ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces what the book is about: how six examples of Iraqi women’s story-making have been mediated in English translation across different times, political contexts and locations. The writers in focus are Daizy Al-Amir, Samira Al-Mana, Inaam Kachachi, Betool Khedairi, Alia Mamdouh and Hadiya Hussein, six among many Iraqi women writers who have turned to translation as one way of preserving their stories – and stories of many other Iraqis – beyond conventional geopolitical borders. Samira Al-Mana and Daizy Al-Amir were amongst the first Iraqi women writers to publish stories in Beirut during the 1960s. Inaam Kachachi, a pioneer of archiving alternative memories of Iraq as ‘amulets of memory,’ presents the ‘spoken’ voices of Iraqi women in innovative ways in Arabic and English translation. Betool Khedairi’s writing is an interesting example of an Iraqi woman writer working to tell stories of Iraq – while questioning who is telling them – across more than one language. Alia Mamdouh was one of the first Iraqi women writers to defy the many languages of patriarchy in Iraq by using the Arabic language in very specific ways. Hadiya Hussein has always written stories which address fear, particularly “the fears of an Iraqi citizen who has become even more fearful of a slip of the tongue than an actual, physical slip.” In this chapter, I explain how translation has contributed to Iraqi women’s stories moving across charged borders of dictatorship, war, sanctions and exile and why I draw on feminist translation analysis to re/read these six stories’ pathways into translation while interrogating these theories’ geopolitical scope.
