We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War

Introduction. Writing Trauma, Memory, and Materiality

xxv Introduction Writing Trauma, Memory, and Materiality Nadje Al-Ali and Deborah Al-Najjar Addressing Trauma It is difficult to speak of posttraumatic stress syndrome, as Iraqis are continuing to experience various forms of individual and collective traumas both within Iraq as well as within the diaspora. Living conditions of the over two million refugees who fled since 2003, mainly to Syria and Jordan, but also to Egypt and Iran and to a lesser extent Europe and North America, are dismal and often desperate. Is a collective trauma the sum of traumatized individuals, is it more than that, or is it something else? What happens when a community—be it a political group, an ethnic or religious community, or a whole nation—deals with devastating events? How is the identity of communities implicated in and reshaped by overwhelming circumstances? How are violence and mourning encoded into collective narratives and how are such narratives psychologically, sociologically, and culturally implicated in the interpersonal dynamics of trauma? How are cultural formations in communities, including symbols, local narratives , cultural productions, artworks, and rituals mobilized to inscribe, resist, and heal trauma? What is the connection between the collective and the individual experiences? How do individuals resist both the ongoing occupation and the collective trance created through speci fic circumstances and social pressure to join sectarian, political, and xxvi  Introduction economically motivated violence? And how do violence and destruction relate to individual agency? These were the questions we had in mind when we approached the contributors to this volume, who have all engaged with various aspects of trauma, memory, and coping, especially in the form of literary and visual narration. Trauma not only destroys but creates . And the creativity of trauma lies very much at the core of this book. Dena al-Adeeb’s essay and images speak directly to the trauma of war, memory, and the performative aspects of ritual and religion in her art installation called Sacred Spaces. Her work complicates static notions of the rites of religion and simplistic representations of diasporic subjectivities. Iraqi men, women, and children are not merely passive victims of violence, vulnerable recipients of repressive regimes, or bystanders of their country’s destruction. While everyday life is fraught with the potential of danger and trauma, it is in the everyday life itself that we find the making of hope. Iraqis continue to cope, to try to create an everyday that has some semblance of normality: preparing food, sending their children to school, cleaning, socializing, but also cracking jokes and dreaming about a better future. Within the realm of imagination and creative expression, we also find that Iraqis create ruptures in the healing, as healing is not static or final. Writers continue to write. Artists make art. Filmmakers film. Reclaiming Resistance One impetus for this book was our frustration with the way the concept of resistance has been (mis)used in the media and within the antiwar movement. Media representations have tended to conflate Ba‘thi fighters, Islamist militia, foreign jihadis, and criminal gangs under the broad label “insurgents.” There has been very little analysis of the actual political and armed resistance to the occupation, as opposed to attacks that kill innocent Iraqi civilians. But even more lacking from our perspective has been the exploration of everyday forms of resistance that do not involve arms and violence. Introduction  xxvii We wanted to find out more about nonviolent resistance both to the occupation itself and to its many consequences in the form of criminal gangs, sectarianism, and increased gender-based violence. Our particular interest in the context of this book is culture broadly defined. We decided to look at the way Iraqis retain, subvert, and produce art/activism as ways of coping with despair and resisting chaos and destruction. Ultimately we have looked for the means by which we might find light and dark, contrasts and connections; as Saad Jawad eloquently shows in his contribution, these shapes and colors have their own twisted meanings in the Iraqi context. His main focus and interest is education, which, of course, has been one very signi ficant aspect of the attempt to retain and reinvigorate culture. Saad Jawad’s essay about the disintegration of the higher education system in Iraq shows that for many Iraqi professionals, especially teachers and academics, continuing their job in the face of chaos, lawlessness, and violence presented a tremendous act of resistance and bravery. His...