ABSTRACT

Unlike most American novels on the Iraq wars, which tend to be either celebratory or redemptive, Iraqi-born Sinan Antoon’s The Corspe Washer (2013) bears witness to the traumatic effects of destituteness from the perspective of the conquered. The novel recounts how the war prevents Jawad, an Iraqi is his twenties, from becoming an artist, and forces him to make his living as a corpse washer, as his ancestors have done for generations. By drawing on Esther Peeren’s notion of the living ghost, on Alain Badiou’s notion of destituteness, and on Judith Butler’s concepts of grievability and nonviolence, I argue that as narrator and focaliser of his story of displacement, Jawad expresses a liminal discourse on the reality that is at once his own and no longer his own. His narrative alternates between realistic and nonrealistic scenes to cope with his traumata in particular, and the devastating effects of war and globalisation on non-Western countries in general. As a “living ghost”—marginalised, invisibilised, ungrieved, and devoid of agency—Jawad undergoes an individuation process and gradually comes to accept his fate and that of his country, thereby gaining a new sense of agency and a new understanding of corpse-washing as an act of recognition of the other. Jawad’s stand against instrumental violence defies his state of destituteness and becomes a powerful plea for nonviolence and for recognizing our interdependence on the other as the common ground of human existence.

摘要

与大多数关于伊拉克战争的美国小说不同，这些小说倾向于庆祝或救赎，伊拉克出生的思南安东的The Corspe Washer（2013）从被征服者的角度见证了贫困的创伤性影响。这部小说讲述了战争如何阻止 20 多岁的伊拉克人贾瓦德成为一名艺术家，并迫使他像他的祖先世世代代所做的那样，以洗尸工为生。通过借鉴 Esther Peeren 的活鬼概念、Alain Badiou 的贫困概念以及 Judith Butler 的悲痛和非暴力概念，我认为作为他的流离失所故事的叙述者和聚焦者，Jawad 表达了关于现实的阈限话语既是他自己的，又不再是他自己的。他的叙事在现实和非现实场景之间交替，以应对他的创伤，以及战争和全球化对非西方国家的破坏性影响。作为一个“活鬼”——被边缘化、隐形、冷漠、没有代理——贾瓦德经历了一个个体化的过程，逐渐接受了自己和国家的命运，从而获得了一种新的代理感和对尸体的新理解——洗脸是对对方的认可。贾瓦德反对工具性暴力的立场无视他的贫困状态，成为对非暴力和承认我们对他人的相互依赖是人类生存的共同基础的有力呼吁。