The Book of Collateral Damage and The Yellow Birds: U.S. Hegemony and Divergent Narratives of War

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Associate Professor of English Literature,, department of linguistics and foreign languages, Shiraz, Shiraz University (corresponding author),

2 Ph.D graduate of English Literature, Shiraz, The International Branch of Shiraz University

3 Associate Professor of English Literature, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad,Mashhad, Iran

10.22077/islah.2026.9955.1718

Abstract

This paper is a comparative study of two war novels, namely The Book of Collateral Damage by Sinan Antoon and The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers. Both Antoon, an Iraqi-American author, and Powers, an American writer, describe war critically but from very different points of view. In Antoon’s novel, an Iraqi scholar living in the U.S. during the conflict tries to review the war, collect newspaper pieces of war news, and create a catalogue of the people, the land, and the human and non-human entities he knew before and during the war in Iraq. In Powers’ autobiographical account, the narrator is a young soldier struggling with war trauma and trying to express his bereavement for his dead friend. Both novels address war trauma, but the dimensions of trauma and the way memory and remembering operate in the lives of the narrators are very different. This paper argues that the positionality of the authors determines the way they narrate war. The Iraqi scholar tries to revisit the past and finds recollection a therapeutic act, while the young American soldier is haunted by the memory of his lost friend, and forgetting often becomes a survival strategy for him. The approach used to answer the question—How is war trauma experienced differently on the two sides of the same battlefield?—is a postcolonial one. The study borrows some ideas from postcolonial theoreticians such as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak to analyse the two novels comparatively.

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History

  • Receive Date: 21 August 2025
  • Revise Date: 06 December 2025
  • Accept Date: 21 August 2025

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