Hegemonic Discourse

Afghanistan is a country besieged by years of instability and unrest as a result of the weak governments that have seized power, especially after King Zahir. Mohammad Asef Soltanzade’s “Brazen Bulls” is the story of the tragedy that befalls a country similar to Afghanistan. The story is an allegory of the atrocities committed against the civilians and the civilians who resort to extreme forms of violence to counteract the government and occupied forces’ measures. The novel has propensities for dialogical analysis as a result of the voices that represent different discourses in the present-day Afghanistan. This paper is an attempt to link the text of the novel to the discursive and social practices that gave rise to the emergence of such novels. It aims to illustrate the way in which literary products could engender discourses that are necessary for forcing effective changes in hegemonic discourse over time. The methodology used to fulfill the purposes of the paper and generate discussion is the critical discourse analysis endorsed by Norman Fairclough.

This paper is a comparative study of two war novels, namely The Book of Collateral Damage by Sinan Antoon and The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers. Both Antoon, an Iraqi-American author, and Powers, an American writer, describe war critically but from very different points of view. In Antoon’s novel, an Iraqi scholar living in the U.S. during the conflict tries to review the war, collect newspaper pieces of war news, and create a catalogue of the people, the land, and the human and non-human entities he knew before and during the war in Iraq. In Powers’ autobiographical account, the narrator is a young soldier struggling with war trauma and trying to express his bereavement for his dead friend. Both novels address war trauma, but the dimensions of trauma and the way memory and remembering operate in the lives of the narrators are very different. This paper argues that the positionality of the authors determines the way they narrate war. The Iraqi scholar tries to revisit the past and finds recollection a therapeutic act, while the young American soldier is haunted by the memory of his lost friend, and forgetting often becomes a survival strategy for him. The approach used to answer the question—How is war trauma experienced differently on the two sides of the same battlefield?—is a postcolonial one. The study borrows some ideas from postcolonial theoreticians such as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak to analyse the two novels comparatively.