The Violence and the Problem of Ungrievability in Mehdi Yazdanikhorram’s Khoon khordeh: A Butlerian Study

Document Type : Original Article

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faculty of Foreign Languages- Science and Research Branch

Abstract

A new term has been appearing in philosophy and used more and more after a number of wars and the pandemic and their consequences, grievability. Mourning and grief come after death and death finds meaning when there is a life. As Butler puts it, who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And what makes for a grievable life? (Butler, 2004) This Butlerian reading of grievability offers new horizons in understanding Yazdanikhorram’s world. this paper examines the reasons why death is appreciated and even taken for granted and somehow commodified in Iran during the imposed war and why some lives are precarious and some are grievable and was there any livable life for Iran’s war generation or not in Khoon khordeh (2018). What happened for unrepresentable, dehumanized lives during and after war? Khoon khordeh is a chronicle of an outlaw generation who did not live and where not supposed to live and whose deaths were not of high importance to an extent that their dead bodies were not taken back and buried properly. The war generation of Iran even shouldn’t have dreamt of prosperity. Khoon khordeh is the depiction of ungrievable, unrepresentable, unrecognized and dehumanized lives of the decade of war and the reasons behind this unrepresentability.

Keywords: Grievability, Precarity, Livable, Violence, Khoon khordeh

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 20 March 2024

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