ABSTRACT
Both born in 1935, Samira Al-Mana and Daizy Al-Amir grew up during times of huge political changes in Iraq: Iraq’s independence from British colonial influence; the rise of leftist political influences in Iraq in the 1950s; and the prevalence of nationalist discourses leading to the Iraqi Ba’athist party assuming political control of Iraq in 1968, which would last until 2003. Both writers published their first stories during the 1960s, a time when the Iraqi Ba’athist Party was rising to power. Shakir Mustafa likens Samira Al-Mana to a “modern-day Scheherazade intrigued by story-telling but mindful of the risks it involves” (Mustafa 2004, 129). Daizy Al-Amir is acclaimed for expressing the voices and silences of women from various perspectives (Ghazoul 2008, 193), often through metaphors of travel, transit and (forced) departure. Samira Al-Mana’s حبل السرة [The Umbilical Cord] (1990) was the first novel to focus on the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq war as experienced by diaspora Iraqis living in London. Daizy Al-Amir’s 1988 short story collection على لائحة الانتظار [On the Waiting List] presented women’s experiences of war in Lebanon. Both of the works present a challenge to read in translation. To give background to why this is the case, I first give an overview of the leitmotif of ‘the uncanny’ in contexts of post/colonial literary writing and how it relates to Iraqi women’s story-writing. I then analyse how different aspects ‘حبل السرة [The Umbilical Cord] (1990) by Samira Al-Mana and Daizy Al-Amir’s على لائحة الانتظار [On the Waiting List] (1988) move across into English translation using perspectives of feminist translation which focus on ‘uncanny’ presences and absences, two themes prevalent in earlier Iraqi women’s literature but yet to be explored in contexts of English translation.
