Dr. Sinan Antoon: When Wars and Wounds Collide

Marking the twentieth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, Iraqi-American poet and novelist Professor Sinan Antoon visited UT on April 6, 2023 for a public reading from his new novel, Khuzama (in English, Lavender), on the eve of its publication. Khuzama offers a timely meditation on the enduring wounds of the invasion, which Antoon explores through the multigenerational experiences of members of the Iraqi diaspora living in the United States. The novel’s characters are Iraqi expatriates who grapple with their memories of war and their homelands as they commingle with other marginalized and displaced groups.

The reading sparked a conversation on the destruction wrought by the invasion and decades-long war, as well as the ability of creative writing to render visible the more human and intimate effects of US imperialism. Antoon recalled his own formative memory of sheltering in a basement in Baghdad as US planes bombed his city for two months in 1991—and then coming to the United States and watching aerial footage of the same bombings on CNN. He realized that the first live-TV war was “the first war from the perspective of the bombers, and that our experiences as civilians were completely not present at all.” Antoon’s visit was co-sponsored by the Arab-American Education Foundation.

Antoon, an associate professor at New York University’s Gallatin School, has published numerous acclaimed and widely translated novels, articles, and collections of poetry in Arabic and English. His work explores the impact of war on everyday life, labor, and family.