Bleeding Subjects

Contemporary Iraqi fiction of the past fifteen years has witnessed radical changes regarding narration, style, themes, representation and political engagement. After breaking through the walls of censorship, Iraqi fiction is transgressing social, literary, linguistic and religious taboos. The 2003 US invasion, the sectarian conflict in 2006 and the refugee crisis were the major factors that provoked this change, but most importantly the way in which these factors were conducted; using and producing carnal violence through torture, murder and mutilation, has, in a way, created a new collective imaginary of the Iraqi identity that is inscribed on the body.

Authors such as Hassan Blasim, Alia Memdouh, Mayada Khalil and the first anthology of Iraqi science fiction, Iraq +100 (2015), among others, have presented literary pieces in which they registered the horrors and pain that refugees go through during their journey from homeland to exile and backwards. These Literary works depict displacement in place as parallel to the transformation of identity and the positioning of the self regarding Otherness. At the same time, this transitioning journey inscribes its burden on the bodies and the memories of their characters.

Elements of Gothic and grotesque literature are particularly present in contemporary Iraqi fiction when it comes to this painful process of identity transition. Gothic and Grotesque fiction is characterised by the frightening, gloomy and inhospitable settings like the unwelcoming nature, the abandoned house, or the prison, all these places are surrounded by a deep sense of extreme threat and isolation. In refugee fiction we join refugees into their pasts, their dark lives, the war scenes they witnessed, and the graveyards where their dead beloved lie. We also walk with them through their clandestine paths to their new destination and share them their agitating anxiety.

In such haunted places, the unfamiliar and subversive aesthetics of the grotesque body become visible. “The grotesque focuses on the human body, and all the ways that it can be distorted or exaggerated: its aim is to simultaneously elicit our empathy and disgust. Very much like the uncanny, the grotesque draws its power from the combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar, or the familiar distorted.” (Bowen, 2014) This subversive body links to the Freudian uncanny which is also a classic Gothic element. The uncanny is often represented in the horrifying breakage of the self, where the human anima transgresses the realm of the natural and the logical to enter a supernatural reality. Other mental processed related to terror and Gothic aesthetics, such as hallucinations, madness and psychotic fits are also becoming part of the Iraqi character repertoire. Similarly, obscene, profane and blasphemous aesthetics, that target the sanctity of the religious iconography, are elements of the Gothic genre, they represent the uncontainable rage and the detachment of the anima from the tortured body. Transition or displacement itself is a Gothic motif as it is charged with notions of the scary paths and the uncertain possibilities of what is beyond people’s power, that is the supernatural and the irrational.

This distorted depiction in the case refugees is a distorted depiction of vulnerable bodies and of vulnerability itself. It certainly aims at documenting the horrors of wars and sectarian violence, and to register the traumatic experience of confronting death, torture, imprisonment, pain, hunger, thirst, etc. … Nevertheless, there is also an empowering element in depicting vulnerable refugee bodies. According to Judith Butler: “without being able to think about vulnerability, we cannot think about resistance, and by thinking about resistance, we are already underway, dismantling the resistance to vulnerability in order precisely to resist.” (Resistance & Vulnerability, Madrid 2014)

This means that writing about vulnerable refugee bodies by refugee authors is a political statement to self-voicing subaltern bodies and, hence; subaltern subjectivities. Exhibiting vulnerable bodies is a categorical instrumentalisation of the vulnerable human body in the political struggle for representation and authority in writing history and in shaping subjectivity, as I am who I say I am. Such positioning challenges, first, the colonial discourses of rescue which were employed to wage the wars that pushed populations to refugeedom in the first place, and, second, it also challenges the racist anti-migration policies enacted by recipient countries. In other words, refugee fiction uncovers a reality that purposely differs from the other realities stated in the international debate on refugees.

The works of Hassan Blasim, for instance, are substantial testament to the employment of Gothic and grotesque motifs in order to vocalise resistance. His stories in The Madman from Freedom Square (2009) The Iraqi Christ (2013) contain constant imageries that evoke the Gothic and grotesque aesthetics, especially in stories such as ‘The Truck to Berlin’, ‘The Corpse Exhibition’, ‘Ali’s Bag’, ‘The Hole’ and ‘The Dung Beetle’, all full of cries of horror, darkness and dismantled bodies, escaping from the horrors of violence and precarity to confront the horrors of nature (the sea, the forest, the desert, etc…), racism and xenophobia. The tragic ends in Blasim’s fiction, the metamorphosis of young men into animals or monsters, the constant imagery of dismembered bodies, disfigured flesh combined with images of faeces and relics respond to the horrors of the gradual dehumanisation that accompanies injustice, violence, and the subjugation of the body to inhumane conditions through out its refugeedom.

The obsession with non-human analogies, the grotesque representations of the body and the supernatural aesthetics are not characteristics of Blasim’s Gothic/grotesque fiction alone, it is a recurrent motif in other Iraqi fiction pieces such as the opening scene of The President’s Gardens (2012) by Muhsin Al-Ramli, A memoir of an Iraqi Dog (2016) by Abdul Hadi Sadoun, The Corpse Washer (2010) by Sinan Antoon, The Hankering (2007) By Alia Mamdouh and Life from a Door Hole (2018) by Mayada Khalil. Grotesque, fantasy and dehumanised body images are used to document self loss and the breakage of the Iraqi identity and its human nature. Refugee literature and art represent displacement as dehumanisation and bodily transformation, which is a mechanism of defence to challenge the inevitable neglect, forgetfulness and death.