This paper explores the intersections of gender, nation, and historical time in Iraqi nationalist imaginations after the revolution of July 14, 1958. Its focal point is a famous public monument in Baghdad built by Iraqi artist Jawad Salim: Nasb al-Hurriyya or the Monument to Freedom, which was commissioned by the new regime shortly after the revolution. On one level, the work’s construction of a visual narrative of the Iraqi nationalist movement and the revolution it produced is a remarkably literal illustration of the homogenous linear-historical time that Benedict Anderson tells us is a prerequisite for any national becoming. But on other levels, the monument points toward heterogeneous and non-linear temporal conceptions and experiences that may also be seen as constitutive of Iraqi nationhood. For example, sequences of masculine-linear time are interwoven with those of feminine-cyclical time to propel the ineluctable forward march of the nation’s pre-revolutionary history and, ultimately, the explosive and transcendent time of its revolution, which ruptures linearity and tears the (nationalist) past from the (developed) future. The paper draws on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concept of postcolonial heterotemporality to explore multiple ways of reading the monument’s representations of time, which I argue are more heterogeneous and ambivalent than previous scholars of the work have recognized. It also engages with Partha Chatterjee’s framework of “inner” and “outer” domains in anticolonial nationalism to look at some of the normative as well as creative aspects of Iraqi nationalist imaginings of femininity, masculinity, and childhood.