When the Dead Speak and Voices Break: Traumatic Narrative and Survival in Antoon's the Corpse Washer

Abstract

     Sinan Antoon's novel The Corpse Washer (2013) narrates story of Jawad, "a good and a soft-spoken man," who reluctantly inherits his family's traditional profession of washing the bodies of the dead in post-invasion Iraq. This study examines how Antoon employs a Manichean conception of silent body/broken voice to articulate unrepresentable trauma of living in present-moment Iraq. Through subjecting the text to a close reading informed by trauma theory and postcolonial critique, the article focuses on corpse-washing as a means of bearing witness to collective suffering and interrogates narrative capacity to represent excessive violence. The article demonstrates how Antoon's narrative techniques generate a poetics of survival that grants the dead their due alongside the living, and produces a new textual form of resurrection to preserve memory against forces that seek total erasure.