Only the pomegranate tree

Author's name: Sinan Anton Publishing house: Al-Jamal Publications for Publishing and Distribution Year of publication: 2014 Literary classification: Novel Brief about the book: The Iraqi writer Sinan Anton's novel "Only the Pomegranate Tree" (Arab Studies and Publishing Institution) opens with a simple narrative storytelling that sometimes surprises you with its turns into dreamlike, fantastical images, fragmented according to cinematic screenplay steps, depicting scenes of death that devour the occupied Baghdad heart, which remains vivid before the eyes of 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. Washing the dead used to take place before the American occupation of Iraq, in its usual manner and natural course. With the heavy weight of war, and the fighting among the country's own people, groups and individuals, the rate of killing increased significantly, taking terrifying forms of mutilation and abuse of corpses, stabbing, strangling, burning, piercing, and dismembering. Jawad reached the point of confusion and bewilderment about how to wash a severed head without a body, and a body cut with an electric saw, in a ritual washing that Islamic law prescribes before burial.