Hanan Jasim-Khammas: On Writing the Body in Iraqi Literature After 2003

By Olivia Snaije

Iraqi academic Hanan Jasim-Khammas was just 19 in 2004, when the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse came to light. Later, as a student of comparative literature, she became fascinated by body and gender studies, which led her back to 2004, to examining the terrible and powerful representation of bodies in the Abu Ghraib scandal.

“I couldn’t articulate how I felt about Abu Ghraib, how those images influenced me and other Iraqis. Up to this point, no one had asked the question of what the impact had been on the Iraqi psyche. What is a body, how is it formed in this society, and why this attack on the body during the military operations?”

Jasim-Khammas ending up focusing her doctoral thesis on the representation of the body in contemporary Iraqi fiction, and it was published this year as a book. Writing Through the Body: Iraqi Responses to the War on Terror was published by Edicions UAB (Universitat de Barcelona), and it is also available open access in PDF form. Jasim-Khammas is the academic coordinator of UAB’s Contemporary Arabic Studies program—the only master’s degree in Europe taught entirely in Arabic—and also teaches contemporary Arabic literature and thought.

In the introduction to her book, Jasim-Khammas writes that her examination of corporality in contemporary Iraqi literature, besides reflecting the collapse of national identity and the trauma of war and occupation, is “also a manifestation of a reconceptualisation of corporeality, that is, a rewriting of incorporated histories, a redefinition of the meaning of the body and the way it is written about.” The process, she says, is directly linked to neo-colonial hegemony. The body Jasim-Khammas investigates is created in a socially, culturally, politically, and “historically moulded language—which makes of the body a space of existence constructed in the in-betweens of the discourses surrounding the colonial and postcolonial realities.”

When Jasim-Khammas left Baghdad with her mother and sisters in 2006, at age 21, she had been enrolled at Baghdad University, where she was studying English literature and language. Her mother, director of an organization called Occupation Watch Centre, had received death threats. Jasim-Khammas’ father, a professor who taught cinema at Baghdad University, followed later. The late Jaume Botey i Vallès, a priest, anti-war militant, and history professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, helped Jasim-Khammas enter the university system in Barcelona. She dedicated her book to him.

In Barcelona, she says she began a journey of “seeing Iraqi society from the outside.” She started to read Iraqi literature but ironically, in translation, because she couldn’t find the original Arabic-language books in Barcelona. She would often source texts from Banipal magazine, and years later became an editor for the Spanish edition of Banipal, the Revista Banipal.

Jasim-Khammas’ interests—and continued research in theory, gender, and sexuality—lead her directly into the first chapter of her book, called “This is a man’s world,” in which she examines corporeality in Iraqi society and fiction pre-2003. The problem with the body in Iraqi society, she argues, is that it is constructed and interpreted based on male supremacy. The body is seen as being “originally masculine…the body is perceived within a phallo-centric paradigm in which femininity does not merely differ from the centre, but rather it is defined as a deviation and an incompleteness.”

Saddam Hussein’s regime, which had been in a constant state of war since the two Gulf Wars and the uprising in 1991, projected a masculinist and hyper-gendered discourse, only addressing women’s issues when it benefitted the regime politically, says Jasim-Khammas.

By the time the US invaded Iraq in 2003, and following the invasion, “ordinary Iraqi citizens lived global politics within their own bodies. Iraqis starved, suffered physical pain, illness, disability, and deformation.”

That’s when something changed in Iraqi fiction, says Jasim-Khammas. “Sexual intercourse, violence, annihilation, and disability was described in a way that hadn’t been dealt with before. And this is what makes it so interesting. Bodies are at the heart of all work.”

In the second chapter, “Operation Feminise,” Jasim-Khammas examines how the body is treated during ‘the war on terror”, in TV series, video games, or fiction written by US war veterans—the body and its gender are instruments, seen either as “war relics or terrorists.”

Jasim-Khammas’ third chapter, “Irakaustos. Representation politics in contemporary Iraqi fiction” delves into sexuality, disability, and the grotesque, in four works of literature by award-winning Iraqi novelists: Alia Mamdouh’s التشهي (The Yearning) (2007), Sinan Antoon’s وحدها شجرة الرمان  (2010), translated by the author and published as The Corpse Washer (2014), Ahmed Saadawi’s فرانكشتاين في بغداد (2013), translated by Jonathan wright(2018), and Hassan Blasim’s معرض الجثث (2014), English translation by Jonathan Wright as The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq (2014).

Jasim-Khammas points out in her conclusion that there is an ambivalence in post-war and invasion narratives in contemporary Iraqi fiction. “There are texts which deal with corporeality as a sign of merged histories and as a symptom of development, and there are others which deploy the body in a discourse of pathos that responds to colonial fantasies. The grotesque body is a manifestation of the post-breakage moment, it indicates that some change is happening, and that corporeality is undergoing a process.”

It is important, she writes, that the representation of violence should not become “an example of the banality of violence.”

Jasim-Khammas has taken on this dense and painful subject with academic and intellectual rigour. “Post war Iraqi literature is a memorial to pain,” she says simply.

This is not, of course, confined to Iraqi literature; Palestinian academic and feminist Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has also focused on the scattering and reconstitution of Palestinian bodies and Palestine itself. You can listen to a discussion with her on a recent episode of the podcast Makdisi Street.

Olivia Snaije is a journalist and editor based in Paris.