Reading Iraqi Women's Novels in English Translation

Iraqi Women's Stories

Ruth Abou Rached

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000202977
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geology & Earth Sciences

By exploring how translation has shaped the literary contexts of six Iraqi woman writers, this book offers new insights into their translation pathways as part of their stories' politics of meaning-making.

The writers in focus are Samira Al-Mana, Daizy Al-Amir, Inaam Kachachi, Betool Khedairi, Alia Mamdouh and Hadiya Hussein, whose novels include themes of exile, war, occupation, class, rurality and storytelling as cultural survival. Using perspectives of feminist translation to examine how Iraqi women's story-making has been mediated in English translation across differing times and locations, this book is the first to explore how Iraqi women's literature calls for new theoretical engagements and why this literature often interrogates and diversifies many literary theories' geopolitical scope.

This book will be of great interest for researchers in Arabic literature, women's literature, translation studies and women and gender studies.

1
Pathways of Iraqi women’s story-writing in English translation

At a literary event on Iraqi literature held in Berlin in 2020, Syrian-Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun remarked that everyone in the Middle East, particularly Iraq, seems to be ‘waiting in line’ to tell their stories of war, dictatorship, survival and exile. Iraqi women writers have not been spending time waiting: for decades they have been writing their – other Iraqis’ – stories of hope and survival, many engaging with translation as part of their creative expression and literary activism. Little, however, has been written on how stories written by Iraqi women writers have been mediated – or ‘re-written’ – in English translation. This gap is surprising in view of Iraq’s high international profile for decades. As a response to this gap, this book explores how six examples of Iraqi women’s story-making have been mediated in English translation across different times, political contexts and locations. The writers in focus are Samira Al-Mana, Daizy Al-Amir, Inaam Kachachi, Betool Khedairi, Alia Mamdouh and Hadiya Hussein, six Iraqi women writers who have turned to translation as one way of preserving their stories – and stories of many other Iraqis – beyond conventional borders.

Samira Al-Mana and Daizy Al-Amir were amongst the first Iraqi women writers to publish stories in Beirut during the 1960s. Inaam Kachachi writes stories to archive alternative histories of Iraq as ‘amulets of memory’ (Snaije 2014). Betool Khedairi works to archive ‘photos’ of Iraq through her creative writing. For decades Alia Mamdouh has challenged the many languages of patriarchy via her innovative use of Arabic. Hadiya Hussein writes to show Iraq’s beauty while addressing fear, specifically “the fears of an Iraqi citizen who has become even more fearful of a slip of the tongue than an actual, physical slip” (Hussein cf. Lynx-Qualey 2013). Drawing on analytical frameworks of intersectional feminist translation, I show how one story of each writer has moved across its many charged borders, some of which included changes of government, deteriorating infrastructure and ongoing conflict in Iraq. English translation is, of course, not the only way by which Iraqi women writers communicate their stories with different readerships, and story-writing is not the only way that Iraqi women express their literary activism. Innovative literature by Iraqi women, particularly during the early years of their story-writing yet to be translated or to circulate outside Iraq (Abou Rached 2020, 51–51) also merits much more critical attention. Poetry, theatre, art and music are also just four of the many rich categories of Iraqi expression which are beyond the scope of this book.

As part of a Series which seeks to provide a focused overview on topics to encourage further research, this book does seek to cover all stories by Iraqi women writers in translation in English and other languages. Underpinning the focus of this book on Iraqi women’s story-writing through case studies in a specific context, however, is a consciousness that many innovative works are only accessible in specific locations or are no longer available for many reasons, amongst them censorship, war and varying locations languages and politics of publication. This book aims to raise wider appreciation of the critical importance of specific works though the nexus of translation to ensure the vital issues their writers raise across borders remain as a source of debate, discussion and inspiration. By exploring pathways of English translation for these six stories, this book invites wider research on Iraqi women’s story-making as a body of creative activist work crossing many genres and borders.

The politics of reading Iraqi women’s stories

While Iraqi women have always been a bedrock of Iraqi cultural memory, women writers have always been working within many “political and social restrictions to make their voices heard throughout the Arabic-speaking world” (Abu-Haidar 2005, 193). Successive wars in Iraq have shaped their cultural production, specifically the 2003 war and ongoing military occupation arguably ‘marking’ Iraq as the first ‘new’ neo/colonial Arab nation state of the twenty-first century (Ismael 2014). This war also presented Iraq as site of where a long-standing dictatorship could fall. Saadi Simawe (2004) has framed the ramifications of Iraq’s history of dictatorship and war as oddly conducive to Iraqi creativity:

It seems to me that literature and the arts live on disasters which, because they challenge our very existence, force us to think imaginatively and creatively. The African American experience produced the blues, the Jewish experience produced Kafka, and the Russian sorrows gave us Dostoevsky. Iraqis’ tragedies have produced profound literature that needs to be published…. [T]here are now two Iraqi literatures: the literature of exile and the literature under fascism and war.

(Simawe 2004)

He also saluted Iraqi women writers for “an existentialism … mixed with humour alongside an unusual compassion for all humans,” that is, their representations of everyday people in Iraq making choices in almost impossible circumstances. This way of writing is not new in Iraqi women’s literature: Iraqi women have always written of how everyday Iraqis face interlocking effects of poverty, corruption, violence and social injustice. Shifting since 2003, however, is how some women writers view the act of writing. Haifa Zangana first described the post-2003 space as akin to a “sterile, dark silence extend(ing) its shadow over the imaginary,” leaving many Iraqi writers, herself included, feeling that “the cruel reality of occupation has turned writing fiction into a meaningless act” (Zangana 2004, xv). Inaam Kachachi similarly distances violence as a source of her creativity in any language:

Violence tires me, and my description of its mechanisms cannot match the skill with which it is being committed on the ground. Give me peace and I will describe it to you and furnish it with characters. Don’t you think that a warm, well-lit room conveys the darkness to us?

(Kachachi cf. Najjar 2014)

Sinan Antoon also configures translation as an act of mourning, insofar that the demand of Iraqi literature in English translation seems at times predicated on war and violence in Iraq rather than appreciation of the aesthetics of Iraqi creativity (Mattar 2019, 73). This ‘demand’ for violence – in translation – opens up the risk of a work going far beyond the intention of any Iraqi writer by whichever mode s/he uses to mediate her/his work. Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal (Bilal & Lydersen 2013) discovered that spectators based in the United States were all too happy to fire paintballs at him at the click of a button during his interactive installation “Kill an Iraqi/Domestic Tension.” Although his installation purposefully invited audiences to confront violence, the sheer force of the ‘hits’ he received raises many questions on what it means to constructively engage art and violence in Iraq with international audiences. Other questions relate to the impact of gender on Iraqi aesthetic and literary production inside and outside Iraq. What if Bilal had been a woman? Or with a group of women? Such questions relate to crucial debates within Iraqi scholarship, particularly in the wake of the US media – post-George W. Bush’s Greater Middle East Initiative – saturating its publics with images of Iraqi women voting in post-2003 Iraq elections (Denike 2008; Winegar 2005) as Iraqi citizens “helping [to give] birth to freedom” (Wolfowitz 2004, cited in Al-Ali & Pratt 2009, 83), the midwife of this freedom being US army intervention and occupation. While not relating to translation, such debates suggest that an Iraqi women’s story published in English translation is a charged and productive site of inquiry ‘requiring’ more in-depth critical attention and exploration.

One way of thinking through how Iraqi women’s stories move across translation is to read the English versions as more than just a new ‘version’ of a ‘first’ Arabic-language story published in the wake of specific events in Iraq. Clearly Iraqi women write in response to particular political-historical junctures (Abdel Nasser 2018; Abdullah 2018; Atia 2019; Mehta 2006), as do Iraqi men, with more recent novels focusing on post-2014 presence of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Iraq (Hamedani 2017). Majeda Hatto (2013) contends that Iraqi women’s writing is far more than the poetics of women’s experience being “بقايا ضلع رضوض من اضلاع الخطاب الذكوري” [remains of a bruised rib within the rib-cage of masculinist discourse] (2013, 3) on war and nationalism. In other words, the varying poetics of Iraqi women’s writing have always expressed how power injustices relating to women could apply to anyone in Iraq (Abou Rached 2020). Lutfiya Al-Dulaimi’s short story collection البشارى [Glad Tidings] (1974) for example showed dystopian worlds dominated by psychic uncertainty. In one story, women find themselves acting in a play they thought they were going to watch. Another woman is overjoyed to hear “البشارى” [the glad tidings] or ‘good news’ that she has run a red traffic light (1974, 43). Whether she is happy to be seen crossing a red line or to have identified what the red line/light is in the first place is left open to interpretation. Interweaving Bouthayna Al-Nasiri’s short story “القارب” [The Boat] (from her collection حدوة حصان [Horse-Shoe] (1974)) about long-standing traditions in local river communities) is also a silent threat of violence pervading the world of each protagonist, woman or man. The impact of censorship is often alluded to in Iraqi women’s stories. In ملتقى النهران [Where the Two Rivers Meet] (1968), Daizy Al-Amir writes of two women expressing solidarity through holding hands, neither woman having the power of speech. Maysalun Hadi’s story “زينب على ارض الواقع” from the 1994 collection رجل خلف الباب [A Man Behind the Door] translated into English as / translated into English by Shakir Mustafa under the title of [Her Realm of the Real] (2008) presents a mouse asking about his missing beloved without stating exactly why a mouse is asking about a missing person in Iraq. Neither writer however states why their protagonists cannot speak openly. Other earlier stories by Ibtisam Abdullah, Salima Salih and May Muzaffar represent ‘everyday’ tragedies of Iraq in ‘documentary’ and poetic ways, their very occurrence obviating the need for overt political critique. Recent stories such as Hadiya Hussein’s ما بعد الحب [Beyond Love] (2004) refer to specific tragedies of Iraq within gendered frames to ask more direct and pointed questions of their perpetrators.

Reading earlier examples of Iraqi women’s writing in English translation can present challenges as the politics of many writers do not seem to be overtly expressed or articulated in the text. Stories by Iraqi women were firstly published in Iraqi literary journals such as Iraq, Iraq Today and Gilgamesh (Altoma 2010) sponsored by the cultural arms of a prosperous Iraqi government seeking to promote itself as a leader of pan-Arab power and solidarity. Publishing in English in such journals did not mean that an individual writer could express political opinions freely. With Iraqi President Saddam Hussein insisting “The pen and the barrel of a gun have one and the same opening” (Antoon 2010, 29), all Iraqis were subjected to intense state surveillance when the 1968–2003 Iraqi Ba’athist government ruled over Iraq, in whichever language they published. Those who did not confirm to state directives often simply ‘disappeared.’ Raad Mushatat (1986) recalls how poet Burhan Asshawi and story-writer Jihad Majid were imprisoned and tortured for their refusal to conform. Nejem Wali (2007, 52) recalls: “even those who chose to quit writing saw themselves forced to write something which did not rile the dictator, because even silence was considered a crime,” meaning, in the words of Alia Mamdouh, that “the ban on speaking and the obligation to speak” (Mamdouh cf. Chollet 2002) was a site of productive and tragic tension for many Iraqi writers. Such issues of productive tension of silence and ‘speaking’ raise important questions on how we could approach reading Iraqi women’s stories now: how to read such stories in English translation if we know little of their politics of writing, translation and production at the time?

While 2003 is not a ‘watershed’ for Iraqi women’s writing per se it is fair to say that this date has been ‘a line in the sand’ for Iraqi women’s literature in English translation published in the United States, at least. The prominence accorded to ‘expert introductions’ in many post-2003 US-based publications suggests that complex geopolitical, gendered power relations are (rightly) assumed to be interweaving new interest in Iraqi woman’s story-writing in English translation. All four novels by Iraqi women writers published by the New York Feminist Press have critical introductions and afterwords by academic experts – Hélène Cixous and Farida Abu-Haidar in two novels by Alia Mamdouh (2005, 2008); Hamid Dabishi and Ferial Ghazoul for Haifa Zangana’s Dreaming of Baghdad (2009); and Nadje Al-Ali for Iqbal Al-Qazwini’s novel Zubaida’s Window (2008). Hadiya Hussein’s Beyond Love (2012), by Syracuse Press, has two introductory chapters by miriam cooke and translator Ikram Masmoudi. Iraqi women’s novels shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) in English translation, however, have no introductions at all. Inaam Kachachi’s story about an Iraqi woman interpreter in the US army, The American Granddaughter (2011), has a note on its IPAF short-list status and a brief translator bio. The 2018 IPAF winner The Baghdad Clock (2018), by Shahad Al-Rawi, highlights solely its IPAF status and briefly states that it “takes readers beyond the familiar images in the news.” Reading these two ‘award’ stories in English translation alongside the other novels framed with so many para/textual supplementations raise further questions: what local and global politics could be at play in the mediation of Iraqi and Arab women’s story-making as ‘glocal’ – that is local and global – publications?

Such potentially varying politics of reception bring me to why I draw on intersectional perspectives of feminist translation studies to read six Iraqi women’s stories moving across Arabic and English. It is a pertinent question to ask in view of the charged discourses of ‘feminism’ at play in post-2003 Iraq. Haifa Zangana reminds us that US state-funded ‘feminist’ NGOs in Iraq, often serving US state interests rather than the needs of Iraqi women, have significantly damaged the legacy of Iraqi women’s local gender-focused political activism (Zangana 2005; Ismael 2014). The assassination of Iraqi woman poet and journalist Behjat Atwar in 2006 by unnamed ‘opposition’ militias (Zangana 2014) is a tragic example of how power relations in Iraq go far beyond definitions of what ‘feminist’ agency is or isn’t in any language. One starting point is to consider how analytical frameworks of feminist translation could relate to Iraqi women’s story-making. As an activist praxis, feminist translation interrogates ‘the feminine’ in a variety of ways: as a gender construct, women’s experiences, linguistic relations of power and a metaphor for translation itself (Abou Rached 2017, 199). In earlier feminist translation scholarship, praxes of ‘translation’ were often explored – to expose and question – the patriarchal premises on which many languages and terms of reference are based, translation one way of rewriting them to transform them (Massardier-Kenney 1997; Simon 1996; Flotow 1991; De Lotbinière-Harwood 1991; Godard 1989). In more recent feminist translation studies scholarship, the interlocking relations of power such as those of race, ethnicity and class (Crenshaw 1991) have emerged as vital lines of inquiry alongside gender and other sites of discrimination, such as “racism, capitalism, colonialism, heteronormativity, ableism and so forth” (Castro & Ergun 2018, 125). Concerning translation, sites of discrimination and marginalisation could include language, location, cultural capital and sociopolitical identity. This is why critically engaging feminist translation with translated literary works does not mean that texts or writers of inquiry are identified as having a defined feminist or activist ideology. One fundamental premise of feminist translation analysis is actually to challenge categorical definitions of ‘feminist’ in the first place (Flotow & Kamal 2020; Castro & Ergun 2017; Flotow & Farahzad 2016; Álvarez 2014). As many Iraqi women’s stories call many theories and critical methodologies into creative question, I engage with analytical perspectives of feminist translation to explore, for the first time, critical aspects of Iraqi women’s stories in translation while considering such theories’ geopolitical scope.

Any analytical engagement with feminist translation nonetheless calls for some clarification on how ‘feminist’ or النسوية [al-nisūwiyya] writing can be understood. In Arabic, النسوية [al-nisūwiyya] means “feminine,” “womanly” (Wehr 1994, 1130) as well as ‘woman-focused,’ ‘by a woman’ or ‘feminist.’ Its potential slippages of meaning give some critical perspective to the negative connotations of النسوية [al-nisūwiyya in post-2003 Iraq] and how women’s political agency is often configured within politically gendered frames of reference. It also contextualises why the term النسوية [al-nisūwiyya] is used by Iraqi scholars writing in Arabic about Iraqi women’s literature (Khodeir 2013; Hatto 2013; Kadhim 2017; Al-Dulaimi 2016; Ahmad 2017). Hadil Ahmad uses النسوية [al-nisūwiyya] as a strategic frame for defining Iraqi, Arab and women’s writing as a specifically gendered frame of interaction:

.المعلوم ان ما تكتب المرأة من الأدب كان وما زال مثار الجدل واسع والإشكالية لا تنتهي”

تبدأ التسمية الأدب النسوي وتمر بخصوصية الجنس الأنثوي المقابل الهيمنة…

الذكورية والتنميط الثقافي للمرأة في المجتمعات العربية، ولاتنتهي بالموضوعات التي

تتضمنها النصوص الإبداعية، ونعني بها المضامين التي تدعو الى التمرد على التقاليد

“.السائدة الموروثة والتحرر من السلطة الأبوية

[Whatever literature a woman writes has evoked – and continues to evoke – a sense of controversy and ambiguity which never ends…. It starts with literature being labelled as ‘nisūwī’, and how it relates to the specificities of feminine gendered experience in the face of masculinist hegemony and the cultural stereotypes about women in Arab ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Note on transliteration
• Frontispiece
• 1 Pathways of Iraqi women’s story-writing in English translation
• 2 Translating ‘the uncanny’
• 3 Translating gendered dis/location in post-2003 Iraq
• 4 Conversations about ‘solidarity among the subaltern’
• 5 Re/writing confrontations in translation
• Ongoing questions: re/reading Iraq women’s stories in English (para)translation
• Bibliography
• Index