MESA Banner
The Spatiality of the Occupation in Iraqi Fiction
Abstract
In the context of the American occupation of Iraq and the war on terror space was managed and invested in order to consolidate basic distinctions such as inside/outside; order/disorder; the realm of law/the state of nature. In this geographical and political ordering the centrality of the camp as a concept, an organizing principle and a practice was strongly reaffirmed as “the most absolute biopolitical space that has ever been realized” (G. Agamben) Iraqi authors who wrote about the occupation focused their attention on space ordering and the geography of occupation reflecting in their novels the two opposite paradigmatic spaces and their corresponding practices: the city and the camp standing in opposition to one another. The Green Zone as the walled, entrenched space elected for law and culture opposes Bucca camp in the Iraqi desert where “evil” is contained and granted a visible localization and where lawlessness and barbarism reign. Two novels by Iraqi author Shakir Noori bearing as titles the two different spaces In the Green Zone (2009) and The Prisoners of Camp Bucca (2011) unveil the spatial rationale of the tortured geography of the occupation and the politics of security enforced by the Americans and its dehumanizing practices. Despite their differences, the two spaces converge in the way they are both the sites of moral and legal transgression: terror as the exception to order on the one side, and torture on the other as the transgression to law leading to its suspension. In both spaces the biological lives of the occupants are exposed, can be targeted and reduced to “bare life”. Within Giorgio Agamben’s frame work about the camp and the concept of bare life, this paper will examine the geography of occupation as it is portrayed in fiction with its two realms: the city and the camp and the bare life that reside in there.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Iraq
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries