The Corpse Washer

Sinan Antoon

2 ideas

1. The sculptor who returned to washing corpses

   Jawad, son of a Shia corpse-washer in Kadhimiyya, Baghdad, rejects his father's trade and studies sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts. His brother Ammoury is killed in the Iran–Iraq war, the sanctions years shut off any living from art, and his father dies after the 2003 invasion. As sectarian killing floods the washhouse with mutilated bodies, Jawad takes over the family work he tried to escape, and his attempt to leave Iraq fails.

2. Pomegranate tree watered by the dead

   In the washhouse garden, a pomegranate tree is fed by the water that runs off the corpses as they are washed. It works as a compact image of one mechanism: the living are literally nourished by the ritual processing of the dead. The survivor who tends the dead is in the same position as the tree, rooted in place and growing on what the violence delivers.

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