One of the most expressive narrative patterns in Iraqi women’s writings are the ones that deal with their sojourn in metropolitan centers like London, Paris, and Berlin. With a memory focused on their past in Iraq, both past life and present experience are played out as traumatic moments. This division between physical presence in metropolitan centers and the harrowing retrieval of the past creates a style rife with uncertainty and tension. This is manifest in the following two narratives I have chosen to discuss: Hayfa Zangana’s Through the Vast Halls of Memory and Nuha al-Radi’s Baghdad Diaries. Both narratives provide a polarization that enables us as readers to see the difficult choice facing Iraqis. They also provide a factual record that enables readers to see through each writer’s vision of herself in relation to communal (including familial), social, and political life inside and outside Iraq. The outcome is important to literary experiences on psychological and sociological levels. Iraqi women’s experience is more focused on a detailed record of how outside events influence the makeup of one’s psyche. In surveying many narratives, I have come to the conclusion that a female perspective has both the exactitude of the camera and the inhibitions of a beleaguered soul.

Ismail Fahd Ismail is one of the leading literary figures in Kuwait today. He claims to have a Kuwaiti father and an Iraqi mother. He was born in the Iraqi city of Basra in 1940, where he lived until the late 1960s when he moved to Kuwait. He has published around fifteen novels, a collection of short stories, and some critical works on Kuwaiti and other Arab writers. His novels are comparable—in terms of length, technique, subject-matters—to those of the Egyptian Najib Mahfuz, the Palestinian Ghassan Kanafani, and the Saudi-born Abdul Rahman Munif. Before moving to Kuwait, Ismail had, however, established himself as an ‘Iraqi’ writer. Even after his relocation, many literary critics and commentators continued to refer to him as Iraqi. Adding to this confusion about his national identity is the fact that the majority of his writings—especially those published before the 1980s—did not treat any issue relating to Kuwaiti society. His earliest novels were about the political turmoil in Iraq in the late 1950s, which he personally witnessed as a youth. And the rest depicted similar chaotic situations in Egypt and Palestine. Even when in the early 1980s he was ‘compelled’ to write about Kuwaiti society, the result was “far from convincing, either socially or artistically”. The two novels he wrote then about Kuwait “lack[ed] local color”. This paper will examine not just the Iraqi influence on the author, but also, the issue of identity in his works. Special attention will be paid to his seven-part novel, Ihdathiyyat zaman al-uzla [The Occurrences of the Time of Isolation] (1996). This novel chronicles the day-to-day events of the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait (August 1990 to February 1991). Interestingly, both the titles and the contents of the last two parts of the novel treat the Iraqi traumas occasioned by the US-led “Operation Desert Storm”—the Second Gulf War—through which Kuwait was liberated. Does the novel reflect a conflict of identities on the part of the author? In addition to answering this question, this paper will examine the novel’s representation of the collective sufferings of the Iraqis both under Saddam Husain and during the Second Gulf War.

The contemporary Iraqi Poet, Sami Mahdi (b. 1941?), has published sixteen volumes of poetry since 1966. Although he is not canonized, he has a distinctive poetic voice. This paper focuses on Mahdi’s last two volumes of poetry, La Qamar Ba’d Haadha al-Masaa’ (No Moon after Tonight) (2008), and Abnaa’ Ininna (The Children of Ininna) (2009). The focal point of his poetic vision in these volumes shifted from an existentialist poetry, which is an expression of an individual consciousness in search of “authenticity” (as in his Asfaar Jadiidah (New Journeys) (1976) and al-As’ilah (The Questions) (1979)) to a poetry that deals with the traumas of the current war in his home country, Iraq. Two twin themes of a binary vision emerge in this poetry: first, resisting exile, and second, negotiating Iraqi Identity. The first secures continuity and prevents rupture in Iraqi cultural history, and the second reclaims and embraces the cultures and civilizations of ancient Iraq, Mesopotamia: Sumerian, Acadian, Assyrian and Babylonian. This paper merges two critical theories: Phenomenological Criticism of the Geneva School, especially that of Georges Poulet (e.g. in his book on Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Exploding Poetry). Mahdi’s poetry is viewed as an expression of an individual consciousness representing a unique vision which is epistemologically different from that of another poet. I “observe the writer’s perceiving mind to discover the patterns of perception embodied in his work, and to understand how patterns of perception coordinate with the formal patterns of the text” (Poulet). The other critical theory is essentially my own. I call it “Culturalist Theory,” a theory that pushes Phenomenological Criticism further to probe into the poet’s consciousness in order to discover the patterns of the creative engagement of his poetic vision with his culture. These patterns are amorphous, interpretive or critical culturalist poetics. Mahdi’s is interpretive. The paper concludes that Mahdi’s recent poetry is an “interpretive culturalist” poetry instigated by the traumas of the current war in his country, Iraq. The poet incorporates his culture in his vision, and engages with it to the point that it becomes part and parcel of his vision. He rejects exile from the homeland to avoid rupture with his cultural past and insure continuity with it, then reinterprets and redefines his Iraqi identity by enhancing it to include that cultural past.

This paper examines the transformations and shifts in Iraqi visual production that took place around two key traumatic moments in Iraq’s recent history: the 1990s’ sanctions and the 2003 invasion. They are two moments of extreme contrasting natures. The first moment is characterized by severe isolation and the second by a sudden thrust of openness. Both moments, nevertheless, share the alteration in Iraq’s traditional state-patronage and the fragmentation and dislocation of Iraq’s art center, located in Baghdad throughout the 20th century. The displacement and migration of Iraqi artists resulted in the creation of new temporary and shifting artistic centers in exile. It also resulted in two distinct art productions and a wide gap, even resentment, between diaspora artists and established artists who remained in the country. Along with the two productions, in exile two types of Iraqi art exhibitions emerged, caused by a much broader interest in Iraqi art aroused as the world recognized the existence of contemporary Iraqi artists. This interest, however, is very conditioned by the politics of a victimized people or a new “liberated” nation. The paper will examine the two art productions, inside and outside Iraq, and will focus specifically on how these visual works articulate and provoke traumas, as well as the politics of exhibiting these works today.