage he has done, yet needs a civilian to carry the burden and bear witness to his action, even if his action is malicious, and Zara succeeds where his father fails only because she listens sincerely and interacts positively.
The possibility of healing through listening and interaction between soldiers and civilians seems to be Klay’s message in his stories. In establishing a narrator-listener bases, Klay offers various techniques for acknowledging soldiers and treating them with tolerance, even if they do not fulfill the civilian’s heroic fantasy. Through Waguih, Klay is demanding from the society an equal share of responsibility for waging the war. If the society neglect their experience and dismiss their testimony, soldiers may find themselves alienated. In consequence, they will suffer and pursue salvage. This message is clear in his story, “Prayer in the Furnace.” Klay offers religious path as a recovery for a soldier who cannot testify to a disengaged society. If the soldiers fail to follow this spiritual path, they will resort to drugs, crime and eventually kill themselves. The story starts with questioning how far a soldier should follow orders if his life is at stake. Testifying to such an experience becomes approachable through the mythology of suffering offered by a religious man. This story concentrates on the victimization of soldiers and, their griefs as survivors caught inside the bureaucracies of war narratives. Similarly, it asks the question
67 Zara does not really explain in details why she has a bad relation with her parents except that she refuses their ideas and rebels against their ideologies. 170 of whom to blame for war crimes. In this story Sergeant Ditoro obliges the soldiers to do jumping jacks on the rooftop to attract enemy fire. During this exercise, a sniper shoots and kills Fuji. Bearing witness to the death of his friend which was due to a lapse in judgment, Rodriguez testifies with difficulty to a chaplain, not for the sake of confession but for the sake of seeking moral rectification through narrating the truth. In turn, the chaplain, the story’s narrator, reports the immoral act to people in a higher position in the army so they can take action against those responsible for the atrocities perpetrated on the soldiers by the leader of their squad. However, such a story never falls under the preferred narrative of the higher ranks and thus the reaction is not what the chaplain hoped for:
This is nothing,” he said. “Last month Weapons Company shot two hajjis I know they didn’t follow ROE [Rules of Engagement] on. And Colonel Fehr didn’t think that was worth an investigation… you think Lieutenant Colonel Fehr will ever become Colonel Fehr if he tells higher, ‘Hey, we think we did war crimes’? (144)
The process of healing only starts when a traumatized person establishes a connection with a genuine listener, one who “partakes of the struggle of the victim with memories and residues of his or her [the victim’s] traumatic past. The listener has to feel the victim’s victories, defeats and silences, know them from within, so that they can assume the form of testimony” (Testimony 58). The chaplain, who becomes this devoted listener and a witness to the soldier’s horrific experience, takes responsibility to relieve the rage and frustration of Rodriguez, who keeps returning to the chaplain for spiritual support and moral solution.
171 As an interactive listener, the chaplain seeks a spiritual cure for the soldier’s tortured soul, a soul that believes “I know I won’t make it out of combat alive…every day, I have no choice. They send me to get myself killed. It’s fucking pointless” (148). The purposeless death toll on both sides tortured the soldier and, obviously, he develops
PTSD. The chaplain describes him as follows:
When I asked him why he felt the way he did, I got a long list. Since the death of his friends six weeks before, he’d been having mood swings, angry outbursts. He’d been punching walls, finding it impossible to sleep unless he quadrupled the maximum recommended dosage of sleeping pills, and when he did sleep he had nightmares about the deaths of his friends, about his own death, about violence. It was a pretty complete PTSD checklist—intense anxiety, sadness, shortness of breath, increased heart rate, and most powerfully, an overwhelming feeling of utter helplessness. (147-8)
This makes the chaplain attempt to take a positive attitude by suggesting that some good would come from the whole experience. However, he regrets it, considering, “I don’t think hope of the life to come would provide comfort for Rodriguez” (154). Therefore, he seeks religious advice from Father Connelly, who suggests that healing comes through connection, even if this connection results from the suffering of human beings. Thus, the chaplain sermonizes, “as Paul reminds us, ‘There is no righteous, no, not one.’ All of us suffer. We can either feel isolated, and alone, and lash out at others, or we can realize we’re part of a community. A church” (159). Establishing a connection with the collective community through suffering is what this religious man offers. Judith Herman says, “Those who have survived learn that their sense of self, of worth, of humanity, depends upon a feeling of connection to others” (Trauma and Recovery 214). With the help of a religious man, Rodriguez somehow manages to overcome the horror of war
172 during his deployment, and unlike some of his fellows in the same squad, after being discharged, he never engages in drug abuse or deadly fights or committed suicide.
The message of Klay is loud and clear; establishing a connection with a community expedites the healing process for mentally injured soldiers. Reconnecting might come through sharing sufferings and bearing witness to the atrocities occurring to human beings during war time. Klay’s use of a religious man to announce this theme was not a coincidence. The religious quotations and sermons are Klay’s way of giving authority to his message. After the death of Ditoro, Rodriguez visits the chaplain and the story ends with them conversing: “Twenty years of Christianity,” I said. “You’d think we’d learn.” I fingered the small cross.” “In this world, He [God] only promises we don’t suffer alone.”
Rodriguez turned and spat into grass. ‘Great,” he said” (167). Though it is only suggested through the Christian religion, there is also a touch of belief in humanity in this story that is originated through the sufferings of humanity in general. Recovery then comes through sharing the sufferings and connecting through the process of testimony.
Unlike Klay, generally, Blasim expresses more faith in humanity outside the scope of religious, regional, or even political powers still his stories resist recovery or healing solutions that he declares that in his one of his interviews: “I don’t think I am ready to offer any messages or advice” (Ashfeldt). One of his stories, reflects his faith in humanity and the unpredictable source of human resilience, which might be considered the ray of hope he is offering in his stories. “A Thousand and One Knives” depicts a small group of
Iraqi people gathering to make knives disappear and reappear. Despite the destruction around them, this group of five people meet every Thursday for ten years to perform this 173 ritual. One of the characters thinks, “Our knife skills were a secret vocation that would change the world” (110). Through their gathering, they not only share this game but also share the sufferings of those around them and bear witness to the destruction engulfing the whole country. Their gathering becomes a site of play, narration and storytelling; for instance, Allawi considers the game “a drug that erased his memory of the painful loss of his parents at an early age” (114). In addition, Umm Ibtisam, whose husband was killed by a bomb explosion, narrates how the knives started to appear in her backyard after she was haunted by nightmares of her husband’s death and mutilated body. This group helps each other not only by getting together but also by witnessing, and listening to each other.
They are genuine in their process of testimony. This might serves as a therapeutic act away from the horror of war and invasion, an empowering deed established through communication. As Herman claims, “the solidarity of a group provides the strongest protection against terror and despair, and the strongest antidote to traumatic experience”
(Trauma and Recovery 214). This is exactly what this gathering offers to these people; at a certain moment, the narrator, who is also unnamed, states:
We were like one family. Our knife-handling skills weren’t the only thing we had in common. We also shared our problems in life, our joy, and our ignorance. We were buffeted by all forms of misfortune, and several times we grew disappointed with the knives. There were other concerns in life. We almost split up on several occasions, but we were drawn back together by the strangeness and pleasure of our gift…that knives could be a solace and give our lives the thrill of uncertainty. Ten years have passed since we became a team in the knife trick. (109-10) Despite this relation and the psychological need to attend the gathering every week, the group is separated after the kidnapping and killing of the founder of the group and
Souad’s brother, Jaafar. The narrator describes the dark times in which they are living 174 after 2003: “the wars and the violence were like a photocopier churning out copies, and we all wore the same face, a face shaped by pain and torment. We fought for every morsel we ate, weighed down by the sadness and the fears generated by the unknown and the known” (123). Blasim shows how these characters are victims held captive by the violence of their surroundings and by their inability to change their existing circumstances to help each other endure the atrocities committed against their community. Consequently, this causes the group to fall apart. They seem to lose the sense of collectiveness they used to have and focus instead on their individual situations.
The narrator’s personal survival and recovery during such violence are made possible by his wife and baby, and he confesses that his life has improved since he married Souad, who is the only person in the group that makes knives reappear. Described as being kind, helpful, and humane, she seems to represent hope. The narrator declares:
Souad and I had a beautiful boy, and we called him, Jaafar. I continued working in the religious school. I never managed to tell Souad what had happened to her brother. I suppressed the horror that his death caused, and I loved Souad even more. She was my only hope in life. She went back to the school of Medicine, and time began to heal the wounds, slowly and cautiously. (125)
One day, a person comes to the narrator and tells him the story of how Jaafar was murdered, but the narrator never passes this information to his wife. That the narrator makes himself the bearer of the story of the torture and death of her brother and not her is consistent also with the idea of containing hatred and spreading hope instead. Souad, which means happiness in Arabic, portrays a recognition of how healing can occur in time of war and destruction. Despite the break-down of the group, she keeps on tending the group members and helps them by making their knives reappear, she also passes her 175 healing genes to her son, as a sign of intergenerational ability for resilience through hardships. The end of the story brings us back to the title of it:
My love, I need your help!” she would pinch me on the bottom, then climb on top of my chest, strangle me with her hand, and say, “ha, you wretch, how many knives have you made disappear? I’m not going to get them back until you kiss me a thousand and one times.” I kissed every pore of her body with passion and reverence, as if she were a life that would soon disappear. (125-6)
There is an obvious allusion to One Thousand and One Nights. Just as Scheherazade proves to be more powerful than those around her by bringing to an end the violent killing of women through the power of narration, Souad, in this story, is a symbol of therapy promoting the healing and restoration of her society. By having her talent pass to her son, Blasim is expressing hope for a better future. It seems that Blasim believes that the first step in healing a society is to empower women, which is an interesting point given that Balsim’s stories are packed with male characters with no opportunity or even a glimpse of healing; the only female character with distinct features is Souad. She succeeds in doing what the male characters fail to do. As for the narrator, he acts as a witness to the therapeutic process Souad is initiating in his life, for his son, and probably for their society, when she will become a doctor after completing her medical degree. As survivors, Souad and the narrator accept their trauma and move on with their lives despite the violence surrounding them.
Through witnessing both constructive and hostile events during war time and the struggle against pervasive destruction, the story offers a level of closure to a traumatic event that is unprecedented in all of Blasim’s stories. Felman also suggests this about the survivor’s struggle: 176 A therapeutic process—a process of constructing a narrative, of reconstructing a history and essentially of re-externalizing the event—has to be set in motion. This re-externalization of the event can occur and take effect only when one can articulate and transmit the story, literally transfer it to another outside oneself and then take it back again, inside. Telling thus entails a reassertion of the hegemony of reality and a re-externalization of the evil that affected and contaminated the trauma victim. (Testimony 69)
When the trauma is accepted as part of the traumatized past, present, and fate, a closure or healing could be possible. This is a closure Blasim denies his other characters, and thus, they circle within their traumatic experience as a present reality. As Felman asserts,
“Trauma survivors live not with memories of the past, but with an event that could not and did not proceed through to its completion, has an ending, attained no closure, and therefore, as far as its survivors are concerned, continues into present and is current in every respect” (69).
IV. Closing Remarks
In an article about a traumatized hero, Roy Scranton criticizes the deliberate negligence of the other’s suffering when writing about the war and its horror. He specifically concentrates on Klay’s first story in the collection Redeployment, asserting that “by focusing so insistently on the psychological trauma American soldiers have had to endure, we allow ourselves to forget the death and destruction those very soldiers are responsible for” (10) and arguing that the opening statement “we shot dogs” is inhumane:
177 This short, powerful sentence, while factually true, offers readers a comforting moral lie. “We shot dogs” is as accurate as “We built schools” or “We brought democracy,” and works much the way we seem to want our war literature to function: by foregrounding a peripheral detail, it obscures much more significant big-picture realities. By focusing on how “We shot dogs,” Klay allows American readers to ignore the unpleasant fact that we shot people. (10)
To Scranton, “Sgt. Price is our hero—he pays the ‘price’ for the bloodguilt” (11), and this empathetic sentiment is exactly how Klay continues to portray his American soldiers. He romanticizes the horror of war through depicting soldiers as witness-victims more than as perpetrator-victims. In the same way, Buchanan, in his book Going Scapegoat, explicates such ‘subjective representation’ to “the audience’s need for redemption through the hero’s suffering. It’s an easy and cheap purging, and it seems to be available in just about any representation of war” (199). Klay employs this personal account of soldiers’ agency in his stories. In “Prayer in the Furnace,” a fictional YouTube channel is invented when an anti-war group, ‘Winter Soldier,’ led by a former soldier Alex Newberry, reflects on some of the horrible deeds committed by Marines during their enlistment. While
Newberry “had brought a camera to Iraq and used photos and video to accompany his testimony” (163), Alex, a soldier in the team of Newberry, has another opinion in reply to the video:
It’s not whether it happened or not. You don’t talk about some of the shit that happened. We lived in a place that was totally different from anything those hippies in that audience could possibly understand…you can’t describe it to someone who wasn’t there, you can hardly remember how it was yourself because it makes so little sense. And to act like somebody could live and fight for months in that shit and not go insane, well, that’s what’s really crazy. And then Alex is gonna go and act like a big hero, telling everybody how bad we were. We weren’t bad. I wanted to shoot every Iraqi I saw, every day. And never did. Fuck him. (164-5)
178 Here, Klay is encouraging the reader to ignore the testimony of Newberry in favor of empathizing with the Marines. He asks the reader not to bear witness to the violence enacted by the soldiers but to testify to the horrors the Marines face and the harms they are suffering. Critic Sam Sacks shares with Scranton his despair of the dogmatic truth of the war in Iraq that Klay ignores in his narrative. Further, he mourns that writers of contemporary war fiction like Klay concentrate on “the singular and the personal” on
“the soldier’s consciousness… [As] the field of battle”, and attributes that to the “danger of settling into the patterns of complacency that smoothed the path to the Terror Wars in the first place” (“First-Person Shooters”). Bearing witness in such a case can be insufficient, since it overlooks a moral account of the other, which Scranton also criticizes. Klay projects a caricaturized version of the Iraqi figure, assuming that this might enlarge the gap between “American audiences and the millions of Iraqi lives destroyed or shattered since 2003” (12). In Klay’s story “After Action Report,” the narrator argues that it is acceptable for a young child to see her brother killed in front of her only because she is an Iraqi character, an argument that soothes the guilt of Timhead:
““this kid’s Iraqi, right?” “Sure.” “Then this might not even be the most fucked-up thing she’s seen” (49). This same attitude is expressed by the chaplain in “Prayer in the
Furnace” in his final sermon, when he asks a rhetorical question, “Who would trade their seven-month deployment to Ramadi for that man’s68 life, living here?” (158). Through obscuring the character of the Iraqi figure, Klay focuses on the individual American
68 In the story, an Iraqi character who is portrayed as a bad person asks for the Americans’ help to save his burning daughter even though he hates them. 179 soldier to make society bear witness to the atrocities and the violence these young men endure. He is not concerned in projecting the reality of politics, the sufferings of the other, and the ideological truth behind the war in Iraq as much as he is interested in revealing the psychological damages and the miseries of the American soldier. Indeed, he is suggesting that bearing witness to the horrors of war shatters the inner-self, causing people to act irrationally. In so doing, Klay is actually manipulating the perpetrator- victim-witness connections through the blurring distinctions and resisting accountability of the soldiers, on the contrary, he holds the society responsible for sending young people to war and asks the community to act responsibly by sharing soldiers’ trauma, and listen to them.
Blasim, on the other hand, addresses the global and the collective. Through his stories, he testifies and makes readers testify to the atrocities of the Iraqi people, individually and collectively. His approach is less didactic than Klay’s and more into graphic representations and humanitarian approach, and his stories are testimonies against perpetuating violence and evil.
Blasim depicts the chaotic recent history of Iraq, the disorder, and the horrors inflicted on his people. Ghost-like characters and a dimension of writing between reality and fantasy is his way “through shock that seeks to negate the distance between the reality of the depicted events and that of the reader” (Milich 293). He presents Iraq as a war debris, a product of political and historical violence. It is his mechanism in testifying to the horror of war through the “narratological devices… [that] combine the techniques of
European ghost stories and horror films with events taken from various media reports, 180 thus tying together fact and fiction” (Milich 293). Using metaphor, symbols and allegory, Blasim manages to reflect the violence perpetrated on Iraqis inside and outside its land. To him, Iraqis are depleted with trauma which they should accept and embrace as part of their existence or they will face fatal consequences like the character of Salim in “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes” who is doomed with death only because he rejects his Iraqi identity in favor of another one. In this, Blaism agrees with Kay Erikson who assumes that trauma prevents the traumatized “from slipping back into proper chronological place in the past” (185). The effect of trauma in his stories is solid and far from being redemptive. In presenting this micro Iraqi collectivity, Blasim is actually addressing the macro global one. This approach, somehow, abstracted the Iraqi character into a fatal destiny with less choices and options discharging, somehow, individual trauma as a main focus and substituting it with the collective. This is especially apparent with arbitrary endings of the stories, and no adequate physical identification of the characters. He mold his characters into one of frame of violence in his attempt to address the global reader rather than the local.
This chapter challenges the process of testimony between the witness and the listener.
The temporal dimension, whether genuine or disengaged, created in these stories, reiterates itself through an interactive relation struggling to break the boundaries between the texts and the reader. Both collections internalize the profoundly traumatizing event of war to create and transfer these experience beyond the boundaries of texts. Testifying to the self and the collective, then, becomes a purpose by itself taking into consideration that
181 these symbolic contextualization combine subjective modes with historical facts in a fictional narratives.
182 Conclusion
It has always amazed me how personal affairs can be controlled by the collective political attitude. Living in Iraq, I feel I have been tied up with politics and violent history my whole life. One day, when my mother, brother, and I were having dinner, the door was knocked down by military soldier; they tied up my brother and took him away to an unknown place leaving two soldiers pointing their guns at me and my mother. While my mother started to wail and cry, I held my courage up and became silent. I didn’t want to make any sound because, after all, I was a woman in an invaded country. The soldiers covered themselves from tip to toe, looking more like robots than human beings, so that I could barely notice the drop of a sweat that fell down from the forehead of one of them.
A feature that humanized the soldier. Luckily, the humiliating situation was solved peacefully after declaring it was a mistake. My brother told us that the soldiers tied up his hands behind his back as they did to all the young men in our neighborhood, let him sit on the sidewalk, and kept on screaming and humiliating him the whole time. This situation resided within me for a long time raising so many questions: Did these soldiers recognize us as ungrievable human beings? Why did I and my family have to face such a humiliating situation? Who gave the right to these soldiers to invade my country and my house in such a way? Did I have the right to object or I should feel lucky because most of similar situations would end up much worse? Besides, if the situation would not be solved peacefully and my brother was taken away and we would not hear of him or he would be imprisoned and humiliated like the prisoners in Abu Ghraib, did that give us the right to join the resistance and fight back to restore our humanity? In such a scenario, are 183 we to be considered victims or perpetrators? A significant point I should mention is that I am an Iraqi citizen and those were American soldiers; imagine if it was the other way around? I built on these questions in my decision to write my research despite the fact that writing about the war and trauma in my country brings some anxiety.
Caruth claims "history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other's traumas"
(Unclaimed Experience 24). While Caruth refers to Freud’s Moses and Monotheism study, I would like to concentrate on the usage of “we” away from Western experience and contextual references. To accept an intersection between history and trauma, the
“we” then may combine us as humans not in a naïve expectation but as an ethical and moral responsibility. To recognize that our own actions are implicated in other’s trauma is to take accountability and depoliticize our own relations and cross-cultural othering. In this case and through the medium of fictional narrative, this study problematizes such intercultural relations only because these texts discuss war and violence. By understanding such a complicated relation, trauma texts, in general, connect readers to the histories represented in these narratives. Readers should maintain empathetic as well as ethical awareness when treating these texts even if they are fictional since trauma and representation are enmeshed together. Similarly, reading these texts, readers should not conflate positions of victims with those of perpetrators only because they can identify and interpret their characters easily. They are bearing witness to a disaster, collective or individual, and need to take sides. As implicated by Herman, if their experience becomes internal, witnesses, in this case readers, are taking the side of the perpetrators while
184 externalizing the experience of reading/ listening privileges the victim because the victim
“demands action, engagement, and remembering” (7-8).
Actually, readers are a vital medium in the intersectional concept of this study.
Certainly, since the conversation is grounded in gender, space, and testimony, several viewpoints of trauma and victimhood view these texts as aesthetic pieces between the awareness of a writer and an analysis of the reader. This act can honor the commemoration of the miseries of others. However, when all the characters are cast as victims, a crisis of representation mobilizes political ends with self-expression. This does not mean that these characters are not considered survivors, it only means that comparable experiences would not be understood plainly unless consciously placed within the categories of victim-witness-perpetrator. The shift from one category to the other sometimes collapses the reflective dimension of a reader into a more subjective mode which might originate an empirical internalization of trauma. In a sense, when readers are affected by the texts they are exploring, they are also likely to collapse the distinction between a reader and a witness if not governed by an ethical approach.
Cross-cultural relation is the fulcrum of this study by which perpetrators and victims, psychological and cultural trauma narratives are contextualizing the violence and horror of war. Iraqi trauma texts written in Arabic and translated into English would seem to cross nations into an empathetic, privileged, western reader in an attempt to connect and create a response to the misfortunes happening in another place, and maybe, in another time. Their writers, as well, reflect an understanding of the history and affiliations of the other which is clearly reflected in their fiction and their self-identification with their texts 185 that are much articulated by assimilated affinities. On the other hand, American trauma texts seem to limit their scope to the Western reader. They ignore traumatic histories of the other in favor of a one-sided perspective of the war. Their texts challenge the ethics of war representation since they sustain the “trauma hero myth” rather than deconstruct authoritative representations, especially as they reside on the privileged side. However, another trend of American war fiction pioneered by Helen Benedict invites the American reader to rethink war representations. She seeks a humanitarian approach towards the other, or to be more specific, to think of intersectional representations different from the archetypal ones.
On the other hand, Iraqi novels focalize Iraqi civilians through humanizing their sufferings, personalizing their lives, and delineating their culture. What such war narratives do as well is to portray the American soldier as the other, in another way, they provide how the American occupation looks like from an inside perspective, an exceptional overview that needs to be embedded more in the Western representations.
Iraqi texts portray how trauma may change perceptions of the character’s history and construction; how trauma also disrupts former mechanisms of the self, manipulates new formations of identity and annihilates constructive formations of memories. Such cultural and individual trauma put side by side with intergenerational sufferings, because of long- term war and destruction, trauma then becomes endemic. It is a unique model of trauma that needs to be explored further. It may be the reason for Iraqi writers to perpetuate cultural trauma over an individual representation with a less therapeutic dimension.
186 As for how much the American texts have contributed to the national mythology is still under debate since the power of war narratives of 2003 has challenged the collective representation of the nation. Mapping the route of American war fiction creates a moral conflict of representation among the public. A successful way to resist this is to break stereotypical ways of representing war and soldiers. Simply, humanizing the other, here the Iraqi character, and creating an empathetic reading will grant an authoritative voice to those soldiers, who are reflecting on their war experiences, by accepting accountability without marginalizing the other. In doing this, the nation will be complicit in taking responsibility as well, not only to the atrocities done to the other but also to the sufferings of its own soldiers.
However, it is interesting how cultural and individual trauma narratives create a similarity between the fiction of the invader and that of the invaded. All six writers struggling with concerns that include gender, identity, memory and recovery seem to have theoretical antecedents. For this first generation of writings about the 2003 war, themes like gender, space, and testimony seem to reside in the narrative treatments of both sides, which is perhaps a set of categories through which to view the other while writing around the immediate aftermath of the war. This relative resemblance produces a conversation that might change how to perceive cross-cultural trauma in transcultural narratives in the future.
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Documentary Films:
-About Baghdad. Directed by Sinan Antoon &et.al, Production company Adam Shapiro,
2004. DVD.
-Fahrenheit 9/11. Directed by Michael Moore, Production company Dog Eat Dog Film
Fellowship Adventure Group, 2004. YouTube.
youtube.com/watch?v=S5Jpok1Xx4s&has_verified=1&bpctr=1606166524.
-We are Many. Directed by Amir Amirani, Production company Amirani Media, 2015.
DVD.
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