Pathways of solidarity in transit: Iraqi women writers’ story-making in English translation

Iraqi literature has survived and thrived despite many Iraqi writers having to negotiate highly charged, gendered, political discourses of censorship and solidarity. This chapter gives an overview of the different pathways by which Iraqi women writers have taken their stories – and their politics of counter-hegemonic solidarity – into English, and explains why these diverse pathways often reconfigure – and question – definitive notions of boundaries between writing, translation, and ‘paratranslation’ in ways yet to be explored in depth within contexts of translation studies. To help engage with the potential complexities of such mediations of cross-border solidarity, the chapter draws on intersectional perspectives of feminist translation which frame acts of translation as gendered and geopolitically situated modes of re/writing – not as reiterative versions of an ‘original text’ or ‘paratext’ – to frame the overview and its analyses. From such critical perspectives, this chapter argues that the pathways of Iraqi women’s stories in English translation can be read as negotiations of complex discourses that mediate ‘Iraq’ and ‘Iraqi people’ within often-shifting spheres of solidarity and as a distinct aesthetics of ‘rewriting’ localized, gendered perspectives of such stories; making this a vital field of study calling for further research.