REVIEWS

The Corpse Washer by Sinan Antoon:

A Review Written by Deleny Figueroa

Sinan Antoon’s 2013 novel The Corpse Washer is the author’s English-translation of his Arabic novel Wahdaha Shajarat al-Rumman (The Pomegranate Alone). The fiction novel is set across a 20-some year period in Baghdad, starting from the early years of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship to the 2003 United States occupation of Iraq. The story begins and ends at the washing bench where Jawad inherits his father’s business, the mghaysil, a place for the Islamic ritual cleaning and shrouding of bodies before burial. A life-long struggle with the role of death in his life results in Jawad’s detachment from the family business, straining his relationship with his father. Jawad becomes unsettled with the idea of death providing for him, and he turns to art to combat death with creation and life. After the American invasion of Iraq, the situation in Baghdad became dismal. The population reduced as did employment opportunities, leaving a struggling Jawad without work. After his late father’s assistant, Hammoudy, who took over the mghaysil, disappears, Jawad finds himself back at the washing bench despite all his efforts to distance himself from it. Except Jawad enters the profession at a time where the “workload”, for lack of a better word, is magnified by the American invasion: “If death is a postman, then I receive his letters every day…But letters are piling up, Father! Ten-fold more than what you used to see in the span of a week now pass before me in a day or two.” The novel does not follow a linear timeline; it is fragmented, jumping from past to present, set in reality and in the nightmares that haunt our narrator, Jawad Kazim. This literary technique gives insight into how populations’ collective memory is fractured by state terror, as Jawad’s nightmares and reality often become undistinguishable. Through Jawad’s eyes, Sinan Antoon positions the reader in his homeland as it is affected by wars over territorial-disputes, sectarian violence, state violence, and American interventionism. The translation of the novel invites an English-speaking audience to rethink how they have been taught to understand the United States presence in Iraq.

Through the often-absent character of Jawad’s uncle, Sabri, we can understand how the situation in Iraq continues to affect the displaced population. Through Sabri’s character, Antoon develops a critical stance against the occupation and the misplaced blame on the Iraqi people for their reactions to their circumstances. Much like the author, Sabri left his homeland and would not return, except for sporadic, unannounced, short visits.

After fleeing Iraq due to threat against his life for his participation in the Communist party, he returns to an American-occupied Iraq to find that his homeland is almost unrecognizable:

“I knew the embargo had destroyed the country, but it’s different when you see it with your own eyes. It’s shocking. The entire country and every one in it are tired…This is not the Baghdad I’d imagined… Believe me, these Americans, with their ignorance and racism, will make people long for Saddam’s days.”

Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer is a literary masterpiece, deeply depressing, but deeply profound with poetic language and critical commentary of state violence. From the eyes of Jawad Kazim, we begin to understand how the Iraqi state becomes unrecognizable as a result of American interventionism which attempts to erase Iraq from the map, by encouraging sectarian violence and forcing mass displacement due to lack of work, unsafe living conditions, and cultural erasure. Reading The Corpse Washer is but one way to ensure that the collective memory of Iraq is never forgotten.

LOCKESQUATTING

Anonymous Submission

Secret Mall Apartment (2024) is a hilarious and heart-

warming documentary on the significance of squat-

ting as a means of protesting gentrification and urban

renewal. It follows a group of eight artists in Provi-

dence, Rhode Island, who initially challenge them-

selves to spend a week living in the bustling, 1.4 million

sq ft Providence Place mall as an act of détournement

against the new development. A few days into the

challenge, the group uncovers a hidden, unused space

in the mall and embarks on a four-year long journey to

repurpose the room into their own secret apartment.

The story begins in Eagle Square, a community of

Providence artists who, throughout the 1990s, estab-

lish several venues for events and the arts in decom-

missioned industrial buildings. At the center of this

movement is Fort Thunder, a warehouse that serves

as an art studio, venue for underground music and

events, and living space for its tenants (including the

noise rock band Lightning Bolt.)

Eagle Square is situated in the neighborhood of Ol-

neyville, a former industrial powerhouse that had

undergone rapid economic decline and depopulation

after the end of WWII. These issues were exacerbated

with the construction of a highway connector in the

1950s, which geographically separated Olneyville and

other lower-income neighborhoods from the rest of

Providence.

While most Providence residents considered Ol-

neyville to be nothing more than an economically de-

pressed and deserted waste of space, artists capitalized on the neighborhood’s many vacant mills and factories which provided vast spaces free from disturbances. Supported by its proximity to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where most of Secret Mall Apartment’s characters first meet, Eagle Square emerges as the new epicenter for Providence’s burgeoning arts scene and counterculture.

Unfortunately, in the matter of only a few years, real estate developers also begin to recognize the immense potential in Olneyville. Lying a stone’s throw from downtown Providence and the newly built Providence Place mall, Olneyville becomes ripe for urban renewal. By the early 2000s, developers began sinking extensive financial and political capital into the construction of Providence Place and the redevelopment of the surrounding area, displacing the artists of Eagle Square from both their artistic and living spaces simultaneously.

Fast forward to 2004, five years after Providence Place first opened to the public, and the mall has radically transformed the surrounding area. Frustrated with the destruction of Eagle Square and the changing urban landscape of Providence, the group of artists challenge themselves to live in the mall for a week.

A few days into the endeavor, one of the artists recalls a nondescript space in the mall that they had observed during its initial construction, thinking that it may still exist unused. Lo and behold, the team discovers a 750 sq ft room deep in the bowels of the building! Recognizing the incredible potential of this space, they proceed to lug couches, tables, and other items to furnish their newly established apartment.

Later, the mall apartment becomes a place for the group of artists to convene and plan out their greater mission: to travel across the country and spread the craft of “tape art,” which entails creating murals using nothing more than rolls of painter’s tape. A deep sense of humility and genuineness permeates the whole film, presenting a unique contrast to the pretentiousness typical of the DIY punk ethos.

Secret Mall Apartment is profound for many reasons. Not only does it tell a deeply inspirational story about how artists can create meaning and impact out of limited resources, but it also reflects on how those displaced by destructive real estate developers can fight to take back their spaces. Throughout the film, the squatters make it explicitly clear that this project is a commentary on gentrification. At one point, they explain that urban redevelopment projects in Providence are oftentimes framed as merely improving “underutilized spaces” in order to obfuscate their truly destructive nature. Using this same rhetoric, they are able to justify their own reclamation of “underutilized space” in the mall—if they can do it, then so can we!

What’s particularly interesting is that the argument raised by these squatters is eerily reminiscent of John Locke’s theory of property rights, which posits that people derive a natural right to property through the exertion of labor upon natural resources. Assuming that all land originates as part of the “public commons,” Locke’s theory states that anyone who invests their own labor to improve that land and transform it into a productive form of capital thereby earns the right to claim the newly improved property as their own.

It goes without saying that Locke’s theory of property rights provided an ideological basis and moral justification for the appropriation of indigenous peoples’ land by English settler-colonists, who argued that since their territories were “unimproved” and part of the natural commons, that they therefore had the right to invest labor onto the land and consequently claim it as their own property. Locke’s theory of property rights continues to be applicable to our current understanding of political economy, as explored throughout Secret Mall Apartment, by providing a rational framework for capitalists to appropriate public lands for their own private gain. However, one peculiar aspect of Locke’s theory is that it also quite explicitly advocates for squatting, as articulated in the following passage:

“The same measures governed the possession of land too: whatsoever he tilled and reaped, laid up and made use of, before it spoiled, that was his peculiar right; whatsoever he enclosed, and could feed, and make use of, the cattle and product was also his. But if either the grass of his enclosure rotted on the ground, or the fruit of his planting perished without gathering, and laying up, this part of the earth, notwithstanding his enclosure, was still to be looked on as waste, and might be the possession of any other.”

- John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government (1689)

It turns out that Locke’s reasoning not only advocates for appropriation (squatting) in the instance that privately-owned property is being squandered, but even presents it as a moral obligation! Of course, the purpose of this rhetoric is not to defend Locke’s dubious conception of property rights. His framework is deeply flawed for a multitude of reasons, most importantly because it makes a critical assumption that everyone is equally entitled to “the public commons” of Earth. It doesn’t take much creativity to find morally intuitive counterexamples to this theory: would European settler-colonists really be equally entitled to a land that they had just “discovered,” compared to the indigenous communities who had resided there for their whole lives?

Locke also strangely uses God as a sort of stand-in for any social phenomenon that cannot be explained through natural causes, including the natural entitlement of all people to the commons. One might refer to Locke’s divine rhetoric as a form of “proto-reification,” where reification refers to the misattribution of social norms and practices as innate to human nature. This is a practice that is all too common throughout Enlightenment philosophy, a movement which preceded the emergence of the social sciences.