Punish Yet Cannot Discipline:Two Iraqi Prison Novels

Hanan Jasim Khammas

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Resum

Al-Munāḍil (The Militant) (1972) by ʿAzīz al-Sayyid Jāsim, and Iʿjām (Iʿjaam) (2004) by Sinan Antoon are two prison novels about the historical turning points which mark the rise and fall of the Baʿth regime in Iraq. While the first employs imprisonment as a lens through to expose the corruption and injustice exercised by the monarchy against the emergent revolutionary power, the second shows the Baʿthist government applying similar methods of surveillance, and of physical and psychological torture. Reading these texts by al-Sayyid Jāsim, who died in the Baʿth prisons, and by Antoon who wrote Iʿjaam from his diasporic memory, this article offers an examination of the incarcerated body across history, in various locations, and within the bounds of physical experience. The aesthetic and political analogy of the imprisoned body between these two novels illustrates three points: first, that the suffering body can act as a representation of what Elias Khoury calls “the massive human suffering of the Arab whose citizenship has been confiscated and who has been deprived of his/her right to liberty” (from Khoury’s introduction to Iʿjām: 1); secondly, that the shift in perceiving the prisoner’s sexuality from a homophobic standpoint in the first novel, where homosexuality is depicted as a sign of corruption and moral decay, to resilience in the second, where the prisoner’s sexuality functions as a space for free self-expression; and finally that in line with the dialectical thinking of the Foucauldian statement that “the soul is the prison of the body” (Discipline and Punish: 30), both novels reveal an understanding of the body as an empowering instrument of empowerment and protection. Similarly, the narrative of vulnerability allows the body to become the ultimate “prison bars,” locking out the torturer’s corruption and preventing him from infecting the soul’s hope for resilience.
Idioma originalEnglish
RevistaCLCWeb - Comparative Literature and Culture
Estat de la publicacióAcceptat en premsa - 2024

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