Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory

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The drive to humanize the enemy other has gained much traction in contemporary war texts. As Stacey Peebles established in her early study of Iraq War literature, many troops themselves "arrive in Iraq ready to reach across national and ethnic divides and make a difference" (3), even as their role as combatant limits such possibilities and can in turn increase their trauma.⁵ Jennifer Haytock sees this representational [End Page 88] change as tied in with larger shifts in multicultural identity, recognizing "increasing attention to the importance of knowing and listening to the other, particularly nonwhite others who are the victims of American military aggression" (336). These critics recognize how many American combatants are themselves aware of racist or xenophobic practices, and they seek new ways to wage war while resisting the othering impulse. Perhaps the most influential theory in this move is Judith Butler's idea of "grievability," specifically in relation to war representations in Frames of War, in which she articulates how changing the ways warfare is framed holds the potential to challenge systems by making so-called enemy lives grievable. She writes that

the opposition to war has to take place, in part, through remaking the conditions of its possibility and probability. Similarly, if war is to be opposed, we have to understand how popular assent to war is cultivated and maintained, in other words, how war waging acts upon the senses so that war is thought to be an inevitability, something good, or even a source of moral satisfaction.

(ix)

Ideas of grief and precarity anchor her theory, in that "we" must break the frames of our war texts to see the structures that render certain lives as ungrievable. "Ungrievable lives," she claims, "are those that cannot be lost, and cannot be destroyed, because they already inhabit a lost and destroyed zone; they are, ontologically, and from the start, already lost and destroyed, which means that when they are destroyed in war, nothing is destroyed" (xix).

This move illustrates a key challenge of the war text as it situates grievability within an understanding of the structures of life and community, not just in individual self/other encounters. As a process, this wartime othering hinges on structures of difference and supposed inferiority, predominantly racial/ethnic and cultural. While the rhetoric used to justify military action often involves America "protecting" or "liberating" those whose shared humanity is ostensibly recognized, in practice, the frames of American war involve dehumanization and differentiation. For example, the ubiquitous derogatory term "hajji," found in practically every textual representation of the war and occupation, emphasizes this dual othering (along with the term's original religious [End Page 89] connections to Islam, yet another layer of othering). A slur similar to other derogatory terms for enemies from earlier wars, it serves as a placeholder for an entire network of racial/ethnic differences and supposed cultural primitivism when compared to American civilization, both of which combine to dehumanize Iraqis. Crucially, this dehumanization both enables invasion (America must bring civilized democracy to the backwards Iraqis) and emerges through the waging of war (American combatants dehumanize their enemies so as to facilitate violence against them and to cope with their own trauma). And while war texts often focus on individual moments of contact between protagonist and enemy, they do so without considering the social, cultural, and political structures of the enemy as a group. Butler's work thus poses a different challenge: "we" must not only recognize individual lives as precarious and grievable, but also "understand precariousness as a shared condition, and precarity as the politically induced condition that would deny equal exposure through the radically unequal distribution of wealth and the differential ways of exposing certain populations, racially and nationally conceptualized, to greater violence" (28). The contemporary Iraq War text offers readers an opportunity for this kind of critique, given the way the initial war evolved into a prolonged Occupation that embeds American combatants within the very spaces of their supposed enemies.

Yet if one thrust of contemporary war scholarship involves greater grievability, it often seems at odds with another increasingly debated topic of war academics: the "trauma hero." The phrase itself comes from Scranton, who defines the "myth of the trauma hero" as the recurring story of innocence, loss, trauma, and the need to testify the awful truths of war to people who don't want to listen. He argues that "this myth informs our politics, shapes our news reports, and underwrites our history. It dominates critical and scholarly interpretation of war literature, war movies, and the visual culture of war. … Like all myths, this story frames and filters our perceptions of reality through a set of recognizable and comforting conventions" ("Trauma Hero"). Furthermore, reliance on this myth actively others the Iraqi or Afghan. As Scranton elaborates in his work Total Mobilization,

Cultural narratives about war that highlight the status of combatants as victims, sanctify combat experience as a revelation of transcendental truth, and disavow the recognition of complicity in favor of moralistic denunciation serve and have [End Page 90] served to obscure serious consideration of the responsibilities of power, efface and marginalize the suffering of others (particularly those targeted by our tragic trauma heroes), justify aggression, and excuse war crimes.⁶

(222)

Sam Sacks echoes this idea, noting that this genre of war literature "scrupulously avoids placing the Terror Wars within a larger political or ideological context," so that the trauma hero narrative allows American readers to not think about the (non-American) lives their own wars have destroyed.⁷

This critique has emerged as a dominant thread in recent scholarship, provoking questions as to the extent a support-the-troops mentality has hindered empathy rather than facilitated it. Patrick Deer contends that, in recent American war texts, the "sacralization—and isolation—of the figure of the veteran is clearly at the core of the militarization of American culture," and "trauma has become the dominant vocabulary" (62). Deer sees the trauma hero as "like the colonial agent of old, returning transformed from an exotic and savage land to an indifferent imperial metropolis" (63). Jim Holstun links the trauma hero to what he terms the "shoot and cry" narrative, which foregrounds the suffering American combatants feel after they kill Iraqis or Afghans, and claims that such a narrative "provides US readers with heightened affect and a political alibi" (3). The shoot and cry narrative "differs from simple racism or the colonial 'othering' familiar from Edward Said's analysis of orientalism, for it denies responsibility for the other's suffering while appropriating it as an authenticating experience. The detached moments of isolated, ostensibly uncaused traumatic affect form an alibi for the colonial narrative they compromise" (5–6).⁸ Or, as he puts it more bluntly, "Trauma narrative in the era of high modernism offered an alternative to and critique of triumphant nationalism. But in late modernist American war fiction, it serves that very nationalism" (22). Such critiques of trauma hero narratives do not necessarily mean dismissing them entirely, but rather asking how war texts can challenge readers who have demanded these standardized conventions.⁹

The trauma hero model is fundamentally limited in the amount of identification or empathy it can generate, given that its default remains the lurking danger of the other. In a critique of Butler, Veronica Austen argues "an awareness of one's own precarity does not necessarily motivate an empathetic connection to another person. Instead, one's [End Page 91] knowledge of another's precarity competes with one's own experience of vulnerability, thus compromising one's willingness to forge an unconditional empathetic bond" (36).¹⁰ In other words, in Butler's framing, the American combatant, exposed to his or her own precarity in a war zone, would come to identify with others who share that precarity, be they Iraqi or American.¹¹ Yet the trauma hero model shows that this is often not the case, and that threats to the self mainly lead to increasing hostility towards the other. Haytock acknowledges this limitation but argues that "American characters … rarely connect more than momentarily with native individuals, yet the reader is positioned as an insider able to understand more than the soldiers" (340). The reader, safe at home and removed from the threats of combat, thus supposedly offers a better vantage point through which to redefine grievability.

This focus on the reader's engagement applies specifically to Gallagher and Scranton, as both of their texts investigate the limitations and possibilities for potential empathy within the trauma hero narrative. While very different in terms of plotting and style, the two texts serve as strong companion pieces, given that both are texts written by white male American veteran authors who share an interest in considering Iraqi society and culture as essential to their war texts. Both authors probe the limits of precarity, offering distinct ways to further notions of grievability and empathy. Gallagher, more focused on the war zone itself, reaffirms Peebles' idea that the very attempt to empathize can traumatize the American combatant, while acknowledging that such trauma can lay the foundation for future acts of shared humanity outside the war zone. Scranton, in contrast, radically challenges the trauma hero narrative to force civilians to confront their own precarity, indicating that grievability is best served by attacks on the reader's own sense of safety and cohesion. While Gallagher's text seems to trace the limits of grievability in war, Scranton in turn exploits the cultural contacts within war literature to shatter the divides between safe and unsafe zones to bring all parties involved—American civilian, American combatant, and Iraqi (both civilians and combatants) into a shared sense of precarity that might in turn lead to new acts of empathy.

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Rather than telling of a soldier in a nonspecific location attempting to survive until his tour is finished, Matt Gallagher's Youngblood's complexity comes from its historicity.¹² Set in the town of Ashuriyah, [End Page 92] the novel has a twofold historical focus: on one hand, protagonist Lieutenant Jack Porter must repeatedly confront Iraq as a country with its own history outside of American interests; on the other hand, and more crucially for Porter, his wartime experience begins at the tail end of the Occupation in 2011, which means that, for both Iraqis and Americans, the war itself has a history that Porter must consider. The narrative drive of the novel comes from Porter's attempt to make sense of the history of those Americans who have come before him, their efforts to conquer and then rebuild Iraq, and the damage done along the way.

As an officer in the later stages of the Occupation, Porter is not working to conquer a country, nor are he and his men fighting a surge or battling organized resistance. Instead, they are attempting to rebuild and maintain the war-ravaged country. "Clear and hold. Then build" is the repeated mantra of their counterinsurgency mission, making Porter and his men a combination of police, bureaucrats, negotiators, and guards (16). While the soldiers of Youngblood are eternally aware that they inhabit a combat zone, their daily tasks are more bureaucratic. They distribute funds to militia and police. They regularly conduct "Electricity recon," which is "army language for walking around a neighborhood asking people how many hours a day they had power" (6). They sit down for chai with local leaders who have, at various points in the invasion, both aided the Americans and supported the insurgents. When they hear gunfire off in the distance, one apparently unironic officer radios "demand[ing] to know what sort of battle had interrupted the war" (45-46). While this reads as a joke, it illustrates the larger ambiguity of this moment in the occupation—these soldiers are engaged in war as policing and bureaucracy, a mission that places them in a confused subject position when it comes to the crafting of their own identities. If traditionally combatants define themselves against the enemy other, then those definitions become blurred when the other is both potential enemy and a civilian to serve.

As a result, questions arise as to if such redefinitions of war and warriors allow for a more complicated engagement with the other. In other words, to what extent does Porter's role as historian and negotiator let him see Iraqis as grievable? If early soldiers in Iraq were prevented from transgressing the line between American and other due to the constraints of more straightforward military action, then can grievability be reframed when the parameters of soldiering themselves change? If the role of the soldier becomes more connected to [End Page 93] understanding history and regulating the populace, what new possibilities for empathy arise?

Key to these questions is an awareness that the success of their mission requires a sense of history. Porter struggles to navigate the complexities of Ashuriyah, recognizing that there is a history within the community that structures its responses to his actions. Porter of course is not unique in his role as soldier who also seeks to respect Iraqi culture, but Youngblood emphasizes how this kind of cultural respect has become a goal of the mission rather than a hindrance to it. Because the role of combatant has bled into that of bureaucrat, police officer, and community organizer, every interaction Porter has with the Iraqis is grounded in the shared history of these two countries, so to accomplish his mission he must engage with Iraq as a historically-specific place and Iraqis as individuals, learning and respecting their history and the complex social and political networks shaped by that history. While he might not like all the Iraqis he meets, Porter must see them as at least potentially grievable to be effective. Yet to keep his men alive, he must also see every Iraqi as potentially an enemy. These at-times competing identities thus demand seeing Iraqis as both Subjects and others.

As a relative newcomer, Porter is thrust into the role of historian, and his missions bring him further into the history of the occupation. He recognizes that the locals have their own version of history: in one early moment, Porter looks through an Iraqi guard's photo album, "a flipbook of the entire fucking war" like "a yearbook of a school I dreamed about" (36–37). He spends much of the novel reading reports and interviewing witnesses about previous American efforts, which leads him into the story of Elijah Rios, a former US soldier, and Rana, the local sheik's daughter whom Rios loved. Or rather, the stories of Rios and Rana, as each person Porter talks with has a different version, ranging from a Romeo and Juliet-like tale of forbidden love to one American's quest to become Iraqi and escape the binary thinking of war.¹³ Porter's struggle is not just to learn the history, but to untangle histories. To lead effectively, he must engage with a multiplicity of competing narratives, recognizing Ashuriyah as a place with a complex past both intertwined with and independent from American involvement.

This historian perspective creates the potential for grievability, a point Gallagher makes explicit by pitting Porter against a more traditional combatant, his new staff sergeant, Chambers. While Porter is [End Page 94] relatively new to the war, and thus approaches this history from without, as a scholar might, Chambers is on his fourth tour, his third time deployed to Ashuriyah. Chambers's hatred of the Iraqis marks him as an earlier form of soldier, from the time of what he calls "Real combat. None of this counterinsurgency handholding bullshit. Just kill or be killed" (23). He represents a challenge to Porter's worldview because of his experiential, not academic, knowledge of local history; he knows the older names of checkpoints, knows the history of the major players in the town, and lived through what Porter is forced to confess he has only read about (23). Even the novel's title hints at this disparity; a "youngblood" is an inexperienced soldier who needs to be protected by veteran troops. While Chambers intends the term as an endearment, it constantly reminds Porter that Porter may have authority of rank, but Chambers has authority of experience. And due to this experience, Chambers remains in the mindset of the more traditional combatant, who sees all Iraqis as enemies first, people second. His overt racism, suspicion, and open hostility towards the Iraqis shocks Porter and begins to create a rift in the troops. Gallagher reveals their fundamentally different worldviews as mediated by the histories they engage with: Porter reads Lawrence of Arabia and Che Guevara, attempting to consider the local history and the insurgent perspective, while Chambers suggests instead Caesar's Conquest of Gaul, a story, he says, about "how an empire deals with the barbarians" (71). While Chambers knows much of the history, prolonged exposure to combat has closed off avenues of empathy and reinscribes a worldview that refuses to see Iraqis as grievable at all.

Chambers and Porter offer different approaches for the reader. As a survivor of combat, Chambers stands in for the more traditional trauma hero, who claims that civilians can never understand the experiences of war because they have not lived it. His rejection of Iraqi grievability is therefore intricately connected to his idea of himself as a trauma hero, to the point where he sees Porter, a fellow combatant, as more of a civilian, lacking in experiential authority. Porter however represents a unique perspective for the civilian reader, in that his attempts to be a historian mirror our own attempts to understand this war zone, while his drive to keep his men alive mirrors Chambers' combat soldier mentality. In other words, Porter is driven to be an empathetic reader of Ashuriyah and its people, but also a combat soldier who cannot afford [End Page 95] such a liability. The narrative drive of Youngblood comes from Porter's attempts to navigate these roles, and the ways this history embroils him in a situation that both approaches grievability and limits it.

Recognizing this tension, Porter struggles to connect and imagine alternative viewpoints, a struggle that seems doomed to fail. He talks with locals and attempts to learn Arabic. He fasts during Ramadan, the only occupier to do so. "In theory, I wanted to empathize with these men who'd lost a loved one to an ignorant, violent occupation they called the Collapse" he thinks as he negotiates with the grieving relatives of a civilian killed by American forces (68). He not only sees the folly of the occupation but also recognizes the different terminology that constitutes a different worldview (the "Occupation" vs. the "Collapse"). But even here he struggles towards that empathy and understands the limitations of the soldier's ability to grieve: "In theory, in an air-conditioned classroom I'd once sat in with great clarity and wrath, I would grasp and grapple for a solution that bridged this vast divide. … In practice, though, things were different. They just were" (68). Or, as he puts it after talking with his Iraqi counterpart, a lieutenant in the local militia, "He was still a them. I was still an us. No amount of chai could change that" (146).

This continued division provides an update to Peebles' conclusion in Welcome to the Suck, which focused on earlier Iraq War literature. For Peebles' subjects, even considering the possibility of grieving for the other becomes traumatic, leading her to conclude that "empathy with the Iraqis may be as personally devastating as … coldness turns out to be" (102). Youngblood pushes this further to show how the Occupation itself is in some ways forcing this traumatic dualism onto its combatants, requiring both empathy and detachment as imperatives for mission success.

This impasse between a desire to empathize and a desire for self-preservation is crucial to Gallagher's overall project, for his text seems to conclude that, despite his best efforts to learn history and approach grievability, the combat soldier cannot provide a perspective that collapses the self/other divide. In part this is due to the continued presence of the dominant trauma hero narrative. The entire text is framed as a flashback, with a prologue written by Porter long after his tour has ended. He puts forth the novel as an attempt to answer civilians' repeated question "What was it like?" (1). In laying out his own trauma [End Page 96] (a move that gives him authority as trauma hero), he positions the female Iraqi civilian Rana as one of the key factors: "And her, of course. She comes in fragments, slivers of jagged memory that cut and condemn. How she'd sigh before we talked about the past. How my mind ached after we considered the future. I failed Rana, failed her utterly, all because I tried to help" (2). Here Porter (and potentially Gallagher) falls into the very trap of the trauma hero narrative that he seems to be critiquing: he uses the (fragmented) female other as symbol of his own pain and trauma, someone whose suffering is noteworthy because of the ways it can "cut and condemn" him. In the novel, Rana follows a somewhat clichéd arc: the former lover of Rios, another American soldier, she becomes an object of fascination, longing, and erotic and romantic desire for Porter. Ultimately, he attempts (and fails) to save her and her children by paying to smuggle them to Beirut, never to learn if they arrived successfully. She becomes emblematic of his failures throughout the war, and his failure to save her indicates his failure to save the country itself. While this is certainly traumatic for him, it also falls into standard Orientalizing tropes, striking a sour note in a novel that seems invested in breaking down those tropes. But again, I would argue this indicates a failure of the trauma hero narrative itself, one that Gallagher cannot entirely escape.

At the same time, however, Youngblood offers a stronger move in its investigation of grievability, contending that grievability can only ever be partial because such a move is limited by the complexities of American identity as well. Porter's attempts to see Iraqis as grievable subjects are hindered by the very history he seeks to understand, in that it renders the Americans as equally de-individualized to the Iraqis. The story of Rios illustrates this problem; Rios, "the best American to come to Ashuriyah," indicates a possible reconciliation between the two populaces, because while "other Americans cared about certain Iraqis, … he cared for all of them. … He wanted to be one of them" (82). Yet this goal still privileges an American desire for individual agency and ahistoricity—he wants to adopt Iraqi culture without recognizing their lived history. Rios is killed because he cannot understand that many Iraqis do not see him as a grievable other; he imagines that if he can abandon his own prejudices and find common ground with Iraqis, they will all do likewise. But the text shows throughout that the Iraqis make just as many generalizations about Americans as the Americans do [End Page 97] about them. "Just as all Iraqis look the same to your eyes," one Iraqi tells Porter, "all Americans look the same to ours" (143). This becomes dangerous for any American who seeks to transgress his own nationality; as Porter is warned at one point, "You know what happened the last time an American soldier tried to be one of us" (191). Rios, it seems, was killed in part because he refused to stay in his own category.

Yet this does not mean that recognition of shared humanity is entirely doomed to failure. A climactic moment at the end of the novel finds the platoon sent to disperse a mob, wherein Porter comes perilously close to ordering his men to fire into the Iraqis. Rather than give in to his fear, he takes off his own helmet and drops to one knee, leading his men to perform similar acts of nonaggression. This potentially suicidal maneuver reconfigures the mob, so that Porter sees not a collective, but "human beings, mostly young, as confused and mad and foolish as we were" (321). While this is not a moment of truly reciprocal grievability—we never know how the Iraqis see Porter in this moment—it does seem to indicate that only through a surrender of the postures of the combat soldier and the strategies of self-protection can the occupier begin to see individual, grievable lives, even if this is just a momentary point of contact. Here, Porter reveals the precarity of self, deliberately removing his implements of war and exposing his own vulnerability and individuality to these potential enemies. By exposing his own precarity, he in turn recognizes the precarity of the other, which becomes the closest the novel allows for shared, grievable humanity.

In the end, Gallagher seems defeated in his attempt to find grievability within the war itself. Rather, he recognizes that this struggle must continue beyond the confines of the combat zone, for only there can rapprochement take place. Driven by his guilt, following the end of his tour, Porter and his wartime translator Snoop—whom he now refers to as Qasim, his actual name—move to Beirut—Qasim as a refugee and Porter on a Middle Eastern Studies scholarship. Porter spends some of his time searching for Rana, but more than that he "just want[s] an answer for why" (340). While the ending is not particularly hopeful, and continues the problematic politics of a trauma hero narrative ignoring larger political issues of American culpability, it does seem to suggest that a greater cultural understanding and shared grievability must continue outside the combat zone and outside the confines of the war novel itself, between scholar and refugee rather than soldier and [End Page 98] civilian. The soldier's perspective, Gallagher contends, continues to limit the possibilities of understanding, but a recognition of history can lead to non-oppositional modes of engagement that create the preconditions for future grievability and a recognition of shared precarity that can lead to new acts of empathy and solidarity.

________

While Gallagher imagines possibilities beyond the battlefield, Roy Scranton brings the violence of war home to implicate more directly the civilian/reader in a system of precarity. Scranton openly transforms his trauma heroes into the enemy, one that is a threat to both Americans and Iraqis. Scranton's novel positions American and Iraqi civilians within systems of precarity in order to realign empathetic responses and force readers to recognize their own culpability in creating the conditions of war. Though the novel may be admittedly pessimistic about the lessons that can be learned from war, it does suggest that a broader sense of grievability may arise specifically through rejecting trauma hero narratives and doing a kind of epistemological violence to the reader.

Scranton weaves together three separate stories in a way that brings disparate cultures into dialogue with each other. The stories are nested within each other, each taking place temporally before those that precede it narratively. We move from a Columbus Day barbecue in 2004 to an American soldier's story of the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, to an Iraqi family's perspective on the buildup to the invasion, and then back out. Each story follows its own protagonists: Matt and Dahlia, a liberal, civilian couple hosting the barbecue; Specialist Wilson, an American poet-turned-soldier; and Qasim, an Iraqi graduate student of mathematics. Yet each story touches on the others in oblique ways: Aaron, a returning veteran attending the barbecue pops up momentarily in Wilson's narrative, Qasim appears in Wilson's narrative as an interpreter for the Americans, and Aaron reveals to Matt that Qasim ends up being tortured and humiliated by American jailers in a manner reminiscent of Abu Ghraib. Each story thus both adds its own narrative and works to disrupt the preceding narrative frame, repeatedly reorienting its readers and changing their alignments.

In this way, War Porn already offers a counter to the trauma hero narrative by crafting what Jennifer Haytock has referred to as the "multivoiced" war novel (337). These novels "decenter American [End Page 99] experiences, link soldiers' voices to those of the other, and open up the question of who matters in war to include civilians, refugees, and other noncombatants." Such models can serve as a corrective to a text like Youngblood, which attempts to represent the other but ultimately subsumes its voices into the trauma hero narrative. Instead, a multivoiced novel "disrupts the primacy of the trauma hero narrative by presenting at least two (if not more) first-person narrators from opposing sides of the conflicts." These novels "place the reader inside the experience of both the American soldier and the Iraqi or Afghan civilian: the trauma hero is juxtaposed with the cultural and racial other" (338). Haytock focuses on novels that bring the trauma hero perspective into dialogue with the other, inviting an oscillation between sympathy, empathy, and identification as the reader imagines the subjectivity of both sides of the conflict.¹⁴ Scranton crafts such a multivoiced novel through his three distinct narratives. Beyond that, he intersperses the text with smaller sections called "Babylon" (akin to the "Newsreel" sections of John Dos Passos's USA Trilogy) creating a polytextual collage of cut-up snippets from propaganda reports, army manuals, guides to the Middle East, and other unspecified texts. The novel vigorously critiques the monovocality of the trauma hero narrative by emphasizing war itself as an amalgam of texts and voices, all shouting to be heard.

Most obviously in the novel, Scranton rejects the idea that his soldiers are trauma heroes. The dominant wartime narrative, following Wilson's increasing dehumanization and corruption, is noteworthy in that it avoids the standard tropes of the trauma hero narrative. He is never involved in any major battles, the violence seems largely to take place nearby him, and most of his stories involve darkly farcical non-combat. Much of the frustration Wilson feels is due to how his experience violates the standard war story: "We expected nothing less than shell shock and trauma, we lusted for thousand-yard stares. … We were the camera, we were the audience, we were the actors and film and screen: cowboys and killer angels, the lost patrol, the cavalry charge, America's proud and bloody soldier boys" (54). In this moment, Wilson shows how aware he is of the framing surrounding war stories, and how standard conventions have equated heroism with trauma. Not only does Scranton reject trauma hero narratives in his text, he actively critiques how such narratives are framed culturally, through movies, books, and national mythologies. [End Page 100]

Scranton's focus throughout the "combatant" sections of the novel is on how American combatants come to eschew ideas of the grievable other. Wilson's first major ethical concern involves not just how to act, but whether to grieve. When ordered by his captain to drive over an Iraqi boy if the boy blocks their way, Wilson thinks:

I wouldn't look in the rearview at the stain of blood on the road. I'd keep my eyes straight ahead and not even from the corner would I look at the boy I'd killed.

Of course I'd look.

No. I'd watch the taillights of the truck in front, I wouldn't look.

Of course I'd look. I'd speed up—but would I even feel the body under the humvee's tons?

(47)

But while at the start he considers such ethical questions regularly, as his time in Iraq continues, the Iraqi becomes the focus of his rage and the potential site for his own redemption:

This wasn't who I was, who I was meant to be. I was sensitive. I'd been a poet. The solution seemed obvious: if I just shot a hadji, it'd all be okay. If I just killed one hadji, anyone, someone, then all the black bile, hatred, and fear would flow out of me like blood and water pouring from the wounds of Christ. I'd be transformed, transfigured. Please Jesus, I prayed, let me fucking kill somebody.

(118)

Even while the reader recognizes that he has become traumatized through his deployment, the effects of the trauma are not just in his own sense of self, but the loss of his ability to grieve for others.

Scranton complicates questions of trauma and grief by locating the Iraqi perspective firmly at the center of his text. While the other two narratives are divided in half and spread across the novel, the central narrative, of an Iraqi math graduate student named Qasim and his family, is a cohesive whole. And while the other narratives intertextually connect, with characters from one narrative popping up in another, Qasim's section exists without such referents. Qasim appears in other stories, but none of the others appear in his. Temporally, his narrative precedes the others, even as it follows them in the book's structure. [End Page 101] Qasim's narrative takes place in the weeks leading up to the invasion, taking the reader through the process of shock and awe alongside Iraqi civilians.

By choosing the days prior to America's invasion, Scranton breaks many of the frames surrounding Iraq. In virtually every other American war text, the reader first encounters Iraq (usually Baghdad) as a city either being invaded or already conquered, as if they were always already an occupied war zone. Scranton changes that frame, by showing Iraqis going through ordinary lives, attending school, going to work, and, most crucially, fearing for their own safety against American military power, and talking through their options and fears. Scranton adds to the polyvocality of the novel by introducing an array of different Iraqi voices, male and female, young and old, religious and secular, pro- and anti-Saddam, pro- and anti-American. Scranton's Iraq is contested by its own citizens, who debate issues of religion and history, of nationalism and globality. And these contradictions are contained within the individuals as well, most notably in Qasim's cousin Nazahah, a devoutly religious teenage girl who nonetheless also adores Michael Jackson, "whom she understood to be somehow vaguely yet irrevocably not halal, possibly even haram" (172). By giving voice to the debates, contradictions, and contested ideas of Iraq itself, Scranton shows a people outside the traditional frames of war. Imagining themselves as a nation, not just as a territory for the US to invade, these Iraqis see their country as having its own narratives. These debates echo the Columbus Day barbecue earlier in the text, when the Americans all sit around debating politics and the future of America. Through such a comparison, Scranton foregrounds similarity only to further emphasize the disruptive power of the American invasion, not only in terms of physical losses but in ideological destruction.

Most crucially, however, Scranton shows Iraqis directly confronting how their experience is framed by outside forces. They watch the news on Al Jazeera, CNN, and the BBC. In a pivotal moment, they watch President Bush's speech about the start of the invasion, which is directed to Americans and is about Iraqis, yet here the Iraqi's subjectivities confront a speech that seeks to strip them of that subjectivity. Even as Bush says "We come to Iraq with respect for its citizens, for their great civilization, and for the religious faiths they practice. We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its [End Page 102] own people" (201), the Iraqis observe how their own selfhood is being framed as incidental to the invaders. This scene is followed by probably the most postmodern moment in the text, as Qasim's family watch Al Jazeera footage of American bombers departing from a British airfield, while reporters note that it will take the bombers six hours to reach Baghdad. The Iraqis imagine those coming to kill them, scenes they directly frame through American war movies, and the scene ends with the family sitting down to wait for the bombers to arrive, watching the Harrison Ford movie Air Force One, or, as one of them describes it, "Han Solo and his big silver jet" (211). These Iraqi lives have been framed by political and military discourses, but those discourses in turn have been framed by American pop culture and textual representations, and Scranton reasserts Iraqi subjectivity by making Iraqis both the observers of the frames and those being framed, watching and debating as those frames close in on them to obliterate their nation.

But if the first two steps in reframing grievability involve undoing the conventions of the trauma hero narrative and reframing Iraqi subjectivity, then the final step in the process involves direct implication and violence towards the reader. The entire novel is bookended by the story of an American barbecue on Columbus Day (with the obvious colonial implications very much present). As this narrative progresses, Matt and Dahlia both become fascinated with and then violated by Aaron, the Iraq War veteran exploiting his role as trauma hero. For Matt, this involves becoming implicated in the larger damaging frames of war texts. Towards the end of the night, he and Aaron go off alone to look at "War porn" (322), pictures that Aaron has brought back from his time as a guard at an Iraqi internment facility. At first, Matt looks at the pictures with interest, but increasingly with disgust, as they reveal Aaron's cruelty towards his Iraqi prisoners. Seeing this discomfort, Aaron openly taunts him, saying he can stop looking whenever he wants. Looking at the pictures, Matt models the ethical quandary at the heart of war texts. To what extent do readers look as voyeurs, and to what extent do they have a responsibility to look? He notes "It's awful, but I think I should see it. So I know what it's like. I should know what it's like" (310). In this moment, he articulates the supposed drive behind the valorization of the trauma hero text—that civilians have an obligation to bear witness. Yet this claim seems facile in the moment, as Matt only turns to this language to justify looking at more pictures. He [End Page 103] is appalled by what he sees, yet also fascinated. Matt's failings directly implicate the readers, asking them to consider the extent that they consume texts (primarily trauma hero texts) as an excuse for "war porn" of their own. The desire for an ethical response to the trauma hero, Scranton suggests, actually works as a screen with which readers displace any real ethical engagement with Iraqis or the devastation American politics and culture have wrought upon them.

In these final moments, the novel reframes its stories to break apart the neat compartmentalization and challenge readers to consider how their own framing compromises others. Aaron displays a series of photographs of himself enacting the torture of Qasim, which is both real and feigned torture, a specific kind of war pornography meant to titillate by simulating the real. Qasim has clearly been tortured, yet in these images, Aaron is within the frame, no longer simply the one taking pictures. He shows an image of Qasim's face being forced into the bars of his cell—a picture Aaron staged. "It wasn't a real interrogation. Just fucking around" he says, continuing an earlier series that showed Aaron's fellow guards deliberately mimicking the infamous Abu Ghraib pictures (321). In this moment, the novel depicts the replication of texts and images, as the soldiers actively seek to mimic the war texts that have mediated their own experiences. But beyond that, the reader sees a new kind of framing: the supposed trauma hero within the same frame as the Iraqi he tortures, and moreover, how the trauma hero exploits his knowledge of framing to solidify his own sense of power. The cynical Aaron is very much aware of how disgusted Matt is by these pictures, yet rather than feeling guilt, he reasserts his own power.

Scranton makes the point even more violently explicit with Dahlia. Throughout their scenes, Dahlia and Matt have been presented as a tolerant, liberal, normal civilian couple whose relationship has grown troubled in the time preceding the novel. Dahlia flirts with Aaron, attracted to his masculinity, the danger he represents as a warrior, and his trauma hero facade.¹⁵ The two break away from the party and start to have sex in Dahlia's room, but the scene turns from consensual sex to consensual bondage (initiated by Aaron) to rape. (Scranton is unequivocal here, as Dahlia says "no" five separate times in rapid succession [332].) This scene most obviously destroys the image of the trauma hero, in that the returning veteran is a callous and brutal rapist. Beyond that, it relocates Dahlia's subjectivity alongside that of the Iraqis in the [End Page 104] internment camps, whom the novel has already shown us being physically and sexually violated. As he rapes her, Dahlia thinks:

Feeling herself rattle loose from herself, thinking: who's this happening to—the room going out of focus, the gray fabric blurring. Thinking: who decides things. Thinking: where's Matt, and what happened, and who is this. How? Who? What's happening and who to, yes, no. Whose body? No. Who makes choices? No. It's not me. Not mine. No. No.

(333)

The bodily and psychological violation that Dahlia experiences here, the loss of control and denial of selfhood, the disconnect from her own body and her own identity, and the complete lack of choice or agency here are horrific in their own right, but they also mirror the thoughts of Iraqis being bombed, invaded, imprisoned, and tortured by Americans throughout the war and occupation, so in this moment, Dahlia's own sense of precarity becomes their parallel. And while she might not overtly make the connection, War Porn's readers have seen this theme develop throughout the novel.

Matt and Dahlia here occupy somewhat similar spaces. To be clear, I am in no way trying to equate the violation Matt feels from looking at pictures to the sexual violation Dahlia undergoes. Hers is far more severe and traumatic than his. And while Matt feels violated by what he sees, he is the one controlling whether to look at more pictures, while Dahlia has control taken from her by force. Yet both experience a kind of violation of self, an attack on their subjectivities, of some outside force invading their civilian world. And both occur in part due to a sense of betrayal by a trauma hero figure. The novel itself ends with Dahlia alone, finally opening her eyes for the first time since she was raped. The eye opening is crucial here; both Matt and Dahlia function as reader surrogates, the type of compassionate Americans who feel empathy for veterans, thank them for their service, and sacralize the trauma hero. In other words, the very type of person who would go out and buy a literary war text. Dahlia opens her eyes, as Matt has had his eyes opened about the truth of war, as the readers opens their eyes about the complexities of war itself and the violations of subjectivity involved. And while these are not at all the same (I am not trying to argue that reading a book is the same as being raped), they do all [End Page 105] involve a kind of epistemological violence that destabilizes the self and, in Scranton's logic, locates the reader's subjectivity more alongside the Iraqis.

What is particularly troubling in this recognition is the issue of blame. Dahlia is of course not to be blamed for being raped. (The novel does not imply at all that she was "asking for it.") And Matt and Dahlia, as liberal, tolerant Americans, are presented as people opposed to war in general and the Iraq War particularly. And yet, Aaron's attack on both seems to indicate a kind of shock due in part to their own blindness, a kind of American subjectivity that functions by ignoring their own complicity in what their nation has done on their behalf. Scranton links this blindness directly to the valorization of the trauma hero; in Total Mobilization, he writes that

the trauma hero functions as a scapegoat for postwar liberalism. Guilt for collective violence is displaced onto its agent, who through traumatic psychological wounding becomes a surrogate victim in place of the enemy. This displacement effects a double purgation. Guilt over the traumatically wounded soldier takes the place of blood guilt, while the soldier is purged of responsibility for his violence by being transformed into its victim. This symbolic scapegoating serves an important function in the liberal political imaginary: that of obscuring the scandalously violent origins of the peacetime political order.

(225–26)

Thus the epistemological violence done to Matt and the physical and sexual violence done to Dahlia in some way mark their complicity in a kind of willful collective cultural blindness, a blindness that functions by hiding civilians' responsibility for the damage done to the other in times of war. By experiencing the violence behind the façade of the trauma hero, they (and by extension the reader) are better primed to see their own accountability to Iraqis, which can lay the foundation for new ideas of grievability.

________

These novels are but two examples within the developing canon of Iraq War literature, yet together they indicate an increasing focus on the American's ability to recognize, empathize with, and grieve for [End Page 106] Iraqis as subjects unto themselves, rather than enemies or others. Both texts emphasize that the preconditions for grief involve recognizing the precarity of the Iraqi alongside the American, both combatant and civilian. Gallagher's Lieutenant Porter is at his most successful not just when his life is threatened, but when he willingly exposes his own precarity to others. Similarly, Scranton's text brings the reader most fully into understanding the dangers of blindly accepting the trauma hero narrative when Matt and Dahlia's (and by extension, the civilian reader's) own precarity is exposed. Together, Gallagher and Scranton seek to craft ways in which readers are asked to expose their own precarity, to risk willingly as readers their sense of safety, rather than simply feeling that safety threatened by others. In short, when we readers are willing to render our own lives precarious in the service of the other, we begin to approach new possibilities for grief and solidarity.

To be sure, a focus on American representations of Iraqis is fraught with its own problems, in that it still emphasizes the American speaking for the other, rather than allowing others to speak for themselves. The trauma hero narrative cannot stand as the only narrative told about America's wars, and this expansion must include a dialogue with other texts by Iraqis themselves. Just as the canon of Vietnam War literature has come to include texts such as Le Ly Hayslip's When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and (most recently) Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer, the canon of the Iraq War and Occupation must increasingly include Iraqi voices. But as authors such as Gallagher and Scranton show, challenges to the othering practices that enable warfare must involve America's attempts to understand the other within American texts as well, if only to jar readers out of the comfortable subjectivity of a monovocal canon and force them to reassess their own precarity.