This article examines how Sinan Antoon’s The Baghdad Eucharist, The Corpse Washer, and I’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody portray the psychological aftermath of war as a generational problem of memory, continuity, and inheritance. While scholarship on Antoon has extensively explored themes of trauma, violence, displacement, and loss, less attention has been paid to the uneven psychic resources available to characters for negotiating these experiences. Drawing on Freudian psychoanalysis and Svetlana Boym’s distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia, this study asks how memory, ritual, domestic continuity, and inherited relationships to the past shape characters’ responses to prolonged violence. Through a qualitative textual analysis, the article argues that Antoon’s fiction challenges homogenised understandings of Iraqi trauma by depicting psychic survival as unevenly distributed across generations. Older characters frequently retain access to memories of a pre-war world, ritual practices, domestic routines, and historical perspectives that help situate suffering within broader frameworks of meaning. By contrast, younger characters often inherit disrupted attachments, damaged spaces, fractured futures, and memories already saturated by violence. Rather than encountering war as a rupture from stability, they experience violence as the condition through which reality itself is understood. The study contributes to scholarship on Antoon, Iraqi war literature, and trauma studies by offering a more differentiated account of how violence is lived, remembered, and negotiated across time. Antoon’s novels ultimately suggest that the legacy of war lies not only in the wounds it inflicts but also in the unequal inheritance of the memories, attachments, and continuities through which those wounds are endured.

Keywords: Iraqi literature; post-2003 Iraq; memory; generational narrative; violence

Ahmad, A., Sofi, M. A., Sundelin-Wahlsten, V., & von Knorring, A.-L. (2000). Posttraumatic stress disorder in children after the military operation "Anfal" in Iraqi Kurdistan. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 9(4), 235–243. https://doi.org/10.1007/s007870070026

Ahmed, A. S. (2007). Post-traumatic stress disorder in children in Baghdad. Arab Journal of Psychiatry, 18(1), 67–82.

Al-Hadithi, N. (2016). Identity and displacement: The local life in contemporary Iraqi narrative. Journal of the College of Arts, 118, 45–62.

Aljawadi, A. M. (2007). Prevalence of psychiatric disorders among children in Mosul, Iraq. Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal, 13(5), 1045–1054.

Al-Obaidi, A. K. (2011). The psychological state of Iraqi children after the 2003 invasion. Journal of the Faculty of Medicine Baghdad, 53(1), 12–19.

Al-Qarawee, H. H. (2014). Iraq’s sectarian crisis: A legacy of exclusion. Carnegie Middle East Center.

Alosman, M. I. M., & Raihanah, M. M. (2024). Clashing dialectics of victimhood in Iraq war narratives: A comparative approach. 3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature, 30(4), 74–86.

Antoon, S. (2007). I’jaam: An Iraqi rhapsody (S. Antoon & R. C. Johnson, Trans.). City Lights Books.

Antoon, S. (2013). The Corpse Washer (S. Antoon, Trans.). Yale University Press.

Antoon, S. (2017). The Baghdad Eucharist (M. Tabet, Trans.). Hoopoe.

Al-Tikriti, B. (1992). The history of the Iraqi intelligence service. Ministry of Information.

Behrouzan, O. (2013). Prozac diaries: Psychiatry and generational memory in Iran. Stanford University Press.

Blasim, H. (Ed.). (2016). Iraq + 100: the first anthology of science fiction to have emerged from Iraq. Comma Press.

Blass, R. B. (2013). On the real essence of danger: Freud's evolving theory of anxiety and the loss of the object. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 82(3), 643–668.

Boym, S. (2001). The future of nostalgia. Basic Books.

Brook, I. (2003). Making here like there: Place attachment, displacement and the urge to garden. Ethics, Place & Environment, 6(3), 227–234.

Bryant, R. (2014). The past in pieces: Belonging in the new Cyprus. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Burke, J. (2019). Materiality, memory, and the recovery of identity in post-conflict Iraq. Journal of Material Culture, 24(2), 158–174.

Cordesman, A. H. (2015). Trends in Iraqi violence, casualties and impact of war: 2003-2015. Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Feist, J., & Feist, G. J. (2009). Theories of personality (7th ed.). McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Freud, S. (1953). The interpretation of dreams (J. Strachey, Ed. & Trans.). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1900)

Jonathan, S. (2016). Psychological vacuums and familial rupture in post-conflict states. Academic Press.

Jonathan, S. (2016). Psychological vacuums and familial rupture in post-conflict states. Academic Press.

Hutchinson, A. J., & Banks, S. (2006). Iraqi families: Resilience and vulnerability in a context of war and sanctions. International Journal of Social Welfare, 15(2), 132–148.

Mankhil, A. S. (2020). Trauma and identity crisis in post-2003 Iraqi fiction: A study of The Corpse Washer. Journal of Al-Frahedis Arts, 12(41), 450–468.

Masmoudi, I. (2015). War and occupation in Iraqi fiction: Post-2003 perspectives. Edinburgh University Press.

Mitchell, J. (2014). Freud’s theory of the unconscious. Routledge.

Morshed, A. (2018). The absence of the humane personality in post-2003 Iraqi fiction. Al-Mada for Culture and Arts.

Qasim, H. M. (2015). The homogenization of Iraqi suffering: A critique of post-war narrative analysis [Master's thesis, University of Baghdad].

Qasri, L. (2018). Counter-narratives of the Iraq war: Sinan Antoon and the re-humanization of the Iraqi victim. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 54(4), 410–425.

Saadawi, A. (2014). Frankenstein in Baghdad. Oneworld Publications.

Sadiq, M. (2020). The transformation of the Iraqi novel: From nationalism to the aesthetics of fogginess. Journal of Arabic Literature, 51(3), 210–235.

Salim, Z. (2021). Al-asra al-iraqiyun fi iran... malaf ghayr mughlaq [Iraqi prisoners in Iran... an unclosed file]. Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.

Sharma, J., & Piachaud, J. (2011). Iraq: The medical cost of 25 years of war and sanctions. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 198(2), 83–85.

Smith, J. R., & Gala, S. (2014). The psychology of re-entry: Identity conflicts in Iraqi combat veterans. Journal of Military and Veterans' Health, 22(3), 22–35.

Sosis, R., & Handwerker, W. P. (2011). Psalms and coping with uncertainty: Religious rituals and psychological well-being among Israeli women during the 2006 Lebanon War. American Anthropologist, 113(1), 40–55.