Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War – A Conversation with Amir Moosavi
Amir Moosavi in conversation with Anne-Marie McManus
Amir Moosavi is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University-Newark. He is the co-editor of Losing Our Minds, Coming to Our Senses: Sensory Readings of Persian Literature and Culture (Leiden UP, 2022), and his writings have appeared or are forthcoming in Middle East Critique, ALIF: Journal of Comparative Poetics, Arab Studies Journal and the International Journal of Middle East Studies, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Middle Eastern Literatures, among other outlets. His first single-authored book, Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War iin Arabic and Persian Literatures, is the first comparative study of the massive literary output of the Iran-Iraq War—the longest two-state war of the twentieth century—in both Arabic and Persian. In bringing together these two literatures, it argues for the expansion of modern comparative literary studies across the two languages based on common experiences of war and writing under authoritarian regimes.

Anne-Marie McManus (AMM): Your book, “Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War”, has recently come out with Stanford University Press. What’s the book about, and what are the questions you wanted to answer in it?
Amir Moosavi (AM): This is a book about how Iranian and Iraqi writers have dealt with the Iran-Iraq War and its consequences from wartime (1980–1988) to the present. It doesn’t attempt to answer a single question per se, but in the process of telling a story of several well-known writers from both countries and the ways that they’ve depicted this long war in their short stories and novels, it suggests answers to several questions:
- Why have Iranian and Iraqi writers from multiple generations continued to revisit the story of this war and its consequences?
- What are the stakes of writing about this war today and how have they changed in the three and a half decades since the war ended?
- How does literature about this war illuminate the similarities and differences between Iraqi and Iranian writers today and the ways they remember, commemorate, and (re-)narrate the story of one of the twentieth century’s longest and most deadly wars?
- How can fiction about this war be used as an entryway to the comparative study of contemporary Arabic and Persian literatures?
I wanted to write a book about something I kept seeing in Iranian and Iraqi fiction: writers returning to this war and the effects it had on their countries. It seemed to me that the ways each government tightly controlled the war narrative during the war years foisted a responsibility upon writers from both countries to write the story of this war anew, outside the terms of the two “official” literatures that were produced abundantly during the 1980s (and have continued to be produced in Iran until today). I think the book’s biggest contribution can be found in the way it demonstrates both Iranian and Iraqi writers’ various entanglements with this war and the ways that they’ve overlapped and diverged over time.
AMM: These returns to the war make a convincing framework for the book’s Arabic-Persian comparison. To what extent did you see writers in each national context engaging with the war as a way to push back against/resist state domination over recent history? It seems that each state’s respective campaign to control their war narrative turned the Iran-Iraq war into a key site for writers to enter this struggle.
AM: Iranian and Iraqi writers’ attempts to challenge the war narratives of the 1980s are very much about resisting the larger historical narratives of both wartime states. I think this is true even if the wartime state no longer exists, as in the Iraqi case. I show that during the war, the Islamic Republic and Saddam Hussein’s Ba’thist regime both connected their war narratives to larger stories about the victory of their own revolutions (although it was clearly less of a “revolution” in the Ba’thist case) and, through the war, tried to draw a connection to major moments in the early history of Islam. From the start of the war, Saddam Hussein framed his invasion of Iran in terms of the Battle of Qadisiyya (630 CE) that marked the beginning of the Arab-Islamic conquest of Sassanian Persia and soon after, the Islamic Republic started calling the war “The Sacred Defense,” harking back to the righteousness of the third Shi’i Imam, Hussein, and his martyrdom at the Battle of Karbala.
Both sides were prolific in producing cultural material supporting their narratives of the war, and by the time the fighting stopped, in August 1988, there was an incredible amount of literature (as well as music, film, and visual art) to support each side’s war effort. I limit my discussion in the book to fiction for practical reasons and because I think fiction is where the debate over the war’s representation has occurred most in bothnational contexts. I also make the case that it didn’t matter that the great majority of readers of Arabic and Persian fiction who encountered these works of literature knew that they were part of the states’ propaganda efforts. Rather, from each state’s perspective, these war-related writings clearly set the boundaries for readers’ horizons of expectations for the war’s representation.
By 1988, writers who wanted to deal with this war and its aftermath inevitably had to contend with the leftovers of nearly a decade of overdetermined ideological literature. This propagandistic representation of the war in literature—both in its form and content—is what I contend that writers from both sides have had to deal with from the end of the war until the present day and in the process they’ve turned literature into a site of struggle over the war’s story.
AMM: It’s interesting, because we often frame the representation of war and violence in literature as a struggle against forgetting. In your book’s case, it seems that writers have to contend with too much memory about the war in public spaces and discourses. I imagine this puts a particular set of creative pressures on them. You mentioned, for example, that writers’ returns to the war challenged both the form and content of official writing. How so? Can you elaborate further?
AM: Sure, Chapters 2–5 of the book essentially deal with this issue. Each chapter centers on a central overlapping theme that appears in fiction by writers from both sides and then compares them to each other. This includes shedding light on writers’ attempts to break the binary (good–evil / friend–enemy) nature of the official discourses (Chapter 2); disenchanting narratives around martyrdom and battlefront heroism (Chapter 3); highlighting writers’ latent attempts at resisting the state war narratives through language (Chapter 4); and recent examples of writers using ghosts and the undead to treat the many lingering effects of the Iran-Iraq War ‒ especially that of the environment in Southern Iraq/ Southwestern Iran (Chapter 5).
Most chapters deal with two Iraqi writers and two Iranians. In juxtaposing them, though, I don’t say that they are doing the same things. In fact, demonstrating how local dynamics play out in Iran and Iraq, and how publishing or writing from exile has offered writers different possibilities of representation at various moments over the past three decades is a large part of what the book does. One example of this appears in Chapter 3, which reads writers who deal with the experiences of soldiers and their anti-war writings that appeared in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Here, I compare novels by Jinan Jasim Hillawi and Muhsin al-Ramli, two Iraqi writers who have been publishing from Sweden and Spain respectively with Ahmad Dehqan and Hossein Mortazaeian Abkenar, two Iranian writers who either still live and work in Iran (Dehqan), or who once published in Iran and now live in exile (Abkenar).
This isn’t the place to go into detail, but in brief, putting these works into a comparative context reveals how writers from both sides of the war sought to directly rewrite the pillars of the official narratives (martyrdom and heroism) from the site where those narratives took place (the battlefront). Writers from both sides first disenchanted the idea of martyrdom by stripping it down to its physicality and grisly corporeal details, as we see with Dehqan and Hillawi. But later, in the early aughts, writers like Abkenar and al-Ramli, highlighted the figure of the resisting draft evader. Formally, realism dominates most of these writings, but with Abkenar’s 2006 novella The Scorpion, there’s a shift to the fantastical and heavy use of fragmentation. I know it’s cliché to say “foreshadowing”, but his novel really does pioneer the use of formal techniques that would become more common in writing this conflict in the nearly two decades since its publication. In any case, all of these writers directly attack the truth-claims of the Iraqi Ba’thist state and the Islamic Republic, but in doing so they highlight all these different factors that affect the production of contemporary Iraqi and Iranian literature across the globe, and, I think, add interesting components to the ways we can see how writers have dealt with the war’s legacy.
AMM: Do you see this literature offering itself as a source of alternative, “better” truth-claims? And/or, are writers trying to destabilize the very idea of truth-claims on the war? It sounds like it might be both, depending on which authors you look at.
AM: I think it’s a bit of both, as you guessed. No one is denying that the battlefront fighting during this war was absolutely brutal or that the bombs that targeted cities all over each country were traumatic, or that maybe a million people were killed or injured across both countries. Those are undeniable facts around which all these war stories have been written. But the postwar writers whose work I focus on—and even a handful of wartime writers on both sides—are mostly interested in pushing back against the Foucauldian “regimes of truth” that both states pushed during the war and that the Iranian state has promoted since 1988.
The writers I mentioned before are directly involved in debating the states’ representation of the war from the perspective of the front. And it bears mentioning that the stakes are higher for Iranian writers in this sense, since they’re writing against the same state that has existed since 1979. So when Abkenar, as a war veteran, starts his novella with the sentence “All the scenes of this novel are real,” he’s launching his own war against the plethora of Iranian war memoirs largely published by state-sponsored presses that continue to be published today. Other writers, like Lu’ay Hamza Abbas or Sinan Antoon from Iraq or Amir Hassan Cheheltan or Shahriyar Mandanipour from Iran are generally more interested in broadening the war story to include the suffering of civilians and highlight their attempts to resist the state’s framing of the conflict at the same time.
All this points to a bigger issue, namely literature’s role in contemporary societies that have dealt with recent, violent pasts. For Iran, Iraq, and much of the surrounding region, the 1980s were a violent and politically repressive decade. Iran and Iraq had their war, but at the same time, among other things, Lebanon had its civil war, the Soviet Afghan War was taking place, and the First Palestinian Intifada began toward the end of the decade. The political alliances of states and individuals’ personal political persuasions in the region were changing, too. In this part of the world, the final decade of the Cold War saw the language of resistance shift from Marxism to Islamism, with Iran emerging as a center of resistance to the regional interests of the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia.
That story is well-known at this point and historians and journalists have done a good job at proving to us just how important this “long decade” was. I call it that because the processes began in the late 1970s and continued at least until 1991, following the fall of the U.S.S.R and the First Gulf War. I think those of us working in literature (and other forms of cultural production), have somewhat neglected this period until now. Or, at best, we’ve treated the representation of major political events and national literatures as unrelated to one another and not part of a larger transregional story. My book, in a way, is about thinking through the narration of the 1980s across national literatures and linguistic borders, and I hope it might encourage others to do something similar in different contemporary contexts. The conference you and I organized a couple years ago and the forthcoming special issue we’re publishing with Middle Eastern Literatures expands this conversation and I hope that will spark more interest in the era for those of us working in literature, as well as other forms of cultural production. I really think so much of what we’ve witnessed in Southwest Asia and North Africa in recent decades has its roots in the 1980s—including even the recent short war between Iran and Israel. Writers and artists, who can be some of the best interpreters of history, are still very much concerned with narrating and giving meaning to that period and I think we ought to pay attention.
AMM: Could you share more about the ecocritical/environmental aspects of the book’s final chapter? Why do you see these themes emerging in the more contemporary texts you’re addressing?
AM: Sure. For context, the book moves chronologically, and the final chapter treats novels and short stories published between 2008 and 2018. The chapter is organized a bit differently, as it does not feature two Iranian and two Iraqi writers, but rather three Iraqi writers (Ahmad Saadawi, Hassan Blasim, and Diaa Jubaili) and one Iranian writer (Nasim Marashi). The writers I treat in this chapter are the youngest. Globally, the Iraqis featured are also the highest profile writers I treat in the book, and Nasim Marashi, for her part, is definitely a rising star in the Iranian literary scene. The slight imbalance was intentional on my part. I wanted to highlight these few prominent Iraqi writers’ treatment of the Iran-Iraq War—which I think are all really great pieces of fiction—as well as offer a final insistence that this war is still important for Iraqi cultural memory, even though its often overshadowed by everything the country has been through from 1988 until today. That the war still carries cultural importance in Iran is a given and I don’t think readers need another reminder about that!
In any case, I noticed that a younger crop of writers—I’m speaking here about people born between 1973 and 1984—kept writing about this war and did so uniquely through the undead. So, these four writers’ works are linked together by the fact that the Iran-Iraq War appears through these ghost-like, living dead creatures, in texts published between 20 and 30 years after the war ended. Clearly, the war was having another life, so to speak. The fact that these writers, who ranged from teenagers to young children by the time the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988, were writing about the war this way signaled to me that the war’s story remained unsettled in both Iraqi and Iranian contexts. It’s rarely mentioned that Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, which is not a novel about the war with Iran, is intricately tied to it through the monster—the Whatsitsname (Shishmu)—who is mistaken for an MIA soldier from the war and makes a former Ba’thist henchman from the neighborhood his first victim. Blasim’s short story An Army Newspaper (Jarida ‘Askariyya) is a sort of score settling with the writers who profitably cranked out war stories for the Iraqi state during the 1980s. It revives a dead editor to confess to his crime against literature to an unnamed living writer. Before the story concludes, the dead editor asks the living author if he “also once worked for an army newspaper?” In doing so, he suggests that his writerly judge could be from any state that employed writers to produce war propaganda (there’s an obvious possibility here). I think the story might have a curious afterlife in Persian translation.
Aside from those two texts that employ the undead, part of the war’s unsettled nature was also clearly connected to the effects that it left on the natural environment between the two countries. The two youngest writers I treat in the book, Diaa Jubaili and Nasim Marashi, directly connect the war and its toxicity (in every sense) to the land, with a focus on the marshlands of southern Iraq, near Basra, and southwestern Iran, in Khuzestan province. In Jubaili’s fantastical microstories, which were wonderfully translated by Chip Rosetti a couple of years ago, the war still lives in the mud of the Iraqi marshes. In one of those stories, farmers attempt to cultivate the land after the war ends and in doing so cause soldiers’ corpses to rise to the surface. In another, a fisherman hunts frogs from the Shatt al-Arab’s tributaries and in the process catches a buried “frogman”—the type of frontline soldier in scuba gear that crossed the border via water and attacked the other side. These dead soldiers come to life and nervously ask if the war has ended or if the story’s protagonist is Iraqi or Iranian. For her part, Marashi in her novel Pruning (Haras), connects the war to the damage sustained by the flora and fauna of the Iranian marshlands. Her novel takes place on a fictional island in the marshes where a group of mothers who have lost children and husbands during the war with Iraq come to live, separated from the rest of society. The women live off the damaged earth and nurture herds of injured, now deformed water buffalo. One of novel’s main characters, Nawal, develops a magical ability to heal the island’s dead palm trees.
I think the larger point here is that a new generation of writers is approaching this war more creatively and with a wider lens than previous generations. The writers who were most active from the 1980s until the 2010s lived through the conflict and wrote about it mostly through a realist lens informed by their own experiences as combatants or civilians who had bombs raining down on them. These younger writers no longer feel a burden to represent the war that way and, I think, more freely see its broader, longer-term effects, which include the slow violence enacted upon nature and, nearly 40 years after the Iran-Iraq War concluded, remains embodied in the earth.
AMM: Tell us about your next project: what’s next for you now this book is out?
AM: In a way, I already did. The two things I’m currently working on have to do with eco-critical approaches to cultural production in Iran and the Gulf region and cultural history of the 1980s, provisionally titled From Fidaii to Mujahid: Culture and Conflict in the Greater Middle East. They’re both ideas that have been cooking for a while and around which I have a few forthcoming articles or presentations. They’re both also closely connected to Dust That Never Settles, although in both cases, I hope to expand the objects of analysis beyond literature to film and visual art.
About the Author
Anne-Marie McManus heads the ERC-funded Starting Grant SYRASP (“The Prison Narratives of Assad’s Syria,” 851393) at Berlin’s Forum Transregionale Studien. She is the author of Arab Nationalism, Decolonization, and the Making of a Transregional Literature (Cambridge UP, 2025); co-author and editor of Design of Necessity: Resilience and Survival in Syria’s Sieges (coculture, 2025); and a member of the Lab for the Study of Violence. Her research has been supported by the ERC, the Mellon Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and NYU Abu Dhabi, among others.
Citation: Amir Moosavi and Anne-Marie McManus, Dust That Never Settled: Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War in Arabic and Persian Literatures – A Conversation with Amir Moosavi, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 09.09.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/61273
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (September 9, 2025). Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War – A Conversation with Amir Moosavi. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved December 11, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14m6r


