Under Ba’athist rule, orality was used in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) as a vehicle to process and represent atrocities and suffering. Sharing stories and news orally was a way to resist, since doing this in writing could be regarded as an act of civil disobedience and treason. For James Scott, the absence of literacy constitutes a form of flexibility, and oral traditions should therefore, from his perspective, not be understood as a deficiency. Instead, it could be argued that they have several advantages over written traditions. Orality in the war torn Iraq, even though forced, was indeed a powerful tool to evade the power of the state. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, as part of nation-building efforts, the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in the KRI has systematically engaged in the construction of museums and memorial sites that concern traumatic events that took place under Ba'athist rule. These sites have taken over the functions that older oral histories used to have, especially in the context of constructing a shared sense of community. However, these processes of monumentalization also embeds Kurdish victimization into a larger historical context. In this way, the memories of traumatic events are explicitly politicized and revolve around the attempt to legitimize the constitution of an independent Kurdish nation. Simultaneously, this paper argues, non-state actors, mostly victims of the former regime, are demanding a different historical narrative. One that acknowledges their individual and particular experiences of suffering. In these narratives, memory is used not to create a sense of nationhood, but to build a community based on shared understandings of suffering and pain. In this paper, these arguments will be substantiated with help of the discussion of several memory sites in the KRI.