Gothic is the New Iraq

Born after the second U.S. invasion, the Iraqi gothic originated in response to the chaotic war and its aftermath, along with the political, religious and social changes in the region. The psychology and mentality of Iraqis changed in the decades after the invasion. Daily life became a tableau of public deaths, explosions, burning and revenge with the cadavers that resulted from kidnapping and torture, littering Baghdad’s streets. Amidst the waking nightmares, the gothic emerged as a way for writers to express novel forms of fear and horror, in response to an endless cycle of oppression and sectarian war. Gothic introduced to the Iraqi literature new settings, different themes and characters. It struggled to appear, but once it’s there, gothic float over the products of the Iraqi fiction since 2007. The list of the gothic texts is growing rapidly and writers old and new see it as a new obsession. It is for the first time that writers criticize law, voice fear and negotiate life and death. My purpose here is to provide a clear definition of the Iraqi gothic fiction, followed by major representative texts. All the tempts here is to honor the need for an understanding of the rise of this particular form of fiction in Iraq at this time.