Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer (2013) constitutes an account of post-war Iraq narrated by an Iraqi youth and authored by an Iraqi émigré. It is thus a valuable alternative to American fiction on the conflict and its aftermath. From this premise, this article explores how the myth of the trauma hero, which has whitewashed the American invasion in redemptive terms, is here replaced by a more nuanced discourse. Mbembe’s necropolitics—i.e. the “subjugation of life to the power of death” (2003: 39)—helps explain the story of Jawad, the corpse washer of the title, and of Iraq as one of dehumanization, wounding and spatialization inflicted by Western supremacy and alleged ‘rationality.’ The novel challenges Western necropolitics in two main ways: Iraqi stereotypes are questioned, especially their identification with terrorism and martyrdom. On the other hand, surrealism and gothic elements help the protagonist and his country to sublimate the trauma derived from American neocolonial politics.

In the last years, more and more literary accounts of recent and current wars in the Middle East have been published. In most cases, they are authored from a Western viewpoint and provide a narrow account of the Muslim world. This article focuses on Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer because it opens the scope. That is, it constitutes an alternative to the imagery of the American film industry. Moreover, as Antoon is a Christian, his account of contemporary Iraq is particularly peripheral and hybrid. To analyse the novel, this article makes use of Transmodernity, a concept coined by Rosa María Rodríguez Magda in 1989. Yet, instead of Magda’s Transmodernity as a neatly Euro-centric phenomenon of worldwide connectivity, Ziauddin Sardar’s version of the concept is preferred. Sardar’s Transmodernity adds to connectivity a message of reconciliation between progress and tradition, particularly in the context of non-Western cultures. This paper defends that Antoon’s novel opens the debate on Islam to challenge the prejudiced Western discourses that have ‘legitimized’ war. To do so, Sardar’s ‘borders’ and Judith Butler’s grievability are particularly useful. In a Transmodern context, novels like Antoon’s show that humans should never be bare lives.

In keeping with the current ethical turn in humanities, this paper analyses Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary as a literary testimony of post-Levinasian relationality. Such relationality – whereby the One and the Other both meet, ‘emasculate’ and give meaning to each other – draws on vulnerability. That is, the novella shows that to be human is to be exposed and vulnerable to the Other. This is not necessarily negative because such exposure relies on the ethics of care that Mary performs particularly with her neighbour Farina, her cousin Mary, Jesus and Lazarus. Indeed, the wounds both men suffer are not only traumatic symptoms, but also relational meeting points. Hence, the article proves that wound ethics (vulnerability being the etymological root of the wound) is recast into interpersonal care to re-present the encounter with the Other.

This article contends that the evolution from a postmodern to a transmodern paradigm explains the changes in gay and queer representation from Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library to Paul Mendez’s Rainbow Milk. With this purpose in mind, the analysis is structured on a triple axis: the articulation of non-western bodies and sexuality; the temporal framings that convey both novels’ discourses; and the progression from neo-Freudian trauma narratives to decolonized ones. After close reading the two novels, it can be argued that Rainbow Milk contests The Swimming-Pool Library on all three concerns. The black queer body is not only vindicated, but given a voice of its own. The teleological framework, which Hollinghurst’s novel revises, does not work in Mendez’s. Finally, Rainbow Milk works through the individual and collective traumata of the protagonist and his community instead of acting out a discursive aporia.

Unlike most American novels on the Iraq wars, which tend to be either celebratory or redemptive, Iraqi-born Sinan Antoon’s The Corspe Washer (2013) bears witness to the traumatic effects of destituteness from the perspective of the conquered. The novel recounts how the war prevents Jawad, an Iraqi is his twenties, from becoming an artist, and forces him to make his living as a corpse washer, as his ancestors have done for generations. By drawing on Esther Peeren’s notion of the living ghost, on Alain Badiou’s notion of destituteness, and on Judith Butler’s concepts of grievability and nonviolence, I argue that as narrator and focaliser of his story of displacement, Jawad expresses a liminal discourse on the reality that is at once his own and no longer his own. His narrative alternates between realistic and nonrealistic scenes to cope with his traumata in particular, and the devastating effects of war and globalisation on non-Western countries in general. As a “living ghost”—marginalised, invisibilised, ungrieved, and devoid of agency—Jawad undergoes an individuation process and gradually comes to accept his fate and that of his country, thereby gaining a new sense of agency and a new understanding of corpse-washing as an act of recognition of the other. Jawad’s stand against instrumental violence defies his state of destituteness and becomes a powerful plea for nonviolence and for recognizing our interdependence on the other as the common ground of human existence.