Whose Dead Is to Be Grieved? A Comparative Approach to Contemporary War Literature

M Ikbal M Alosman

Abstract


This paper examines Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2012) and Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer (2013) in terms of their representations of Americans and Iraqis in the context of the 2003 Iraq War. It aims to investigate and compare the novels' approaches to the lives/deaths of Americans and Iraqis, drawing on Judith Butler's claim that people in the West conceive of and deal with the lives/deaths of these non-Westerners differently. The lives of Westerners are made the most valuable at the expense of the safety and security of those outside these geographies. The analysis is made in two paradigms: 'Western lives' and 'non-Western lives'. While Fountain's novel focuses primarily on American soldiers, who are presented as the ultimate victims of the war, Antoon's provides a counter-narrative that challenges Fountain's argument and provides Iraqi characters with extended narrative spaces to recount their grievances. In Fountain's work, American deaths are thoroughly mourned at the expense of Iraqi deaths. Antoon's narrative, on the other hand, mourns these ungrievable souls and reclaims their ignored value.

 

Keywords: Ben Fountain; grievable lives; Iraq War; Sinan Antoon


Full Text:

PDF

References


Alosman, M. I. M., & Raihanah, M. M. (2022). Homines sacri in contemporary war novels: A comparative insider-outsider perspective. Global Journal Al-Thaqafah (GJAT), 12(1), 14-26.

Alosman, M. I. M., Raihanah, M. M., & Hashim, R. S. (2018b). Architectures of enmity in Andre Dubus III’s The Garden of Last Days. GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies, 18(4), 251-264.

Alosman, M. I. M., Raihanah, M. M., & Hashim, R. S. (2018a). Differentiation and imperfectionality in John Updike’s Terrorist. 3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature®, 24(2), 58-70.

Alosman, M. I. M., & Sabtan, Y. (2022). Negotiating heroism in Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. International Journal of Social Inquiry, 15(2), 251-261.

Antoon, S. (2013). The corpse washer. Yale University Press.

Antoon, S. (2016). Envisioning the postwar: Dr. Sinan Antoon. Retrieved September 21, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFTwYJ8ekX8&t=123s

Asad, T. (2007). On suicide bombing. Columbia University Press.

Barta, D. (2015). Veterans and “innocensus” in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and the Yellow Birds. In P. Petrovic (Ed.), Representing 9/11: Trauma, Ideology, and Nationalism in Literature, Film, and Television (pp. 79–92). Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield.

Bayoumi, M. (2022). They are ‘civilised’ and ‘look like us’: the racist coverage of Ukraine. The Guardian. Retrieved March 5, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/civilised-european-look-like-us racist-coverage-Ukraine

Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. Verso.

Butler, J. (2009). Frames of war: When is life grievable? Verso.

Deer, P. (2017). Beyond recovery: Representing history and memory in ıraq war writing. MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 63(2), 312-335.

Dyer, G. (2012). Americaʼs Team. The New York Times. Retrieved March 5, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/books/review/billy-lynns-long-halftime-walk-by-ben-fountain.html.

Ellison, S., & Andrews, T. M. (2022). They seem so like us. Washington Post. Retrieved March 21, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/02/27/media-ukraine-offensive-comparisons/.

Forbes, M. (2013). Sinan Antoon's second novel is a compact masterpiece. The National. Retrieved April 25, 2022. https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/sinan-antoon-s-second-novel-a-compact-masterpiece 1.337471.

Fountain, B. (2012). Billy Lynn's long halftime walk. Harper Collins Publishers.

Gregory, D. (2004). The colonial present. Blackwell.

Johnston, C. (2017). Postwar reentry narratives in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Studies in the Novel, 49(3), 400–418.

Kaiserman, A. (2021). Unreality in America: Reading Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk in a post-truth age. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 62(5), 574-585.

Klay, P. (2015). Redeployment. Penguin.

O’Brien, S. (2021). Trauma and fictions of the “War on Terror”: Disrupting memory. Routledge.

Powers, K. (2012). The yellow birds. Little, Brown and Company.

Restuccia, F. L. (2018). Kristeva’s severed head in Iraq: Antoon’s The Corpse Washer. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, 26(2), 56-68

Scranton, R. (2014). Not the man but the shadow he leaves behind: Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer. Retrieved March 15, 2022. https://kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2014-spring/selections/the-corpse-washer-by sinan-antoon-738439/.

Scranton, R. (2015). The Trauma Hero: From Wilfred Owen to Redeployment and American Sniper. Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved April 3, 2022. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/trauma-hero-wilfred-owen redeployment-american-sniper/.

Scranton, R. (2016). War Porn. Soho Press.

Tait, T. (2012). Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain – review. The Guardian. Retrieved May 7, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/06/billy-lynn-ben-fountain-review.

Williams, B. (2017). The soldier-celebrity in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 59(4), 524–47.

Yanyu, Z. (2017). Transnational landscape and politics in three American Iraqi novels. Foreign Literature, p. 01.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17576/3L-2024-3001-01

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


 

 

 

eISSN : 2550-2247

ISSN : 0128-5157