Search results for ""Author Ikram Masmoudi""

Hussein’s starkly beautiful novel Beyond Love plunges us into the 1991 Gulf War and its aftermath. Huda, the young woman at the center of the story, experiences the deprivation and humiliation of life in sanctioned Iraq, working in the satirically named al-Amal factory (factory of hope) making men’s underwear. While surveillance and fear permeate daily life, Huda dares to vote ""no"" in the referendum for Saddam Hussein. This courageous act could have cost her her life had she not fled to the closest border, Jordan, where the novel begins. Huda is not alone: Iraqi exiles are legion there, all waiting to be relocated and start new lives. Unable to go home and to feel settled in a foreign city, she struggles to overcome her grief and haunting memories of the war and the Shi’ite uprising. In letters, diaries, and oral stories, Hussein’s characters viscerally portray the pain of war and the alienation of exile. Originally published in Arabic in 2003, Beyond Love introduces English-language readers to one of the leading voices in Iraqi fiction today.

Read more less

Examines tangible experiences of war and occupation in recent Iraqi fiction Explores fictional works by a new generation of leading Iraqi authors such as Ali Badr, Shakir Nuri, Najm Wali and Hdiya Hussein Provides a historical contextualization of the Iraqi novel before and after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime Presents an analytical and critical study of a selected corpus of novels about war and occupation in Iraq Explores tangible experiences of war and occupation such as desertion, camp detention and suicide bombing in the Iraqi novel The last three decades in Iraqi history can be summarized in these words: dictatorship, war and occupation. After the fall of Saddam's regime Iraqi novelists are not only writing about the occupation and the current disintegration of Iraq but are also revisiting previous wars that devastated their lives. This book examines how recent Iraqi fiction about war depicts the Iraqi subject in its relation to war, coercion, subjugation and occupation. The theoretical medieval concept of the homo sacer, the killable, as defined by Giorgio Agamben is used to explore the lives and the experiences of different war actors such as the soldier, the war deserter, the camp detainee and the suicide bomber depicted in their 'bare life' as men doomed to death in the necropolitical context. War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction is an exploration of fictional works by a new generation of leading Iraqi authors such as Ali Badr, Shakir Nuri, Najm Wali, Hdiya Hussein and others. It brings to light the overarching continuum in the production of homines sacri in Iraq. Instances of homo sacer under the dictatorship are complemented by new instances found in the camp and under the state of exception of the occupation and the war on terror.

Read more less