Necropoetics and the Art of Death in Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer (مقاله علمی وزارت علوم)
درجه علمی: نشریه علمی (وزارت علوم)
آرشیو
چکیده
The Corpse Washer (2013) by Sinan Antoon explores the intersections of resistance, memory, and mortality in post-invasion Iraq from the perspective of Jawad, an artist who has become a corpse washer. In contrast to prior research that has examined the novel through trauma theory, existentialism, and postcolonial critique, this paper introduces necropoetics, a theoretical framework that connects Achille Mbembe's necropolitics (the power to orchestrate death) with literary aesthetics, to investigate how Antoon stylizes death as both a political act and a narrative story. The novel transforms Jawad’s grim vocation into a site of artistic defiance against the erasure of Iraqi lives by emphasizing the ritualized labor of washing corpses. This study contends that necropoetics, as a lens, demonstrates how Antoon’s prose resists the commodification of war trauma, instead portraying death as a subversive, intimate practice that challenges state-sanctioned violence and historical amnesia. The Corpse Washer is not merely a chronicle of loss; it is also a literary act of preservation and dissent, as a result of this approach.Necropoetics and the Art of Death in Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer [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.
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