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1981
Volume 4, Issue 1-2
  • ISSN: 1751-2867
  • E-ISSN: 1751-2875

Abstract

In this article I hope to shed light on the ways Iraqi women fiction writers are testifying in their novels to war events, the devastation and the trauma they have suffered over the last 35 years. Using the concept of the 'unexperienced experience' formulated by Derrida and Agamben's theory of testimony, I seek to show the intertwined natures of testimony and fiction in these novels. All of the women characters in these works have witnessed trauma and death – whether the symbolic death of their dreams and ideals or the physical death of their husbands and male relatives or friends. Through their testimonies as stigmatized survivors they give voice to the missing testimony and the missing voices of the 'true witnesses', those who have died. In the pages of these novels, the women who have escaped remain in a state of demourance, in between spaces, between death and life, between the homeland and their exile.

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/content/journals/10.1386/ijcis.4.1&2.59_1
2010-08-01
2025-02-12
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