International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies - Volume 4, Issue 1-2, 2010

The issue of Iraq has largely receded from the public agenda in the western world. While the United States continues its military occupation of the country, domestic political concerns, alongside the popular belief that the war was essentially 'won', have pushed Iraq to the back pages of western media coverage. Yet while Iraq has largely been forgotten in the West, for Iraqis, the war remains all too real, with the perennial concerns of human well-being, oil and sovereignty dominating the politics of everyday life.

There has been a steady growth of western interest in the writings and wartime accounts of Iraqi women, representing a burgeoning literature, of interest to scholars of Middle East politics and history, as well as gender studies. This article considers the diaries of Nuha al-Radi (NR) and their reception and representation by American readers, both within specialized fields of Middle East studies as well as across the broader American audience. NR, a western-educated Iraqi woman, established herself as a ceramic artist of international acclaim. In 1991, NR began her Baghdad Diaries, originally publishing her wartime account in the British literary journal Granta in 1992, which was subsequently expanded and published in book forms in 1998 and 2003. NR's piercing account of Iraq under war, both physical and economic, highlights the details of everyday survival. Her focus examines the often ignored aspects of war survival, the 'disorientation, uncomprehending sadness, and denial of the victims' suffering'. With the 2003 publication of NR's Baghdad Diaries by Vintage Press, NR's work reached a wider audience in the United States. The discovery of NR's work by American readers is examined here critically, with an examination of the various uses and interpretations of NR's text by academic readers. American interpretations of the Baghdad Diaries are examined in terms of how American readers have used NR's narrative for scholarly inquiries in varied academic questions concerning Iraq: notions of just war and the practice of American warfare in Iraq; oncology and the use of depleted uranium in Iraq, as well as environmental concerns; the role of women in conditions of war; and other inquiries. Finally, this article examines the reception of NR's diaries in the popular press, where treatments of her diaries have been met with reactions ranging from condescending and chauvinism to empathy and intrigue.

This article considers the musical expressions and activities of rural, Bedouin and urban Iraqi women of popular classes, and the different contexts and themes inscribed therein. Based on both Iraqi written material and fieldwork conducted in the 1970s and 1980s, it locates women's central role in Iraqi ceremonies, festivities, celebrations and various rituals. It takes into account regional, religious and social differences that shape how women perform song and poetry in their respective surroundings. The article is structured around four broad themes that explore how women are positioned as cultural actors in four different expressions: women's solo songs; women-to-women shared performances; complementary male–female expressions; and professional mixed groups. The author identifies untrained, non-professional women as constituting the majority of women that are covered under the first theme of women as solo performers. Here, she focuses on the role of lullabies, child care songs and work songs that are usually performed by women in privacy or in the company of their children or other women. When exploring women-to-women shared performances, the author considers a range of different spaces for this type of performance, including non-professional women gatherings, Sufi and Shi'a rituals, professional singers who perform for female audiences including in lamentations for the deceased. The third theme explores how gendered divisions become blurred through performance and how various popular festivities foster gendered interactions. Finally, the article considers how Bedouin and Gypsy mixed gendered groups are embedded in the Iraqi cultural landscape.

A key facet of the much-vaunted US strategy of 'surge' in Iraq has been the fracturing of Baghdad into a vast network of separated and walled communities. Baghdad has been segmented by a maze of 'security walls' that has fundamentally altered the nature of Iraqi life, reinforcing the sectarian divisions that were foisted upon the country with the Anglo-American invasion and occupation. While these 'walling' measures have been officially justified as a necessary security measure, Iraqis perceive these walls as a marker of US domination and enforced sectarianism. This article critically examines the occupation policy of walling, arguing that the walling of Baghdad is a measure to control the popular and to enforce a new social reality. This new reality in Baghdad has created unprecedented changes to daily life, impacting commerce, social relations and the Iraqi culture. Baghdad, historically multicultural and replete with intermarriage, has been segmented along sectarian lines. The impact of the occupation walling policy has been most profound on women, who have been uniquely vulnerable under US occupation. In the environment of walling, Iraqi women have been forced to adapt complex modes of social survival and have acquired a highly differentiated role in society. As the US policy of walling has proceeded against the backdrop of a collapse of social welfare, Iraqi women have been subjected to extreme limitations of movements, given the large increase of gender-based violence. Against this backdrop, Iraqi women have endured extreme hardships to survive, with limited access to social support: girls and young women struggle to access education, while Iraqi widows, who number over a million, struggle to survive. Likewise, Iraqi women have been forced to acquire previously unheard of functions in Iraqi society, notably the responsibility to bury their dead. The diminished status of Baghdadi women, like Iraqis generally, is a by-product of a US occupation policy to segment Iraq's communities and force a new social reality. The walling is but the latest and most visible aspect of occupation strategy, with Iraqi women having borne a distinct burden. The traumas inflicted on Iraqi women, and Iraq generally, will be suffered for generations, as Iraqis desperately attempt to forge an independent existence against the weight of occupation policy.

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.

Dunya Mikhail's collection of war poetry The War Works Hard reveals the double eclipsing suffered by women, first as Iraqis, and then as Iraqi women, during the current crisis in Iraq. This marginalization constitutes another war crime in the form of a tacit yet complicit agreement between colonizers and resistors to achieve their self-defined goals of liberation at the expense of women. Using Nawal El Saadawi's concept of 'dissidence and creativity', I demonstrate how Mikhail's poetic testimony of the war unsettles the reader with its probing existential meditations on the human cost of war and sanctions. The collection represents a crucial feminized intervention in war poetry to relate the anguish of mothers, wives and daughters, the search for place and identity and the sense of displacement occasioned by exile and occupation. While all forms of creative resistance such as literature, cinema, dance, art and music represent valuable acts of resistance, this essay makes the case that poetry goes beyond the limits of the possible (and acceptable) by its ability to resonate with a certain 'vibration' of thought and feeling. As an oral narrative, poetry eludes borders and boundaries to imagine its own sensorial landscapes. Poetry penetrates the very depths of the unconscious to revive repressed memories, expose gaping wounds, provide healing in moments of despair, connect with the wonders of nature in an 'unnatural' environment of fear and violence, and to celebrate the spirit of survival in commemorative verse. In other words, poetry, as a form of creative resistance, becomes an urgent call to action in situations of domination and anarchy, through its articulation of a sense of ethical consciousness. In so doing, poetry gives voice to traumatic experience and the un-nameable, this precarious non-dit, resisting transliteration in conventional language.

The relationship between literary modernism and the representation of femininity is an area that has not been much explored, particularly in the Arabic context. This article initiates such an exploration by examining the function of the feminine in the poetry of two pioneering Arab modernists, the Iraqi poets Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati. The poetry of these two leading figures has been celebrated for its dramatic ruptures on formal and thematic levels with traditional as well as Romantic Arabic poetic forms. Their poetry, and that of their contemporaries, is widely regarded as inaugurating the modernization of Arabic poetry. This article argues, however, that despite these formal and thematic breaks, Arabic modernist poetry does not significantly alter the Romantic subordination of femininity to the masculine self. The representation of the female, and particularly the female beloved, remains the means of objectifying the poet's desire, rather than taking on any kind of independent, self-contained significance. In other words, the feminine continues to serve as a means of projecting a representation of the authentic human self and externalizing the contradictions of this self. What changes with modernism is the nature of the self and its desire that the poetry seeks to represent. The modernist vision of artistic perception as creative transformation of the world is based on a (somewhat) new way of understanding the self, explicitly opposed to Romanticism, and explicitly communal in nature. Feminine sexuality, the embodiment of the material realm of death and dissolution in Romanticism, is redeemed in Modernist poetry. Yet this sexuality is merely the catalyst for the poet's revolutionary, transformative, function in human society. Femininity has changed, but remains a moment within the masculine and the communal self.

The results of rushed provincial and national elections in 2005 polarized local identities, submerging chances for a return to Iraqi tolerance and coexistence. The provincial polls of January 2009 however reawakened Iraqi tendencies for more national, moderate and even secular ideals compared with 2005 voting dominated by religious and regional identities. The July 2009 election of a new Kurdish opposition opened possibilities for more democratic relations with Baghdad. Political coalitions are reflecting a common identity with Iraqis struggling to emerge from the consequences of insurgency, Islamization, constitutional ambiguity, regionalism and corrupt leadership. Through the prism of 2009 provincial and regional election results in fourteen provinces and in Kurdistan, this article compares voting with the 2005 local and regional elections. Research explains the link between party behaviour and the dynamics of Iraqi political identities. After detailing the work of election commissions in 2004 and 2008, provincial and regional poll results, in particular those in Ninewa, Kurdistan and Karbala, will be examined to highlight current political trends, geopolitical challenges and national coalition prospects for parliamentary elections in March 2010. Constitutional and parliamentary developments since 2005 will reveal that Iraqi behaviour continues to reflect a tradition of political concession-making and of tribal manoeuvering which surpass any religious affiliations. A brief tracing of the complex journey of Iraqi identity will serve to evaluate prospects for reconciliation and coexistence in Iraq. Post-election negotiations mark a reversal from the decentralizing 2005 constitution which detailed the parameters of a weak federation. Along with the provincial election results, such developments reject regionalization and spell the end of ethno-federalism and religious meddling in politics. A federal system under a more effective central authority is on the rise.

Debating oil issues and oil policy among Iraqis has always been vibrant, interesting, rich and heated. This is simply a reflection of the centrality that oil usually occupies in the economy and society and thus mainstream national thinking, on one hand, and the serious developments that have taken place pertaining to petroleum sector, on the other. The ongoing discourse over key oil issues in the country has, since late 2006, been characterized as issue-driven in somewhat sequential chronological order. The debate appears to have been more reactive to actions taken by the government than a proactive guide to effect policy formulation. Hence the debate generally has opposing tendencies. The opposition was mainly from outside the governing establishment, taking collective forms in the beginning but moving gradually into Internet-networking and professional publication. This was due to the fact that most of the contributions were made by Iraqis living outside the country – a somewhat positive effect of brain drain, through voluntary 'distance think tank' or voluntary 'outsourcing consultancy service', which provide professional opinions on related matters in their homeland. Effective opposition from within became apparent during the last quarter of 2009. Also, the judiciary was involved to draw the line of legality between the executive and legislative branches, which could have far-reaching ramifications on a wide range of oil issues. This article aims at shedding more light on, and provides an in-depth critical analysis of, various developments relating to key oil issues. It further argues that though the debate and concern would continue unabated on the same issues, it predicts and indeed calls for the debate to move from the general to more issue and sub-issue specifics, proactive and with policy objectives orientations.