-
19. Dissidents, Displacements, and Diasporas: An Interview with Dena Al-Adeeb
- Syracuse University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
213 Dissidents, Displacements, and Diasporas An Interview with Dena Al-Adeeb Nadine Naber Through an interview-style narrative, Dena Al-Adeeb explores the multiple and multilayered displacements and dislocations that color her Iraqi diasporic experiences. This article maps out her dissident trajectories through her political and social-cultural activism and artwork. Dena outlines almost thirteen years of work against the war and sanctions in Iraq, against anti-Arab (including other West Asians and North Africans) racism and xenophobia, and on Palestinian solidarity efforts. The interview traces her commitment to coalition building and transnational solidarity campaigns through her efforts in people of color, third world, immigrant, and indigenous peoples and transnational -radical women of color feminist formations. Al-Adeeb situates her artistic productions within movement work and as a catalyst for social change and transformation. Can you tell me a bit about your history? When and why did you end up moving to the United States? My immediate family avoided the Baath regime’s forced deportations waged in the 1980s against Iraqi Shiites of presumed Iranian descent.1 We escaped to Kuwait after members of my father’s family were deported from Iraq to the Iranian borders. Two of my cousins were also arrested at that time, and we recently found out that they were executed in 1982 and 1983. My early lived experience taught me from a young age to question the very construction of borders, nation-states, and citizenship . In retrospect, I realized that they were created in order to organize and control us based on the political interests of governing elites. That was my first encounter with displacement, and it also served as an early catalyst to introduce me to the fluid, shifting, and destabilized nature of identity, home, and belonging. In Kuwait, the presence of the Iraqi Mukhabarat threatened the safety and security of politically displaced Iraqis.2 We never spoke about the deportation and especially kept 214 | Activist Communities quiet about it in public. These ten years were filled with fear and censorship; the active presence of the Mukhabarat was so threatening that people refrained from calling their families out of concern that the phone lines might be tapped. The trepidations my family negotiated were owing to both the formal and shadowing surveillance of the Iraqi secret police in Kuwait and their collaboration with the Kuwaiti authorities as well as the informal or public consent to this surveillance. My mother, sister, and I returned only briefly to Iraq in the late 1980s, toward the end of the Iraq-Iran war; it was a remarkable risk since my father’s name could have been on the Mukhabarat’s “red list.” It was only after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq that my father was able to return to Iraq after twenty-three years of exile. I experienced a second displacement during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. My family and I came to the United States a few days before the invasion. We planned to return to Kuwait after a few weeks, as we needed to briefly stay in the United States to uphold the requirements of our green cards. A few days after we arrived, on August 2, 1990, we learned about the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and realized that we would not be able to return. The ruptures I experienced as a result of the multiple displacements became a position for me to explore my multiple and complex identities. The ruptures caused not discontinuity, but rather a continuity flavored by layered and multifaceted experiences that inspire me to find different modes of expression. Hoping I could finally escape living in the “belly of the beast,” I returned to Iraq several times throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and after the U.S. invasion and occupation in 2003. In 2004, I was ready to go “home,” to return to Iraq, especially after the escalation of violence and hatred toward Arabs, Muslims, West Asians, and North Africans in the region and in the diasporas. Shortly after arriving in Iraq, I came to realize that this time there might not be a place to go back to in my lifetime since the “beast” had unleashed decades of carnage. The place I once called home was no longer. After experiencing displacement from Iraq to the United States, what have the terms “violence” and “belonging” come to mean to you? Violence, displacement, belonging, and not belonging paved the path to the formation of my identity, sense of self and community...