One of the most expressive narrative patterns in Iraqi women’s writings are the ones that deal with their sojourn in metropolitan centers like London, Paris, and Berlin. With a memory focused on their past in Iraq, both past life and present experience are played out as traumatic moments. This division between physical presence in metropolitan centers and the harrowing retrieval of the past creates a style rife with uncertainty and tension. This is manifest in the following two narratives I have chosen to discuss: Hayfa Zangana’s Through the Vast Halls of Memory and Nuha al-Radi’s Baghdad Diaries. Both narratives provide a polarization that enables us as readers to see the difficult choice facing Iraqis. They also provide a factual record that enables readers to see through each writer’s vision of herself in relation to communal (including familial), social, and political life inside and outside Iraq. The outcome is important to literary experiences on psychological and sociological levels. Iraqi women’s experience is more focused on a detailed record of how outside events influence the makeup of one’s psyche. In surveying many narratives, I have come to the conclusion that a female perspective has both the exactitude of the camera and the inhibitions of a beleaguered soul.