ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I focus on two novels – حبات النفتالين [Mothballs] (1986/2000) by Alia Mamdouh and ما بعد الحب [Beyond Love] (2004; 2012) by Hadiya Hussein – as examples of how Iraqi women writers write the dynamics of confrontation and conflict in Iraq in more transformative ways in Arabic and English para/translation. Mamdouh’s novel, حبات النفتالين [Mothballs], was the first novel by an Iraqi woman published in hardcopy English translation after the outbreak of two wars in Iraq – once in the United Kingdom in 1995 and again in the United States in 2005. Hadiya Hussein’s story ما بعد الحب [Beyond Love] (2004; 2012) mediated overt critique of the Iraqi Ba’athist brutality and the role of the US military forces in Iraq in ways which called for a politics of reading that fostered and co-created new lines of solidarity. The transformative politics of both stories relates to their specifically gendered modes of story-telling. In Mamdouh’s novel, gendered confrontation is presented thematically through the events in the story and by different registers and focalisations of Arabic creatively moving alongside each other. In Hussein’s novel, the politics of reading Iraqis stories of conflict and exile is situated as a call to re/imagine the present and future differently. In this respect, one of the most critical aspects of each novel is that there is always more than one story, something which presented opportunities for co-creating new spaces for cross-border solidarity via English para/translation.
