The Historicity of the ‘Traumatic’ in Iraqi Literary Production Iraqi literary production since 1991 is distinguished by an acute sense of rupture that is better expressed in themes of isolation, suspicion and distrust of Others. Although the central referents are the homeland and its enemies, homeland grows into an abstraction, a community where forlornness settles and where ghosts survive to muse on their betrayal by state and Others. Ambiguity and fantasy help in establishing this sense that does not openly cross red lines. Style, language, scenes and episodes complement each other in creating a tableau that may seem and sound grim otherwise has it not been for sarcasm, hilarity, irony and travesty. Elements that are usually associated with post-modernity poetics, regain a political and social sense through the overriding longing for an open space and locale. Nationhood under the sanctions becomes a burden, and bitterness at the American-led wars and sanctions does not minimize disgust and mistrust leveled at national centers of power, the regime and its many reorientations. Literary production since 2003, especially the one produced inside Iraq, rewrites the past with more criticism of regimes of thought and power, but the central monster, with many forms, is the intruder and the invader. Even when not mentioned in political terms, it exists in every instance of human violation, fear, failure, and brutality. The homeland retains its ancient image of compassion and love though under dire circumstances and duress. The family replaces the regime or any other center of power and self hood assumes another presence and role in an otherwise harrowing outside. While homeland is one’s anchor, not his/her enemy, it is the Iraqi writer residing outside Iraq who receives the butt of sarcasm. Though it is difficult to speak of nationhood, exile, human love, violence and war as literary trends, their presence is so pervasive as to impact styles and ways of presentation. In matter and manner the distinctive aspect connotes traumas and anxieties.

Continuity and Change in Iraqi History-Writing today-A Revisionist View Contrary to much which is written, the finding here is that Iraqi culture and in particular history-writing remains today what it has been during the modern period despite the disasters inflicted on the country in recent years and the attempts to impose an Orientalist reconstruction thereafter. History-writing has generally been a pursuit of the middle strata in relation to the state and the society. The strategy used by the state to rule, it can thus be hypothesized, has had a profound influence on the form history-writing takes. In nation states such as Iraq with its cosmopolitan major cities and its Nomenklatura poised atop a hierarchy of caste and class groups, the predominant form of modern history writing was and remains that of state-oriented productions-diplomatic, political, military, international or institutional history somewhat related to the state as on law, education, or economic development, some of it more liberal and positivist, some more romantic. Such history writing includes even oppositional writing, for example, accounts of class or caste in their relation to the state. Such writing –at least for the modern period-and most history writing is on the modern period has been and remains somewhat constant. While it might be assumed that the series of disasters Iraq faced over the past quarter century would totally change the academic structure, evidence from recent writings in history, however, does not suggest this is what is occurring. The paper concludes turning to the question of change in history-writing. It hypothesizes that some change is taking place. It has been imposed on history professions around the world over the past quarter century as states became increasingly more connected to each other than they did to their own societies. Under such conditions, historians in countries such as Iraq given the tradition of the strong link between the historian and the state feel a particular bind. Evidence is drawn from a range of recent historical studies.

The first Gulf War and the 1991 Uprising were cataclysmic events in the life of Iraqi citizens. The Uprising is currently one of the most memorialized events in recent Iraqi history. Particularly in the Southern Provinces o f Iraq, events commemorating the victims of the Uprising are often accompanied by the consecration of public spaces named after the Intifada. Political blocs consisting of the families of the victims of the Intifada, push for their rights in local governments. In December of 2008, the Iraqi High Tribunal concluded its 18 month trial of the leadership of the Ba’th party responsible for the suppression of the Intifada. It accused the defendants of crimes against humanity and of inflicting great suffering on a population that had rebelled against an oppressive regime. Most analyses of the uprising focus on its failure to dislodge the regime as well as its nature: was it a Shi’i uprising supported by opposition parties in Iran or a chaotic rebellion that had not leadership? I am less interested in this aspect of the uprising than its impact on the public culture in Iraq that was shared by all parties to the conflict. I will argue in my paper, that 1991 marked the introduction of a language of suffering that highlighted the epic encounter between the forces of “good and evil” in the Iraqi press, among opposition groups who supported the Uprising, as well as by Iraqis who were witness to the events. Furthermore, I argue that the break-up of the Iraqi state, the disintegration of the armed forces, and the level of violence that the state and the rebels unleashed led to the description of the violence in a depoliticized language of the “apocalypse” that removed agency from all parties in the violence. The language of suffering and victimization was further reinforced by the reports of human rights groups on the uprising and its suppression. What were the implications of this new language of suffering and victimhood on Iraqi public culture in the 1990s? I hope to conclude my paper by speculating on this question. My paper will draw on the government controlled press of the 1990s as well as the press of the opposition. It will also draw on a number of interviews I conducted with witnesses and participants of the Intifada in Amman and Damascus.

Since its inception in 1921, a number of successive regimes have sought to politicize Iraq’s cultural history in order to develop national identity and foster social cohesion across this rich and complex nation. Foremost among these were the Baath party, particularly under the rule of Saddam Hussein, who used much of the nation’s Oil wealth to undergo an extensive nation-building campaign. However, identity in Iraq is far from monolithic and various factions have long resisted the state sanctioned version of “Iraqi” identity and asserted alternative histories and narratives to underpin their own identity politics. With the invasion of Iraq by Coalition forces in 2003, however, came an unprecedented era of cultural destruction. Following the devastation of the battle phase of the war, there were further attacks on Iraq’s cultural heritage including everything from the carefully choreographed removal of the giant bronze statue of Saddam in Firdos square, through to military bases set up at sensitive archaeological sites such as the ancient city of Babylon. In addition, Iraqi civilians targeted the cultural history of their nation with wanton looting and arson, as well as systematic attacks on sites of archaeological or ethno-religious significance. More recently, the Shia and Kurdish dominated Iraqi Government have organised the “Committee for Removing Symbols of the Saddam Era” and drew up plans to purge the state of its Sunni dominated past. This paper argues that the unprecedented scale and magnitude of the destruction of Iraq’s cultural history has played a part in eroding the various intersecting and overlapping versions of identity politics in Iraq. In turn, this has provided fertile ground for terrorists and sectarians to plant the seeds of their own narrow and deadly ideologies. This has brought about the rise of ethno-religious based violence and seen a series of bloody and protracted conflicts emerge between previously peaceful and compatible factions. In this way, Iraq serves as a powerful case study in furthering academic discussion on the complex inter-relationships between cultural and historical destruction and identity politics, sectarianism, violence and democracy.

“If sorrow [shajan] were a man, I would not have killed him but prayed that his life may be long”: thus opens In‘am Kajahji’s 2008 novel al-Hafida al-Amrikiyya (The American Granddaughter). The novel is about an Iraqi-American, Zayna, who returns to Iraq in 2003 as a translator with the American army. There, she reestablishes contact with the Iraq she had left as a teenager, with her elderly grandmother and her community – except that she is on the other side of the fence. As the atrocities of the war unfold and the truth about Zayna’s job sinks in with her grandmother, the elderly woman seeks to imbue her with Iraqi patriotism. Faced with Zayna’s intransigence, the grandmother dies, it is suggested of a grief-stricken heart, and the translator returns to the US with an enduring shajan that she feels will rectify her, keeping alive within her the memory of Iraq. As the proposed presentation would argue, the novel makes multiple thematic and structural use of the bilingual and bicultural identity of Zayna to bear witness to a traumatized Iraq while consistently calling into question both Iraqi and American nationalist ideologies. That Zayna speaks of her competition with “the authoress” – her quasi-superegoic Iraqi nationalist double – underscores her exemplary status as a divided subject. This split makes her emblematic of a range of Iraqi positionalities even as she becomes the battle-ground for competing agendas and loyalties. How, then, to interpret the function of shajan at the end of a novel that closes with the Biblical “If I forget you, Baghdad, let my right hand forget her cunning”? I would submit that shajan in Zayna’s articulation, as a form of abiding “melancholia” rather than a “mourning” that can be worked through (see Sigmund Freud), is offered as the locus for the nation. That is, melancholia signals the haunting by an unburied but irrecuperable Iraq; it is the response that suggests both inadmissible yet undeniable national trauma. Yet, this ambivalence calls for a critical ambivalence about the potential for political incapacitation: “trauma” and “melancholia” broach the limits of representation. The paper, therefore, frames this issue through theoretical interventions – by Cathy Caruth, David Eng and David Kazanjian – that have tackled the question where to situate the ethico-political within conditions of trauma and melancholia. The conclusion would propose a dialectic between mourning and melancholia, relating this to the structure of the novel.

A fundamental question at the heart of coming to terms with Iraq’s past is how to address the dead and their absence; address them in both senses of the verb. The relationship of the living to the dead is, of course, a political one and itself a contentious site. Alas, it is not hyperbolic to recognize Iraq itself as an open mass grave. In addition to the victims of Ba`thist dictatorship, many of whom ended in mass graves, there are those million or so victims of the genocidal embargo (1990-2003) who are in a figurative mass grave insufficiently recognized. The ongoing occupation and the civil war produced their own variations of horror in terms of violence and displacement. Iraqis in general and Iraqi producers of culture in particular are haunted by the ghosts of the occupants of this mass grave. This hauntology, to borrow a term from Derrida, is a crucial political as well as a literary trope. These mass graves were and still are appropriated as a political trope or commodity and deployed by the United States and its Iraqi allies to justify the war and invasion. The new mass graves attributed to the militias of the regime and its corrupt police recently discovered are in turn being exploited by some to belittle and ultimately rehabilitate Saddam’s era and erase its own crimes in a futile Manichaean equation of who was worse? My paper examines the effects of the fragmentation and disintegration of Iraq’s material reality and space on the late poetic discourse of one of Iraq’s major poets, Sargon Boulus (1944-2007), who happens to be grossly under-researched in English. How do the traumas of the last two decades reorient his work and which new themes appear and predominate? How is Iraq reconstructed or imagined? How does he excavate the layers of tragedy and carnage and how does he articulate the cogito of grief and mourning! Boulus presents a unique case because he is one of few who succeed in avoiding the usual ideological traps, the snares of outmoded traditions, and facile nostalgia. I will focus on the trope of ghosts as a strategy to articulate a real that is almost inaccessible and seems beyond comprehension or articulation and is thus equivalent to the Lacanian real which resides in a space beyond the grasp of the symbolic and the imaginary and which can only be glimpsed in nightmares.