Toposi smrti u savremenom iračkom romanu
The Topos of Death in Contemporary Iraqi Novel

Summary/Abstract: This paper offers an insight into the literary presentation of the situation in Iraq after the American invasion, with special reference to topoi of death. The war apocalypse exacerbated the misery of the country that had already been crushed under Saddam’s dictatorship. The literal destruction of the country and society in a paradoxical way caused the awakening and affirmation of the novel, a literary genre that had largely been under the Baa’th party embargo or written in exile. Ahmad Saadawi and Shakir Nuri are prominent novelists who tried to reconstruct the torturous reality of contemporary Iraq in their fiction. Their novels, Frankenstein in Baghdad and The Madmen of Camp Bucca, present a new geography of bare existence and thanatopolitics as the newly established norm of life. Furthermore, these novels question the fractures of the homeland through Foucault’s perspective of narrative and formal heterotopias produced within the structures of biopower. The figure of Baghdad’s Frankenstein or The Nameless symbolizes a new Iraqi “overman” or an improved version of homo sacer, and Camp Bucca proves to be the ideal paradigm of thanatopolitics’ mimicry and the symbolic order of the twenty first century.

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