This paper considers the Iran-Iraq War’s repackaging by examining female narrated memoirs published in the last fifteen years by Sureh-ye Mehr, the official publisher of the Artistic Center of the Islamic Development Organization. Laetitia Nanquette’s recent article published in 2013 regarding the popular memoir Da (2008), “An Iranian Woman’s Memoir on the Iran-Iraq War,” sheds light on the topic of female memoirs. She does not, however, offer a critical reading of Seyyedeh Zahra Hoseini’s book. Nor does she put Da (“Mother” in Kurdish) in conversation with the many other female-narrated memoirs published by Sureh-ye Mehr. Academic scholarship of the war has thus far been limited to military histories, like Dilip Hiro’s The Longest War, or ethnographies of the post-war generation, like Roxanne Varzi’s Warring Souls. The memoirs discussed in this paper, with ethnic minorities and women at their center, breathe new life into the now stale Iran-Iraq War narrative. In the same vein as works like Houchang Chehabi’s article, “Ardabil Becomes a Province” (1997), my paper explores the manipulation of the Iran-Iraq War by ethnic minorities to exert influence over the public sphere while simultaneously legitimating the populist rule of the Islamic Republic. In order to reconceptualize Iranian nationalism, this paper interrogates gender, racial and ethnic identities during the Iran-Iraq War. These books offer the unique subaltern subjectivities of those ascribing to a Shi’i faith in majority Sunni communities, an Arab-Iranian identity in the midst of an Arab-Iranian war, a Kurdish identity with family on both sides of the border and so on. In these memoirs, the state both calls to attention and normalizes complex ethno-religious identities. For example, Nahid Salmaani, the subject of the short memoir Gol-e Simin, describes her mother as yearning to return home to Iraq and never learning Persian without ever conceding her truly "Iranian" identity. Other memoirists use racial minorities as a foil to present “good” and “bad” cultural values in an effort to critique Iranian mores. Female memoirists interrogate Iranian nationalism, calling into question race, religion, language, and ethnicity during a conflict between Iraqis and Iranians of all stripes and creeds. Through a comparative perspective, I analyze themes shared by eight memoirs in order to discern the larger implications these memoirs present for the Iranian Shi’i state.