Whether in representations of more traditional wars such as the Iran– Iraq War (1980–8) or the Gulf War (1991) or the most recent American war of occupation (2003–11), the novels discussed in this book are focused on the centrality and vulnerability of human subjects in their relation to coercion, war and ‘necropower’, to use Achille Mbembe's term. Re-endowing the war novel with depictions of the male war actor in his anti-war spirit, his desertion, and his utopian quest for freedom, with his vulnerability amid sectarian killings and suicide operations, Iraqi authors privilege and reveal these fundamental experiences and their corollary forms of living death and life in extremis.

The war experiences depicted today in Iraqi novels are not those of the heroes of battles or war martyrs sacrificed in the name of ideology and the homeland; they are the experiences of the ‘other’ war actor, a different kind of actor who refuses coercion, subjugation and humiliation. This ‘other’ war actor is also trying to reclaim some form of agency, whether through desertion, in suicide attack or through testimony as a prisoner of war. Novels examining old wars such as the Iran–Iraq War from the perspective of the ‘other’ soldier, the poet-deserter and the marginalised alienated artist-soldier shed light on an important aspect of the cultural and political landscape of the 1980s in Iraq, recovering the hidden memory of the war deserter and re-inscribing it into the history of the war and its literature. The ‘other’ war story of the Iran–Iraq War as it is surfacing today in the Iraqi novel is a story of rejection of violence, killing and the militarisation of life that was enforced during the years of the Baͨath regime. By unearthing the story of the war deserter, The Professor of Illusion, Khiḍr Qad and the Drab Olive Years and The Descent of the Angels rehabilitate and humanise the war deserters by investigating their dreams, their fears, their experiences and their vulnerability as the living dead. All three novels dig deep into the deserters’ singular and tragic fate and the spirit of insubordination and transgression that animates them under a totalitarian Iraq governed by fear and the rule of the exception.