Post Invasion Iraq: Gothic Chronotope and the Trauma of the Homo Sacre in Baghdad's Mortuary

Abstract

Since the eighteenth century, gothic aspects seep into the fictional representation of traumatic experience, be it individual or collective. Representing trauma through gothic aspects places the reader in a direct confrontation with the uncanny; it faces him with traumatic feelings that powerfully haunt and unsettle the present.    The study argues that Burhan Al-Shawi's Baghdad's Mortuary is a gothic novel that figures out violence and rupture in the aftermath of 2003. Al-Shawi, in other words, situates the suspense and grotesque of gothic mode to represent the apocalyptic sociopolitical discourse of physical and psychological ruination which contour Iraq in the aftermath of the American invasion.   Symbolically, the location of the novel, namely the mortuary, is a gothic chronotope where the repressed returns to haunt Adam's consciousness by means of ghostly corpses who speak for and about their traumatic death. The study aims at answering the following question: how does the author represent the conflation of life and death in post invasion Iraq? The study significantly reflects on the collective traumatic identity that the whole Iraqi people share regardless the details that differentiate one experience from another.