The Corpse Washer by Sinan
Antoon
Translated from the Arabic
by the author
I’ve been reading this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist
(along with a group of book bloggers chaired by Stu) and Tony has kindly invited me to share my
thoughts on one of the longlisted titles.
The Corpse Washer is narrated by Jawad, the youngest son from a Shi'ite family living
in Baghdad. Jawad’s father (like his father before him) washes and shrouds
corpses prior to burial and he expects his youngest son to learn this
time-honoured ritual in order to continue the family’s calling. At an early
stage in the novel, we follow the young Jawad as his father takes him to the mghaysil
(washhouse) for the first time to learn the basics of the trade. Jawad’s first
task is to observe his father and Hammoudy (his father’s assistant) as they
attend to the ritual of cleansing and shrouding bodies. In an extended section
covering several pages, Antoon describes Jawad’s introduction to the mghaysil with
grace and humanity:
It was a bit smaller than I
had imagined it. The scents of lotus and camphor wafted through the air, and I
felt the humidity seeping into my skin. He closed the door behind us and went
inside ahead of me. The
first object that struck my eyes after we crossed the hallway and entered the
main room was the marble bench on which the dead were washed. Its northern
part, where their heads would rest, was slightly elevated so that the water
could flow down. The mghaysil was more than six decades old, and many
generations of our family had worked in it, including my grandfather, who had
died before I was born. (pgs. 14-15)
As the young Jawad grows up, he becomes reluctant to continue the
family’s vocation. He has a talent for art, aspires to be an artist and chooses
instead to study at Baghdad’s Academy of Fine Arts. But events in Baghdad
intervene and impinge on his dreams; years of economic sanctions under Saddam
Hussein’s regime, followed by the American invasion and occupation of Iraq take
their toll:
After weeks of bombing we
woke up one morning to find the sky pitch black. The smoke from the torched oil
wells in Kuwait had obliterated the sky. Black rain fell afterward, colouring
everything with soot as if forecasting what would befall us later. (pg. 61)
Jawad feels trapped in a place where ‘even the statues are too terrified to sleep at night lest they wake up
as ruins’. His father dies (along with his brother who is killed in the
Iran-Iraq war) and it becomes virtually impossible for him to find alternative
work, or to leave Iraq for the matter. As the casualties of the Iraq War
continue to mount, Jawad returns to the mghaysil to maintain the ritual of
washing and shrouding. Death is a dominant presence in the narrative, and our
protagonist seems unable to escape its shadow:
Death is not content with
what it takes from me in my waking hours, it insists on haunting me even in my
sleep. Isn’t it enough that I toil all day tending to its eternal guests,
preparing them to sleep in its lap? Is death punishing me because I thought I
could escape its clutches? If my father were still alive he would mock my silly
thoughts. He would dismiss all this as infantile, unbecoming to a man. Didn’t
he spend a lifetime doing his job day after day, never once complaining of
death? But death back then was timid and more measured than today. (pg. 3)
Antoon augments this effect by showing us how a combination of
mind-numbing insomnia and horrific nightmares haunt Jawad by night. These distressing
dreams punctuate the narrative, and in this example he’s visited by and old man
with long white hair and a long white beard - once again, death is a recurring
theme:
Wake up, Jawad, and write
down all the names! I think it very odd that he knows my name. I look at his
eyes. They are a strange sky-blue colour, set deep into his eye sockets. His
face is laced with wrinkles as if he were hundreds of years old. I ask him
flatly: Who are you? What names? He smiles: You don’t recognise me? Get a pen
and paper and write down all the names. Don’t forget a single name. They are
the names of those whose souls I will pluck tomorrow and whose bodies I will
leave for you to purify. (pg. 26)
The Corpse Washer is a powerful and very moving book. The narrative’s timeline moves
backwards and forwards as Antoon shows us snapshots of key moments in Jawad’s
life, almost like a series of vignettes. It’s a story of a young man’s choices
in life, his dreams and ambitions and his family’s expectations. And it gives
us an insight into the pain and sorrow of living with the inevitable death and
destruction that come with war.
The Corpse Washer certainly deserves its place in the IFFP longlist; I particularly
liked Antoon’s portrayal of Jawad’s relationship with his father and the scenes
set in the mghaysil (which has the calm atmosphere of a haven within the
tumultuous city). As with many of the books I’ve read this year, it took me to
a different place, another world.
The Corpse Washer is published
in the UK by Yale University
Press.
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