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"Delights from the Garden of Eden": Sensory Narrations of Home in Oral Histories with Iraqi Diasporic Women
Abstract
My paper traces the central role of food and drink in the process of memory-making and inherited memories across three generations of Iraqi women living in diaspora. By exploring the way in which memories are transmitted across generations through family histories, dreams, anecdotes and food metaphors, the paper offers a framework for considering the role of place and space in shaping the affective belongings of diasporic migrants. With a view to understanding how, in diaspora, migrants reconstruct their internal landscapes and memories, the paper’s focus is on urban women migrants from Iraq who have been displaced to suburban sites in the Detroit metropolitan area, Toronto's satellite cities, and refugee camps outside of Amman, Jordan. Drawing upon fieldwork conducted across all three sites of settlement from 2008 to 2018, the paper seeks to understand the ways in which Iraqi women used the senses in our oral histories to invoke and initiate memories that were threaded with difficult pasts. The paper will trace, for example, how Iraqi diasporic women of diverse ethno-religious background use the ritual of serving coffee in oral history interviews to designate formal and informal spaces. The interconnectedness of food and loss in the nostalgic imaginaries of women's memoryscapes informs the basis for this methodological reflection on the process of “sharing authority” in ethnographic work with women refugees. In conclusion, the paper will posit an analysis on the ethics of representation in oral history research.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Iraq
North America
Sub Area
Ethnography