On December 19, 1989, the state-owned, Amman-based daily Ad-Dustour printed three obituaries for Ghalib Halasa, a Jordan-born author and activist exiled in 1956, who had died in Damascus the previous day. The first, published by the Halasa tribe, expressed grief over the loss of their kin. The second commemorated Halasa as a Fatah member and an icon of leftist politics. The third and lengthiest notice invited the citizens of the nation to congregate at the Syrian border that day to welcome the body of Jordan’s “distinguished son.” In distinctive ways, each obituary hailed the body of Halasa, who was returning to Jordanian soil for the first time in over 30 years. This paper examines the discursive practices surrounding the exile, death, and repatriation of two Jordan-born authors—Ghalib Halasa (d. 1989) and Amjad Nasser (d. 2019)—to argue that “dead-body politics,” using Katherine Verdery’s phrase, relates not only to corporal remains but also the body of texts through which the meaning of a death is negotiated. It is through texts such as obituary notices, social media posts, journalistic articles, and literary retrospectives that multiple and often competing readings of an author’s life emerge, both at the moment of death and in perpetuity. The cases of Nasser and Halasa, whose literary remains are also open for interpretation, serve to highlight the textual, interpretive, and rhetorical practices through which actors—authors, intellectuals, government officials, and others—strive to harness the symbolic capital of a deceased cultural figure. Drawing on obituaries, journalistic articles, and social media posts, in addition to ethnographic interviews and observation at the Ceremony of Honor for Amjad Nasser in 2019, this paper proposes an analytic that foregrounds the interplay between the corporeality and textuality of the body to better understand the political stakes of repatriation, burial, and memorialization. Specifically, the analysis highlights how varied actors utilize metaphor, narratively construct space-time (i.e., chronotopes), and ascribe authorial intention to project political meanings onto the body. Like the material practices of transporting and burying, these rhetorical strategies capitalize upon the symbolic potential of the body to reconfigure understandings of space-time and reproduce boundaries of political communities. However, it is important to underscore that unlike transport and burial, which occur during discrete episodes of time, the discursive and textual negotiations over what a death means can extend into the future, well after the corporeal body is interred.