FICTION OF THE IRAQ WAR: BETWEEN VICTIMIZATION AND PERPETRATION

Abstract

This dissertation addresses the opposition between civilians and soldiers. It demonstrates how five recent works of trauma fiction about Iraq describing both civilian and combat spheres register and respond to many subsequent disruptive cultural and personal events resulting from the Iraq War in 2003, showing the avenues opening up in trauma studies through a focus on issues of trauma, testimony, and representation. It explores how fictional texts written by civilian Iraqi writers not only address suffering and injustice but also reveal collective trauma. It examines Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, which provides convincing evidence that Gothic style now forms an element of the language of those who have been colonized— particularly in regions far removed from Western Europe and the United States. I analyze Sinan Antoon’s The Book of Collateral Damage, in which autofiction provides those who have survived trauma the chance to explain their stories with no disconnection from actual events. It examines The Baghdad Clock by Shahad Al Rawi, which attempts to use a traumatic Iraqi location to further the understanding of the complicated relationships among humanity, location, trauma, and memory. I also explore two narratives of perpetrator trauma by Helen Benedict, The Sand Queen and Wolf Season. These texts examine the experiences of perpetrators and the lasting effects of the Iraq War on American combatants as well as the moral injuries the conflict necessarily causes. Trauma and the war between victimization and perpetration serve to meet the ii essential ethical imperatives of trauma studies and offer insightful and illuminating tools for the analysis of traumatic human experience both during and after war