Unnamed bodies, bodyless names: Anxieties of identification in post-2003 Iraqi fiction

The article addresses the poetical and narratological issues relating to the naming of characters in Iraqi fiction dealing with the civil conflict. The character’s name is conceived of as both a minimal narrative in itself and as a metatextual operator, defining and/or blurring the border between text and the extra-textual. The article shows how these two elements of naming are articulated in the paradigmatic plot of state and/or sectarian questioning, with its violent interrogation of identity. It will then move to the discussion of two strategies Iraqi fiction has employed to deconstruct enforced identification: that of the nameless body (as represented by Aḥmad Sa῾dāwī’s Frankīshtāyn fī Baghdād and Ḍiyā᾽ Jubaylī’s al-Mashṭūr), and that of the bodyless name (as represented by Ḥāzim Kamāl al-Dīn’s Miyāh mutaṣaḥḥira).