نوع مقاله : مقاله علمی پژوهشی
نویسنده
Digital Media Dept, Dhi-Qar University, Nassiriya City, Iraq
چکیده
کلیدواژهها
موضوعات
عنوان مقاله [English]
نویسنده [English]
Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer (2013) does not unfold as a linear narrative of post-invasion Iraq, but as a fugue of interrupted rites, spectral inheritances, and tactile refusals—each mediated through the body of Jawad: an artist of thwarted form turned ritual laborer of the dead. Against critical readings that align the novel with frameworks of trauma theory, existential estrangement, or postcolonial elegy, this study introduces necropoetics: a conceptual lattice in which Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics—the sovereign calibration of life and death—intersects with the granular, affective labor of literary form. What emerges is not merely a thematics of death, but a poetics: a refusal to abstract, a stylization that resists both the bureaucratic flattening and the spectacular mediation of Iraqi suffering. Jawad’s meticulous acts—washing, shrouding, tending—become, in Antoon’s rendering, a counter-sovereign rite, a sensory insurgency. Each gesture refuses the erasure of the singular, reanimates flesh as memory, and holds open a space for mourning where none is sanctioned. Thus, The Corpse Washer ceases to function as lament alone; it becomes a textual sarcophagus, an ossuary of vessels in which carework becomes counterhistory. Necropoetics, as theorized here, names the form through which Antoon’s prose enacts funerary intimacy, shielding the dead from the degradations of state power and archival forgetting.
کلیدواژهها [English]
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