Collective Performance: Gendering Memories of Iraq

Hayv Kahraman’s artworks are featured on the three covers of JMEWS 2015, and they are discussed in this essay.

— Editors

Let me share with you my memories.

I remember once when my dad was driving in downtown Bagdad and we passed a narrow street that led into a larger square. I was in the front seat of the car and pointed up toward the demolished building and asked him, “What happened?”

There was a foggy air around this once-tall building—now half its size—that made me recall the many dust storms that occupied the city every now and then.

“It is because of the Iran-Iraq War,” he said with a low voice, as we turned the corner.

That was the first time I had seen destruction of that magnitude.

I remember clinging to my mother in the basement of my uncle’s house in Suleymania in northern Iraq. I remember my relatives curled around candles, waiting for the loud noises outside to stop. Despite my fear, a sense of solidarity prevailed: I was surrounded by my family, and somehow I felt protected as we all sang and played games in the dark.

When the noises stopped, I went out to play with my friends in the hopes of collecting the most bullet shells or the biggest bullet shell to impress my peers. Somewhat golden in color and quite beautiful, I remember thinking. Then suddenly the loud sirens went off. I learned years later that it was the Thunderbolt 7000, to be precise. It was so loud that you had to cover your ears and run.

These howling sounds shook me to the very core, yet they were part of my childhood. Now they serve as a memory that both jolts me to the ground and reminds me of my vulnerable past. A past that I cherish, because I lost it. I left my life behind. The house my father built, my friends, my school, my toys.

The works in Let the Guest Be the Master are generated from a feeling of losing my childhood and the selling of my home in Baghdad.¹ This was difficult for me, because I attributed that home to a tangible space, a space that encapsulated memories I did not want to lose. My childhood memories were interrupted because of war. My history was carved into those walls not only intimately but literally. Growing up, I used the four walls of an entire room as my canvas and filled them with characters, narratives, concerns, jokes, and discoveries. When our home sold, a part of me faded. We tried to hold on to it as long as we could, but my father has two daughters, and we couldn’t have inherited the house. The laws in Iraq prohibit a female member of the family from inheriting a property, so our home would have had to go to the next closest male kin. The house is also located close to the airport, where sectarian violence is high. There had been a few shootings around the location and on the property itself. Of course, there was the matter that we might return, but this was always dismissed by my family and me partly because of the political situation but also because of the growing dissociation with our home.

Each panel work is based on aerial views of Iraqi homes with courtyards, some still standing, some not. The act of tracing these lines on the panels makes me feel that I’m archiving and preserving a history somewhat. Every line I paint corresponds to a tangible structure, a wall, a door, a room that was once inhabited and had a narrative in its own right. It might even still be there. I also sometimes imagine myself as an archaeologist, digging and tracing these lines to research and recover a past and perhaps a connection with it.

I then started researching residential structures in the Arab region, which are engineered to segregate the sexes and conceal the private from the public. These houses are also broken into successive hierarchal sections that herald increasing degrees...