Wanted Dead or Alive: Bare Life, Non-Grievability and Spectrality in Ibrahim Nasrallah's Prairies of Fever

Abstract

Ibrahim Nasrallah's Prairies of Fever narrates a fantastic story of an exiled teacher in Al-Qunfudhah, believed to be dead by the police and forced to pay his own funeral expenses. The text becomes more complex when he searches for his imaginary double but then is charged with murdering him. While this bizarre story is not independent of the historical backdrop of the disenfranchised refugees who moved to the oil-rich Arabian Peninsula to earn a living after the 1950s, I suggest that Nasrallah's work illuminates the exile subjectivity in a broader context while covering its intricate faces. He shows how displaced people are exposed to ungrievable, thus dispensable lives and how their relationship with authority is constituted through banishment. Furthermore, he illustrates the shading of expatriates into spectral figures and their exposure to an infinite expulsion. This article will examine these themes by engaging with the concepts of grievability, bare life and spectrality.