Only the pomegranate tree – Sinan Anton | Novel

In alone, the pomegranate tree places us in front of the dichotomy of life and death. The heroes of his novel are corpses waiting for their turn, as if it were an open text with multiple layers, diving into the mysterious and dark areas of the life of the Arab person who faces tests repeated every day, as if it were a comedy more than a tragedy. The Iraqi writer Sinan Anton's novel "In Alone, the Pomegranate Tree" opens with a simple narrative style that sometimes surprises you with its turns to dreamlike, fantastical images, fragmented according to cinematic script steps, depicting scenes of death devouring the occupied Baghdad, which remains vividly before Jawad, who practices washing the dead and shrouding them after learning the fundamentals, principles, and secrets of the profession from his father. It is a profession inherited by the family for a long time. The washing of the dead used to take place before the American occupation of Iraq, in its usual manner and natural course. Under the heavy weight of brutal war and fighting among the people of the same country, groups and individuals, the rate of killing increased noticeably, taking terrifying forms of mutilation and mistreatment of corpses—stabbing, strangling, burning, piercing, and cutting. Jawad reached a point where he was confused and bewildered about how to wash a severed head without a body, and a body cut into pieces with an electric saw, in a ritual washing that Islamic law prescribes before burial.