The Corpse Washer

Mainstream Discussion:

Ritualized/Religious Death

• Ritualized nature of the "corpse-washing" or shrouding
• "'In the name of the God, most Merciful, most Compassionate. Your forgiveness O Lord, your forgiveness. Here is the body of your servant who believed in you...'" (19)
• "The faces and the bodies of the dead would change, but the rhythm of the washing was fixed." (23)
• Ammoury's martyrdom
• Mother seeks comfort in washing husband's body.
• al-Fartusi's charity
• Sectarian Violence

Mainstream:

Political/Religious Death

Sinan Antoon: Interview with NPR

• Conversations with mother and Um Ghayda'
• "Um Ghayda' often repeated that the Sunnis cannot stand Shiites being in power and have always wanted to slaughter them... She raised her eyebrows and said: 'Oh my. Are you with us or with them?'" (148)
• Radio Propaganda
• Contrast with Uncle Sabri's perspectives
• "'They put him there as a Shiite, and not because he represents an ideological trend or party...Now an entire history of resisting dictatorship and rejecting war is being trashed." (92)

• http://www.npr.org/2014/03/30/295243989/in-civilian-snapshot-of-iraq-an-artist-is-a-corpse-washer (2:10)

• "The problem is that in this country and in the "West" in general - and I put that under quotes - we get the American narrative. And in this country, we get the narrative of the vets, which is important of course, but we never see the world from the point of view of the civilians who are on the receiving end of tanks and drones and whatnot. You know, and it's very tricky because it's very easy to write a scene where there's an encounter between civilians and soldiers, and the soldiers are demonized. But this encounter between an occupying military and civilians is going to be humiliating and horrible and traumatic, if not violent and deadly, irrespective of any of the slogans or of the intentions of the people carrying it out because this is what military occupation does. It humiliates people. It disrupts their lives, and it destroys them eventually."

Discussing Death:

From Ritual to Incomprehensible

Death as Agent

QUESTIONS

• What are the implications for this alternate way of discussing and processing death given the way the text ends? Are these alternative methods successful?
• How does Jawad's role as an artist impact his discussions of death?
• What can those detached from the Iraq and Muslim sects take away from the text about the way we talk about and process death?

"What he wanted to sculpt was not a man but the shadow he left behind." (42) (162)

• "I can almost hear death saying: 'I am what I am and haven't changed at all. I am but a postman.' If death is a postman, then I receive his letters every day. I am the one who opens carefully the bloodied and torn envelopes." (3)
• "As if death had exited the with the coffin and proceeded to the cemetery and life had returned to this place." (22)
• Dream sequence on 26: Old Man Death
• "Death was kind to me on my first day and gave me a long rest." (130)

Blending of Two Worlds

• Epigraph from the Qur'an (chapter 55)
• "In both gardens are fruit, palm trees, pomegranates."
• Constant Switching between dreams and reality: death is a significant theme in both
• "I cannot wake up from this endless nightmare of wakefulness... I was living my days exclusively with the dead." (131)
• Bodies: living and dead
• " I climbed back over the mound of rubble and felt the wreckage I'd been carrying inside me mount even higher..." (74)
• "I don't want you to live with a woman who has a bomb ticking in her body." (114)

Rhetorical Questioning

• "Is death punishing me because I thought I could escape its clutches?" (3)
• "Which one will carry the dead man's soul? Where will it take it?" [Of clouds] (7)
• "Was he a victim of the sectarian war? Or just thugs?"(156)
• "'Isn't it a crime? Is this honorable resistance?" [Um Ghayda, suicide bomb] (139)
• "If we, the living, are worthless, then what are the dead worth?" [taxi bomb] (146)
• "Was there a mysterious force taking me back to the myghasil?" (122)

The Corpse Washer

Sinan Antoon

Leeann Oelrich