We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War

By Nadje Al-Ali and Deborah Al-Najjar

While the occupation of Iraq and its aftermath has received media and political attention, we know very little about the everyday lives of Iraqis. Iraqi men, women, and children are not merely passive victims of violence, vulnerable recipients of repressive regimes, or bystanders of their country’s destruction. In the face of danger and trauma, Iraqis continue to cope, preparing food, sending their children to school, socializing, telling jokes, and dreaming of a better future. Within the realm of imagination and creative expression, the editors find that many Iraqi artists have not only survived but have also sought healing.

In We Are Iraqis, Al-Ali and Al-Najjar showcase written and visual contributions by Iraqi artists, writers, poets, filmmakers, photographers, and activists. Contributors explore the way Iraqis retain, subvert, and produce art and activism as ways of coping with despair and resisting chaos and destruction. The first anthology of its kind, We Are Iraqis brings into focus the multitude of ethnicities, religions, and experiences that are all part of Iraq.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Jan 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9780815651994

Book preview

Introduction

Writing Trauma, Memory, and Materiality

NADJE AL-ALI and DEBORAH AL-NAJJAR

ADDRESSING TRAUMA

It is difficult to speak of posttraumatic stress syndrome, as Iraqis are continuing to experience various forms of individual and collective traumas both within Iraq as well as within the diaspora. Living conditions of the over two million refugees who fled since 2003, mainly to Syria and Jordan, but also to Egypt and Iran and to a lesser extent Europe and North America, are dismal and often desperate. Is a collective trauma the sum of traumatized individuals, is it more than that, or is it something else? What happens when a community—be it a political group, an ethnic or religious community, or a whole nation—deals with devastating events? How is the identity of communities implicated in and reshaped by overwhelming circumstances? How are violence and mourning encoded into collective narratives and how are such narratives psychologically, sociologically, and culturally implicated in the interpersonal dynamics of trauma? How are cultural formations in communities, including symbols, local narratives, cultural productions, artworks, and rituals mobilized to inscribe, resist, and heal trauma? What is the connection between the collective and the individual experiences? How do individuals resist both the ongoing occupation and the collective trance created through specific circumstances and social pressure to join sectarian, political, and economically motivated violence? And how do violence and destruction relate to individual agency?

These were the questions we had in mind when we approached the contributors to this volume, who have all engaged with various aspects of trauma, memory, and coping, especially in the form of literary and visual narration. Trauma not only destroys but creates. And the creativity of trauma lies very much at the core of this book. Dena al-Adeeb’s essay and images speak directly to the trauma of war, memory, and the performative aspects of ritual and religion in her art installation called Sacred Spaces. Her work complicates static notions of the rites of religion and simplistic representations of diasporic subjectivities.

Iraqi men, women, and children are not merely passive victims of violence, vulnerable recipients of repressive regimes, or bystanders of their country’s destruction. While everyday life is fraught with the potential of danger and trauma, it is in the everyday life itself that we find the making of hope. Iraqis continue to cope, to try to create an everyday that has some semblance of normality: preparing food, sending their children to school, cleaning, socializing, but also cracking jokes and dreaming about a better future. Within the realm of imagination and creative expression, we also find that Iraqis create ruptures in the healing, as healing is not static or final. Writers continue to write. Artists make art. Filmmakers film.

RECLAIMING RESISTANCE

One impetus for this book was our frustration with the way the concept of resistance has been (mis)used in the media and within the antiwar movement. Media representations have tended to conflate Ba‘thi fighters, Islamist militia, foreign jihadis, and criminal gangs under the broad label insurgents. There has been very little analysis of the actual political and armed resistance to the occupation, as opposed to attacks that kill innocent Iraqi civilians. But even more lacking from our perspective has been the exploration of everyday forms of resistance that do not involve arms and violence.

We wanted to find out more about nonviolent resistance both to the occupation itself and to its many consequences in the form of criminal gangs, sectarianism, and increased gender-based violence. Our particular interest in the context of this book is culture broadly defined. We decided to look at the way Iraqis retain, subvert, and produce art/activism as ways of coping with despair and resisting chaos and destruction. Ultimately we have looked for the means by which we might find light and dark, contrasts and connections; as Saad Jawad eloquently shows in his contribution, these shapes and colors have their own twisted meanings in the Iraqi context. His main focus and interest is education, which, of course, has been one very significant aspect of the attempt to retain and reinvigorate culture. Saad Jawad’s essay about the disintegration of the higher education system in Iraq shows that for many Iraqi professionals, especially teachers and academics, continuing their job in the face of chaos, lawlessness, and violence presented a tremendous act of resistance and bravery. His contribution painfully outlines the gap between the many promises made to Iraqis and the actual outcomes of the occupation. But it also reveals the continuity of oppressive authoritarian structures that existed under the previous regime.

Saddam Hussein and the Ba‘th regime have been ousted, yet the sharp reality is allowing people to see that it takes much more than a military invasion and a new government to establish democratic structures and transform an authoritarian political culture built on patronage, connections, and corruption. As Sinan Antoon has articulated clearly in his public talks and as Saad Jawad expresses, many of the worst patterns linked to the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and the Ba‘th party have been strengthened. At the same time, some of the social institutions that were not owned by the Ba‘th have been looted, destroyed, and obliterated since the invasion. These include museums, monuments, and libraries as well as networks of artists, writers, academics, intellectual, neighbors, and friends.

Many contributors in this collection are involved in this difficult endeavor to save, retain, and reclaim Iraqi culture. Nada Shabout, for example, has fought relentlessly since the invasion to retain modern Iraqi art, which had been looted in the Museum of Modern Art. Shabout’s Bifurcations continues the intellectual labor of thinking about the visual in relation to disruption, violence, occupation, and empire. Shabout considers the co-optation of art/artist that even Saddam Hussein tried to perform by having his face deface the whole of Iraq. One could not look anywhere in Iraq without seeing Saddam Hussein, both his face and the power he represented (the visual eponym and daily reminder that censorship and the threat of violent repression loomed high and low).

Other contributors are engaging creative means of expression, may they be painting, sculpture, photography, or writing. Nadje Al-Ali’s interview with Maysaloun Faraj provides grounding in the historical roots of Iraqi visual artists and their commitments. Faraj has some poignant things to say about the writer Nuha Al-Radi who experienced challenges to her seemingly neutral writing. The cancer she battled, as Faraj tells us, was due to the use of depleted uranium in the first Gulf War. Al-Radi’s own body was a testimony to the violations that she suffered. Her 2003 postscript, again, points to the atrocities that are pre-2003 and pre-9/11, In the last twelve years of sanctions, the U.S. and the UK bombed the no-fly zones almost daily. Iraq did not manage to down a single jet or do any injury to any country near or far. How, then, is it such a danger to the world? (217). Faraj’s interview carefully provides the details of what the Iraqi artist scene is like and how the realities of war and exile impacted their work.

Ur’s Echo is a moving meditation on the ancient properties of Iraqi cultural capital. Rashad Salim offers us a poignant and melodic song whose pitch is perfect regarding the register (moral, melancholic) nature of our endeavors in this book. Salim knows that Iraqis do not forget histories—their current occupation is a palimpsest—and that military history and memory are long and arduous. In fact, memory has gained center stage in the often deadly contestations of history, truth, and the nature of the new Iraqi state. This is not a new phenomenon. Many Iraqi intellectuals, writers, and artists had subordinated their creativity and their artistic expressions and sold their souls to the state. Yet, as Eric Davis argues in Memories of the State (2005), in contrast to simplistic notions of a republic of fear à la Kanan Makiya or a total silence of the intellectuals, many artists and intellectuals developed new and subtle forms of resistance that germinated creativity, imagination, and opposition to the regime.

Today, in the post–Saddam Hussein period, the instrumentalization of history and memory is continuing. Intellectuals and writers close to specific political parties are busy trying to rewrite Iraqi history from their specific vantage point and positioning. Yet, rather than mere ideological debates, we suggest that contestations over Iraq’s history are more about struggles over resources, power, and legitimacy. This is regardless of whether it is with respect to constructions of hierarchies of suffering—which ethnic or religious groups have suffered the most and have therefore more entitlements and rights in the new Iraq—or whether it is about the origins of sectarianism. One of the two extreme positions here is that the country’s problems all started in 2003 and that everything was happy and harmonious before. Or the other extreme that some promulgate is that Iraq itself is an artificial construction inherently ridden by inner conflicts, sectarian tensions, and fragmentation.

BEING IRAQI

Estimates of the numbers of Iraqis killed as a result of the recent invasion and occupation ranges between 30,000, provided by former President Bush (who later conceded that it might be closer to 108,000 and counting as stated by the organization Iraqi Body Count), and more than 650,000, put forward in 2006 by the medical journal Lancet. The prestigious British medical journal used previously accepted methods for calculating death rates to estimate the number of excess Iraqi deaths after the 2003 invasion. Almost 92 percent of the dead, the study asserted, were killed by bullets, bombs, or US air strikes (Burnham et al. 2006). We know that many more thousands of Iraqis have died since the study was carried out. While numbers are frequently manipulated to decrease the immensity of the suffering and loss of life, numbers in and of themselves do not tell a story that resonates deeply. Irada Al-Jabbouri, in The Identity of Numbers, narrates the stories of her family members, friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and colleagues who have become a number of the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis. Her reflections show that behind each number there was a complex life intricately woven into the lives of others. Al-Jabbouri speaks out to the world without a specific audience in mind as a way to resist amnesia, to attach humanity to what is too often dehumanized and to assure continuity. Her writing serves as a chronicle for her daughter; writing as/is survival emerges as a recurrent theme in this book.

Writing can also be life threatening. My Trips to the Unknown by Maki Al Nazzal is an example of writing as activism and as guerilla warfare, so to speak. As a journalist and human rights activist, Al Nazzal has been in great danger. He fears for the safety of his family, but he is motivated by a moral and ethical imperative that puts his life at peril. In April of 2009, he was shocked and dismayed to find out that the NGO No More Victims would no longer be able to work properly and help him or his family financially.

The details and complexities found in the various contributions to this book contrast with the generalizations and replete essentialisms we regularly get within the Western media: Iraqis are victims of the occupation. Or they are violent perpetrators. Collective violence particularly presents the temptation to homogenize a collectivity. Many who write about Iraq and the Middle East more widely collapse the trauma and destruction of specific conflicts, wars, and occupations into so-called cultures of violence. Individual agency but also wider and specific political, social, and economic structures, inequalities, injustices, and criminal acts get all too easily subsumed by sweeping and often racist notions of a culture of violence.

These days, Iraqis tend to be represented in terms of ethnic and religious groups: Shi‘i, Sunni, Kurd, and Christian. And in a few more sophisticated reports they also come as Mandeans, Yazidis, Turkmen, and Jews. We stress the simple and seemingly obvious fact: Iraqis exist in the plural as any other population. However, they are differentiated not merely by ethnic and religious background, as is frequently mentioned today, but they are diverse in terms of social class, gender, and place of residence—urban versus rural, political orientation, specific experiences of the past regime, and attitudes toward religion and the occupation. They are also differentiated in terms of their life experiences, opinions, dreams, aspirations, talents, and aesthetic tastes.

Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, ethnic and religious backgrounds have played an increasing role in political and social life to the extent that sectarian divisions have started to cut across previously unifying variables, such as class or a specific urban identity. This becomes very evident in Yara Badday’s contribution, which is based on her own experiences during her recent visits to Iraq.

Yet, many Iraqis are still refusing to think in sectarian terms, not only those whose marriages and families are mixed to start out with. Talking to Iraqis, it becomes clear that a large segment of educated Iraqis feel alienated from the discourses and practices of sectarianism, which have been institutionalized by the occupation. The alienation from sectarian sentiments and practices is particularly prevalent among many of the millions of mainly educated professional Iraqis who have left since 2003, the vast majority of whom have been living in Jordan, Egypt, and Syria. With recent events in Syria, many Iraqis have moved back to Iraq yet often are unable to return to their former homes and jobs.

The recent wave of refugees adds a significant layer to the already substantial Iraqi diaspora, which existed prior to the invasion. And here our book is aiming to make an intervention, based on what we have learned from postcolonial studies, namely, that dislocation and displacement do not stop someone from identifying with, feeling for, and hurting about Iraq. Our contributors are questioning the insider/outsider distinction that has become so central both within Iraq as well as within media depiction. As the fictional protagonist of Ali Bader’s chapter 10 bemoans: I had now become one of the overseas intellectuals: I, who had been recognized just two years before as being one of the ‘inside intellectuals.’ It all seemed to be part of an absurd game of place, nothing more than that, a game that marginalized people by using the idea of place, temporarily dislodging them from their positions, and labeling them as insiders or outsiders. At the same time, Bader critically and creatively engages with the economic and educational gaps between those who have lived outside and those from the inside.

The memory of dislocation very much shapes Ella Shohat’s articulations expressed in the interview with Evelyn Alsultany. The interview contains a careful genealogy of the traces that mark Shohat’s very seminal relationship to Baghdad, to Arab identity formation, and her political alliances and intellectual trajectory. The expulsion of Jews from Iraq and their move to Israel is often misnarrated. Shohat’s scholarship has provided attention to that history and especially in her film Forget Baghdad (2002). This interview revisits some of these crucial historical ruptures but also provides a personal reflection on the pain of how her work gets lost in translation. The cliché is relevant in that translation is always fraught. As Brent Edwards’s work on African Diasporas argues, transmission and translation are not straightforward or easily made legible (2003). Dislocation is central to Dahlia Petrus’s piece. Her essay My Own Private Munich recalls the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich and the specific impact of that historical moment on her personal narrative. This launches Petrus into an examination of childhood memories, both painful and humorous, where she reflects on her national identity and ethnic affiliations and loyalties.

A Tale of Two Exiles by Sama Alshaibi examines her relation to her heritage and parents’ homeland: Palestine and Iraq. She also writes about her American-ness. A story about passports is always a story about passages, borders, and the conditions of exilic life. Alshaibi lived with the daily reality of three wars while growing up, and that history has informed her identity as an artist, writer, thinker, filmmaker, and activist. In blurring her body/politics as performance/art, Alshaibi generates vibrant and fresh visual histories that ask us to think about paradoxical truths and corporeal reality. Wafaa Bilal’s Invisible Mirror is a performance artist’s reflections on his artwork, his political investments, and how he copes with the realities of his life as an exiled Iraqi. Bilal’s creations cross over genres, art forms, and viewer’s expectations. As he notes, his work as an artist will engage the person who may or may not care about politics. He cleverly gains audiences who might not be gallery goers. The matter of his performance/art reaches more people: they are forced to think more critically about Iraqis, destruction, and the wages of war.

The editors and the contributors are Iraqis speaking for themselves about their homeland. We find too often in area studies, specifically Middle East studies, that the intellectual, political, and cultural experts are outsiders who manage the production and circulation of knowledge and are the ones granted expert status. We also know that Iraqis are varied. Our versions of Iraqi history, the current war, and the potential resolutions are multiple and contested. What we do see in the mainstream global media is a focus on sectarian violence and sectarian difference. We know (through material reality, oral histories, and lived experience) Iraqis had good relations with one another. They lived next door to one another. They maintained peace and love with their neighbors regardless of religion or sect.

Iraqis have chronicled the 1990s through the 2000s, creating a worldwide readership. Riverbend and other Iraqi bloggers became journalists, the eyewitnesses to the atrocities of sanctions, the documenters of harsh postwar economic realities. Despite these words of warning from Iraqis and other global citizens and activists, a western campaign grew to reduce Iraq to its Ba‘thist regime at the expense of the Iraqi people. In contrast, Maysoon Pachachi, filmmaker and activist, has been documenting developments in Iraq and her relationship to the place she left many years ago in her own films. Her recent documentary Our Feelings Took the Pictures: Open Shutters Iraq is an incredibly moving and powerful film about a photography project as well as an insight into the lives of Iraqi women in the postinvasion period. Pachachi also opened a film school in Baghdad with her friend and colleague Kasim Abid to enable young Iraqis to document their own lives and represent themselves on film. In her contribution, she tells us what it is like to teach film in Baghdad. Her essay is about working against limited resources and a precarious environment.

Our book is an extension of all that work. It is in solidarity with that continuous labor and should be read as a consolidation, not as a revision, of those perspectives. In general, it is the exception, not the rule to hear from an Iraqi about Iraq. The military perspective routed through government authority (in the United States and the United Kingdom) is how the average citizen subject has learned about Iraq. The United States and the United Kingdom often appear to have learned nothing except minimally about defense strategies. We have heard few Iraqi voices, limiting our ability to digest the enormity of loss and to properly mourn those losses. The trauma from these wars, including the Iran-Iraq war, is yet to be accessed or registered. We do have cancer rates, we do know about the deaths, we do know how families have fled, and we do see the repercussion that is separation, exile, and upheaval. The rages of war are at the heart of our political disgust. What we think emerges is not despair.

We do not offer solutions except that we have always opposed war as a means to an end. We are not politicians or policy makers. The Obama administration has created what seems to be a mock departure in 2011, but the Green Zone and the large US embassy are marks of what might be longstanding claims on oil and other resources. We have heard regret and dismay at the wrongs of war. This current economic crisis is because of the investments in national security and the lack of investments in securing health, home, and education for all citizens. Iraqis may not have had democracy, but under their Ba‘thi rule, all these rights were assured. Many Iraqis, especially those living in the diaspora, supported Bush’s invasion because they wanted Saddam Hussein’s reign to end. They did not learn the lessons of the Gulf War. They ignored the truth that Bush was politically motivated by oil and greed. Liberals and leftists alike did very little to effect change and minimally mobilized against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan just as the Left has been woefully silent on Palestinian rights’ violations: Liberal apologists for the Gulf War insisted that it was necessary to safeguard the real interests of the people of Iraq. Its outcome would be a democratic regime in Baghdad, albeit after a limited period of direct rule by Washington. Imperialism, we were told, would defeat ‘fascism’ and restore democracy and was, for that reason, preferable (Ali 2002, 43).

IRAQI AFFECT/S

We are not the first. This book is unique in that it brings many newer voices together in the same textual and spatial register, but our contributors are not new to politics, activism, or academe. They are exhausted, frustrated, angry, and on fire with passion about their place of origin (or their family’s home of origin): Iraq. Ugly feelings can work to one’s advantage. We do not claim the high moral ground in some way that oversimplifies the complexity of what historically constitutes Iraq and these most recent iterations routed through cultural creations. We do think that hope and despair are precariously knotted together. It would be fair to say that the intensity of emotion is not conveyed in these sentiments. What might make sense is to think about disgust, a reaction and an emotion that is clear and unvexed. Moreover, like envy, paranoia, and other feelings that are more likely to be objects of moral disapprobation rather than ways of expressing it, disgust is neither of the left or of the right and has the capacity to be summoned in either direction (Ngai 2005, 339). The voices and visions in this book are motivated by political disgust. It does not mean that we are all aligned politically; however, our political perspectives were not part of the dominant discourse. Ironically, with shifting views, new administrations and critiques of US occupation are the new world order and amnesia is the drink of the day, as Ali Behdad would remind us in his Forgetful Nation (2005).

Iraqis in the Diaspora have been sad, disappointed, and depressed. We would not describe out/rage or anger as the mainstream response. Many activists, artists, and academics of Iraqi descent or Arab origin, and people of color in general have felt the rage of this economy and see the financial links are tied to the continued marginalization of people who are consistently being maligned and denigrated in the media. This persistent character/cultural assassination has had material consequences. Race and racism are important rubrics to think through the complexity of issues that reoccur through this book. National identity and loyalty are routed via many means. We can talk about Iraqi cultural production as cultural objects but we want our readers to think about the racialization of Arabs and the racialization of a religion, Islam. Even though Arabs in the United States are listed as white on the census, they had been treated as others long before September 11. This framework is something that Nadine Naber and Amaney Jamal lay out in the introduction of the edited anthology Race and Arab Americans (2008): The aftermath of 9/11 not only illustrated what critical race scholars have been arguing for decades—that ‘visibility’ is a power-laden project that has the effect of silencing critiques of state violence and the structural inequities that produce hatred and racism—but also the objectification that often accompanies ‘inclusion’ (3). Benjamin Barber in Jihad vs. McWorld (1996) frames the competing ideologies in relation to the threats against democracy that come from both conservative Arab cultural expectations and the hegemonic forces of the global reign of consumer culture. We have to challenge, again, what constitutes democracy when the global circulation and force of capitalism and western ideologies dominate the intellectual, cultural, and even emotional frameworks and logics from which we operate as citizen subjects; there are no free decision-makers in advanced global markets. Mahmood Mamdani in Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (2005) also challenges us to rethink our assumptions about race and religion. His book asks readers to disrupt the binary framework that continues to circulate as a dominant ideology that structures Islam in Orientalist discourse. The cultural and religious ideologies drive the global discursive circulation of our knowledge about Islam. Both books center their critique on US imperial powers.

In publishing Baghdad Diaries (2003), Nuha Al-Radi became a writer so she could chronicle the destruction of her country. She begins in 1991. From her final entry dated 21 March 2003: I am sleeping in the sitting room in front of the television these days. Writing does not come easy. . . . This week was supposed to have been an Iraqi cultural week in Beirut, with an art exhibit, a play and a poetry reading. The play was cancelled after the first day of war because war seemed to be imminent and the players wanted to get back to their families in Iraq. The poets too (215).

Poets, like visual artists, interrupt daily routines and the business-as-usual numbness that marks everyday life for people. Dunya Mikhail’s Larsa expresses deep emotion but it is not in the clichés of common discourse; she dares to conjure an aesthetic of poetics, of art, of continents—ancient rivers and the sky that we all share. Alise Alousi’s eerie and evocative What Every Driver Must Know elicits the senses and awakens us to the hostile, the dangerous, the sensual, and the ineffable. How does one speak to the fragility of life in a war zone? How does one say, without saying, what seems imaginable and unimaginable? All the writers in this book express in implicit and explicit terms internal and external turmoil. Hassan Abdulrazzak’s Shadow of Their Former Selves also speaks to familial and historical fragilities. How to recount one’s own history, pay homage and yet speak to the destructive forces that personal and cultural history has taken on self, body, heritage, family, nation? The genetic archive he generates haunts and resonates for the reader. In 1001 Nights, Jananne Al-Ani also addresses the memory of war and violence. Her dream-like meditation