Hussein s starkly beautiful novel Beyond Love plunges us into the 1991 Gulf War and its aftermath. Huda, the young woman at the center of the story, experiences the deprivation and humiliation of life in sanctioned Iraq, working in the satirically named al-Amal factory (factory of hope) making men s underwear. While surveillance and fear permeate daily life, Huda dares to vote "no" in the referendum for Saddam Hussein. This courageous act could have cost her her life had she not fled to the closest border, Jordan, where the novel begins. Huda is not alone: Iraqi exiles are legion there, all...

The last three decades in Iraqi history can be summarized in these words: dictatorship, war and occupation. After the fall of Saddam's regime Iraqi novelists are not only writing about the occupation and current disintegration of Iraq but are also revisiting previous wars that devastated their lives. Ikram Masmoudi examines how recent Iraqi fiction about war depicts the Iraqi subject in its relation to war, coercion, subjugation and occupation. The theoretical concept of the Homo Sacer, the killable, as defined by Giorgio Agamben, is used to explore the lives and the experiences of different...