ABSTRACT
Much activist work by Iraqis concerns the impact of post-2003 US occupation of Iraq on aesthetic forms of expressing political Iraqi identity. Iraqi writer Ali Badr (2013) observes how Iraqi artist/writer identity has become binarily interlinked to “location” (Badr 2013, 115) by some Iraqi writers still living ‘inside’ Iraq as taking the following position: “the internal literature is the only true one; as those living overseas, these are the cowards, we have lived through hell for many years” (Badr 2013, 117), with those ‘outside’ Iraq responding: “you lived under a dictatorship, the authority destroyed your perspective, making you incapable of producing a true and humanistic literature, because there was no escape from censorship” (ibid). Intersecting with these debates are concerns about the effect of US interest on Iraqi aesthetic production in the 2003 war in Iraq. Iraqi art critic Nada Shabout warned that “within today’s interest in all things Iraqi, Western media has taken the liberty to define Iraqi art and publicise the image it found fit for the world’s perception of what this art should look like. In other words, Western media is ‘inventing’ a new historical narrative for modern Iraqi art” (Shabout 2013, 7). As the perceived location of post-2003 Iraqi cultural production as well as the Iraqi artist/writer her/himself emerged as an integral part of a work’s political agency and meaning in different ways soon after the 2003 war, I explore the perceived ‘politics of re-location’ of الحفيدة الأميركية [The American Granddaughter] (2009; 2011) by Inaam Kachachi, written in Arabic in 2009. It is the first novel by an Iraqi woman writer translated into English to focus on the politics of Iraqi women translating in Iraq during the 2003 war. In this chapter, I focus on the politics of different translator ‘voices’ moving across languages using ‘audible’ paradigms of translation analysis.
