ABSTRACT
Iraq has been a land of many peoples, ethnicities and religions for thousands of years, with countless and diverse local cultures particular to specific regions of Iraq (Salloum 2013). The 1970s era of Iraq is referred to as ايام الخير [ayyām al-khīr], ‘the days of plenty’ – a time of great wealth, connected to varying frames of political patronage. As this patronage worked to co-opt intellectuals, writers and artists, deafeningly absent in most 1970s Iraqi literature is critique of the Iraqi government. This did not mean that Iraqi writers did not express discomfort at the political dynamics underpinning the premise of khīr in Iraq. But they did so at great risk. Iraqi women stories at that time thus often portrayed the experiences of women in differing contexts of oppression (Ghazoul 2008, 198). Betool Khedairi’s novel !كم بدت السماء قريبة [A Sky So Close] (1999; 2001) was the first novel by an Iraqi woman writer which portrays ايام الخير [ayyām al-khīr] critically as an era shaped by diverse politics of belonging and oppression from gendered perspectives of class, rurality and ethnicity. In this chapter, I explore how different conversations about ayyām al-khīr interweave this novel across its three different languages – formal Arabic, Iraqi dialect and English – with a focus on rural identities. I explore why this novel calls on us to reflect on the tensions of its own representation as an Arabic publication and its post-9/11 contexts in English translation, using analytical frameworks of feminist translation that interrogate the representation of the dynamics of oppression via language.
