Where Is the Iraq War Literature?

The Iraq Study Group Report may be selling well--it's number 40 on Amazon's best seller list--and the New York Times best seller lists are full of incrimination lit, but so far we haven't seen any novels about the Iraq War. It's not because the war is too fresh: it's already lasted longer than US involvement in World War II. Still, it's only a matter of time as far as the American novel is concerned. I'm sure there's a future Norman Mailer taking notes inside his Humvee someplace in Anbar province.

But what about Arab literature, with its long and distinguished history of recording wartime events? As Nazim Muhanna notes, the 33-day Lebanon war inspired an outburst of drama and poetry, but Iraq seems to have Arab writers flummoxed. In an excellent article in Asharq Alawsat Muhanna tries to find out why. The reasons are practical, political, and aesthetic.  At a practical level, it's too dangerous right now. People who have escaped Iraq are too removed from events to convey them realistically, but people still there are too busy dodging car bombs to sit down and write. At a political level, the Iraq War is something new. It defies the occupier versus the people paradigm with which Arab intellectuals are familiar. Arabs are having the same difficulties sorting out who's murdering who as Americans are. The Syrian poet Abid Ismail laments,

Indeed, with the exception of Iraqi writers, no one seems to care [about the Iraq War]! You find yourself trapped in a lose-lose situation; if you condemn the war [the resistance], you will be accused by the majority of Iraqis as advocating the oppressor, and if you support the war, you will be supporting the occupation! The Iraqi issue is obscure – unlike the situation in Lebanon. In Lebanon there is no dictator that the US sought to remove, and the identity of resistance in Lebanon is clearer than it is in Iraq.

There's also the problem of the immediacy of the suffering of ordinary Iraqis. The suffering is unfolding in real time with no end in sight. Muhanna calls the strife "a rolling fireball that only becomes fiercer as it rolls." Arabs intellectuals are as stupefied by the horror as everyone else. The magnitude of the suffering precludes, for the time being, the kind of narratives one used to see in Latin American novels that feature ordinary people adjusting to a newly brutalized existence while the deposed dictators stumble around their villas, cast off like impotent lovers.

Finally, the Iraq War is still an emerging narrative. The fleeting Arab-Israeli conflicts may inspire a "literature of occasions," as Syrian novelist Fawwaz Haddad disdainfully calls the quick literary output these incidents usually produce, but Iraq is still far from closure. The fear is that this war won't be a neat Flags of Our Fathers, but rather an interminable Thirty Years War where everyone comes to an exhausted and ignoble end, Arabs and Americans alike.