The Case of Yasmina Khadra’s The Sirens of Baghdad

Abstract

This chapter investigates the relationship between terrorism and literature. Yasmina Khadra, Algerian novelist, 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 a national to a gender identity issues, the malaise bred by an archaic mentality and lack of development opportunities remain the challenges that drown deep the Arab society in terrorism. Yasmina Khadra appropriates then rejects, denies, and acknowledges these problems as his and displays the consequences. From a lost narrator to lack of communication, to hatred, to anger, to folly and a sense of the absurd, or perhaps adherence to fundamentalist theses as in the case of Dr. Jalal in Yasmina’s novel The Sirens of Baghdad (2008), this is the lot of a sane intellectual. The author connects the abject with desire, the hideous with the beautiful, the present with the past and the real with the mythical, but above all the betrayal of the west and its values. The Orient remains eternally Salambo, and humiliation is a factor to the rise of fundamentalism. The Kafkaen Western communication with the Orient reinforces the chthonic body relation to terrorism while the West seems to manipulate the deep-sea monsters. In The Sirens of Baghdad, with a setting in Beirut, Baghdad and Kafr Karam, space remain related to body and terrorism. Mapping the origins of terrorism, body and soul are other plausible source for evil when Yaseen the fundamentalist ‘struck his chest with the flat of his hand. ‘We are the wrath of God.’ Terrorism is not only the hell fruit of both the absence of communication and democracy in the Arab world but the natural consequence of a despising West as well.