In Waḥdaha shajarat al-rummān (The Corpse Washer, 2010), a novel by Iraqi writer Sinan Antoon (Sinān Anṭūn), a sculptor turned corpse-washer who inherits the family trade in Baghdad during the 2003 US invasion and the ensuing sectarian violence reads in the culture pages of the Iraqi daily al-Jumhūriyya ‘a long article about the Arabian Nights and the Arabic literary tradition and how both had influenced Latin American writers’ (37; 60). The article cites ‘Borges’s fascination with the East’ and his short story ‘Averroes’s Search’ (37; 60). When Jawad the corpse-washer takes his uncle, an exile who has just returned to Baghdad, to the book market on al-Mutanabbi Street, a bookseller shows him rare editions of poetry collections by Iraqi poets Muḥammad Mahdī al-Jawāhirī and Saadi Yousef (Sa‘dī Yūsif), Jurjī Zaydān’s novels and Pablo Neruda’s memoir. The book market street, named for the Abbasid poet Abu al-Ṭayyib al-Mutannabī, was bombed in 2007, an event that was emblematic of the obliteration of culture in Iraq. Waḥdaha shajarat al-rummān harnesses an Arab cultural heritage and Latin American literature to resurrect culture from the violence that plagued Iraq from the Iran-Iraq war to the US occupation.

There are frequent allusions to Latin American literature in Arabic cultural production in the twenty-first century. Iraqi writers such as Jabbar Yussin Hussin, Sinan Antoon and Hassan Blasim have made connections to Latin American literature that draw on a shared cultural archive. Both Hussin and Antoon draw on Borges’s ‘Averroes’s Search’, and Blasim reinvents the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. In the case of Blasim, he has been compared to Latin American writers who have crafted a literature from violence and horror.

This chapter will focus on short stories from Iraq to explore Arab writers’ direct relationships to Latin American literature and new directions in the twenty-first century. Arab writers experimented with intertextuality and new literary aesthetics in post-2003 Iraq. The short stories we will examine in this chapter are part of post-2003 Iraqi literature of war, occupation and migration by writers such as Alia Mamdouh (Aliya Mamdūḥ), Inaam Kachachi (In‘ām Kachāchī), Iqbal al-Qazwini (Iqbāl al-Qazwīnī), Sinan Antoon, Ali Bader (Alī Badr) and Fadhil al-Azzawi (Fāḍil al-‘Azzāwī).