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Narratives of Democracy and Care in Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary, Naomi Alderman’s The Liars’ Gospel and Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer


 This article aims to explore how narratives can respond to the current crisis of democracy addressed by critics such as Pierre Rosanvallon, Jacques Rancière, Zygmunt Bauman and Carlo Bordoni among others. To do so, I analyse three texts of the last decade, Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary, Naomi Alderman’s The Liars’ Gospel and Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer. Although they do not tackle democracy as a political discourse, they do address its mechanics of representation, the first two being rewritings of the Gospels through the eyes of Christ’s mother (from a Catholic and a British Jewish standpoint respectively), while the third looks at occupied Iraq through Jawad, a Shiite corpse washer. Through the three protagonists’ humility and ethics of care, these texts provide the basis for my exploration of democratic narratives that complement the classic representability of democracy with compromised relationality.