Irakerinnen erzählen ihre Geschichte: Iraqi Women’s Stories

This study offers a critical exploration of Iraqi women writers’ novels in Arabic-English translation as a body of work which reflects in many ways the impact of seismic political changes on the peoples of Iraq at different times and places. Iraqi women writers’ novels have been acclaimed for privileging localised gendered perspectives of everyday life over discourses of hegemonic politics in Iraq while negotiating the shifting effects of state censorship, violence, war and dislocation on Iraqi literary output, inside and outside of Iraq. With Iraq’s modern history of war, conflict and fluctuating political contexts, the strategies used to mediate Iraqi women writer’s novels in Arabic in English translation have been varied. In view of many Iraqi writers having to publish their novels outside of Iraq, the politics of Iraqi writers’ location – and that or their literary works - have emerged as potentially charged and fruitful points of debate in contemporary Iraqi activist scholarship. The strategies of translation used to mediate Iraqi women writers’ novels raise interesting questions on how Iraqi women’s stories told from localised, gendered and distinctly Iraqi perspectives were translated into English, a language associated with and at times intertwining Iraq’s recent history of war, occupation and political instability. The aim of this study was to raise appreciation of an important part of contemporary Iraqi literature by putting forward a new approach of reading how Iraqi women writers’ novels move across languages in shifting, charged frames of gendered geopolitical contexts.