Gulf War Captivity Narratives

0. Establishing the Framework : Theoretical Foundations and Introduction

“Recounting, following, understanding stories is then simply the continuation of these unspoken stories.” (Ricoeur 30)

In the years of 2018 and 2019, the world’s attention was drawn to a captivity experience on U.S. soil that affected thousands of migrant children at the Mexican-American border.¹ Starting in April 2018, American procedures against illegal migration via Mexico underwent a drastic change towards a “‘zero tolerance’ policy” (Gomez),² which meant that migrant families were now being separated when caught crossing the border illegally. As a result of this separation policy, migrant children were detained without their caregivers for extended periods of time.³ These children were held in detention facilities that have since been compared to “a concentration-camp system” (Holmes).⁴ In an open letter, former First Lady Laura Bush linked the facilities in which migrant children were held to “the Japanese American internment camps of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history” (Calamur).⁵

The practice of separating migrant children from their families is epitomized in photographs that went around the world. They show young migrant children clinging to their parents and family members at border patrol stations along the Mexican-American border and pictures of infants, young children, and teenagers who clutch silver emergency blankets made of foil behind mesh-wire fences.⁶ In contrast to the captivity stories in the corpus of this book, the experience of these young migrant children largely remains unspoken, their voices unheard because they are either too young to speak for themselves or too traumatized (Sherman et al.). While the public soon engaged in a “semantic debate” (D. A. Graham)⁷ about how to refer to the mesh wire enclosures in which the children were being held, this focus “on what to call the pens in which children separated from their families are being held, rather than the fact that children separated from their families are being held” (ibid.) is completely beside the point from a moral standpoint. I agree with David Graham who states that the “point is that these children are incarcerated.” In addition to the dismal living conditions that were observed in these camps – “six children have died in the care of other [American immigration] agencies since September [2018]” (Holmes) – it is clear that these children run the risk of being traumatized and that they and their families suffer from this US American policy.

During the process of writing this book on American captivity experiences in Iraq, the reporting on these young migrant captives seems to forebode that the academic and the social community must confront a new captivity situation and investigate its ramifications for American social life and American identity. I am constantly reminded of dehumanizing strategies in former captivity scenarios when “Hispanic immigrants [are referred to] as ‘rapists’ and ‘drug-dealers’ and ‘criminals’” (ibid.). Looking at the language that is used by right wing politicians to refer to the so-called migrant crisis, “[t]‌here’s talk of ‘animals’ and monsters and suddenly anything is justifiable” (ibid.).⁸ This kind of language is highly similar to the way in which former conflicts have been framed. It can exert a powerful impact on the public reception of current events and on mainstream opinions, which is why it is especially important to study the aspect of language and its ideological use in various conflict settings.

During the running-up to the 2020 presidential elections in the USA, the concept of what it means to be ‘American’ – a discussion about who belongs to the American community and who does not – has once again been central to a heated social debate. As yet another presidential campaign was gathering momentum, we witnessed crowds of American Trump-voters chant the slogan: “Send her back!”⁹ This slur was directed at a Democratic Congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, after President Trump criticized her at a publicity event in North Carolina during his campaign for presidency in 2020.¹⁰ Even before this incident, the President’s rhetoric on Twitter had triggered an outcry of protest across all political factions. He had tweeted about four American Congresswomen, Ilhan Omar, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, that they should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” (@realDonaldTrump).¹¹ This dive into the storehouse of racist insults against American citizens with a background in immigration¹² is a powerful incentive to critically re-examine notions of ‘American’ identity as much as American constructions of racial and cultural alterity that incite xenophobia, Islamophobia, and racism.

My book deals with the ideological power and identity formation within American Gulf War captivity narratives, examining their factuality, authorship, and impact on public perception. It explores the struggle for epistemic authority and reveals the complex interplay between captors, captives, authors, and editors in shaping the narrative. By incorporating various resources and analyzing central themes such as alterity, heroism, and violence, the book highlights the correlations with historical events, ideologies, and social debates. It emphasizes the need for continued research into these narratives to counteract their persuasive power and balance their impact on socio-political discourse and conflicts, providing insights into their social, ethical, and ideological implications.

In this book, I research a contemporary form of the American captivity narrative, namely the Gulf War captivity narrative. Though I examine the Gulf War captivity narrative’s place in the genre history of the American captivity narrative, see chapter 1 “History of the Captivity Narrative,” my work offers more than a diachronic view on a successful American literary form. Instead, I propose that the American Gulf War captivity narratives are valuable objects of study for the field of narrative identity formation, for the research of ideology and dissidence, and for the debate on factual versus fictional narration. Therefore, I base my analysis on Paul Ricoeur’s “Life in Quest of Narrative” ([1991] 2014) and on theories of dissidence and ideology, such as Alan Sinfield’s Faultlines (2001). These theoretical perspectives are complemented with narratological theories of factual narration, for instance by Christian Klein and Matías Martínez, Wirklichkeitserzählungen (2009), and Monika Fludernik and Marie-Laure Ryan’s Narrative Factuality: A Handbook (2019). My overall aim in this book is to bring different theoretical paradigms together in order to further an understanding of the contemporary captivity narrative and its significance for controversially debated ethical, political and social topics in the contemporary U.S. American context. When they are approached with a combination of tools from classical narratology, discourse analysis and strategies of dissident re-reading, the Gulf War captivity narratives can provide a wealth of insight into the construction of individual and collective American identity in factual narratives, as well as into the ideological tasks of captivity narratives and the construction of alterity by narrative means in a contemporary context.

The dominant narrative about America’s role in the Gulf Wars is that of a rescue scenario as George Lakoff observes in “Metaphor and War” (1992) and in “Metaphor and War, Again” (2003). In this scenario, the roles of villain (Iraq), victim (Kuwait or Iraq’s oppressed population), and hero (America) are easily allotted. It is safe to say that the Gulf War captivity narratives are rather uncritical of the official line on the wars in Iraq: “I thought we should fight,” states Rhonda Cornum, a First Gulf War captive; “It would have rewarded Iraq for taking Kuwait if we [e.g. the Americans] had looked the other way” (Cornum and Copeland 62).¹³ Cornum’s biography and its lack of self-reflection on its role as Americentric war-propaganda and on its contribution to the proliferation of racist national stereotypes are striking. In fact, this attitude is the norm for the American Gulf War captivity narrative. Thus, it is critically important to identify rhetorical and narrative strategies of othering¹⁴ within the analyzed captivity narratives and to uncover the ideology behind the construction of collective identities, such as ‘American’ vs. ‘Iraqi.’ In pursuance of this aim, I attempt to locate “stories that have not been recounted” (Ricoeur 30) and trace the dissident potential of the unspoken in my corpus of Gulf War captivity narratives. Methodologically, I perform a close reading of the narratives and of related public discourses during which I search for moments where the rigid binary opposition between the American Self and the Iraqi Other fails to produce a semblance of stability.

With my analysis, I want to create an awareness of how the captivity genre works today, how its formal and stylistic characteristics influence the narratives that are produced now about the Gulf Wars and how, as a result of these narrative forms, the readers are manipulated into accepting a certain version of events. It is necessary to reflect upon the fact that this ‘official’ version, i.e. the dominant version, is often narrated from a biased and one-sided perspective. Much like the Indian captivity narratives of the seventeenth-century, the Gulf War captivity narratives frequently promote (white) American supremacy. However, what is presented in these texts as national identity must be regarded with skepticism. Precisely because of the lack of self-reflection in the materials that I analyze, I think it is important to show how the Gulf War captivity narratives, as factual narratives, operate as part of an American ideology that promotes (white) American supremacy and how they tell and re-tell a larger master narrative that justifies the Gulf Wars on moral grounds.

One central element of my book is an analysis of how the Gulf War captivity narratives and related American discourses in the media create and maintain an image of alterity that is used to define the Self in opposition to a perceived Other. For the most part, the texts uncritically employ overly simplistic binary categories, such as ‘the West’ vs. ‘the East’, us vs. them, good vs. evil, human vs. inhuman, et cetera. One result of this radical division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ via diverse narrative and rhetoric strategies is the dehumanization of the Iraqi Other. This effect can be observed in many different settings, for instance in the printed captivity narratives of my corpus, in the Abu Ghraib pictures, or in news-media coverage of the wars. “‘I didn’t Think of Iraqis as Humans’” (Daily Mail), states a U.S. soldier who was convicted of raping and killing an Iraqi teenage girl and of killing her family together with four comrades.¹⁵ In chapter 2, “The Mirage of Difference: Rhetorical Techniques that Define Self and Other,” I critically review the rigid binary oppositions that help to create a dehumanizing image of the Other and the representation of these oppositions as common-sense knowledge.

With a critical eye on the impact of racism, sexism, classism, and religious orientation, I also query conceptualizations of an ‘American’ heroism and of American national identity that are developed and propagated in the Gulf War captivity narratives, see chapter 3 “Gulf War Heroisms: Constructing and Deconstructing (Anti-)Heroes.” Considering the ‘send them home’ controversy or the worrying developments at the American-Mexican border, it is of vital importance to reflect critically on processes of heroization in the Gulf War context: who can become an ‘American’ hero and who, apparently, cannot? What kind of hero narratives are told? What are the practices of representation when it comes to heroizing ethnic minorities in captivity? By incorporating narratives with non-white captive protagonists into my analysis, I aim to counter the hegemony of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) perspective in the captivity genre – and in scholarship on the captivity genre for that matter – because it ultimately supports racist notions of white supremacy. In my search for counter narratives to the dominant story, I discovered that stories about American captives as victims are not nearly as visible as stories that tell of heroic captives. With the exception of representing (female) captives as martyrs, permanently ‘damaged’ captives and Americans who do not survive the war in Iraq are effectively banned from public remembrance and representation, for instance by means of the American policy of the Coffin Ban.¹⁶ It is therefore important to analyze these practices and their implications.

Another important issue that requires special attention is the genre’s ‘standard’ way of representing men and women in captivity. Some critics, like Elliott Gruner (1994 and 1994), have noted familiar tropes of the raped white woman and the male warrior immersed in a fight against evil in connection to the captivity narrative as a genre. Nonetheless, a systematic analysis of the Gulf War captivity narrative’s practices of representing captives according to gender is missing from the academic landscape. What are the social implications of the dominant modes of representation of male and female captives in the American Gulf War captivity narratives? What roles do class, and race play in these literary practices? Where are the faultlines¹⁷ of these dominant modes of representation? And what does the captivity narrative’s practice of exploiting women’s stories for the voyeuristic pleasure of an implied male reader mean in our contemporary context? The impact of violence and trauma on narrative identity construction is a multifaceted research field from which I draw inspiration for chapter 4, “Gender and Violence in Captivity.”

In the remainder of this introduction, I want to provide an overview over important terms, provide some historical context, and discuss the theoretical paradigms that underpin my analysis. My underlying objective is to point out how the different theories that had an impact on my analysis can be merged in order to better understand the phenomenon of the American Gulf War captivity narrative. For instance, it is nearly impossible to introduce the conceptualizations of ‘American’ heroism that can be found in the narratives without touching upon the subject of ideology or narrative identity construction. Likewise, it is equally difficult to write about the Gulf War captivity narrative as an instance of factual narration without mentioning the genre history. Moreover, the phenomena that I observe in the Gulf War captivity narrative cannot be explained solely on the basis of genre theory and the ‘micro-level’ of textual analysis. Instead, it is absolutely imperative to also include the cultural and historical context in the analysis. With the background provided in this introduction, it will thus be easier for the reader to navigate the subsequent analytical chapters.