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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