death studies

The Corpse Washer (2013) by Sinan Antoon explores the intersections of resistance, memory, and mortality in post-invasion Iraq from the perspective of Jawad, an artist who has become a corpse washer. In contrast to prior research that has examined the novel through trauma theory, existentialism, and postcolonial critique, this paper introduces necropoetics, a theoretical framework that connects Achille Mbembe's necropolitics (the power to orchestrate death) with literary aesthetics, to investigate how Antoon stylizes death as both a political act and a narrative story. The novel transforms Jawad’s grim vocation into a site of artistic defiance against the erasure of Iraqi lives by emphasizing the ritualized labor of washing corpses. This study contends that necropoetics, as a lens, demonstrates how Antoon’s prose resists the commodification of war trauma, instead portraying death as a subversive, intimate practice that challenges state-sanctioned violence and historical amnesia. The Corpse Washer is not merely a chronicle of loss; it is also a literary act of preservation and dissent, as a result of this approach.