Necropoetics and the Art of Death in Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer [English]

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Department of Digital Media ,Massmedia College ,University of Thi-Qar,Nassiriya City -Iraq

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Main Subjects

References

Alhashmi, Rawad, et al. “The Grotesque in Frankenstein in Baghdad: Between Humanity and Monstrosity.” International Journal of Language and Literary Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 2020, pp. 90–106, https://doi.org/10.36892/ijlls.v2i1.120.
Antoon, Sinan. The Corpse Washer. Yale University Press, 2013.
Atia, Nadia, et al. “Death and Mourning in Contemporary Iraqi Texts.” Interventions, vol. 21, no. 8, 2019, pp. 1068–1086, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2019.1585915.
Baker, Charlotte, et al. “Introduction: Performances of Sovereignty in African Dictator-Fiction.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 49, no. 3, 2019, pp. vii–xiv, https://doi.org/10.2979/RESEAFRILITE.49.3.01.
Bilal, Wafaa. Domestic Tension. Performance Installation, 2007, https://wafaabilal.com/domestic-tension.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004.
Firmino-Castillo, María Regina, et al. “Tracing the Ouroboros’ Tail: Paradoxical Politics against Necropolitical Binaries in Lukas Avendaño and Muxx Project’s Theory and Practice.” Documenta, 2025, https://doi.org/10.21825/documenta.93275.
Geller, Pamela L., et al. “What Is Necropolitics?” Bioarchaeology and Social Theory, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70704-0_5.
Gržinić, Marina, et al. “The Body in the Field of Tensions between Biopolitics and Necropolitics.” Filozofski vestnik, vol. 44, no. 2, 2023, https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.44.2.02.
Head, Scott, et al. “Necropoetic Gestures.” Horizontes Antropológicos, vol. 29, no. 67, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1590/1806-9983e670406.
Isakjee, Faiza. “Death, Burial, and Belonging in Diaspora.” Social & Cultural Geography, vol. 22, no. 4, 2021, pp. 515–533, https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2019.1628900.
Kadhim, Abbas. Reclaiming Iraq: The 1920 Revolution and the Founding of the Modern State. University of Texas Press, 2012.
Khanna, Ranjana, et al. “Touching the Corpse: Reading Sinan Antoon.” New Literary History, vol. 51, no. 2, 2020, pp. 401–418, https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2020.0024.
Kopka, A., et al. “Mourning and Grievability: Several Remarks on Judith Butler’s Politics of Living Together.” Praktyka Teoretyczna, no. 4, 2021, https://doi.org/10.14746/PRT2020.4.5.
Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, pp. 11–40, https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11.
Mhoodar, Rana Ali, et al. “Post 2003 Iraq and Unhappy Reality: A Study in Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer.” Galore International Journal of Applied Sciences and Humanities, 2021, https://doi.org/10.52403/gijash.20211007.
Motyl, K., et al. “Writing Against Neocolonial Necropolitics: Literary Responses by Iraqi/Arab Writers to the US ‘War on Terror’.” European Journal of English Studies, vol. 22, no. 2, 2018, pp. 128–141, https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2018.1478256.
Naser, Adhraa AbdulHussein, et al. “Iraq Wars: From A Literary Text to Social Context.” لارک, vol. 3, no. 46, 2022, https://doi.org/10.31185/lark.vol3.iss46.2548.
O’Donnell, Samantha, et al. “Living Death at the Intersection of Necropower and Disciplinary Power: A Qualitative Exploration of Racialised and Detained Groups in Australia.” Critical Criminology, vol. 30, 2022, pp. 285–304, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-022-09623-2.
Saadawi, Ahmed. Frankenstein in Baghdad. Translated by Jonathan Wright, Penguin Books, 2018.
Salam, Wael J., et al. “‘Life in Death’: Decolonizing Trauma in Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer.” Style, vol. 58, no. 1, 2024, pp. 22–45, https://doi.org/10.5325/style.58.1.0022.
Sharif, Safi. “Rituals of Death and Islamic Funerary Practices in Iraq.” Journal of Islamic Studies, vol. 19, no. 2, 2015, pp. 134–147.
Sumba, Eric Otieno, et al. “Necropolitics at Large: Pandemic Politics and the Coloniality of the Global Access Gap.” Critical Studies on Security, vol. 9, no. 1, 2021, pp. 48–52, https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2021.1904354.
Yamada, S., et al. “Casualties: Narrative and Images of the War on Iraq.” International Journal of Health Services, vol. 36, no. 3, 2006, pp. 401–415, https://doi.org/10.2190/6PXW-LQ3B-DWN6-XD97.
Yebra, José M., et al. “Destituteness Revised: Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer.” The European Legacy, vol. 26, no. 7–8, 2021, pp. 775–787, https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2021.1976458.
Zaarour, Meriem, et al. “Coming of Age in the Arab Diasporic Künstlerroman: Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer (2013) and Nada Awar Jarrar’s An Unsafe Haven (2016).” World Journal of English Language, vol. 13, no. 2, 2023, https://doi.org/10.5430/wjel.v13n2p16.
Research in Contemporary World Literature
Volume 30, Issue 2
September 2025
Pages 469-495

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics