Chapter 3 Identity Constructs between Terrorism and Dehumanization in Yasmina Khadra’s The Sirens of Baghdad
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Abstract
This chapter investigates the relationship between terrorism and literature. Algerian novelist, Yasmina Khadra, tries to identify the origins of terrorism in an identity crisis in the Arab world with an imbrication of political and economic failure. The encounter with the different Other in an international environment, a fast moving technological world, from national issues to gender identity issues, the malaise bred by an archaic mentality, and lack of development opportunities, remain the challenges that drown Arab society in terrorism. Yasmina Khadra first appropriates then rejects, denies, and then acknowledges these problems as his own, and displays the consequences. As presented in the novel, intellectuals do not seem to find out easy ways to resolve their problems. In fact, as in his own case, Yasmina’s preponderant character in his novel The Sirens of Baghdad
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seems lost, lacks communication, develops hatred, moves to anger while falling into folly, behaves with a sense of the absurd, and, like Dr. Jalal, adheres to fundamentalist theses. This is the lot of a sane intellectual. The author connects the abject with the desirable, the hideous with the beautiful, the present with the past, and the real with the mythical, but above all the betrayal of the West with its values. The Orient remains eternally Salammbô. Heroines who, like Gustave Flaubert’s sensuous, exotic, version ‘of carnal female temptation,’
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represent the East. Humiliation is certainly another major factor in the rise of fundamentalism. Kafkian Western communication with the Orient reinforces the chthonic body relation to terrorism, while the West seems to manipulate the deep-sea monsters. With settings in Beirut, Baghdad, and Kafr Karam in The Sirens of Baghdad, space remains related to body and terrorism. Mapping the origins of terrorism, body, and soul become other plausible sources for evil when Yaseen, the fundamentalist, ‘struck his chest with the flat of his hand [saying] “We are the wrath of God.”’
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Terrorism is not only the hell