TRANSLATORS AND INTERPRETERS IN IRAQ WAR LITERATURE

Amanda M. Al-Raba'a

A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in

partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the

Department of English and Comparative Literature.

Chapel Hill

2019

Approved by:

María DeGuzmán

miriam cooke

Neel Ahuja

Fadi Bardawil

Nadia Yaqub

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©2019

Amanda M. Al-Raba'a

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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ABSTRACT

Amanda M. Al-Raba'a: Translators and Interpreters in Iraq War Literature

(Under the direction of María DeGuzmán and miriam cooke)

“Translators and Interpreters in Iraq War Literature” looks at texts written about the

Iraq War that focus on the role of translation and the figure of the translator. Taking a

comparative approach to global Iraq War literature, this dissertation focuses on texts that

exceed the boundaries of nationally- or linguistically-based categories of literature and

operate as “translational” texts that undermine the binary between translation and original.

The project shows the ways in which translation acts as a vehicle for addressing gendered,

racial, and political forms of marginalization faced by women in the military, interpreters

working with the US, and Iraqi writers. The dissertation highlights noncombatants whose

work has been neglected from critical studies of Iraq War literature and shows the ways texts

about the Iraq War perform translation and thematize its increased and varying uses in

warfare. The first chapter illustrates the critical role of translation in waging the Iraq War.

The second chapter analyzes In‘ām Kachachī’s Al-ḥafīda al-amīrikiyya (The American

Granddaughter), Nafisa Haji’s The Sweetness of Tears, and Mahmoud Saeed’s “Must‘amarat

al-‘azā’āt (“Lizards’ Colony”),” which all feature women interpreter protagonists. It argues

that the texts use translation as a literal and figurative battleground on which to explore the

struggles of individual interpreters, the politics of translation, and the manipulative logic of

the invasion. The third chapter focuses specifically on the local (Iraqi) interpreter in Shākir

Nūrī’s Al-minṭaqa al-khaḍrā’ (The Green Zone); it engages the ways interpreters highlight

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anxieties in the US forces around space, language, and religious radicalization. The fourth

chapter reads the blogs of Riverbend and Salam Pax as sites of cultural translation.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank Neel Ahuja and miriam cooke for supporting me and my work throughout my

time as a graduate student. I have benefited immeasurably from their guidance. Neel’s moral

and intellectual support have been invaluable, and his encouragement, willingness to give

advice, and patience have continued across distance and change. miriam’s pathbreaking work

sparked my interest in war and gender, and this dissertation would not have come together

without her.

María DeGuzmán, Fadi Bardawil, Dominique Fisher, Laura Halperin and Steven

Salaita were all generous and thoughtful in their feedback. Dr. DeGuzmán stepped in at the

last moment, and I am so grateful for her support and faith. Steven’s scholarship and tireless

pursuit of justice have invigorated my thinking and research.

I am indebted to Ikram Masmoudi, Sinan Antoon, and Louis Yako for their work,

insights on Iraqi literature, and conversations that shaped this dissertation. I thank Mahmoud

Saeed for generously sharing his work with me.

At UNC, I am grateful to my friends and teachers who assisted as this dissertation

developed. The entire project grew from a seed planted in Eric Downing’s class, and I am

thankful to him for encouraging me in developing it. Jessica Wolfe has been so supportive at

every roadblock, and I cannot thank her enough for her dedication to her students. I am

grateful to Hannelore Jarausch for helping me grow as a teacher. Rachel Norman has been a

friend and mentor since my first day at UNC, and I cannot imagine graduate school without

her (or Matt and Isa). Kelli Holt has taught me more than she will ever know. Sharing an

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office with her was a delight, and her honesty and passion continue to inspire me. Che Sokol

brilliantly and patiently discussed progress, setbacks, work, and life with me over many

years. Jordan Schroeder has made me laugh since before we started grad school, and she has

been a fierce friend. I thank my colleagues at UNC: James Cobb, Ani Govjian, Rachel Isom,

Lina Kuhn, Anna Levett, Kenneth Lota, Susan O’Rourke, Hannah Palmer, Jordan Schroeder,

Morgan Souza, Lindsey Starck, Ashley Werlinich, Carlie Wetzel, and Rae Yan.

I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Jessica Grim and Joseph Maiville at Terrell

Library for kindly and patiently helping me access materials without which this dissertation

would have been impossible. My colleagues at Oberlin have been supportive and generous

during writing; thanks especially to Zeinab Abul-Magd, Adrianne Barbo, Charmaine Chua,

Hsiu-Chuang Deppman, Farshid Emami, Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón, Jaleh Jalili, Stiliana

Milkova, Anu Needham, Abe Reshad, Kantara Souffrant, and Matt Senior. I am grateful to

the late Jed Deppman for his abundant kindness and joyful spirit. Hanada Al-Masri has

supported me as a friend, teacher, and scholar; I am so grateful that Ohio brought us together.

Fatima Sahran’s humor, reality checks, and incredible cooking lifted my spirits on difficult

days. Hawraa Sana’s ferocity and faith helped me through the final stages of this project. I

sincerely thank my wonderful students at Oberlin for their engagement, zeal, and patience.

I don’t know what I can say or how I can adequately thank Lauren Campbell for her

unflagging support, unconditional love, kindness, and seemingly limitless patience over the

last 18 years. She is my perfect sunflower, always. Robin Campbell has seen me through so

many phases of life and encouraged me throughout all of them. I have shared laughter, tears,

heartache, and joy with Susan O’Rourke. Her hugs, advice, magnificent baking, and

positivity make life better. She has saved me more times than I can count. Lubna Abdulhadi

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is my translation genius and a constant source of light and knowledge. Amaal Al-Ali’s

friendship and insights informed the last chapters. Jessie McGinty and I ended up in Chapel

Hill at the same time, and I am lucky to have such a wonderful, brilliant friend. Liz Fraccaro

has amused and delighted me across continents. Thanks to Maggie Bishop, Maddie Cooper,

Casia Correll, Abi al-Omari, Katie Shohatee, Zach Thames, Serena Townsend, Nancy

Townsend, Walker Townsend, for their friendship.

My family has been supportive, patient, and understanding throughout this process.

Thanks especially to Larry Eglen, Carole Eglen, Jan Eglen, Jo Eglen, Jocelyn Owen, Tom

Owen, Doug Eglen, Elizabeth Eglen, Lynette Hazelbaker, Lauren Salmon, Diane Roth, and

the Al-Raba‘a, Sa‘ud, and Abdul-Hadi families. I thank Helen Eglen for her love and

support; I miss her dearly. I’m so grateful to Hamideh Al-Raba‘a and Khawla Al-Raba‘a for

everything they do, and most of all, for their love. Richard Brown and Debra Brown have

always eagerly cheered me on in my studies, and I thank them for their love, support, and

interest. Tom Haley has been a friend, uncle, counselor, and inexhaustible source of love,

comfort, and knowledge for my entire life. Betty Patton and Bob Patton radiate love,

selflessness, and compassion; their example encourages me every single day to be more

caring and thoughtful. My parents, Becky Eglen and Jeff Eglen, have nurtured my curiosity

for my entire life. My mother’s intense strength, focus, and guidance have shaped how I

approach life and work. She reminds me every day to pursue the things that matter to me. I

aim—and fail—to be as kind and patient as my father. I have never met anyone so quietly

brilliant and generous. My brother, John Jeffrey Eglen, makes me laugh constantly and

understands me in ways few people do. I thank Basem Al-Raba‘a for generously sharing his

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vast knowledge of Arabic with me, and for all of the things big and small that he does every

day to make life more joyful. I am the luckiest.

My grandmother, Margaret Parmer Brown, wanted to study literature. When I was a

child, she read constantly and seriously, so I copied her. I would never have chosen to study

literature without her. I think about Mimi every day and see her in my mother and my Aunt

Betty. I dedicate this to her memory.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: TRANSLATION AND THE IRAQ WAR ........................................................ 1

Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 1

Methodology ......................................................................................................................... 8

Iraqi Literature .................................................................................................................... 12

Translation in Iraq ............................................................................................................... 16

Chapter Breakdown ............................................................................................................ 23

CHAPTER 2: THE BATTLEGROUND OF TRANSLATION: WOMEN INTERPRETERS

IN IRAQ WAR FICTION ...................................................................................................... 31

Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 31

Translation in Form ............................................................................................................ 37

Interpreter Characters ......................................................................................................... 44

Translating/Interpreting ...................................................................................................... 59

CHAPTER 3: NAVIGATING THE GREEN ZONE: THE LOCAL INTERPRETER IN

SHĀKIR NŪRĪ’S AL-MINṬAQA AL-KHAḌRĀ’ ............................................................... 79

Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 79

Local Interpreters ................................................................................................................ 83

The Green Zone as Space ................................................................................................... 87

Interpreting, Sound, and War .............................................................................................. 90

Suicide Bombing................................................................................................................. 96

CHAPTER 4: BAGHDAD BLOGGERS: RIVERBEND AND SALAM PAX AS

CULTURAL TRANSLATORS............................................................................................ 108

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Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 108

The Form of the Blog........................................................................................................ 111

Blogging and Media.......................................................................................................... 114

Constructing Riverbend and Salam .................................................................................. 118

The Work of Cultural Translation .................................................................................... 125

Ṣumūd in Iraq.................................................................................................................... 131

CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................................... 145

REFERENCES ..................................................................................................................... 153

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NOTE ON TRANSLATION AND TRANSLITERATION

Translations from Arabic and French are my own except when I cite from Nariman

Youssef’s translation of In‘ām Kachachī’s Al-ḥafīda al-amīrikiyya (The American

Granddaughter, Bloomsbury Qatar, 2009) and William M. Hutchins’ translation of

Mahmoud Saeed’s “Must‘amarat al-‘azā’āt” (World Literature Today, 2012).

The transliterations from Modern Standard Arabic are based on a modified version of

the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (IJMES) system. I transliterate the glottal

stop [ء] as [’] and the consonant [ع] as [‘]. Where appropriate, I have used the English

spelling preferred by authors or widely used in English (e.g. Mahmoud Saeed instead of

Maḥmūd Sa‘īd; Raed instead of Rā’id). In the fourth chapter, phrases written in Latinized

Arabic remain in their original form with Arabic transliterations provided in the endnotes

when needed for clarity.

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CHAPTER 1: TRANSLATION AND THE IRAQ WAR

Introduction

Between 1990 and 2000, the Iraqi population in the US doubled from an estimated

45,000 to 90,000.1 By 2007—four years after the US invasion of Iraq—there were 102,000

Iraqis living in the US.2 After the US invaded Iraq in March 2003, they were in need of

translators and interpreters; they recruited heavily in cities with large Arabic-speaking

populations, such as Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

In Iraq, the military relied heavily on contracted Iraqi or “local national” translators

and interpreters, who were promised assistance in emigrating from Iraq to the US; thousands

of these Iraqis remain in Iraq, unable to get the assistance promised them. There are dozens

of news stories about Iraqi translators who are unable to come to the US and whose lives and

families are in extreme danger because they no longer receive any kind of protection from

the US military and are often seen by other Iraqis as “collaborators,” or “traitors.”

The US invaded Iraq in a shock-and-awe campaign in March 2003 under the pretense

of a search for weapons of mass destruction and fear that Saddam Hussein would provide

such weapons to terrorists to use against the US. The Bush administration tried to gain

support for the invasion by constructing the US as the heroic rescuer/liberator of the Iraqi

people while simultaneously demonizing Iraqi “terrorists,” consistently capitalizing on post

9/11 fear to bolster the invasion. In April 2003, Baghdad fell and the US forced Saddam

Hussein and the Ba‘ath Party out of power (although Hussein was not captured until

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December 2003). The sanctions imposed by the UN after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait

devastated Iraq’s economy; the invasion worsened the situation.

Along with translation as text, translation as an act, process, and form of mediation

has been increasingly discussed in comparative literature as a field. There has been a

significant increase in literary translation prizes in recent years in an effort to increase the

circulation of literatures outside of English. Despite this, only 3%3 of all texts published in

the US are translations. In addition to the attention translators and interpreters have received

in the media, there have also been numerous publications on translators and interpreters in

translation studies, sociology, and history. Translators and interpreters play crucial roles in

conflict and warfare, and, as Mona Baker notes, “influence the course of the war in ways that

are subtle, often invisible, but nevertheless extremely significant.”4 During the Iraq War,

because of the lack of Arabic speakers, the US military attempted to quickly train soldiers in

Arabic, but this training was inadequate. As a solution, they hired contractors and local

translators and interpreters. Local and contracted translators are not strictly a part of the

military, but they are also not entirely outside it. They are always in a liminal position

because of the nature of their occupation, their loyalties, their reception, and their complex

identity politics. Perhaps the only stability they have is their job as an interpreter, which is

volatile in and of itself.

This dissertation looks at texts about the US invasion and occupation of Iraq in

Arabic and English. These texts include Al-ḥafīda al-amīrikiyya by In‘ām Kachachī (2008),

The Sweetness of Tears by Nafisa Haji (2011), “Must‘amarat al-‘azā’āt” by Mahmoud Saeed,

Al-mintaqa al-khaḍrā’ by Shākir Nūrī (2009), and the blogs of Riverbend and Salam Pax.

The writers of these texts come from a variety of geographic and national perspectives, but

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what unites them is their focus on both the Iraq War and on translation. In‘ām Kachachī,

Shākir Nūrī, Riverbend, and Salam Pax are all Iraqi writers, but only Salam and Riverbend

lived in Iraq at the time of writing. Kachachī left Iraq in 1979 and currently lives in France.

Nūri grew up in Iraq, but lived in France from 1977 until 2004, when he moved to the United

Arab Emirates, where he currently resides. Nafisa Haji is a Pakistani US American writer

living in California. For many of these writers, the language in which they write is a

deliberate choice.5 Their texts explore the role of translation in war, the complex, fluid ways

that interpreters navigate their identities, and the interpreter’s agency within larger military

structures. Further, in these texts the narrators and protagonists—in various ways—deviate

from their prescribed roles; they refuse to adhere to binary identities or sociocultural

expectations and cause ruptures that ultimately shape the war narrative within the text.

On November 17, 2001 Laura Bush gave a radio address about Afghan women. Near

the end of this address, she said, “the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and

dignity of women.”6 From the beginning of the war on terror, the Bush administration used

women’s “liberation” as a justification for the invasion of Afghanistan and then later, Iraq.

This rhetoric depicts Afghani and Iraqi women as oppressed victims in need of liberation

from the “barbaric” enemy.7 As Jasmin Zine notes in “Between Orientalism and

Fundamentalism: Muslim Women and Feminist Engagement,” this “narrative of

‘progress’…creates a rationale for the occupation of Iraq as a benevolent gesture of

humanitarianism masking the self-serving neo-liberal economic enterprise at the heart of its

imperial design.”8 Gender was central to the Bush administration’s rhetoric about the wars in

in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as in sustaining the “villain-victim-hero narrative.”9 Bush

positioned himself as the heroic protector of the US and its people as well as innocent Iraqis,

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while depicting Saddam Hussein as a vicious dictator who tortures and murders his own

people and poses a threat to the US and its people.10

One of the US military's primary strategies was counterinsurgency, a tactic “fought

among the populace” in which counterinsurgents “take upon themselves responsibility for the

people's well-being in all its manifestations.”11 Counterinsurgency is, at least rhetorically, in

line with the military’s campaign to “win the hearts and minds” of the Iraqi people. In his

book Motherless Tongues, Vicente Rafael argues that counterinsurgency “attempts to

‘weaponize’ and ‘target’ one of the most common things in their [the Iraqi people's] lives,

indeed the very thing that lends to their lives a sense of commonality: their language.”12

Indeed, in the view of the US Department of Defense, language expertise is a “warfighting

skill.”13 This reduces language to a weapon to be used against the enemy.

Several private companies (Blackwater,14 Titan, CACI, Halliburton, etc.) were

contracted by the US military to provide translators and interpreters to work with them. This

included Arabic-speaking US citizens, local national interpreters (also called local

interpreters or “terps”) and third country nationals. The institutional status of contracted

translators and interpreters reflects a larger uncertainty about the role of Private Military

Companies (PMC) and Private Security Companies (PSC) in conflict zones.15 PMSCs are

controversial for a number of reasons, several of which I will outline here. First, there are

concerns about the privatization of warfare; some groups see PMSCs as little more than

mercenaries, while others believe that they provide essential support to the military. Second,

there is a lack of consensus over whether or not employees of PMSCs can be defined as

combatants: contractors often perform the same tasks and duties as soldiers and wear

uniforms, making them virtually indistinguishable from a civilian point of view. International

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humanitarian law insists that “all individuals in the theatre of war [possess] a recognized

primary status as either combatant or civilian”; however, many contracted employees do not

fulfill the requirements for combatant privilege or for civilian status as laid about by the

Geneva Conventions.16 Third, contracted personnel are not always qualified or properly

trained for their assignments.17 Fourth, there were no established codes of conduct for

contractors during the Iraq War.18 Fifth, it is difficult to prosecute PMSCs because of

immunized statements. PMSCs received increased media attention and public scrutiny after

the publication of photos of the atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib (in which several

interpreters were implicated) and the killing of 14 civilians in Nisur Square by Blackwater

employees.

The position of translators and interpreters within this structure of private companies

and the conflict zone itself is unclear and contentious. Because of their ambiguous status,

translators and interpreters are not protected by the rules of war. Translation studies scholar

Moira Inghilleri has written extensively on the ethics of translation in conflict. She writes,

In situations of conflict, translators come face to face with a subject whose

human rights have been violated, withheld, or in some way constrained by

national or international interests. In such situations, the challenge for

translators exceeds questions of linguistic or cultural judgment; it involves

ethical and political judgment as well. These circumstances require…an ethics

of translation that takes as its starting point the actual social conditions in

which translators operate, particularly in situations of conflict, when a

translator’s apparent role as mediator may conceal his/her actual role as a

pawn in a literal or metaphorical war.19

She also notes the vast spectrum of experience for translator-interpreters in Iraq: some may

work in conflict zones, some in interrogations, others may translate technical documents or

military intelligence, or some combination of these. Further, the experience, treatment, and

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payment of a local national (Iraqi citizen) or third-country national (non-Iraqi citizen, non-

US citizen) also differ substantially. As an Iraqi or third-country national, becoming a

translator or interpreter for the US paid better than many jobs at the time (but non-US

citizens received a fraction of what US citizens did).

In the context of Iraq War literature, the interpreter acts not only as a vehicle of

communication (or miscommunication) and understanding (or misunderstanding), but as an

agent whose words have material consequences. In these texts, translation becomes a

medium of the micro politics of warfare; many of the large-scale issues of the invasion are

played out in the interactions between translators and the communicating parties. The

translator is often imagined as a cultural mediator, a neutral facilitator of communication, or

a fantasy of multiculturalism. In war and conflict, the translator’s role is far from neutral, and

they are always subject to the power dynamics at work between the warring parties.

The dragoman,20 a precursor to the interpreter, is an important figure in the history of

the Middle East. The term “dragoman” was used to refer specifically to interpreters working

in Arabic-, Turkish-, and Persian-Speaking countries; in his article on dragomen, Elliott

Colla writes that translators and interpreters were “central to the modern colonization of the

Arab world, in nineteenth-century Egypt and Algeria as in twenty-first century Iraq,”

showing the long history of this figure.21 In the fictional texts, the protagonists are arguably

successors to the historical figure of the dragoman: they are critical to the imperial agenda,

feared, and seen by many as collaborators.22

In these texts, the interpreter functions in part as a representation of the mediated

nature of the war on terror. The writers of the fictional texts write about the Iraq War from a

distance; their knowledge and experience of the war is thus necessarily mediated by the

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media and others’ accounts. In the US, the dominant neoconservative discourse of the war on

terror espoused by the Bush administration demonizes the “enemy other” while portraying

the US forces as “liberators.” Translators and interpreters disrupt this narrative because of

their presence in-between the US forces and the Iraqi people; their shifting identities,

complex loyalties, and multilingualism do not fit into the established war narrative. These

fictionalizations of translation and translators allow these texts to intervene in Iraq War

narratives and to explore these ambiguities.

Comparatists work across boundaries—be they disciplinary, linguistic, geographic, or

otherwise—so translation has long played a central and contested role in the field, but the

original/translation binary (and hierarchy) persists. However, comparatists in the past two

decades have started to rethink not only translation itself and its role in the field, but also

increasingly to accept and acknowledge the importance of translation studies in comparative

literature. Postcolonial studies, too, has always been an interdisciplinary field, and one that

accepts the need for translation more readily than comparative literature. The idea of “world

literature” is often criticized for its incorporation of texts from a vast array of literary

traditions—translated into English—and “flattening” them as a result. Many seminal

postcolonial texts are read so widely in English that the translations themselves become part

of the canon. These texts thematize many of the dilemmas facing translation, such as

monolingualism and the hegemony of global English, the original/translation binary,

mistranslation, translation and violence, and the ethics of translation.

The texts I am working with all engage with issues of language, gender, war, and

globalization, entering into current debates about the role of translation globally, and

exploring how the war on terror has so significantly shaped that role. Many scholars have

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written about the changing role of translation since 9/11, but there has been very little

exploration of its representations in literature. The studies, such as Apter’s, Baker’s, and

Inghilleri’s, that look at the role of translators in the war on terror tend to focus on news

media because there is relatively little research on translators and interpreters in the Iraq

War.23 Through these texts, I analyze how these literary texts conceive of translation and

enter into debates about translation and its relationship to war and violence, globalization,

gender, and belonging.

Methodology

This dissertation analyzes the figure of the translator and the practice and

representation of translation in Iraq War literature, drawing on resources and methodologies

from translation studies. While there has been general and scholarly interest in post-invasion

literature, texts in English (many by writers from the US) have received the most attention.

This project focuses on texts by noncombatants that center translation; the second and third

chapters focus on the figure of the interpreter as represented in fiction, while the fourth

chapter looks at the performance of cultural translation in two blogs.

The focus in the analysis of the fiction is on the figure of the interpreter, but I also

examine formal elements that perform translation, particularly the coexistence of multiple

languages within the text. Chapters two and three center linguistic translation, and

specifically, interpreting—translating speech, rather than text. In the fourth chapter, I use

cultural translation to frame Riverbend and Salam Pax’s efforts to render Iraq, Iraqi cultural

practices, and the Iraq War “readable” to an anglophone audience.

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The question of narrative—how translators and interpreters are narrated or narrate in

the text—is important to this project. Mona Baker discusses how translators and interpreters

participate in producing and transferring narratives, but also how they “are narrated by other

participants in the war zone” and “how they themselves participate in elaborating the range

of public narratives of the conflict that become available to us.”24 In many of these texts, the

translators and interpreters participate in creating their own narratives but are also keenly

aware of how they are perceived by others; this creates an anxiety that often leads them to

question the ethics of their work as translators/interpreters. The Iraq War has been denounced

as an unjust war, which leads Inghilleri to question “whether Iraqi and other Arabic-speaking

interpreters had a moral responsibility not to lend their support to the war despite the

individual or political benefits they stood to gain.”25 For some translators and interpreters—

both real and fictional—their motivation to translate/interpret in Iraq stems from belief that

the US military is there to liberate, not occupy. Experience often changes this belief, leading

interpreters and translators with the need for an ethical framework to translate/interpret in a

war that is unjust. Translators and interpreters developed many different strategies to limit

harm and violence within an unjust system. In Interpreters of Occupation Madeline Otis

Campbell describes some of these strategies. Mohammad, a local interpreter and one of her

interlocutors, tells her that “the ‘culture card’ was the most powerful one he had to play in his

job interpreting for the Marines; he used that card sometimes to mock or resist Marines’

views of Iraqis, and at other times to advocate for changes to unjust military actions.”26 He

consciously plays on the Marines desire to “[be] or at least [appear] sensitive to Iraqi culture”

in order to improve the situation—whether military actions or treatment of prisoners. 27

Another man, Abbas, decided to become an interpreter after witnessing the deaths of two

10

women that were the direct result of an interpretation error.28 His motivation comes from the

belief that by interpreting he could prevent unnecessary violence. Despite the varying

motivations of translators and their equally varying attitudes towards the war and occupation,

they found ways to adapt their behavior to their own ethical codes.

Walter Mignolo’s “border thinking” provides an interesting framework within which

to think about translation and its productive ambiguities. He writes, “the very concept of

‘border’ implies the existence of people, languages, religions and knowledge on both sides

linked through relations established by the coloniality of power (e.g. structured by the

imperial and colonial differences).”29 Border thinking resists and undermines imperial,

colonial knowledge systems that assert their own superiority while insisting on the inferiority

of the other. In Tribal Modern (2014), miriam cooke draws on Mignolo’s border thinking to

examine the coexistence of the tribal and the modern in the Arab Gulf. She uses the Arabic

term “barzakh,” which is “an untranslatable term signifying undiluted convergence, the

simultaneous processes of mixing and separation.”30 Both border thinking and barzakh

envision the space of encounter as a possibility for new knowledges and a site of resistance.

The translator operates in precisely this kind of space, encountering and interacting with

various parties and institutions (the military, Iraqi civilians) while still remaining outside;

further, their position allows them to find new ways of resistance from within this liminal

space.

This concept of the barzakh frames the space in which interpreters function and the

field of translation. The interpreter protagonists in the novels are both allied (through their

jobs) with the US forces but also on the side of Iraqis. Never able to ‘fully’ occupy the

position of Iraqi or US soldier, their status as interpreters frames the constant simultaneous

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intermixing and separation that they experience in other arenas. The barzakh further

illustrates the impossibility of totally faithful translation and the constant barrier to pure

communication or understanding.

The translator/interpreters in these texts work in a conflict situation, and often under

the umbrella of the military or a contractor, so discussions of war, gender, and postcolonial

feminism will all be integral to my analysis. In Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq: A

Feminist Reformulation of Just War Theory (2006), Laura Sjoberg explores the

disproportionate impact of the invasion (as well as the preceding sanctions) on women,

gendered constructions of the masculinity and femininity of Iraqi and US soldiers and

civilians, and argues for a feminist reformulation of just war theory.

In “Baghdad Burning: Women Write War in Iraq,” miriam cooke writes about how

the emergence of blogging has created new avenues of expression for Iraqis under

occupation, contextualizing their writing within Iraq’s history of conflict. She also uses her

concept of multiple critique to understand Riverbend’s writing. Multiple critique is a

“multilayered discourse that allows them [Islamic feminists] to engage with and criticize the

various individuals, institutions, and systems that limit and oppress them while making sure

that they are not caught in their own rhetoric.”31 Riverbend, for example, criticizes the

occupation while still empathizing with the plight of individual soldiers. Anthropologist

Nadje Al-Ali also writes about Iraqi women and has published two edited volumes of work

by Iraqi writers and artists: We Are Iraqis (2013) and Iraqi Women (2007). In What Kind of

Liberation? (2009) she investigates the gendered ways that women suffered under

occupation, and the empty rhetoric of women’s “liberation” that was used to help justify the

invasion.

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Iraqi Literature

Iraq was granted independence 1932 under the rule of King Faisal I, with the

provision that Iraq continue to allow the British to participate in the government. After his

death in 1933, King Faisal’s son, Ghazi, became king. In a 1941 coup d’état, Nūrī al-Sa‘īd

(then prime minister) was replaced by ‘Alī al-Gaylanī, who received support from the Axis

Powers. The British then invaded Iraq and occupied it until 1947, after which Nūrī al-Sa‘īd

was reinstated as Prime Minister. In 1958, during what is known as the 14 July Revolution,

the monarchy was overthrown in a coup d’état led by ‘Abd al-Karīm Qāsim and Iraq was

declared a republic. Although Qāsim supported pan-Arabism before coming to power, after

becoming prime minister, he refused to join the United Arab Republic,32 led by Gamal Abdel

Nasser. Qāsim was subsequently overthrown in a Ba‘athist coup in 1963 and the Arab

Socialist Ba‘ath Party took control of Iraq. After coming to power, the Ba‘ath Party leaders

centralized Iraq and Iraqi nationalism rather than Arab nationalism. The Ba‘ath Party used

cultural production in its mission to “[boost] national pride and [gain] legitimacy”; the notion

of national sacrifice, in particular, “was perverted into a prescribed and state-ordered attitude:

death for the homeland as national duty.”33

The 1950s saw a generation of writers including Mahdi Issa al-Saqr, Fuad al-Takarli,

‘Abd al-Malik Nūrī, and Ghā’ib Ṭu‘ma Farmān who are known for their formal

experimentation and artistry.34 The rise of the Ba‘ath Party and its vigorous censorship

resulted in a difficult period for Iraqi literature. Fuad al-Takarli attempted to publish Al-raj‘a

al-ba‘īd (1980) in Iraq, but the censors refused to publish it unless he removed material seen

to be critical of the Ba‘ath Party, so he published it in Lebanon. Al-raj‘a al-ba‘īd remains a

pioneering work of Iraqi literature and an important contribution to Arabic literature more

13

broadly. The novel revolves around four generations of a single family; it employs multiple

narrators, often recounting the same event from different perspectives. It intimately depicts

the life of a family and the political landscape of Iraq during the last years of ‘Abd al-Karīm

Qāsim’s rule and subsequent rise of the Ba‘ath Party.

As part of his project to gain support and bolster nationalist sentiment, Saddam

Hussein, who came to power in 1979, sanctioned artistic production in praise of his regime.

He linked Iraq’s wars to the seventh century Battle of Qadisiyya in which the Muslim Arab

army defeated the Sasanian Persian army. Many scholars35 have addressed the issue of

cultural production under the Ba‘ath Party. Writers and intellectuals critical of the Ba‘ath

Party were imprisoned and often disappeared, but those who praised the regime were

rewarded, with the expectation that they consistently produce work in support of the

government. For writers like Mahmoud Saeed who were not party members, publishing in

Iraq was not an option.

Because of Saddam’s violent oppression of opposition and the multiple conflicts in

Iraq over the last four decades, many Iraqi writers were forced into exile. Living outside of

Iraq presented these writers with options to publish works that would have been dangerous or

impossible to publish within the country; however, for many, publishing such texts meant

facing the possibility of not returning to Iraq. Exilic Iraqi writers are spread out all over the

world, but many continue to write in Arabic.36 As Catherine Cobham and Fabio Caiani note

in The Iraqi Novel, “it has become almost inevitable for people to talk about two Iraqi

literatures: one written by exiles and one by those remaining inside Iraq.”37 They also argue

that this division, often used by Iraqis themselves, is a slippery one.38 Indeed, most of the

primary texts in this dissertation are by writers who did not live in Iraq at the time of writing.

14

The two bloggers wrote from inside Iraq, but both eventually left because of the occupation.

This distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ matters to this project in terms of the writing

of war: the writers living outside Iraq necessarily experience war in a mediated form, while

the bloggers experience (and write about) the material, lived conditions of occupation.

In Iraq’s Modern Arabic Literature: A Guide to English Translation 1950-2003, Salih

J. Altoma thoroughly outlines Iraqi literature that has been translated into English; at the time

of his research, he notes, most translated Iraqi work was poetry, and there were few women

translated. Arabic poetry predates Islam and has long been an important part of oral culture.

There are many Iraqi poets who have made important contributions to poetic form, including

Nazik Al-Mala’ika, Badr Shākir Al-Sayyāb, and ‘Abd al-Wahhab Al-Bayati, who are

credited with popularizing free verse. Iraqi poets including Sinan Antoon, Sargon Boulus,

Dunya Mikhail, and Saadi Youssef have addressed the invasion and occupation in their

poetry. Because this dissertation deals with prose, post-invasion poetry is not addressed but is

an important part of Iraqi literary history.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq has become a common theme in Iraqi literature.

As Shayma Hamedawi notes, in the realm of the novel, these texts generally fall into two

categories: “those revealing the violations of the Saddam Hussein regime and those dealing

with the radical transformation brought about by the 2003 invasion.”39 Altoma notes the

dearth of Iraqi women writers translated into English at the time of his bibliography’s

publication, but praises Iqbal al-Qazwini and Haifa Zangana “for their unreserved opposition

to the war in spite of their anti-Baath orientation.”40 Other writers whose work tackles the

occupation include Dunya Mikhail, Sinan Antoon, Mahmoud Saeed, Shākir Nūrī, Ahmed

Saadawi, Najm Wālī, Ali Bader, Jasīm al-Raṣīf, In‘ām Kachachī, and Hassan Blasim, among

15

others. There are many important Iraqi fiction writers, including Muhammad Khudayyir,

whose Basrayatha is a formally innovative ode to the city of Basra (where he still lives); and

Luay Hamza Abbas, also from Basra, a writer of many short stories and a novel. The growth

of Iraqi literature today makes it impossible to cover all writers here, but these represent

some of the writers whose work has had an impact on contemporary Iraqi literature, and

particularly, Iraqi war literature.

Iraqi women writers have made important contributions to Iraqi literature, and

particularly to its war literature. Hadiya Hussein’s Mā ba‘d al-ḥubb (2004) narrates both war

in Iraq and exile in Jordan through the lens of the narrator and her friend who dies before the

novel’s beginning. Alia Mamdouh was among the first Iraqi women to be published in the

United States, and her novels Al-maḥbūbāt (2003) and Ḥabbāt al-naftālīn (1986), both

grapple with gender issues and notions of Iraqiness. Betool Khedairi’s Ghayib (2004)

contrasts the “Days of Plenty” in Iraq with life under the economic sanctions. She uses

newspaper headlines and quotations, chapter epigraphs from historical books on Iraq to

contrast the fictional space of the text with the material realities of the sanctions. These

women, among others, portray the impact of the conflicts of Iraq on women in particular,

while also writing about the difficulties of Iraqiness during war and in exile.

Scholars including Ferial Ghazoul, miriam cooke, Yasmeen Hanoosh, Ikram

Masmoudi, Fabio Caiani, and Catherine Cobham have written about the importance of Iraqi

literature and particularly its contributions to war literature. Haytham Bahoora finds parallels

between the prolific literary output of Iraqi writers after 2003 with that of Lebanese writers

after the civil war. The growth in Iraqi war literature after 2003 has also resulted in a great

deal of experimentation, in terms of genre as well as form, in this literature.41

16

Translation in Iraq

Since 9/11 there has been a growing interest in translation and in the role of

translators. The need for Arabic42 speakers directly after 9/11 led to a revived interest in how

we think about and engage in translation. The work published on translators and interpreters

during the Iraq War are largely from anthropological, sociological, and media perspectives.

Translation studies addresses many of the challenges that interpreters face in war and

conflict, as well as those particular to the Iraq War, many of which are thematized in

literature. This foundation of work in translation studies allows me to explore how the

experiences of translators and interpreters and the practice of translation are narrated in

literature, and how this literature engages with public narratives of the Iraq War and the war

on terror.

The study of translation began as a sort of sub-field subsumed under linguistics and

literature. Scholars unsatisfied with the lack of systematic study of translation in universities

met in Leuven in 1976 and declared translation studies as a new discipline, with André

Lefevere publishing their manifesto “Translation Studies: The Goal of the Discipline” in

1978. Around that same time, the fields of gender studies and postcolonial studies were also

growing, and as Susan Bassnett notes, the three fields “shared a sense of frustration with

established literary and language study and all three began by rethinking widely held

assumptions about the writing of history.”43 This shared attitude meant that work in these

fields overlapped, and there was often scholarly collaboration across them.

Translation studies and postcolonial studies share an interest in language politics, and

particularly in the unequal power relationships involved in translation processes. Lawrence

Venuti argues in favor of foreignizing translations as a means of respecting and preserving

17

linguistic, cultural differences in translated texts. Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o—an

important scholar in both postcolonial and translation studies as well as a renowned writer—

began his career writing in English, but subsequently renounced it in favor of his native

Gikuyu. In his work, he argues that African writers should use their indigenous language

rather than a colonial language in their writing; in his view, this is a form of resistance to

imperialism and a way to strengthen African languages and literatures. He has also written

about this practice in relation to translation, noting that writing in English was a “mental

translation of his creative process,” resulting in the loss of “what would have been the

‘original text’ in Gikuyu.”44 Riverbend, for example, chooses to write in English in a

conscious effort to intervene in anglophone media’s representations of the Iraq War and the

Iraqi people.

In Siting Translation (1992), Tejaswini Niranjana contends that translation is both a

metaphor for the unequal relationship between colonizer and colonized as well as a site of the

perpetuation of colonial power. She notes that, “by employing certain modes of representing

the other—which it thereby also brings into being—translation reinforces hegemonic

versions of the colonized”45 Maria Tymoczko argues that literary translation and postcolonial

writing are similar processes: literary translators transpose a text while postcolonial writers

transpose a culture.46 Both processes involve writing to an audience “composed partially or

primarily of people from a different culture.”47 Postcolonial translation pays particular

attention to the power relations at work between colonial and indigenous languages, in the

translation of postcolonial writers, and in colonial language practices and policies.

Translation and gender studies share a concern with the way “‘secondariness’ comes

to be defined and canonized.”48 The expression “les belles infidèles” comes from the 17th

18

century French writer Gilles Ménage, who compared translation to a woman who was

beautiful but not faithful. This comparison genders the translation as female, thus making the

“original” masculine. In “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation,” Lori Chamberlain

provides an extensive analysis of the gendered discourse that has been used to discuss

translation. She sees this as symptomatic of larger cultural issues, namely “power relations as

they divide in terms of gender,” a “desire to equate language or language use with morality,”

“a quest for originality or unity” and “an intolerance of duplicity, of what cannot be

decided.”49 The very activity of translation has historically been discussed and theorized in

gendered and binary terms: translation/original, author/translator, male/female. Translation

studies today rejects such binarized, hierarchical constructions of translation in favor of a

more fluid, flexible understanding of translation.

Scholars like Barbara Godard, Sherry Simon, and Luise von Flotow have all

contributed to the discourse and practice of feminist translation. In “Theorizing Feminist

Theory/Translation,” Godard argues for what she calls “womanhandling,” in which the

feminist translator “flaunts” her presence in the text.50 In Translation and Gender (1997)

Luise von Flotow identifies supplementing, prefacing and footnoting, and “hijacking” as

three strategies of feminist translators. Supplementing involves compensating for language

differences by intervening in the text; prefacing and footnoting asserts the translator’s

presence and allows for the explanation of translation choices or multiple meanings;

“hijacking” deliberately imposes a feminist agenda onto a text that is not (necessarily)

feminist.51 These strategies work to make gender as it operates in language visible, as well as

to emphasize the feminist translator’s presence.

19

In “The Politics of Translation,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak brings together

postcolonial feminism and translation. She insists that translation is an intimate act, in which

translators must surrender themselves to the text and that the “task of the feminist translator

is to consider language as a clue to the workings of gendered agency.”52 She notes the

importance of language acquisition for “the woman from a hegemonic monolingualist culture

who makes everybody’s life miserable by insisting on women’s solidarity at her price.”53

Spivak’s approach to translation argues against the global solidarity and “global language” of

Western feminism, advocating instead for the learning of other languages as a step towards

solidarity.

The growing body of work in the field of translation and conflict is central to this

project. Scholars like Mona Baker, Emily Apter, and Moira Inghilleri have discussed

translation in the context of the invasion of Iraq, the role of the translator during conflict,

translation and narrative, the ethics of translation in war, as well as many other important

topics. Both Baker and Inghilleri have written extensively about ethics in both training and

practice of translators during war and conflict. Baker rejects the idea that translators or

interpreters are “passive receivers of assignments from others,” but acknowledges the

difficulties facing interpreters in Iraq specifically.54 She also, however, notes that translators

and interpreters “can and do resort to various strategies to strengthen or undermine particular

aspects of the narratives they mediate, explicitly or implicitly.”55 Emily Apter’s book The

Translation Zone (2003) looks specifically at the question of translation during the Iraq

invasion, as well as at how translation is influencing and shaping comparative literature as

field.

20

Inghilleri and Baker rely largely on media and news accounts of interpreters; Apter

uses similar sources in her discussion of Iraq as well, but her book as a whole is much

broader. There are limited sources available from Iraqi interpreters themselves, so scholars

have to draw on what is available to them. These contributions go far in theorizing the role of

the translator through sociological, anthropological approaches; my dissertation project will

be one of the first to address these questions within Arab literary studies. All of the texts

simultaneously thematize and engage in translation in various ways. The writers of the

fictional texts all experience the Iraq War from a distance, while the bloggers remain inside

Iraq but write for an audience outside it; they connect translation to the mediated way war is

experienced in the age of globalization.

Translation appears in a number of forms in this project. The analysis of the novels

reads translation as a means of exploring the politics of multilingualism in conflict zones, as

well as the ways translation functions as a metaphor for the multiple forms of hybridity the

protagonists experience. In the blogs, I analyze how the bloggers perform cultural translation.

These two approaches are linked by the figure of the translator and the negotiations required

when acting as a translator (whether military/conflict interpreter or cultural translator). In the

fictional texts, the protagonists work mainly as interpreters—translating oral, rather than

written material—but there is some overlap in these duties. The focus in the chapters on

fictional texts is on the figure of the interpreter, however, their own acts of translation are

relevant in how it shapes their identities and ethics.

Studies of fictional translators and interpreters are numerous, particularly after what is

often called the “fictional turn” in translation studies in the 1990s (a term coined by Brazilian

scholar Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira). While the studies of the translator in Arab literatures are

21

few, this figure has gained attention in other literary contexts, particularly Latin American

and Eastern European literatures.56 This turn towards fiction allowed scholars of translation

studies to use literature “as a source for theorizing about translation, as well as to look at how

translation is represented in order to reflect larger social processes.”57 Although the

representations of translators and interpreters in literature vary widely, Kaindl notes that

translators and interpreters often work to destabilize binaries (between original and the

translation, between languages, etc.), and to embody conflict itself. The edited volume

Transfiction: Research into the Realities of Translation Fiction—the result of the 2011

Transfiction conference—illustrates the wide range of representations of fictional translators

as well as the many different ways these figures function in literature.

In Arabic and Arab diaspora literatures specifically, many works of fiction feature

translators, but few critics have written about this phenomenon. Ferial Ghazoul’s article “The

Arab Translator as Hero” highlights several texts featuring translators: Al-Tashahhī (2007)

by Alia Mamdouh, Al-ḥafīda al-amīrikiyya (2008) by In‘ām Kachachī, Al-Mutarjim al-khā’in

(2008) by Fawwaz Haddad, Riyāḥ Sharqiyya Riyāḥ Gharbiyya (1998) by Mahdi ‘Issa Al-

Saqr, The Translator (1999) by Leila Aboulela, as well as Jorge Luis Borges’ “La busca de

Averroes.” Ghazoul’s article is one of the few articles that focuses on the figure of the Arab

translator; she specifically examines the translator as a translator-hero, examining the

different manifestations of this hero (tragic hero, comic hero, impotent hero, romantic hero,

ironic hero, collaborating hero). Yousef Awad has written about the fictional translator in

terms of diasporic subjectivity and hybrid identity. His article “The Translator as a Fictional

Character in the Works of Arab Women Writers in Diaspora” examines Sabiha Al Khemir's

The Blue Manuscript (2008) and Nada Awar Jarrar’s Dreams of Water (2007), arguing that

22

the protagonists’ work as translators (and cultural mediators) informs the construction of

their identities. These studies show the interest in and variety of representations of translators

in Arab literatures; my project will add the specific context of the Iraq War in addition to

translators’ and interpreters’ roles in conflict more broadly to this ongoing discussion.

Madeline Otis Campbell’s book Interpreters of Occupation: Gender and the Politics

of Belonging in an Iraqi Refugee Network (2016) is an ethnography of a network of former

Iraqi interpreters living in the Boston area. Her conversations with these former interpreters

reveal the extremely complex ways that they navigate identity at what she calls

“checkpoints,” whether “militarized, legal-juridical, or socio-discursive.”58 She uses a

concept she calls “subject formation in translation” to understand their strategies of

identification. Subject formation in translation “describes a process in which subjectivities

are formed through linguistic, discursive, and physical displacements across steep power

divides. It is, in other words, the process of being translated—and translating oneself—across

structures of power and recognition.”59 Drawing on Talal Asad’s notion of “cultural

translators,” she also analyzes the ways that these interpreters operate within and manipulate

discourses of “Iraqi culture” as understood by the US forces.

Ikram Masmoudi’s War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction (2015) devotes part of a

chapter to the role of the interpreter in Nuri’s The Green Zone (with references to The

American Granddaughter), but the chapter focuses on Agamben’s notion of bare life in the

Iraq War, rather than on interpreters specifically. Masmoudi’s book is one of the first to look

at post-occupation fiction by Iraqis, and many of the texts she presents remain untranslated.

In addition to the Iraq War, she also covers literature about the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf

War.

23

The primary texts for this project can all be classified as Iraq War literature, but they

come from a variety of literary perspectives. Nafisa Haji’s Sweetness of Tears follows Jo

March as she becomes a contracted interpreter for the US military. After learning that her

birth father is Pakistani and Muslim, she becomes interested in Arabic and Urdu and

subsequently joins the military as a translator/interpreter. While the protagonist is Pakistani,

the text’s focus is on the Iraq War and on Jo’s role as an interpreter; further, this text serves

as a comparative counterpoint to The American Granddaughter by In‘ām Kachachī which

also features a female interpreter in Iraq. Zayna, the protagonist of The American

Granddaughter is an Iraqi living in the US who decides to become a translator in order to

financially support her family. The third chapter looks at Shākir Nūrī’s Al-minṭaqa al-

khaḍrā’, a novel about a local interpreter who becomes a suicide bomber. The fourth chapter

analyzes the blogs of Riverbend and Salam Pax, and specifically how their blogs engage in

cultural translation.

Chapter Breakdown

This dissertation focuses on two primary modes of translation, interpreting and

cultural translation, and their roles in Iraq War literature. Through the lens of women

interpreters, local interpreters, and bloggers, this project examines texts that show the

impossibility of ‘pure’ translation, and the ways translation itself functions as an extension of

war(fare).

Chapter 2: Al-hafīda al-amīrikiyya, The Sweetness of Tears, and “Must‘amarat al-‘azā’āt”

Chapter two focuses on In‘ām Kachachī’s Al-ḥafīda al-amīrikiyya (The American

Granddaughter), Mahmoud Saeed’s “Must‘amarat al-‘azā’āt” (“Lizards’ Colony”) and

24

Nafisa Haji’s The Sweetness of Tears, all of which are set during the Iraq War and feature

women contracted translators/interpreters as protagonists.60 These contracted translators and

interpreters are not technically members of the military, nor are they strictly civilians; they

are somewhere in-between, but do not receive the benefits of either category. By using

interpreters as characters, these works force the reader to reflect upon the ethics of translation

and the agency of the translator/interpreter in the context of war and conflict. In their

capacities as translator/interpreters, the protagonists work in situations that make them

uncomfortable (raids, interrogations). Their complicity in inflicting or not preventing harm

done to other human beings in their roles as translators haunts these characters. The texts

explicitly mention torture, forcing the protagonists to confront the positions they occupy in

relation to Abu Ghraib and to torture. This need for an ethics of translation has arisen out of

the particular violence and torture enacted by the US military in the 21st century and in

which translators and interpreters have been implicated. All of the protagonists are motivated

by a sense of duty, whether to the US, Iraq, or family. They also, however, commit acts that

breach the “line between good and bad” while further solidifying the line “between us and

them.”61

These characters occupy an in-between, liminal space: they are between languages,

between soldier and civilian, and in the case of the two novels, between nationalities,

embodying the idea of the barzakh. Drawing on the genealogy of translation theory, this

chapter engages with the representation of the military translator/interpreter as a figure in

literature and the social, political, ethical consequences associated with this particular type of

translation. The protagonists disrupt binary identifications such as soldier/civilian,

masculine/feminine, us/them, and original/translation. These texts are the only ones that

25

feature female translators as protagonists, and their gendered experiences as part of the male-

dominated military are critical to understanding their work as interpreters. Their realizations

that the war is unjust, and that the US forces harm rather than help leads them to struggle to

find an ethical framework within which to operate.

Chapter 3: Al-minṭaqa al-khaḍrā’

The third chapter analyzes Shākir Nūrī’s 2009 novel Al-minṭaqa al-khaḍrā’ (The

Green Zone). Nūrī’s novel is written in Arabic, but Nūrī himself also works as a translator

and journalist in English and French. The novel features a local interpreter named Ibrāhīm, a

former English teacher working with a group of Marines as an interpreter, as its protagonist.

Twice daily, Ibrāhīm and four other Iraqi interpreters must submit to a search as they enter

and exit the Green Zone for work. Ibrāhīm has a generally civil relationship with the soldiers

he interacts with, but they are also aggressive and domineering. Ibrāhīm is given no last

name, nor any identifying information about his religious or ethnic identity. The novel tracks

Ibrāhīm’s increasing hostility towards the US soldiers after a series of conflicts. It ends with

Ibrāhīm preparing self-detonate inside the Green Zone. Through careful attention to sound

and space, Al-minṭaqa al-khaḍrā’ focuses on the material conditions of the occupation, and

specifically, inside the Green Zone.

Al-minṭaqa al-khadrā’ highlights the anxieties that the local interpreter creates in the

US soldiers as well as more broadly in terms of the policies of the occupation. Through its

focus on the Green Zone and the many forms of violence perpetuated by imperial occupation,

the novel circumscribes the possibility of translation as a successful form of ‘bridging’ or

‘mediation,’ and underlines the impossible position of the interpreter.

26

Chapter 4: Baghdad Burning and Where is Raed?

The fourth chapter focuses on two Iraqi blogs: Baghdad Burning and Where is Raed?,

authored by Riverbend and Salam Pax (Abdulmunem), respectively. Both of these blogs

were written in English, reporting everyday life in occupied Iraq in a journalistic but also

deeply personal way. The blogs are particularly interesting the authors write in English,

despite being Iraqis in Iraq at the time of writing. This choice to write in English

demonstrates their conscious decisions to act as cultural interpreters: rather than writing in

Arabic to other Iraqis and Arabs more broadly, they aim to reach an anglophone audience.

Like the other texts, their blogs reveal their perspectives on the occupation as well as their

own lived experiences. They both often use US cultural references as well as translate Arabic

words and phrases, both of which serve to encourage their audience to identify with them

while also ‘teaching’ them about their culture and language.

Like the other texts, Riverbend and Salam Pax intervene in discussions about the Iraq

War as well as mediating their own experience into a form that allows them to connect with

an anglophone audience. They strategically use cultural translation as a tool that can connect

people but also recognize and identify its limitations; English allows them to reach a global

audience and to disrupt media narratives about Iraq and Iraqis. Riverbend and Salam Pax

critique both the occupation and their own government, and consume US culture but are also

harshly critical of it. In this chapter, I argue that the bloggers engage in cultural translation

while also looking at the contradictions and ambivalences of the two blogs.

27

ENDNOTES: CHAPTER ONE

1 Elizabeth Grieco, “Iraqi Immigrants in the United States,” The Online Journal of the Migration Policy

Institute, 2003.

2 Aaron Terrazas, “Iraqi Immigrants in the United States,” The Online Journal of the Migration Policy Institute,

2003.

3 This includes cookbooks, travel books, nonfiction, etc., so the percentage of literary texts is significantly

lower. The blog Three Percent at the University of Rochester—which attempts to track all literary translations

into English—estimates that the percentage of literary fiction and poetry is about .7% Three Percent, University

of Rochester, “About.” http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/about/.

4 Mona Baker, "Interpreters and Translators in the War Zone: Narrated and Narrators," The Translator 16, no. 2

(2010): 201.

5 In‘ām Kachachī writes in Arabic but lives in France (and speaks and writes French). Nafisa Haji writes in

English but speaks Urdu and learned some Arabic in school. Shākir Nūri writes in Arabic but can also speak

and write English and French. Riverbend and Salam Pax both write in English but can speak and write Arabic.

6 Laura Bush, "Radio Address by Mrs. Bush," (2001).

7 George W. Bush, "Remarks by the President at Signing Ceremony for Afghan Women and Children Relief

Act of 2001," (Washington DC).

8 Jasmin Zine, "Between Orientalism and Fundamentalism: Muslim Women and Feminist Engagement," in

(En)Gendering the War on Terror: War Stories and Camouflaged Politics, ed. Krista Hunt and Kim Rygiel

(Arlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 29-30.

9 James W. Messerschmidt, Hegemonic Masculinities and Camouflaged Politics: Unmasking the Bush Dynasty

and Its War against Iraq (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2010), 112.

10 George W. Bush, "Remarks Announcing Bipartisan Agreement on a Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of

United States Armed Forces against Iraq," (22 October 2002).

11 It goes on to cite these as including "security from insurgent intimidation and coercion, as well as from

nonpolitical violence and crime," "provision for basic economic needs," "provision of essential services, such as

water, electricity, sanitation, and medical care," "sustainment of key social and cultural institutions," and "other

aspects that contribute to a society's basic quality of life" (42). Eric T. Olson, "Some of the Best Weapons for

Counterinsurgents Do Not Shoot," (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2010), 42.

12 Vicente L. Rafael, Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language Amid Wars of Translation (Durham:

Duke University Press, 2016), 123.

13 US Department of Defense, "Defense Language Transformation Roadmap," (2005), 3.

14 Blackwater changed its name twice: first to Xe, and then to Academi (the name by which it is presently

known). Because it was Blackwater during the Iraq War, that is the name I use.

15 While the terms PMC and PSC are often used interchangeably, a PMC supports military operations and a

PSC provides protection services, but there is debate about the terms and the distinction between them. The

term PMSC (Private Military and Security Companies) is used to encompass both.

28

16 Shannon Bosch, "Private Security Contractors and State Responsibility: Are States Exempt from

Responsibility for Violations of Humanitarian Law Perpetrated by Private Security Contractors?," Comparative

and International Law Journal of South Africa 41, no. 3 (2008): 356.

17 The contracted interrogators at Abu Ghraib had little to no training on the Geneva Conventions or procedures

for treatment of prisoners. Jones, Anthony R., and George R. Fay. "Ar 15-6 Investigation of the Abu Ghraib

Detention Facility and 205th Military Intelligence Brigade." Homeland Security Digital Library: US

Department of the Army, 2005: 51-52.

18 The Montreux Document, ratified in 2008, outlines state responsibility regarding PMSCs under international

humanitarian law and human rights law. Ratifying states include Afghanistan, Angola, Australia, Austria,

Canada, France, Germany, Iraq, China, Poland, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, the

United Kingdom and the United States.

19 Moira Inghilleri, "The Ethical Task of the Translator in the Geo-Political Arena: From Iraq to Guantánamo

Bay," Translation Studies 1, no. 2 (2008).

20 Colla notes that the term “dragoman” comes from the Arabic turjuman, related to the root ت-ر-ج-م, which

itself is likely Aramaic.

21 Elliott Colla, "Dragomen and Checkpoints," The Translator 21, no. 2 (2015): 144.

22 Ibid.

23 The US media in particular has many articles about translators and interpreters, interviews with translators

and interpreters, stories about the relationships between soldiers and translators/interpreters, and articles about

problems with translators/interpreters obtaining visas.

24 Mona Baker, Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account (London: Routledge, 2006), 197.

25 Moira Inghilleri, ""You Don't Make War without Knowing Why": The Decision to Interpret in Iraq," The

Translator 16, no. 2 (2010): 177.

26 Madeline Otis Campbell, Interpreters of Occupation: Gender and the Politics Of belonging in an Iraqi

Refugee Network, First Edition. ed. (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2016), 64.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid., 90.

29 Walter D. Mignolo and Madina V. Tlostanova, "Theorizing from the Borders: Shifting to Geo- and Body-

Politics of Knowledge," European Journal of Social Theory 9, no. 2 (2006): 208.

30 miriam cooke, Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf (Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 2014), 13.

31 miriam cooke, "Multiple Critique: Islamic Feminist Rhetorical Strategies," Nepantla: Views from South 1, no.

1 (2000): 108.

32 al-jumhūriyya al-‘arabiyya al-mutaḥida

33 Leslie Tramontini, "'Speaking Truth to Power?' Intellectuals in Iraqi Baathist Cultural Production," Middle

East Topics and Arguments 1 (2013): 56.

29

34 See Fabio Caiani and Catherine Cobham, The Iraqi Novel: Key Writers, Key Texts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press, 2013).

35 Tramontini 2013; Hanoosh 2013; Milich, Pannewick, and Tramontini 2012.

36 Including Sinan Antoon (United States), Ali Bader (Belgium), Hassan Blasim (Sweden), Hadiya Hussein

(Canada), In‘ām Kachachī (France), Betool Khedairi (Jordan), Alia Mamdouh (France), Dunya Mikhail (United

States), Shākir Nūrī (United Arab Emirates), Iqbal al-Qazwini (Germany), Muhsin Al-Ramli (Spain), Mahmoud

Saeed (United States), Najem Wali (Germany), Haifa Zangana (United Kingdom), among many others.

37 Caiani and Cobham, The Iraqi Novel: Key Writers, Key Texts, 243.

38 Ibid.

39 Shayma Hamedawi, "The Postcolonial Iraqi Novel: Themes and Sources of Inspiration," Babel 36 (2017): 10.

40 Salih J. Altoma, Iraq's Modern Arabic Literature: A guide to English Translations since 1950 (Lanham,

Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2010), vi.

41 Haytham Bahoora, "Writing the Dismembered Nation: The Aesthetics of Horror in Iraqi Narratives of War,"

Arab Studies Journal 23, no. 1 (2015): 189.

42 As well as other languages; this dissertation focuses on Arabic.

43 Susan Bassnett, Translation, The New Critical Idiom (London ; New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis

Group, 2014), 27.

44 Ngugi wa Thiong'o, "Translated by the Author: My Life in between Languages," Translation Studies 2, no. 1

(2009): 19.

45 Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1992), 3.

46 Maria Tymoczko, "Post-Colonial Writing and Literary Translation," in Post-Colonial Translation: Theory

and Practice, ed. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (New York: Routledge, 1999), 20.

47 Ibid., 20-21.

48 Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (New York:

Routledge, 1996), 8.

49 Lori Chamberlain, "Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation," Signs 13, no. 3 (1988): 465.

50 Barbara Godard, "Theorizing Feminist Discourse/Translation," Tessera 6 (1989): 50.

51 She gives the example of Lise Gauvin’s Lettres d’une autre, where Susanne de Lotbinière-Hardwood uses

Québécois-e-s in the English translation where Gauvin used the generic Québécois (among other changes)(von

Flotow 79).

52 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009), 201.

53 Ibid., 215.

54 Baker, Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account, 105.

30

55 Ibid.

56 Scholars such as Rosemary Arrojo, Adriana Pagano, Douglas Robinson, Gideon Toury, George Steiner,

Elizabeth Welt Trahan, and Ingrid Kurz have all written about fictional translators.

57 Klaus Kaindl and Karlheinz Spitzl, Transfiction: Research into the Realities of Translation Fiction

(Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2014), 11.

58 Campbell, Interpreters of Occupation: Gender and the Politics of belonging in an Iraqi Refugee Network, 3.

59 Ibid., 14.

60 In both texts, the protagonists both translate documents and act as interpreters.

61 Nafisa Haji, The Sweetness of Tears (New York: William Morrow, 2011), 139.

31

CHAPTER 2: THE BATTLEGROUND OF TRANSLATION: WOMEN

INTERPRETERS IN IRAQ WAR FICTION

Introduction

In The Translation Zone, Emily Apter notes that since the US invasion of Iraq there

has been increased attention to “the enhanced impact of translation” on “the way [the so-

called war on terror] is waged.”1 Immediately following 9/11, the US government scrambled

to find and train translators in Arabic, Dari, Kurdish, and Pashto, among other languages.2

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States—also known as the

9/11 Commission—noted the paucity of translators and subsequent backlog of untranslated

documents as one of the intelligence inadequacies before 9/11. The intense concern about

and resources devoted to translation post 9/11 reflect its significance in intelligence gathering

as well as in conflict and warfare more broadly. Upon its invasion of Iraq, the US military

was woefully unprepared on the translation front; a former staff sergeant noted in an

interview that when he arrived in Iraq in 2003, his battalion had three interpreters, while by

2008 they had 55.3

The military recruited heavily in cities with large Arab populations like

Dearborn/Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles, focusing particularly on Iraqi communities in

the US. A recruitment message included in an email to the Arab Community Center for

Economic and Social Services (ACCESS) listserv pronounced, “the US Army is offering you

a unique opportunity to use your language skills to serve your country and contribute to the

32

efforts of nation rebuilding in Iraq and other locations in the world.”4 ACCESS is located in

Dearborn, Michigan, which is home to the largest population of Iraqis in the US. These

recruitment messages appeal to the patriotic duty of Iraqis in the US to “serve their country”

while simultaneously invoking a sense of duty to assist in “rebuilding” in Iraq and elsewhere.

In addition to advertising jobs through community centers like ACCESS, the military also

placed ads in Arabic-language newspapers in these cities as well. The starting salaries for US

citizens could reach six figures, with few qualifications required other than language

competence. Because many Iraqis in the US fled Iraq because of the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf

War, or the dictatorship, it was difficult to find Iraqi US citizens willing to return and act as

translators and interpreters.

When the House met to vote on the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention

Act of 2004, House Representative Sherwood Boehlert said, “without serious reforms that

increase the number of intelligence officers who speak the enemy’s language, there is no way

the 9/11 Commission recommendations can be implemented.”5 This framing of language as

belonging to an “enemy” and insistence on its critical role in implementing reforms from the

9/11 Commission demonstrate the US government’s concern with weaponizing language

from the very beginning of the war on terror. Counterinsurgency—one of the US military’s

primary strategies in Iraq—relies on the belief that culture can be “decoded” and

weaponized.6 In Time in the Shadows, Laleh Khalili describes the manipulative rhetoric of

counterinsurgency:

Humanitarian discourse is supplemented with a language that insists on the

urgency of a civilizing, or democratizing, or modernizing, or improving

mandate…The tactics used in such counterinsurgencies continually slip

33

between exemplary or performative forms of violence meant to intimidate and

more ‘humane’ and developmental warfare intended to persuade.7

Counterinsurgency attempts to justify the US government’s neo-imperialism through

discourse that racializes and orientalizes the languages, cultures, and people of Iraq.8 Under

the guise of “winning hearts and minds,” counterinsurgency doctrine obscures and renders

legally acceptable the United States’ carceral practices, torture, and violence.

The need for translators and interpreters was a source of anxiety for the US military

and government after 9/11 because of the lack of officers trained in the desired languages, the

difficulty in recruiting Arabic-speaking US citizens, and because of the dependence on local

interpreters. Governmental and military training manuals insist repeatedly on “accurate”

translation, illustrating their fear of the manipulation of translation by the interpreter. The

universal and machine translation projects carried out by the US government aim to take the

human out of the equation, but they consistently fail. Given the necessity of human presence,

the government both fears and wants to control the interpreter. The texts explore the

centrality of the human in translation, and specifically the gendered experience of women in

that role.

Writer and scholar Sinan Antoon sees the invasion and occupation of Iraq as the

“third act” after the preceding Gulf War (1990-1991) and sanctions.9 The Iran-Iraq War

(1980-1988) resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians on both

sides, economic deterioration in both Iran and Iraq, and ultimately ended in a status quo ante

bellum, resulting in no territorial changes. Like the Lebanese Civil War, the Iran-Iraq War

has faced state-sponsored erasure, and many writers have taken up the task of remembering

the devastation it caused. The US military’s intensive bombing during the First Gulf War and

34

the sanctions on Iraq further devastated the country. Economic sanctions—which had been

imposed in only two other instances before Iraq—are meant to act as a form of coercive

diplomacy, in this case to effect Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait. On August 6, 1990, two

days after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) passed

Resolution 661,10 imposing sanctions upon Iraq. Further sanctions were passed with UNSC

Resolutions 665 and 687 on August 25, 1990 and April 3, 1991, respectively. The sanctions

operated under the assumption that the suffering of the population would influence the

actions and policies of the state. Instead, they strengthened and consolidated Saddam

Hussein’s position and indirectly enabled the state security apparatus to surveil and collect

data on the Iraqi population as a form of control. Political scientist Toby Dodge notes that “in

order to receive their meagre monthly basket of staples, households had to supply detailed

information to the representative of the state in their neighborhood. This allowed the state to

compile a great deal of information in return for the food distributed.”11 Rather than

influencing the regime’s actions, the sanctions punished the Iraqi population and increased

their dependency on the regime. This history of violence between the US and Iraq sets the

scene for the invasion of Iraq.

In‘ām Kachachī’s Al-ḥafīda al-amīrikiyya (The American Granddaughter), Nafisa

Haji’s The Sweetness of Tears, and Mahmoud Saeed’s “Must‘amarat al-‘azā’āt” (“Lizards’

Colony”) all share a focus on the female interpreter and her role in the Iraq War (2003-2011).

Each of these texts forces its protagonist to examine her role in the occupation of Iraq, her

relationship to the atrocities committed by the US military, and her gendered experience

within the military.12 Both Kachachī and Saeed are Iraqis living outside of Iraq. Kachachī

moved to France in 1979 and completed a PhD in Journalism from the Sorbonne Nouvelle in

35

Paris. The American Granddaughter was shortlisted for the International Prize in Arabic

Fiction (IPAF or Arabic Booker) in 2009, and her novel Tashāri was shortlisted in 2014. She

continues to live and write in Paris and works as a correspondent for a number of Arabic-

language newspapers. Mahmoud Saeed left Iraq in 1985 and has lived in Chicago since 1999.

He has written several novels, perhaps the most well-known of which is his 1981 novel ’Anā

aladhī rā’ā. Much of his work deals with violence in Iraq, both under Saddam and after the

US invasion. Nafisa Haji is a Pakistani US American writer living in California. She has an

Ed.D from the University of California at Los Angeles and is also the author of The Writing

on My Forehead.

Kachachī and Saeed belong to the large community of Iraqi writers living in exile.

Kachachī left Iraq for her studies and never returned because of the violence and conflict.

She has lived in France longer than she lived in Iraq, and has said in interviews that while she

still identifies strongly with her Iraqi identity, “it’s not me that still lives in Iraq. Iraq still

lives in me…the millions who left, not only for political reasons but in order to have

freedom, took a little of Iraq with them and preserved it.”13 Saeed was imprisoned and

tortured multiple times after the Ba‘ath Party’s rise to power; he moved to Morocco and the

UAE, with some periods of time spent back in Iraq before moving to Chicago in 1999.14

Many of his novels and short stories have been destroyed, lost, or heavily censored, and all of

his work has been published outside of Iraq. He is a strong proponent of realistic fiction, and

has expressed a lack of enthusiasm for science fiction and historical fiction.15 Kachachī, who

is trained and works as a journalist, has said that her “main concern in writing fiction is to

make use of the past and record its details as a kind of legacy.”16 Like many Iraqi writers,

both Kachachī and Saeed continue writing in Arabic about Iraq to maintain a connection to it

36

and to contribute their voices and experiences of and about Iraq to the development of the

Iraqi novel.

Nafisa Haji lived and wrote into the US before moving to Turkey six years ago. She

moved frequently growing up, spending time in Karachi, London, Manila, and Chicago, and

speaks English, Urdu, Arabic, and Turkish, but writes in English. This global movement is

reflected in The Sweetness of Tears, which shifts between multiple places and features

characters from many different backgrounds. Haji’s work, like many other contemporary

writers, incorporates multiple languages, although she carries this further than the norm.

Kachachī and Saeed use both Arabic and English in the texts under discussion, but Haji uses

English, Arabic, and Urdu primarily, in addition to occasional words and expressions from a

number of other languages.

Zayna Behnam and Jo March,17 the respective protagonists of The American

Granddaughter and The Sweetness of Tears, become translator-interpreters for the US

military through contractors. While Zayna and Jo initially claim to be motivated by

patriotism and duty towards the US, both also have familial motivations. Zayna wants to help

financially support her family and pay for her brother’s rehabilitation. Jo decides, after

learning that her biological father is Pakistani, to learn Arabic and Urdu in college. Zaynab,

the protagonist of “Lizards’ Colony,” is raped while working as an interpreter for the US

Army but has to continue at her job to support her sick child. All of the protagonists have to

re-examine their reasons for becoming interpreters and the consequences of that choice.

Because none of these writers lived in Iraq during the invasion and occupation, these

texts are necessarily the result of their mediated and mediatized experiences of the war.

However, Kachachī and Saeed are Iraqis living in exile, while Haji is a Pakistani US

37

American. Like their translator characters, these writers constantly traverse the space

between languages and cultures. Translation saturates these texts: it operates formally, as an

element of style; thematically, as a site of militarized and individual struggle; and narratively,

as a component of the plot. The texts posit translation as a kind of battlefield, exploring the

struggles of individual translators, the ways translation functions as a metaphor for liminal

identities, and the politics of translation. Through the use of interpreters as literary characters,

these texts merge oral and written translation as well as military and literary translation. A

fictional character interpreting speech in a literary text that mimics the form of a translated

text blurs and bends these categories of translation and undermines the general privileging of

written and literary translation in translation studies.

Translation in Form

The American Granddaughter and “Lizards’ Colony” were both written in Arabic by

Iraqi writers living outside of the Middle East, and both focus on US American as well as

Iraqi characters and their roles in the occupation of Iraq. For both Kachachī and Saeed,

writing in Arabic is a choice.18 For many writers in exile, language is a connection to the

place they left, and writing in Arabic allows Kachachī and Saeed to speak to the global Iraqi

community. Although their work is translated into English, it was written for an audience that

reads Arabic. Their interpreter protagonists in many ways reflect their own diasporic

existence as Iraqis in exile. Through their use of multiple languages and their focus on the

interpreter—the embodiment of translation—each of these writers is participating in a larger

global conversation about the Iraq War and the War on Terror more broadly.

38

These texts diverge significantly from the large number of US veteran memoirs that

have been published since the Iraq War. Many of these popular veteran-penned texts focus

on the “suffering” and guilt of the torturer rather than on the subjectivity and pain of the

tortured. There are a huge number of texts by veterans written in English, making them much

more widely available than texts by Iraqis. While all three texts address torture in some way,

Saeed takes the most direct approach. Both Haji and Saeed specifically confront the role of

interpreters in torture, and Saeed draws clear parallels between the protagonist’s sexual

assault and the torture of a prisoner.

Although both The American Granddaughter and “Lizards’ Colony” are translated

into English, their translations have received little attention in the US (and The American

Granddaughter is now out of print in English). While Saeed’s text rejects the language of

liberation and freedom used to justify the occupation and concentrates on the cycles of

violence the occupation produced, Kachachī and Haji try to look at the supposed

humanitarian motivations for the invasion and occupation on an individual level.

English occupies a notable and problematic position in relation to translation globally.

While the number of texts translated into English is notoriously low, more texts are translated

from English than any other language.19 Rebecca Walkowitz writes that

English-language writing is, like writing in other languages, an object of

globalization; but it is also, unlike writing in other languages, crucial to

globalization’s machinery, both because of its role in digital media and

commerce and because of its role as a mediator, within publishing, between

other literary cultures.20

Globalization and imperialism have facilitated the rise of “global English” as not only a

hegemonic language, but one of the primary languages through which others are mediated.21

In Born Translated, Walkowitz traces the various manifestations of translation in

39

contemporary anglophone novels as well as examining the circulation and practice of the

translation of those novels. She notes that these contemporary writers “build translation into

the form of their works, emphasizing translation’s history and ongoing relevance while

insisting that a novel can belong to more than one language.”22 Her focus is limited to

English-language texts, but all three of the texts I discuss in this chapter draw attention to

translation in both form and content, and they also “belong” to more than one language.

Contemporary literature’s widespread preoccupation with translation bespeaks anxieties

about the limitations of “national” and “world” literature as categories. Linguistically-bound

categories of literature are also being called into question with the increasing recognition that

languages are not discrete but fluid and intermingling.

In the nineteenth century, the global circulation of literary texts led Johann Wolfgang

von Goethe to coin the term “Weltliteratur,” which he believed would come to replace the

paradigm of national literatures. In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used the term in

Communist Manifesto regarding the rise of the bourgeoisie and expansion of the world

market, writing that “national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more

impossible, and from the numerous and local literatures, there arises a world literature.”23

The concept of world literature has, from its inception and early development, been

predicated on both translation and global market flows. This continues to be true today in this

age of globalization. The theorizing of world literature generates significant debate from

scholars of comparative literature.24 Emily Apter and Gayatri Spivak criticize world literature

for its “flattening” of other languages in order to create what Spivak has called “literatures of

the world through English translations organized by the United States.”25

40

Critics of world literature, however, generally embrace its “deprovincialization” of

canon and the accessibility it provides to writers from a wide array of languages. To resist the

erasure of linguistic difference, Apter has argued that “untranslatable” terms and

“untranslatability” act as “a deflationary gesture toward the expansionism and gargantuan

scale of world-literary endeavors.”26 One commonly-cited feature of some “global novels” is

the use of words from second languages. Writers like Mohja Kahf and Rabih Alameddine use

Arabic words and phrases in works written predominantly in English. The English translation

of The American Granddaughter contains a glossary filled mostly with commonly-used

expressions, foods, and proper names of people or historical events. In The Sweetness of

Tears, culturally specific words and phrases appear in italics and are either explained in the

text, or are in the glossary.27 In a text that draws from so many languages, it is unlikely that a

reader would be familiar with all of these words. Although it is not a translation, Haji’s

writing employs strategies often found in translated texts; confronted with an unknown,

italicized word, the reader has to look it up in the glossary to understand it.

All three texts represent and/or use a second (or third) language. The Sweetness of

Tears and the English translation of The American Granddaughter both contain glossaries,

and both italicize nearly all non-English words. The convention of representing English (or

French) text in the Latin alphabet in contemporary Arabic fiction is not uncommon. In

general, English texts use transliteration to represent words from non-Roman scripts (rather

than using the original script itself); contemporary fiction in particular often contains words

from other languages. In the English translation of The American Granddaughter, Arabic

words are represented in italics; Haji uses the same strategy in her novel, so its form mimics

that of a translation. Translation studies scholar Lawrence Venuti has argued for

41

“foreignization” as a strategy for maintaining the cultural specificities of a source text, rather

than “domesticating” them by assimilating or eliding cultural difference to make the text

more legible for the target audience. The texts discussed in this chapter use strategies of

foreignization in the original text, which highlights translation as a formal as well as thematic

component.

In her English translation of The American Granddaughter, Nariman Youssef

chooses to leave certain words untranslated. They are words that would be familiar to an

arabophone audience but would be unfamiliar to most anglophone readers. In addition to

particular foods (dolma, mejaddareh) and expressions (Bismillah, shnou, wallah), there are

also people and historical events that are glossed, including Farhud, Mahjar, Majnun,

Mossadegh, Nasser, Nuri Pasha, Rashid Ali, and Sayyab. These terms are significant in Iraqi

and Middle Eastern history, politics, and literature and thus do not require explanation in the

original. The translation draws attention to these words through italicization and the glossary

augments a reader’s understanding of the text. This foreignizing strategy serves as a reminder

that the text is a translation that comes from a particular cultural context. Translator and

scholar Marilyn Booth writes that in her translations, she “[wants] readers in English to think

about other languages and how bi- or multilingual so many of us are, thinking in different

languages, and maybe not finding the right term in one language—and that English cannot

and should not ‘say everything.’”28 The two Arabic texts employ multiple languages in their

original, which the translators reproduce in their translations; in both cases, the use of

multiple languages (usually Arabic and English) accentuates the context of imperial

occupation and its linguistic power dynamics.

42

The Sweetness of Tears uses a notebook that Jo keeps as a device to represent words

she encounters in other languages. Since childhood, she has used a notebook to write down

new words she learns from her missionary grandmother, and later, from her father and

paternal grandmother. Her maternal grandmother, Faith, changes her name nearly every year,

based on where she has been for her missionary work; for example, she has her grandchildren

call her Abuela (Spanish), Bibi (Swahili), Lola (Tagalog), which sparks Jo’s interest in

language at an early age. She also meets and feels a connection with her paternal

grandmother, Deena, perhaps more so than with her biological father; Deena also sparks Jo’s

interest in Arabic and Urdu. In the clearest example, Jo writes a list of words her father and

grandmother used after a visit, but she cannot remember which words come from Arabic and

which from Urdu, and she forgets the meaning of some of them. Part of the list appears as

follows:

Majlis ?

Mushk water bag

Noha religious song—sad

Muharram month29

Jo’s notebook and her explanation of the process points out her status as a language learner,

rather than someone who grew up speaking these languages, while also displaying part of her

system for learning new words. The notebook also gestures to the always incomplete process

of learning a language, and to the knowledges needed beyond grammar and syntax. All of the

words in her list carry cultural significance, and her meager definitions are inadequate.

In addition to incorporating multiple languages, The Sweetness of Tears also uses a

wide array of intertextual references and employs multiple narrators. The literary references

in the text come from multiple languages, places, and times to underline the shared

43

experiences among the characters, despite their many differences.30 The alternating

narrators—including Jo; her mother, Angela; her maternal grandmother, Faith; her father,

Sadiq; and her paternal grandmother Deena—have varying worldviews, but the novel

ultimately reaffirms humanist connection. Each narrator has a different relationship to Jo and

to her decision to become an interpreter. Her father, for example, expresses “distaste…for

what she had participated in” while also realizing that “if she hadn’t met [him], her life

would have been different” and that she studied these languages because of him.31 Her

mother, on the other hand, never asks about her decision to study Arabic and Urdu, but

recognizes that she is learning “his [Sadiq’s] languages.”32 Although Jo is the focus, the other

narrators show Jo’s development from multiple perspectives and also provide a glimpse into

her family’s history and to the far-reaching consequences of the Iraq War.

Zayna, on the other hand, grew up speaking Arabic and thus has a different

relationship to it than Jo. The American Granddaughter features an interfering author who

attempts to influence Zayna’s ‘original’ text. The author is separate from Zayna, but also a

double or shadow who facilitates her double-consciousness, which W. E. B. DuBois

describes as “the sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, measuring

one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”33 For Zayna,

double-consciousness frames her writing, her examination of her place within her Iraqi and

military communities, and her constant postulating about how others see her. The author sees

Zayna as others see her—something Zayna has difficulty facing. The author’s intrusions can

thus be read as Zayna’s consciousness of the ways that others (like her grandmother) see her

and how they want her story to unfold. Fadwa AbdelRahman reads Zayna’s conflict with the

author as “a mirroring glance that externalizes the character’s struggle for self-definition and

44

self-scrutiny.”34 The conflict between Zayna and the author is another formal way in which

The American Granddaughter performs the doubled nature of the transcultural interpreter.

Through the author’s intrusions, Zayna faces truths about herself that she does not want to

acknowledge, whereas in The Sweetness of Tears Jo’s self-reflection is motivated by the

actions and abuses she witnesses.

In the dialogue of “Lizards’ Colony,” there are references to Zaynab’s translation for

the soldiers, but they are represented in Arabic. In “Lizards’ Colony” and The American

Granddaughter, English is sometimes represented through transliterated words, but there are

other moments when English appears in the text; this literally disrupts the act of reading

because of the difference in script and the change in direction of reading. In “Lizards’

Colony,” the words in English always come from the soldiers, and they are all expletives or

insults.35 These expressions reinforce the violence and vulgarity of the US soldiers and draw

attention to their inability to speak Arabic. The expletives and insults in the story are

culturally specific and arguably untranslatable, so they are left in English. In The American

Granddaughter, brief dialogue in English is sprinkled throughout, but there are other

moments when the text instead reports that a character is speaking English through the phrase

bil-inkilīziyya (in English). The incorporation of multiple languages in these texts underlines

the multiplicity of perspectives and experiences on and of the Iraq War.

Interpreter Characters

Through the use of multicultural contracted interpreters as fictional protagonists,

these texts explore the multiple forms of marginalization the characters face in conflict, in the

military, as contractors, and as diasporic subjects. Furthermore, representing the oral process

45

of interpreting in fiction converts it into a textual form, unsettling the boundaries between

oral and written translation. In Tribal Modern, miriam cooke uses the term barzakh to

characterize the consonance in the Arab Gulf of the tribal and the modern. The term appears

in the Qur’an to describe the meeting point of freshwater and saltwater bodies as well as the

space between life and death.36 For the military interpreter characters, translation itself acts

as a kind of barzakh; they are often in positions that require them to shift between languages,

national identities, gender identities, and allegiances. Because of the visibility this role

entails, interpreters continually perform these identities through behavior, dress, and the

manner in which they translate.

Because the interpreter’s physical presence is a constant reminder of the process of

translation, this role does not allow for the “translator’s invisibility” in the same sense as

literary texts. Lawrence Venuti, one of the most cited scholars in translation studies, argues

in The Translator’s Invisibility that there are two primary methods of translation:

foreignizing and domesticating. Both of these draw on Friedrich Schleiermacher’s models of

either bringing the text to the reader (domesticating) or bringing the reader to the text

(foreignizing).37 Venuti is strongly in favor of foreignizing as well as highlighting the

translator’s visibility, arguing that domesticating a text is a form of violence, and that

domesticating contributes to the invisibility of the translator.38 The interpreter, while

physically visible, is supposed to translate as “accurately” as possible, which is arguably a

form of domesticating. The interpreter is often imagined as having the ability to “purely”

translate from one language to another. Inghilleri notes that “in most accounts of interpreting

in war, impartiality is not what is at issue; interpreters know that they have chosen sides and

are clear about the risk of violence, both symbolic and physical, that this implies.”39 For

46

many interpreters, and particularly for the interpreters portrayed in literature, loyalty is a

complex issue: some working for financial reasons may feel little or no loyalty to the US,

others’ loyalties change as they experience war. The interpreter characters in these texts face

situations that preclude any possibility of neutrality. The barzakh represents a space where

two entities meet while mixing and remaining separate simultaneously, as the interpreter

characters in these texts do. They are always aware of their own identities and ethical,

national, or familial commitments that cause them to question their work as interpreters and

their place in the occupation.

Through the use of first-person in The American Granddaughter and The Sweetness

of Tears, the protagonists express their personal thoughts about their roles as interpreters,

which illustrates how complicated assuming such a role can be and gives narrative space to

figures whose internal processes are largely invisible. The use of first-person draws attention

to their personal thoughts and feelings, diverging from the roles they must play as

interpreters in which their self-expression is extremely limited. Even though they are visibly

(and contractually) connected to the US forces, the feelings they express about the role are

considerably more complicated. This formal strategy also highlights narrators’ biases as well:

the author and Zayna are often at odds, as are Jo and the rest of her family. They resist

having their opinions mediated or translated by others.

Unlike The Sweetness of Tears, The American Granddaughter relies almost entirely

on the protagonist’s point of view, but the voice of al-mu’āllifa (the author) interrupts and

sometimes overtakes Zayna’s. This metafictional strategy separates the work of fiction being

manipulated by the author and Zayna’s text, thereby framing Zayna’s text as the “real” or

47

“original” text and the author as an outside, interfering force. The first time the author

appears, Zayna is typing on her computer:

I do not want to respond to the nagging author who crowds me at the

computer, sitting glued shoulder to shoulder like we are a duo forced to play

on one piano. She wants to tap [the keys] together—with four hands and

twenty fingers—the story of the American granddaughter returning to the

family home in Baghdad. I do not want this author next to me; I push her

away from me, rebel against her attempts, and click to delete the writing on

the screen.40

From her first appearance, the author is an unwelcome, nagging (lajūj) presence, forcing

herself into Zayna’s story with her own agenda—namely, to write a “nationalist novel

(riwāya waṭaniyya).”41 The battle between Zayna and the author in many ways echoes

discussions in world literature about the global and the local. As an Iraqi US citizen who

returns to Iraq, Zayna’s narration drifts back and forth between Detroit and Iraq, while the

author wants the focus only on Iraq from the perspective of an Iraqi. By intervening in

Zayna’s text, the author promotes her own views of Iraq and attempts to undermine Zayna’s

US American perspective. The author aims to appropriate Zayna’s narrative for political

ends; in a space that is supposed to be Zayna’s own, she faces another force trying to curb

her expression. This intervention by the author is a form of renarration; Baker writes that

“intervention can…mean proceeding with the mediation, and being as ‘faithful’ as possible

in ‘speaking on behalf of another,’ but at the same time distancing yourself from their ideas,

even challenging them directly.”42 For Zayna, the author’s intervention and renarration are

unwanted. Her relationship with the author is alternately pitying and antagonistic; she aims to

understand the author and her perspective even as she undermines and disagrees with her. By

48

addressing the author’s intervention directly, Zayna renarrates away from the author’s Iraqi

nationalist narrative in favor of her own, more personal one.

Zayna consciously divides her writer-self from her bodily self; she says, “I came out

from behind the screen and gave her [the author] the keyboard. I wanted to look at the scene

beyond the text, to perform my true role (aqūm bi-dawrī al-haqīqī), which is beyond lines of

words.”43 It is as if her writer-self exists only in and through writing, while performing her

true role exists apart from it. Her keyboard and her screen take her out of the space of the real

and into a more internal space. She says she wants to “perform” her true role, suggesting that

even when she steps away from her writer-self and into reality, she is putting on a show in a

conscious way. Her antagonistic relationship with the author also represents another doubling

of herself. Zayna is intent on speaking for herself and pities the author for her naïve devotion

to “antiquated nationalism (waṭanīyatuha alatī walā zamānuhā wa taḥajarat).”44 Near the

end of the novel, Zayna overpowers the author by planting a mine and pushing her onto it.

This struggle between Zayna and the author stems from fear of misrepresentation on both

sides. There are many points in the novel where Zayna wants to explain her identity and

behavior to Iraqis but is prevented because of her job. The author, too, wants to rob Zayna of

her voice and aims to reduce her to a caricature “on top of the US tank like a female Rambo”

rather than portray her messy “reality.”45 Zayna does not want to be categorized in this

limited, clichéd way; in her own text, Zayna

attempts to be as inclusive as possible by representing the richness of the Iraqi

culture with all its shades: Muslim as well as Christian, Shi’a as well as Sunni

and Chaldean as well as Arab. Through literature, she finally accepts the

realities of her multiplicity and is able to see herself for the first time in her

‘totality’ and to ‘re-cognize’ the holistic nature of her different constituents.46

49

The use of these multiple perspectives and languages in these two novels sets the stage for

the obstacles the protagonists persistently face during the course of their work as interpreters.

In working between languages and cultures as interpreters, Zayna and Jo are constantly

reminded of the many identities they embody; they continuously resituate themselves in

relation to their various communities, and renarrate their views on the occupation and their

roles in it.

When she arrives in Iraq, the reaction by Iraqis is not what Zayna expects: “None of

them were smiling or waving their handkerchiefs like in the scenes in my head from

American World War II movies of girls in Paris and Naples waving to US Army convoys and

climbing onto the armored vehicles to steal a kiss from the lips of a handsomely tanned

soldier.”47 At the beginning of the novel, Zayna seems to believe that the US Army is

liberating rather than occupying, hence her surprise at their less than warm reception. Her

own naïve ideas about war in general—which come from “American” movies—reflect her

naïve ideas about the Iraq War in particular. Further, in her description the soldier is clearly a

male figure; as a part of the entering force, she genders herself as male, occupying the figure

of the “handsomely tanned soldier.” Zayna resists discussing her direct experience of the

war, almost as if it is too painful as an Iraqi and US citizen to articulate that marginalized

experience. Instead, she draws on other wars; in drawing on these wars, however, she erases

her gendered experience and defaults to the male soldier’s experience. In his article “In War

Times: Fictionalizing Iraq,” Roger Luckhurst notes that “the resistance to narrative or

representation of this contemporary war means that cultural narratives about it are often

displaced or filtered through the iconography of prior wars.”48 Zayna uses her knowledge of

50

World War II rather than, for example, the Gulf War, which occupies an important place in

Iraqi collective memory.

Both Zayna and Jo adapt their behaviors, language, and dress to blend in to different

groups, engaging in what Homi Bhabha calls mimicry. In the postcolonial context, mimicry

occurs when members of a colonized society imitate their colonizers, through language,

attitude, and behavior; Zayna indeed engages in a kind of mimicry because of her

ambivalence towards being both part of the occupying force and a former subject of the

occupied space. She feels very strong ties to Iraq and wants to feel that she still belongs to

the Iraqi community even though she is there working for the US. However, because her

primary role in her return is that of an interpreter in a military context, she feels separate

from Iraqis—both and neither at the same time, again invoking the idea of the barzakh. In

The Sweetness of Tears, Jo’s experience is nearly opposite: she uses language as a way to

either blend in or stand out from the local population, depending on the context. Because her

physical appearance is “ambiguous” (she is “read” as both Pakistani and American in

different instances), she is able to blend in where she wants. Of her experience as an

interpreter, she notes,

You’d think I wouldn’t fit in. I don’t know what it says about me that they

accepted me as they did. I wasn’t even that good at my job, not as good as

some of the native speakers who were also on contract, far better interpreters

than I was. I think I was more trusted than they were. Simply because I wasn’t

a native speaker.49

She recognizes her advantaged position as a US citizen who learned languages rather than

being a native speaker of those languages. In “The Ethical Task of the Translator,” Moira

Inghilleri notes that during the Iraq War, “competition erupted over translation assignments

as well as the linguistic competence of non-native Arabic linguists, many of whom were

51

inadequately trained and struggled with the language, including its regional varieties.”50

Zayna, who did grow up speaking Arabic, is privileged over “local” (Iraqi) interpreters

because of her US citizenship. In War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction, Ikram Masmoudi

compares The American Granddaughter with Shākir Nūrī’s novel Al-minṭaqa al-khaḍrā’,51

which features a “local” interpreter named Ibrāhīm. Zayna lived outside of Iraq before the

invasion and is relatively unknown to the community, while Ibrāhīm has to carry out his

work in a mask and is subject to suspicion and abuse by the US soldiers. There is a sense of

distrust and unwillingness on the part of the military to allow native Arabic speakers to

engage in translation and interpreting, precisely because they are “other.” As a native speaker

of Arabic and a Chaldean, Zayna is “other” to the US Americans, but as an interpreter for the

US military, she is “other” to the Iraqis. Her character thus comes to invoke one identity over

the other, strategically.

In both novels, the protagonists shift the ways in which they perform their identities

through their appearance and language. Zayna and Jo both dress, behave, and speak in

specific ways depending on their interlocutors. As Judith Butler writes in Gender Trouble,

gender is a “corporeal style, an ‘act’…which is both intentional and performative, where

‘performative’ suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning.”52 By

performing their identities according to what they perceive as the norms in different contexts,

they link the enacting of multiple identities to their roles as interpreters. The shifting modes

of dress used by the two protagonists parallels their shifting behaviors in their work as

interpreters. In both cases, they perform particular identities and affiliations in order to

strategically adapt to different contexts. Not only do they dress in particular ways to signal

52

belonging to different communities, they also adjust their behaviors, speech, and language

choice to influence the situations they encounter when interpreting.

When Jo returns to Pakistan and then Iraq with her father and grandmother, she

sometimes dresses in traditional clothing and speaks Urdu and Arabic in order to “blend in.”

However, there are other are times when she dresses like an “American” and only speaks

English, going so far as to use a translator to interpret Arabic in order to appear

inconspicuous. She says,

I spoke through Qasim. For some reason, Sadiq wanted me to keep my Arabic

a secret. He said it might draw unnecessary attention...I waited impatiently for

Qasim to translate back to me, the pretense of not already having understood

grating on my nerves.53

In this passage, Jo is dressed in an abaya54 and is pretending not to understand Arabic; her

mimicry is thus twofold: linguistic and sartorial. Her father, Sadiq, does not want her to draw

attention to herself as someone who speaks Arabic, but she is also dressed in a garment

typically worn by Muslim women, while she herself is a Christian. Earlier, she is surprised

that the soldiers boarding her bus do not recognize her as US American. She says,

I was struck by the fact that none of the soldiers recognized me as American.

That felt strange...I had the nearly irresistible urge to stand up and wave and

say, “Hey guys! Where are you from? I’m from California!”55

In this case, she wants to be part of a group, but has “camouflaged” herself so as not to be

seen as US American, which creates a feeling of anxiety. After this encounter, she sinks into

her seat, “glad not to be noticed.”56 Jo is using mimicry in an opposite way from what

Bhabha describes. She engages in mimicry in order to become like a colonial (occupied)

subject, rather than to become like the colonizer. While in Iraq, she tries to blend in and not

look like a US American. She recognizes this odd position by voicing her “nearly irresistible

53

urge” to stand up and assert her position as a US American to the US soldiers. This

ambiguity and uncertainty extends to gender expression as well. In her analysis of the

gendered discourse in media coverage of Jessica Lynch, Sharon L. Holland argues that

“transgressive performances (i.e. women performing the role of masculine soldier) are often

recuperated back into a two-sex/gender schema for the purpose of ‘making sense’ of those

performances and of institutions that are founded upon the disciplining of gendered

bodies.”57 Although they are not actually members of the military, these interpreters work

with them closely and often wear uniforms; as a result, they face the military’s binary gender

expectations.

Zayna repeatedly mentions her uniform as a source of both belonging and shame. She

says, “I was sure that I was going on the mission that would let me earn my US citizenship. It

was my opportunity to repay the country that has embraced me since childhood and opened

its arms to me and my family.”58 Becoming a part of the male-dominated US military during

their occupation of her home country at first makes her feel more US American. As a

woman, an Iraqi, and an interpreter (rather than strictly a soldier) however, she never quite

fits into the army, nor does she fit in as an Iraqi citizen. She does, however, feel indebted to

the US to the point that she wants to “earn” the citizenship it has already granted her.

Although Zayna is not actually a member of the military, she embraces the role of soldier and

sees the uniform as erasing her gender. miriam cooke remarks that “war literature [enables] a

woman to become a combatant…by creating women who challenge gender norms by playing

men’s roles and wearing men’s clothes, or more subtly, by refusing society’s rules for proper

conduct for women.”59 There is a sense of ceremony around Zayna’s donning of the uniform,

but one that pushes her even further into a liminal space in terms of gender, occupation, and

54

nationality: the uniform obfuscates her gender, and although it is a visual, material

designation of belonging to the army, she is a contracted interpreter not a soldier. The

uniform marks her as US American outwardly, and inwardly makes her feel more US

American, complicating her Iraqi identity and her role in Iraq as quasi-occupier. Zayna’s

uniform affects not only her feelings of belonging to the military and alienation from Iraqis,

but also her gender expression. She says,

I tell myself that they are not afraid of me, but of my uniform. It was not by

accident that I felt something akin to masculinity the day I put on my army

uniform. This uniform gives me dimensions that disappear when I take it off;

as if it stretches me, lifts my shoulders, and broadens my chest.60

This explicit reference to masculinity (al-rujūla) illustrates the extent to which the uniform

influences Zayna’s conception of her own gender. She feels that putting on the uniform

changes her physiology as well as her psychology. These changes that the uniform causes

disappear when she takes it off, emphasizing Zayna’s mutable identity.

It is notable that both Zayna and Jo don abayas at different moments in their

respective novels, and to different ends. Zayna wears a black abaya to visit her grandmother,

which is a significant sartorial moment for her. After the occupation of Iraq, Islamist parties

and militias grew in resistance to the occupation. Participation in public life became

increasingly difficult—particularly for women—because of harassment, abduction, and

sexual assault; as a result, it became common for women to cover themselves when leaving

the house. Despite both being Christian, Zayna and Jo feel compelled to wear an abaya and

cover their hair in the way many Muslim women do. They do this partly as a matter of safety,

but both also want to go unrecognized. Zayna does not want to be seen in her uniform by

55

others, especially her grandmother. Jo’s father, Sadiq, asks Jo to wear an abaya so as not to

draw attention to herself. They use these articles of clothing to obscure their identities.

As The American Granddaughter progresses, Zayna’s relationships with the US, Iraq,

her role as interpreter, and her role as writer, all develop. Initially upon her return to Iraq, she

feels separated from the soldiers, but also feels more ideologically committed to the US

Army’s presence as “liberator.” As she witnesses raids and the Iraqi people’s response to the

soldiers, her opinion becomes increasingly ambivalent, but she remains committed to the

military occupation. When she first arrives in Iraq, she notes, “I wanted to flaunt my kinship

in front of them, show them that I was a daughter of the same part of the country, that I spoke

their language (lughatahum) with the same accent (bi-lahjatihim).”61 Even though she is

there because of her job with the military, she still wants to feel like a part of Iraq and its

people. Despite her desire to belong to Iraq, she says “their” language, rather than “ours”; she

distances, and sees herself as apart from, her homeland. Because of her military orders, she

cannot reach out to her Iraqi “kin” and explain who she is. She notes,

For the first time, I resented my army uniform that was cutting me off

(t‘azalnī) from my people. It made me feel we were crouching in opposing

trenches. We were in fact crouching in opposing trenches. Like any skilled

actor, I felt I had the ability to adopt a role and change character, to be

simultaneously their daughter and their enemy, while they could be my kin

(‘ahlī) as well as my enemy (khusūmī).62

Again, Zayna notes the feeling of acting or playing a role as opposed to being herself or

behaving naturally. She resents the army for preventing her from expressing herself, but also

notes that her Iraqi “kin” can also be her enemy. Although the US military is not in Iraq to

fight a war against Iraq in the traditional sense, Zayna nevertheless feels that she and the

Iraqi people are in “opposing trenches.” She notes that she could be “simultaneously their

56

daughter and their enemy,” which positions the Iraqi people as the parent, and by extension

Iraq as the mother/fatherland. Using the term “daughter” for herself places creates a power

differential between herself and Iraq while also subtly invoking her relationship with her

grandmother. The text’s title, The American Granddaughter, defines Zayna as a

granddaughter, necessarily positioning her with relation to her grandmother in Iraq.

Additionally, it marks her as specifically US American; throughout the text, she struggles

with and against both of these designations.

In Economy of Force, Patricia Owens traces the history of counterinsurgency,

specifically analyzing “the household of the modern social realm as a concrete historical

entity and form of government, as a category of political and international thought, and as an

object of military strategy.”63 The work of interpreters traverses the spatial and symbolic

boundaries between the domestic and foreign. In raids, for example, US soldiers invade the

household space with the purported goal of catching “terrorists” to protect Iraqi civilians.

Often violent and destructive, these raids serve to intimidate, coerce, and control civilians. In

a situation so fraught with tension, the interpreter is an arbiter of conflict. There is only one

raid described in detail in The American Granddaughter, with passing mention made of

several others. During this raid, there are descriptions of the inside of the house punctuated

with aggressive dialogue yelled by the soldiers and nervous replies from the residents. Zayna

questions labeling the man whose house they raid the “target” (al-hadaf), and she admits that

the memories of the raid cause her insomnia, but she still does not question the occupation.64

Raids are emblematic of the invasion broadly: both depend on unreliable intelligence

and orientalist rhetoric as justification to enact violence on Iraqi “others.” Before a raid

targeting a former security officer, Zayna proclaims that as long as there are people like him,

57

“Iraq will not rise up (yanhaḍ) and follow the chant of democracy.”65 She touts the invasion

and occupation as an altruistic mission to spread democracy even as she watches US soldiers

spread chaos and violence. Her insistence that Iraq must “yanhaḍ” places Iraq in a

disadvantaged position that it must overcome. Speaking of al-hadaf of their raid, she says

simply, “we were told (qīl lanā) that he is a son of a bitch.”66 The use of the passive qīl gives

no agent for the action and exhibits Zayna’s seemingly absolute trust in what she is told, even

when she does not know the source. On the raid—after the soldiers tie his hands, push him to

the floor, and hold an M16 to his head—she discovers that “al-hadaf” is actually a professor

at the University of Tikrit named Muḥammad Khalīl. He admits that he speaks English, but

instead of speaking for himself asks Zayna to explain his situation to the other soldiers. He

puts his faith in Zayna and her position of authority to intervene on his behalf, affording her

the power to condemn or absolve him. She tries to calm Muḥammad and his wife and

intercedes to let the sergeant know that they need to look for his ID card; only after Zayna

confirms his name and profession does the sergeant apologize and leave the house. Her

mediation in this instance prevents further violence; however, immediately after leaving

Muḥammad’s house, they raid another house before returning to the base and she expresses

disappointment that they did not find the “son of a bitch [they] were looking for.”67 Even

though this scene forces Zayna to directly confront the failure of US intelligence in Iraq, she

remains convinced of the mission.

Jo’s supervisors, like Zayna’s, dehumanize and demonize the people for whom she

interprets to prevent her from sympathizing with them. Their warnings illustrate the desire to

control the narrative before the prisoners have had the chance to speak. After she participates

in the interrogation of the children of a supposed murderer, the “guy in charge” tells her,

58

“[d]on’t let yourself get all dewy-eyed for those kids. Their father is a murdering monster.

They’re murderers in training. They don’t deserve those tears threatening to fall out of your

girly eyes.”68 His harsh response to Jo’s visible distress dramatizes the normative gender

expectations that are pervasive in the US military. Jo’s supervisor sees emotion as a

weakness, and specifically as a feminine weakness. He illustrates this again later when

talking about the behavior of prisoners:

They’ll cry and talk about how innocent they are. I mean grown men.

Weeping. Be ready for that. They’ll tell you their sob stories. About what a

big mistake we’ve made. That’s not your problem. Your job is just to

translate. To tell them what we tell you to tell them. To tell us what they tell

you.69

He begins by undermining the masculinity of the prisoners who cry while also suggesting

that Jo is susceptible to emotional manipulation, presumably because she is a woman. Not

only does Jo’s supervisor question the masculinity of the men being interrogated, he also

questions Jo’s ability to do her job adequately because of her gender. Further, he asserts his

authority over Jo; her job is just to translate exactly what she is told and what he tells her. He

considers Jo a vehicle of communication, failing to consider the culturally specific

knowledge needed to translate effectively or the power that Jo wields. Without her, he would

be unable to understand the prisoner. Although Jo reacts with sympathy and Zayna intervenes

in their respective confrontations with injustice, they both ultimately follow orders; both

accept chain of command, although they do try to mitigate violence inasmuch as they are

able.

After going months without seeing her grandmother, Rahma, Zayna goes to visit her

but has to do so in uniform; the visit is staged as a raid, and her grandmother is

understandably distressed by this. Her grandmother’s extreme reaction upon seeing her in

59

uniform leads Zayna to question the moral, ethical implications of her job. Rahma makes

Zayna question herself as an Iraqi, a US American and even as a member of her own family.

When Rahma (who lives in Baghdad), comes to visit her in Tikrit, Zayna greets her in

“civilian clothes (thiyāb madaniyya).”70 At first, she refuses to admit to her grandmother that

she works with the US military, telling her that she works as a translator for an electric

company; when her grandmother is upset and suspicious, Zayna tells her that she works for

the UN and is observing the US military's interactions with Iraqi civilians. Zayna’s

grandmother, who is a religious, nationalist Iraqi woman, certainly influences Zayna’s

relationship to Arabic, but Zayna is ashamed to admit to her that she is an interpreter for the

army. She uses her civilian clothes to mask her job (and the reason she is in Iraq) from her

grandmother, fearing that “her heart would stop beating if [she] told her the truth.”71 The title

of the novel defines Zayna in relation to her grandmother, and she is determined to preserve

that relationship. When her grandmother dies, Zayna asks herself, “did my grandmother die

from the humiliation of my job and my army uniform? Did she die of shame? The shame of

an American granddaughter?”72 While before, her uniform was a source of pride, after her

grandmother’s death it becomes a source of shame.

Translating/Interpreting

Translation studies has long contemplated the ethical relationship between translator

and text; however, its focus has usually been on literary translation. The role of the

interpreter in particular brings up a number of complex questions about ethics and translation

practice. As a field, translation studies privileges literary translation above other translation

activities, and thinking about an ethics of translation in the context of translation and

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interpreting in conflict is altogether different. Particularly in Iraq War literature, the position

of interpreters in interrogations lies at the intersection of competing loyalties: professional,

military, and communal, which can inform their behavior. While it is generally agreed upon

that there is no such thing as an “impartial” translation, the scenes of torture and interrogation

in these texts highlight the difficult ethical position of the interpreter. The reliance on

translation and interpreting to wage war and the particular violence and torture enacted by the

US military in the 21st century in which translators and interpreters have been implicated

calls for a new consideration of the ethics of translation. Inghilleri argues for the inclusion of

what she calls “spoken text” into discussions of translation and ethics. In literary translation

studies, issues of foreignization versus domestication, the translator’s agency (or invisibility),

and questions of power (political, economic, social) are central to discussions about

formulating an ethics of translation. The vast spectrum of experience of translators and

interpreters in conflict zones makes it impossible to conceive of a broad ethics of conflict

translation; given the complexity and diversity of these experiences, looking at the ways in

which fictional texts use interpreter-characters to enact an individual ethics of translation

allows us to consider some of the dilemmas facing interpreters in conflict.

Many fictional texts about the invasion and occupation of Iraq contain scenes of

interrogation and torture. Such texts often refer explicitly or implicitly to Abu Ghraib, or to

interrogation techniques known to be used by the US military. In the extreme space of an

interrogation, there are two opposing parties: the interrogator and the interrogee. The

interpreter belongs wholly to neither of these categories. Further, the interpreter may not be

the driving force of the interrogation, but they often witness human rights violations. The

61

interpreter in interrogations ultimately determines the way in which the acts of the

interrogation will proceed.

Since 9/11, and particularly since the release of the Abu Ghraib photos in 2004,

torture and interrogation scenes have become a staple of a variety of different film,

television, and literary genres. Often, these scenes feature the “ticking bomb” scenario,

whereby the torturer attempts to get information out of someone to stop a bomb from

presumably killing thousands of people (or to stop some comparable disastrous event). Not

only do the frequency of torture scenes in film and television serve to normalize torture, they

also nearly always adhere to the public “ticking bomb” narrative that justifies it. Despite the

widespread recognition (including from the CIA itself) that torture is rarely effective, its

fictional representations often end with the torturer’s success at attaining the desired

information.

Typically, four people “participate” in an interrogation: the interrogator, the

interpreter, the analyst, and the person being interrogated. Analysts are not usually directly

involved in an interrogation; they collect intelligence on the subject of the interrogation, and

work in varying capacities with the interrogator to prepare for the interrogation. The

relationship of the interpreter and the interrogator can also vary widely, but the interpreter is

an essential part of the interrogation process. An entire chapter of the Army interrogation

manual entitled “Human Intelligence Collector Operations” is devoted to the role of the

interpreter in an interrogation. In the section “Methods of Interpreter Use,” the manual notes

that there are two appropriate placements for the interpreter: behind the “detainee” in order to

increase a sense of anxiety, or next to the interrogator to create a “more relaxed”

atmosphere.73 The manual also delineates two different strategies for “using” an interpreter:

62

the “basic method” and the “advanced method.” The basic method involves treating the

interpreter almost like a translation machine, providing only the essential information needed

to conduct the interrogation, and not including the interpreter in the planning process. In the

basic method, the manual states that “the interpreter is used solely as an interpretation

device.”74 This unambiguously equates the interpreter to a ‘device’ to be used by the

interrogator. The advanced method encourages collaboration with the interpreter, advising

the interrogator to take advantage of the interpreter’s cultural knowledge and allowing the

interpreter to be a part of the preparatory process. The basic method instrumentalizes the

interpreter and excludes them from contributing to the process. This method and its

appellation as basic suggest that it is the less desirable of the two methods, and the one

intended for less-experienced interrogators. The advanced method involves more

participation from the interpreter, specifically relying on their “cultural knowledge.” Both

cases create problems for the interpreter: in the basic method, the interpreter only translates,

but does not become further involved in the interrogation; whereas in the advanced method,

the interpreter assumes a more active role in the interrogation, arguably making them more

complicit in the interrogation. This handbook chapter also illustrates the institutional

limitations in which interpreters operate; the interrogator has the official “authority” to

conduct the interrogation. In reality, though, the interpreter has significant unacknowledged

power; within this framework, the interpreter decides the register of language, how to use and

interpret gestures and body language, and how to translate the speech of these two parties,

which ultimately determine the procedures of the interrogation.

All of the interpreters in the texts I analyze in this chapter are employed through

contractors; the institutional status of contracted translators and interpreters reflects a larger

63

uncertainty about the role of Private Military Companies (PMC) and Private Security

Companies (PSC) in conflict zones.75 Several private companies (Blackwater76, Titan, CACI,

Halliburton) were contracted by the US military to provide translators and interpreters to

work with them. This included Arabic-speaking US citizens, local national interpreters (also

called local interpreters or “terps”) and third country nationals.

In The American Granddaughter, when Zayna first comes to Iraq she sees herself as

aiding in the reconstruction of her country and assisting in the “liberation” of her fellow

Iraqis. She becomes disillusioned over the course of the novel, but she is never able to

comfortably be part of both the military institution and her Iraqi community. Her motivation

for becoming an interpreter is to help her family, including trying to get treatment for her

brother, who is an addict. In “Lizards’ Colony,” Zaynab also becomes an interpreter for

financial and familial reasons: her daughter is sick and in need of medical treatment, and the

job provides her both the access and the money she needs. The night after her first day of

work, some of Zaynab’s colleagues invite her to go out with them, and the next day she

wakes up in the hospital. The general she works for comes to visit her in the hospital and

shows her a picture of herself in a male officer’s arms. He asks her about her salary

($210,000) and says “everything has a price. Isn’t that so? (li-kul shay‘ thamanhu ‘alaysa

kadhalik?),”77 implying that in order to make so much money—six times a school teacher’s

salary, he notes—she must give something else besides just her skills as an interpreter. She

twice says “everything was anticipated and calculable.”78 This sexual assault—which puts

her in the hospital for ten days—gives Zaynab absolutely no recourse, both because she

needs her job and because there are pictures of her (which she does not remember) that give

the impression that it could have been a consensual encounter. She reflects,

64

Her calamity was too great to be washed away with tears. She was a tasty

morsel that had landed between a leopard’s claws. What could she do? If they

had taken this photo of her, no doubt they had taken other pictures of her in

much more compromising positions.79

These photos—the “real” one that is shown to her, and the threat of other possible photos—

terrify Zaynab, and ultimately assist the general in controlling—or at least manipulating—her

behavior.

Both Zayna and Zaynab experience the ire of others in the course of their work with

the US Army. When Zayna is left alone with a prisoner, they have the following

conversation:

“Where are you from, sister? (al-ukht min wayn?)”

“America.”

“But your accent is from Baghdad.”

“Yes, I was born in Baghdad.”

“So why do you work with the occupiers of Baghdad (maḥtalī Baghdād?)”

I cut off the conversation. “You’re not allowed to speak when the officer is

not present (laysa min haqqak ān tatakalam ṭālimā ’ān al-ḍābit ghayr

mawjūd).”80

Similarly, in “Lizards’ Colony,” Ahmad al-Tawwil asks “Aah, lalla al-Iraqiya, ashhal min

dirri ma‘ak?” which means “Iraqi lady, how many children do you have?” repeatedly

throughout the story.81 In both texts, the prisoners know immediately that the interpreters are

Iraqi from their dialect. Further, each prisoner asks the interpreter a pointed question meant

to elicit a reaction, as in an interrogation. Asking “al-ukht min wayn?” can be a polite way of

asking about someone’s origins, but it can also have an undertone of hostility, as it does here.

This brief destabilization of roles elicits a response from both interpreter characters, and

provocation seems to be the goal for both of the prisoners. Zayna cuts off the conversation

65

and tells the man he is not allowed to speak after he asks why she works with the occupiers

of Baghdad. In doing so, she attempts to reassert control, but her impulse to silence the

prisoner illustrates that his provocation has succeeded.

Ahmad al-Tawwil (also called Ahmad al-Maghribi), the prisoner Zaynab interrogates,

repeatedly asks her “Aaa, Lalla al-Iraqiya, ashhal min dirri ma‘ak?”82 This is the only thing

he says during the entire interrogation, regardless of what Zaynab says or asks him. A soldier

comes in and hooks up a machine to Ahmad’s penis, tortures him, then asks Zaynab to

continue questioning him. His response remains the same. She becomes so frustrated that she

starts beating him, which ultimately kills him. Ahmad initially reminds Zaynab of her

brother, who is also named Ahmad, noting the physical similarities between them. She is

sympathetic at the beginning of their discussion, trying to make a connection with him and

almost pleading with him to answer her. She likens the sexual violence he experiences to her

own, but remarks that she was unconscious and has no memory of what happened, only

constant pain to remind her that it did. The question he asks draws very precisely on her own

anxieties about her position: he knows that she is an Iraqi woman, which he likely points out

to question her choice to work with the US, and he seems to intuit that she is a mother.

Asking how many children she has first of all reminds her of the reason she took the job and

the reason she must stay at it: to provide her daughter with the medical care she needs. The

question is highly gendered; he draws on her position as a mother to make her feel guilty and

to question herself about what she is doing. Further, he uses words (lalla, dirri) that are

specific to Maghrebi dialect, undermining her competence as an interpreter and forcing her to

consult a booklet to look up words.

66

The way the soldiers talk about Ahmad is inconsistent and often contradictory. The

previous interrogators conclude that “Ahmad Al-Tawwil [is] dangerous, a systematic,

profound thinker who devised terrorist plans (khuṭaṭ ’irhabiyya) of the first caliber and an

extremely vicious man.”83 Zaynab is not the first person involved in the interrogation; she is

sent in to “double check” on his statement (which has remained virtually unchanged for the

16 months he has been imprisoned) but there seems to be no expectation from the officers

that she will get any new information. The general in particular is fixated on dominating

Ahmad; he acknowledges his resilience as the last prisoner to continue a hunger strike and

acknowledges his strength among the other prisoners (’ayūjad ’aqwa minhu?84). The general

yells and screams in frustration to Ahmad’s repeated questions and enacts his revenge by

authorizing the use of the machine.

This scene describes torture in extreme detail. Ahmad’s face is covered in bandages

throughout the torture, so sounds are his only form of expression. In The Body in Pain,

Elaine Scarry writes that “physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys

it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and

cries a human being makes before language is learned.”85 We see Ahmad’s pain only through

the sounds he makes and his bodily movement: he makes a sound that is “hoarse, strangled,

like a rattle,” he moans and chokes, and his body jerks and shakes. Saeed describes in

painstaking detail the preparation for torture, the torture itself, and the process of cleaning

and bandaging the resultant injury afterwards. The length and detail of the torture scene are

meant to horrify and disturb the reader. The short story describes intimately and violently the

precise way in which the soldier mutilates Ahmad’s genitals, where the blood appears on his

body, and the procedure he uses to clean him up. Zaynab has a physical reaction to

67

witnessing Ahmad’s torture: she sweats, vomits, and cries as she witnesses it, and eventually

she beats him until he dies. She is not the one being tortured, but her horror at seeing it

produces seemingly involuntary physical responses. As she is beating him, she weeps,

screams, and does not realize what she is doing. This extreme attention to detail resists the

widespread normalization of torture that has been aided by its frequent representations in

film and television. The detailed focus on a sexualized form of torture contrasts starkly with

Zaynab’s silence about her rape. As Ahmad is tortured, Zaynab links her rape to his torture:

“She herself had been sexually violated in a similar way after drugs had rendered her

unconscious to what they were doing to her.”86 Later, as she beats him, “the pains in her

midriff tore into her savagely as their flame seared her.”87 In both of these instances, Zaynab

identifies with Ahmad and frames these violations in similar terms. The soldiers torture

Ahmad in an alleged attempt to get information from him, but their indifferent response to

his death suggests that the main purpose was domination. Zaynab’s rape is also an act of

domination; the pictures taken of her give the general control over her behavior, while the

soldier who drugged and raped her took control of her body.

In The American Granddaughter, Zayna speaks about the photographs of torture at

Abu Ghraib—which reminds her of father’s imprisonment and torture under Ba’ath rule—

but never discusses her own personal encounters with torture. After seeing the images of Abu

Ghraib on the news, she says, “I thought about my father at Saadoun Security Complex and

imagined Private Lynndie England tying him by his neck with a dog leash and dragging him

naked behind her. The gorge rose in my throat and my nose. How would I be able to face my

dad?”88 Like Zaynab, she has an involuntary physical response when confronted with torture,

but Zayna responds to an imagined image of her father rather than torture she witnesses or

68

even the images from Abu Ghraib. Her immediate reaction to the images is shock, and that

shock is heightened by the fact that England is a woman. She says, “there were women

offenders too, and that made my anger more bitter. How did that bitch (qahba), who was

dragging a prisoner behind her like a dog on a leash, get into our army (jayshnā)?”89 While

elsewhere in the text she uses the possessive pronoun “their” when talking about Iraqis, here

she explicitly says our army; despite her horror and guilt, she affirms her commitment to the

US military. Her anger towards the photographs is worsened by the involvement of women,

showing that she—at least in this case—holds to the gendered assumption that women are (or

should be) less violent than men. In other moments, her understanding of her own gender less

rigid, but in this case, she has a fixed view about female behavior in the military. Part of her

reaction is based on her own ideas of what she calls “military honor,” (al-sharaf al-‘askarī)

which she describes in terms of movies and books; she says that “military honor was no

longer just a male issue. There were women offenders, too.”90 In spite of her shock upon

seeing the photos from Abu Ghraib, she remains firmly on the side the army; she denounces

the perpetrators and divorces the rest of the military (including herself) from their actions.

Zayna’s own encounters with US violence in Iraq cause her passing discomfort, but she

remains supportive of the occupation despite participating in raids and interrogations.

There are difficult identifications going on through Zayna’s internal monologue:

Zayna, like England, is a woman working with the military and her father was once a

prisoner like those England tortured. In The Language of Empire, Lila Rajiva examines the

role—and, indeed, failure—of journalists in perpetuating the idea that the torture that took

place at Abu Ghraib was an isolated event carried out by a small group of untrained soldiers.

She writes,

69

sanctified contempt for the other…is at the heart of Abu Ghraib and militates

against any reading of it as a war crime of errant individuals. The half-dozen

reservists are no more than scapegoats in a program of racial and religious

abasement that was conceived as completely legitimate. The photographs

horrify us precisely because they express this sense of legitimacy.91

Zayna’s reaction is very much in line with this widespread journalistic tendency to view Abu

Ghraib as “the work of a few bad apples.” Zayna’s peers even repeat some of the same

phrases that were used to minimize the events at Abu Ghraib, calling the perpetrators

“ignorant, (jahla)” “low-ranking (asḥab al-rutib al-wāṭi’a),” “stupid kids (yasaf ’ulā’ik al-

’awlād bil-ghiba’)”92 and arguing that Ba‘athist prisons were much worse. To this, Zayna

retorts, “our job here isn’t to replace torture with torture (shaghilnā mū tabdīl t‘adhīb bil-

t‘adhīb).”93 She describes her father’s torture as follows:

Before they beat him up, urinated on him, broke his teeth, pulled his tongue

with pincers and extinguished their cigarettes on his skin, they had sat him

down naked at a table, set up a TV camera in front of him and given him a

news report to read. The first item on the report was the execution by hanging

of TV presenter Sabah Shamoun Behnam after his having been convicted of

conspiring against the party and the revolution.94

When her mother tries to file a complaint with the dean of the university (where she works),

he says, “[t]ortured him? My dear, that wasn’t torture. They were just messing with him.”95

In both cases, there is an attempt to downplay the seriousness of torture and the identification

of torture as such. Even though she says “our job here isn’t to replace torture with torture”

she displaces the images from Abu Ghraib with images of her father’s torture under the

Ba’ath. In neither case, however, does she question or even acknowledge the systems of

power that permitted and perpetuated these acts of torture.

70

Many scholars have considered spaces like Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and Camp

Bucca through Agamben’s notions of “bare life” and the “state of exception.” Through a

study of Iraqi literature from the last decade, Ikram Masmoudi traces figures of “bare life”

(the soldier, the war deserter, the detainee, and the suicide bomber) in fiction about the Iran-

Iraq War, the First Gulf War, and the invasion and occupation of Iraq. “Bare life” derives

from Agamben’s homo sacer (“sacred man”), who may be killed without it being considered

a crime and whose death cannot be mourned; he sees this figure as a representation of the

state of exception. Invocations of the state of exception and homo sacer appear across

disciplines in scholarship on the war on terror, but Masmoudi shows the presence of this

figure in other wars in the Iraqi imaginary.

In The Sweetness of Tears, Jo directly confronts her own complicity in acts of torture,

specifically the torture of a prisoner named Fazl, whom all of the soldiers and interrogators

call “Fuzzy.” Fazl responds in the same way to all of Jo’s questions, telling his story from the

beginning and starting over after any interruption. Because he does not answer their

questions directly, the interrogators verbally and physically abuse him while Jo stands by

watching. When Inghilleri discusses the ethics of translation, she is talking about precisely

this problem: it is Jo’s job to translate, but by being present during sessions of torture and

abuse, she is complicit. Jo notes,

I thought...I would be one of the good guys, helping to catch terrorists bent on

killing Americans. I would aid and assist in the investigations and

interrogations that would prevent those and guys from ever hitting us again. I

didn’t know what I know now—that the line between good and bad would get

so blurry. That other line—the one between us and them—getting more

distinct. It had to be, for us to be able to do what had to be done. But there

were visceral moments that stayed with me, fueling my imagination,

71

disorienting me, making it hard sometimes to remember the role I was

assigned to play, to stay detached from the things I had seen—the things I had

been a part of.96

It also turns out that Fazl is probably the son of the woman Sadiq killed in a car accident

when he was younger. This realization makes their encounter more personal and leads to her

quitting her job and going to work as a translator for a habeas lawyer working with

Guantánamo prisoners. Jo and Zayna’s complicity in inflicting or not preventing harm done

to other human beings in their roles as interpreters haunts both of them. Further, it goes

against their motivation for becoming interpreters in the first place; both do so in order to

help in some way, whether by “catching terrorists” or “liberating” the Iraqi people. Both,

however, have to commit acts that breach the “line between good and bad” while further

solidifying the line “between us and them.” This brings up questions about what types of life

are “mournable,” or “grievable,” which Judith Butler discusses at length in Precarious Life.

She writes,

there are no obituaries for the war casualties that the United States inflicts, and

there cannot be. If there were to be an obituary, there would have had to have

been a life, a life worth noting, a life worth valuing and preserving, a life that

qualifies for recognition.97

During her first encounter with Fazl, Jo recognizes that what is happening is unethical, but

tries to distance herself from it because she is a translator and not an interrogator. However,

the dehumanization of Fazl—illustrated particularly by the fact that they give him the name

“Fuzzy”—shows Jo that she is culpable, and goes against the dominant narrative of seeing

the “enemy” as not worthy of grief or mourning.

72

The ethical dimension of conflict interpreting is quite different from the translation of

written literary texts. In order to comfort herself about the ethics of what she has done, Jo

says,

In the grand scheme of things, I was nothing, I knew. Nothing but a translator.

An interpreter. A human dictionary. That’s what I told myself in the

beginning, trying to absolve myself of any part of the responsibility of what

I’d taken part in. But the trick was the human part. A human dictionary.98

She tries to minimize her role as a translator in order to absolve herself of responsibility.

Perhaps because of recent military desires to move towards a (mechanical) universal

translator, she emphasizes the fact of her humanity and therefore her moral, ethical

responsibilities. Further, likening herself to a dictionary takes away her own agency, which is

perhaps what she wants; a dictionary does not itself abide by any moral or ethical code, and

is seen as a way to “purely” translate from one language to another, which is the constant,

pervading wish of the US military. Adding humanity to this and using the term “human

dictionary” gives it a completely new meaning that cannot be divided from ethics, politics,

history, and identity. In a war that has so saturated the media, these texts zoom in on

individual translators to portray individual experience, but also to construct additional

mediated narratives of the Iraq War. For most US citizens, war exists on television, in the

news, or on the Internet, but not as a daily lived reality. The American Granddaughter, The

Sweetness of Tears, and “Lizards’ Colony” are all attempts to grapple with the Iraq War by

writers outside of it. The use of translators as protagonists further highlights the mediated

nature of warfare, the differing narratives formed about it, and debates about the legitimacy

of the war.

73

The novels show the trajectory the two protagonists take from patriotism to

disillusionment. More broadly, they use translation in both form and content to look beyond

dominant US narratives of the Iraq War and situate it more globally, incorporating the

perspective of women interpreters. The fictionalized experiences of the protagonists

emphasize the tremendous cost of the Iraq War across the globe, and of the calculating

rhetoric used to justify it. While both novels acknowledge translation’s capacity to connect

people, they also demonstrate its destructive potential. The prominence given to the figure of

the interpreter magnifies the often overlooked but crucial role of interpreters in conflict. The

interpreter figures in The American Granddaughter and The Sweetness of Tears embody the

hazards of translation in Iraq and the potential ethical dilemmas facing interpreters in

conflict. The use of translators as protagonists further highlights the differing narratives

formed about the Iraq War, the way translation itself operates in conflict, and debates about

the legitimacy of the war.

74

ENDNOTES: CHAPTER TWO

1 Emily S. Apter, The Translation Zone : A New Comparative Literature, Translation/Transnation (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2006), 16.

2 These four languages were the focus of the US military’s attention in translator recruitment. However, many

other languages are also spoken in the region, including Turkmen, Chaldean Aramaic, Assyrian Aramaic, etc.

3 The size can vary, but battalions are generally made up of several hundred soldiers. Tom A. Peter, “An Iraqi

Interpreter as Chronicler of the War,” Christian Science Monitor, 2008.

https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2008/0813/p06s01-wome.html

4 quoted in Nabeel Abraham, Sally Howell, and Andrew Shryock, Arab Detroit 9/11 : Life in the Terror

Decade, Great Lakes Books (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011).

5 Conference Report on S. 2845, Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004.

https://fas.org/irp/congress/2004_cr/h120704.html

6 United States. Department of the Army. and United States. Marine Corps., The U.S. Army/Marine Corps

Counterinsurgency Field Manual : U.S. Army Field Manual No. 3-24 : Marine Corps Warfighting Publication

No. 3-33.5, University of Chicago Press ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 3-8.

7 Laleh Khalili, Time in the Shadows : Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford, California: Stanford

University Press, 2013), 4.

8 As detailed by both Khalili and Owens, the US, UK, and France have employed counterinsurgency in colonial

warfare since the late nineteenth century, although the term itself did not emerge until the Vietnam War. This

detailed history is outside the scope of this chapter.

9 Tasnim Qutait to Arab Hypen, 11 November 2016, https://arabhyphen.wordpress.com/2016/11/11/sinan-

antoon-in-stockholm-translation-and-literature-ofon-iraq/.

10 UN Resolution 661 prevents “(a) the import into their territories of all commodities and products originating

in Iraq or Kuwait exported therefrom after the date of the present resolution; (b) any activities by their nationals

or in their territories which would promote or are calculated to promote the export or trans-shipment of any

commodities or products from Iraq or Kuwait; and any dealings by their nationals or their flag vessels or in their

territories in any commodities or products originating in Iraq or Kuwait and exported therefrom after the date of

the present resolution, including in particular any transfer of funds to Iraq or Kuwait for the purposes of such

activities or dealings; (d) the sale or supply by their nationals or from their territories or using their flag vessels

of any commodities or products, including weapons or any other military equipment, whether or not originating

in their territories but not including supplies intended strictly for medical purposes, and, in humanitarian

circumstances, foodstuffs, to any person or body in Iraq or Kuwait or to any person or body for the purposes of

any business carried on in or operated from Iraq or Kuwait, and any activities by their nationals or in their

territories which promote or are calculated to promote such sale or supply of such commodities or products”

(19-20).

11 Toby Dodge, "The Failure of Sanctions and the Evolution of International Policy Towards Iraq, 1990-2003,"

Contemporary Arab Affairs 3, no. 1 (2010).

12 None of the protagonists is an officer in the military, but because they work with/for the military, their work

exists under its umbrella.

75

13 Olivia Snaije, “Exiled in Europe: An Interview with Three Women Writers,” Words Without Borders

(September 2014). https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/exiled-in-europe-an-interview-with-three-

women-writers

14 He recently returned to Iraq as a writer-in-residence at the American University of Iraq Sulaimani, after

DePaul ended his contract.

15 Marcia Lynx Qualey, “Iraqi Novelist Mahmoud Saeed: Finding the Needle in the Haystack,” ArabLit

(November 2012). https://arablit.org/2012/11/19/iraqi-novelist-mahmoud-saeed-finding-the-needle-in-the-

haystack/

16 Inaam Kachachi, interview by Max Marin, 2014. ArabLit, https://arablit.org/2014/02/04/inaam-kachachi-on-

tashari-and-the-iraq-that-she-carries-with-her/

17 The protagonist of The Sweetness of Tears is named after Jo March, one of the protagonists of Louisa May

Alcott’s 1869 novel Little Women. In Little Women, Jo often performs male characters in the plays she puts on

with her sisters, and consciously assumes a “gentlemanly” manner in her behaviors. She consistently defies the

gender norms imposed upon her, and refuses to adhere to unreasonable societal standards.

18 Kachachī speaks and writes French; Saeed speaks and writes English.

19 "Index Translationum," (UNESCO).

http://www.unesco.org/xtrans/bsstatexp.aspx?crit1L=3&nTyp=min&topN=50

20 Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature, Literature

Now, 21.

21 Walkowitz, Born Translated.

22 Ibid., 14.

23 Karl Marx and Samuel Moore, The Communist Manifesto, (Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech,, 2001),

http://libproxy.lib.unc.edu/login?url=http://site.ebrary.com/lib/uncch/Doc?id=5000796.

24 Most recently from Emily Apter, Pheng Cheah, David Damrosch, Aamir Mufti, David Palumbo-Liu,

Berthold Schoene, and Rebecca Walkowitz, most of whom focus on anglophone fiction.

25 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline, The Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory (New

York: Columbia University Press, 2003), xii.

26 Emily S. Apter, Against World Literature : On the Politics of Untranslatability, 3.

27 The Sweetness of Tears uses words in Arabic, Urdu, Spanish, and other languages.

28 Claire Jacobson and Marilyn Booth, "An Interview with Marilyn Booth," Asymptote (October 2017).

29 Nafisa Haji, The Sweetness of Tears (New York: William Morrow, 2011), 68.

30 The epigraphs for each chapter come a wide range of sources, and include Arabic proverbs, Biblical quotes,

and poetry by W.B. Yeats and Ghalib, among others.

31 Haji, The Sweetness of Tears, 301.

32 Ibid., 132. Original emphasis.

76

33 W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Routledge, 2016), 2.

34 Fadwa K. AbdelRahman, "Writing the Self/Writing the Other in Thomas Keneally's the Tyrant's Novel and

Inaam Kachachi's the American Granddaughter," Postcolonial Text 7, no. 3 (2012): 15.

35 Such as “motherfucker,” “shit,” and “animal.” There is one exception, which is “Sunny,” referring to the

Nissan car model. The use of the expression “Sunny نيسان ” is likely just to use the name of the model of the car

as it is widely written.

36 The term, as cooke notes, appears in the Qur’an three times: 23:100, 25:53, 55:19-22.

37 “Either the translator leaves the author in peace as much as possible and moves the reader towards him, or he

leaves the reader in peace and moves the author towards him.” Friedrich Schleiermacher, "On the Different

Methods of Translating." Translated by Susan Bernofsky. In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by

Lawrence Venuti. New York: Routledge, 2012: 49.

38 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator's Invisibility : A History of Translation, Translation Studies (London ; New

York: Routledge, 1995).

39 Moira Inghilleri, ""You Don't Make War without Knowing Why": The Decision to Interpret in Iraq," The

Translator 16, no. 2 (2010): 192.

40 In'ām Kachachī, Al-Ḥafīda Al-Amīrikiyya (Beirut: Dār al-Jadīd, 2008), 34. My translation.

41 Ibid. My translation.

42 Mona Baker, "Ethics of Renarration: Mona Baker Is Interviewed by Andrew Chesterman," Cultus: the

Journal of Intercultural Mediation and Communication 1, no. 1 (2008): 16.

43 Kachachī, Al-ḥafīda al-amīrikiyya, 108. My translation

44 Ibid., 35. My translation.

45 Ibid., 34.

46 AbdelRahman, "Writing the Self/Writing the Other in Thomas Keneally's the Tyrant's Novel and Inaam

Kachachi's the American Granddaughter," 16.

47 In‘ām Kachachī, Al-ḥafīda al-amīrikiyya [The American Granddaughter], trans. Nariman Youssef (Beirut:

Dār al-Jadīd, 2008); (New York: Bloomsbury Qatar Press, 2010), 100-02; 14.

48 Roger Luckhurst, "In War Times: Fictionalizing Iraq," Contemporary Literature 53, no. 4 (2012): 722.

49 Haji, The Sweetness of Tears, 144.

50 Moira Inghilleri, "The Ethical Task of the Translator in the Geo-Political Arena: From Iraq to Guantánamo

Bay," Translation Studies 1, no. 2 (2008): 221.

51 Discussed in chapter 3.

52 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 177.

Original emphasis.

53 Haji, The Sweetness of Tears, 341.

77

54 A long garment (often black) worn in the Middle East, usually by Muslim women. Jo says, “I was wearing a

black abaya, like the other women. We’d all had to practice wearing them, at Dubai, since it was an Arab form

of clothing and none of the Indian and Pakistani people normally wore them” (329).

55 Haji, The Sweetness of Tears, 328.

56 Ibid., 329.

57 Shannon L. Holland, "The Dangers of Playing Dress-Up: Popular Representation of Jessica Lynch and the

Controversy Regarding Women in Combat," The Quarterly journal of speech 92, no. 1 (2006): 27.

58 Al-ḥafīda al-amīrikiyya, 89.

59 miriam cooke, "Baghdad Burning: Women Write War in Iraq," World Literature Today 81 (2007): 188-89.

60 Kachachī, Al-ḥafīda al-amīrikiyya, 153. My translation.

61 Kachachī, Al-ḥafīda al-amīrikiyya, 109-10.

62 Ibid., 15. My translation.

63 Patricia Owens, Economy of Force : Counterinsurgency and the Historical Rise of the Social, Cambridge

Studies in International Relations, 11.

64 Kachachī & Youssef, The American Granddaughter, 1193, 103.

65 Kachachī, Al-ḥafīda al-amīrikiyya, 101. My translation.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid., 106.

68 Haji, The Sweetness of Tears, 142-43.

69 Ibid., 143.

70 Kachachī, & Youssef, The American Granddaughter, 750.

71 Ibid.

72 Ibid., 2199-200.

73 https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm2-22-3.pdf

74 "Human Intelligence Collector Operations," ed. Department of the Army (Washington D.C.,2006), 193.

75 While the terms PMC and PSC are often used interchangeably, a PMC supports military operations and a

PSC provides protection services, but there is debate about the terms and the distinction between them. The

term PMSC (Private Military and Security Companies) is used to encompass both.

76 Blackwater changed its name twice: first to Xe, and then to Academi (the name by which it is presently

known). Because it was Blackwater during the Iraq War, that is the name I use.

77 Mahmoud Saeed and trans. William M. Hutchins, "Lizards' Colony," World Literature Today 86, no. 6

(2012): 19.

78

78 Ibid.

79 Ibid., 23.

80 Kachachī, Al-ḥafīda al-amīrikiyya, 152-53.

81 Saeed, “Lizards’ Colony,” 12.

82 Saeed, "Lizards' Colony," 13.

83 Ibid., 11, 9.

84 Ibid., 14, 11.

85 Elaine Scarry and Kaja Finkler, The Body in Pain : The Making and Unmaking of the World, 1st pbk. ed.

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 4.

86 Saeed and Hutchins, "Lizards' Colony," 22.

87 Ibid., 25-26.

88 Kachachī, The American Granddaughter, 1802.

89 Ibid., 1802.

90 Ibid., 1804.

91 Lila Rajiva, The Language of Empire : Abu Ghraib and the American Media (New York, NY: Monthly

Review Press, 2005), 179.

92 Kachachī, The American Granddaughter.

93 Ibid., 1820, 156.

94 Ibid., 875.

95 Ibid.

96 Haji, The Sweetness of Tears, 139.

97 Judith Butler, Precarious Life : The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London ; New York: Verso, 2006),

34.

98 Haji, The Sweetness of Tears, 141.

79

CHAPTER 3: NAVIGATING THE GREEN ZONE: THE LOCAL INTERPRETER IN

SHĀKIR NŪRĪ’S AL-MINṬAQA AL-KHAḌRĀ’

Introduction

In January 2017, Donald Trump issued a travel ban that blocked people from Iraq,

Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen from entering the US for 90 days, and

stopped the refugee resettlement program for 120 days.1 His ban also prevented Iraqis who

had served as translators and interpreters from receiving Special Immigrant Visas (SIV)

allowing them to come to the US. Although the ban was later amended to allow Iraqis to

receive SIVs,2 the quota for these visas (50 “principals” per year plus family) is not high

enough for the number of applicants. After the end of the occupation of Iraq, translators and

interpreters continue to be targeted in Iraq, and others face suspicion within Iraqi

communities in the US.

The US did not have enough translators or interpreters for the more than 100,000

soldiers of the initial invasion. With so few Arabic-speaking soldiers, the US military relied

on contractors like Blackwater, 3 Titan, CACI, and Halliburton to fulfill their need for

translators and interpreters. Finding Arabic-speaking translators and interpreters was difficult

for contractors, too. Because of their government contracts, these companies often had to

provide a large number of translators4 in a short amount of time; as a result, the screening

process for these translators (testing, background, etc.) was often cursory at best. John

Isgrigg, who was Deputy Director of Contracting for US Army Intelligence and Security

80

Command (INSCOM) from 2006 to 2013 (and Contracting Officer from 2004 to 2005),

admitted in a hearing of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan

that contractors had “not paid a lot of attention to quality in the past because [of] our fill

rates, we were taking whatever we could get.”5 Very few of those who were hired had any

training in translating or interpreting, and the degree of competency in Arabic and English

varied widely. While Titan6 was hired in 1999 to provide linguistic support to the US

military, this was generally done on an as-needed basis; after 9/11, this need became much

more urgent.

The FBI's “Report to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United

States”7 documents intelligence failures and security issues before the attacks on 9/11 as well

as recommendations for improvements; one of the concerns specifically mentioned is

language resources. The report states that

[the] FBI did not dedicate sufficient resources to the surveillance and

translation needs of counterterrorism agents. It lacked sufficient translators

proficient in Arabic and other key languages, resulting in a significant backlog

of untranslated intercepts.8

The report also notes the scarcity of Arabic speakers qualified for such positions: there were

only six undergraduate degrees granted in Arabic in the US in 2002; security clearance

processes took much longer for those who had traveled extensively outside the United States;

and “anyone who was foreign-born or had numerous relatives abroad was well-advised not

even to apply.”9 While contractors did not use the same clearance processes as governmental

agencies, the report gives an idea of some of the difficulties in finding qualified Arabic

speakers to serve as translators and interpreters. In order to fulfill their quotas, contractors

relied heavily on “local national” translators and interpreters as well as “third country

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national” translators and interpreters.10 Many of these local and regional translators and

interpreters chose this work out of financial need, often at significant personal risk.11 Iraqi

interpreters faced a particularly difficult situation: anti-occupation Iraqis targeted them and

saw them as collaborators, US soldiers often saw them as suspicious and threatening, and

they received far less pay than interpreters from the US. However, they were, according to

Madeline Otis Campbell, “by all accounts the most important interpreters in the day-to-day

conduct of the war.”12 Iraqi interpreters were expected not only to interpret speech, but also

to act as “cultural advisors,” fixers, and occasionally, peacekeepers.

Shākir Nūrī’s Al-minṭaqa al-khaḍrā’ (The Green Zone, 2009) focuses on Ibrāhīm, a

former English teacher and librarian working with a group of Marines as an interpreter in

Baghdad’s Green Zone. Twice daily, Ibrāhīm and four other Iraqi interpreters must submit to

a search as they enter and exit the Green Zone for work. Ibrāhīm has a generally cordial

relationship with the soldiers he interacts with, but they can also be aggressive and

domineering. Ibrāhīm is given no last name, nor any identifying information about his

religious or ethnic identity. The novel tracks Ibrāhīm’s growing hostility towards the US after

a series of conflicts, including his wife Vivian’s kidnapping by a militia. After she is

kidnapped, Ibrāhīm receives no support from the US soldiers and his attempts to negotiate

with the militia fail. The novel ends with Ibrāhīm preparing to self-detonate inside the Green

Zone.

The novel highlights the seemingly impossible position of Iraqi interpreters, who

were often targeted by militias and mistrusted by the occupying forces. Nūrī gives no

indication of Ibrāhīm’s ethnosectarian background thus forestalling any reading of him as

religiously motivated. Ibrāhīm works with the US forces but is constantly reminded of his

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lower status and his inherent untrustworthiness as an Iraqi (and therefore potential threat).

The novel examines the relationship between Iraqis and the occupiers broadly while also

addressing questions of space and the failure of translation. Scholars such as Ikram

Masmoudi, Thomas Beebee, and Moira Inghilleri have used Giorgio Agamben’s notions of

homo sacer and “bare life” to describe the lives of Iraqis under occupation. Agamben defines

homo sacer as “one who may be killed but not sacrificed”; during the Iraq War, the figure of

the interpreter embodies the “double exception…both from the sphere of the profane and

from that of the religious” that is characteristic of the homo sacer.13 Ibrāhīm sees no option

for himself but to commit an act of violence as a reaction to the violence he experiences and

witnesses during the occupation. As Masmoudi writes, all “expressive possibilities fail, and

the language of violence and fire is the only code that passes between the two parties.”14 He

turns to suicide bombing as a way to reject and overcome his status as homo sacer, as well as

to avenge those killed by the occupying forces.

Ibrāhīm’s work as an interpreter highlights tensions of language, space, politics, and

community during the Iraq War. The tensions between Ibrāhīm and the US soldiers often

stem from power dynamics and lack of understanding. In Al-minṭaqa al-khaḍrā’, the figure

of the suicide bomber emerges as the result of the pervasive violence of the Iraq invasion.

Ibrāhīm feels disempowered and unable to overcome his status except through violence. This

chapter argues that in this text Ibrāhīm’s character embodies anxieties that arose during the

Iraq War over translation. By highlighting the material conditions of translation—particularly

space, sound, and violence—Al-minṭaqa al-khaḍrā’ shows the material conditions of

translation and the ways it is configured as a site of war. Further, through Ibrāhīm’s

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character, the novel presents the native informant as a mediator whose role as an interpreter

is an impossible one.

Local Interpreters

Iraqi, or “local national” interpreters were hired by contractors to work with the US

military. The fact that so few US soldiers speak any significant amount of Arabic posed a

problem for ensuring the “accuracy” of interpreter’s translations. Dov S. Zakheim, a member

of the Commission on Wartime Contracting, expressed concern that “we really do not know

what these translators are doing.”15 This fear over the power that translators and interpreters

have stems from the perception of language as a weapon, and from the US forces’ inability to

fully “control” translators and interpreters. As Frantz Fanon notes,

To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the

morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a

culture, to support the weight of a civilization…A man who has language

consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.

What we are getting at becomes plain: Mastery of language affords

remarkable power.16

Very few US soldiers speak Arabic and are thus completely at the mercy of the interpreter to

interact with Iraqis. This creates a sense of anxiety in US soldiers as well as US political

institutions who desire total control over Iraq, but who cannot control or contain the power of

the interpreter. Further, Ibrāhīm is a former English teacher and librarian; he has much

deeper knowledge of his occupiers’ language than they do of his.

The division between translators and interpreters was commonly a matter of

citizenship: Iraqi citizens and “third country nationals” served most often as interpreters and

US citizens generally worked as translators.17 The labor of interpreting differs from that of

84

translating: by necessity, interpreters’ bodies visibly participate in the act of interpreting

through expression, gesture, and position; they interpret immediately; and they must adjust

speech and dialect as appropriate for the situation.18 Iraqi interpreters were paid less for

doing more hazardous work, they did not receive the same medical care as US citizens if

injured in the course of their work, and there was widespread institutional distrust of Iraqis

working with the US. In his book on the Iraq War, Rajiv Chandrasekaran writes that Force

Protection put up “signs around the palace warning people not to leave sensitive materials in

places where Iraqis might see it. Rather than becoming more involved in CPA operations,

Iraqis were pushed to the margins.”19

Because of the significant dangers for Iraqi interpreters, they often wore masks when

going out on assignments. Many Iraqi interpreters came from sectarian and ethnic minority

communities who were oppressed under Saddam Hussein. The head of the interpreters in the

novel, Madame Betty,20 organizes “raid parties” based on religious and ethnic affiliations,

with the aim of preventing the interpreters from identifying with the victims of the raid.

Ibrāhīm remarks,

She sent each interpreter on raids with the Marines according to their

affiliations… she sent Sunni interpreters to Shi‘i neighborhoods, Shi‘i

interpreters to Sunni neighborhoods, Kurdish interpreters to Arab

neighborhoods, and so forth.21

Mohammad, one of Madeline Otis Campbell’s interlocutors in Interpreters of Occupation,

says “in Sunni areas I was Omar. In Shi‘a areas I was Mahdi. I played different characters.”22

In both cases, the interpreters’ identities and loyalties are always suspect; hiding one’s

identity on a raid or controlling who goes on raids based on affiliation illustrates the intense

suspicion interpreters faced from all sides. Campbell notes that

85

the idea that one’s interpreting self was a character to be played allowed for

the belief that one maintained a “real” or true identity behind the performed

“fake” identity—a self apart from the words being spoken. Yet, in the back

and forth between the “real” and the “fake,” the edges of these identities

moved, frayed, and at times dissolved.23

Ibrāhīm, who lives inside the Green Zone, wears a mask when he goes out on assignments

but refuses to use a fake name. He says, “we all wear a mask (aqn‘a) in one form or

another.”24 His fiancée (and eventual wife), Vivian (whose real name is ‘Alīa’), wears a

ḥijāb and uses a ‘Western’ name to obscure her identity. Ibrāhīm acknowledges the practical

necessity of wearing a physical mask, but he is also referring to the metaphorical masking of

identity used by interpreters. Ikram Masmoudi points out that Ibrāhīm wears a double mask:

There is the real mask he has to wear to protect his identity when he is out on

raids with the soldiers, and there is the figurative mask, which has a deeper

effect on Ibrāhīm, taking over his real face, his moral features and his soul.

When he looks at himself in the mirror, he does not recognize himself.25

Ibrāhīm has a moment of realization when he looks in the mirror and understands the

implications of his work with the US. At that moment, the distinction between the figurative

mask and his face disappears; the mask has “devoured his face completely”26 and ceased to

be a mask. While Ibrāhīm initially tries to separate out his “true” self and his interpreter-self,

this becomes increasingly difficult the longer he works as an interpreter. Ibrāhīm’s character

internally rages against the occupation, proving the internal, emotional challenges that he

faces as an interpreter. Ibrāhīm frequents bars both inside and outside of the Green Zone; he

sees beer as a “narcotic for the linguists.”27 This comment is, in part, literal: because of the

shortage of barley, the beer is mixed with valium, but Ibrāhīm also seems to use the mix of

the narcotic and alcohol as a coping mechanism.

86

Ibrāhīm faces the internal dilemma of being personally against the occupation while

supporting it because of his job. In her reflection on the role of local translators and

interpreters in the Iraq War, Moira Inghilleri writes,

By working voluntarily for the US military, Iraqi and other Arabic-speaking

interpreters provided support for the putative justness of what many

considered an unjust war. This raises the question of whether Iraqi and other

Arabic-speaking interpreters had a moral responsibility not to lend their

support to the war despite the individual or political benefits they stood to

gain.28

Ibrāhīm struggles with guilty feelings over working as an interpreter, but the job also

provides him with money he needs and access to the Green Zone. Ultimately, it is this access

and the relative trust he gains from Colonel David that allow him to carry out his attack. This

anxiety over the reliance on and suspicion towards interpreters manifests in Ibrāhīm’s

interactions with Marines.

Ibrāhīm often resorts to stereotyped images from films to describe the US Americans.

His initial response to the invasion focuses on the perceived stupidity of US Americans, their

ignorance of Iraq’s history, and their sense of entitlement. Much of the ‘Iraq War literature’

that has received attention in the US was written by ex-occupiers29 who in general erase

Iraqis completely. Marcia Lynx Qualey writes that while some of these books “might be

critical of choices made by individual US soldiers, or by US leadership…American soldiers

are both the central and supporting characters.”30 She goes on to look at representations of

US soldiers in some Iraqi novels, noting that they are “often as much a nameless background

as the Iraqis in American novels. They are a force of chaos and misunderstanding, allied with

shadowy corrupt governments, and often read as untouchable or un-confrontable.”31 While

some individual US soldiers in Al-minṭaqa al-khaḍrā’ are static “types,” many of them are

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complex and full of contradictions. The novel focuses its criticism on the actions of these

“types” who readily accept and carry out the occupation as well as on the US government as

a whole. The interpreter is a powerful vehicle through which to explore these ambiguities and

complications in the Iraq War and narratives about it.

The Green Zone as Space

The Green Zone32 is located in central Baghdad, bordered on the east and south by the

Tigris River. It houses the Republican Palace, As-Salam Palace, multiple embassies, the

former Ba‘ath Party headquarters, restaurants and malls, and was the seat of the Coalition

Provisional Authority during its occupation of Iraq. Before the occupation, the Green Zone

was an affluent, exclusive area populated by wealthy Ba‘ath Party officials. Its use as the

CPA headquarters only served to augment the exclusivity that it represents as a space.

Ibrāhīm comments that “the US generals felt that they inherited (warathū) this site to

establish their authority, calling it the Green Zone,” illustrating a sense of entitlement to the

space and immediate sense of ownership over it.33 Journalists have referred to the Green

Zone as “Little America,” a term that emphasizes its separation from the rest of Baghdad as

well as well as reinforcing it as a site of US imperial power and policing. The cafeteria in the

Green Zone served “traditional,” imported US American food rather than using local

vendors, in line with general US practices in Iraq. Alain Badiou uses the term “American

comfort” on a broad scale to describe the United States’ “self-centering” and “total filtering

of everything that concerns the rest of the world through the very particular system of its

interests.”34 The multiplicity of ways the US military reproduced “American comfort” within

the Green Zone served to further alienate Iraqis working in the Green Zone as well as Iraqi

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civilians. The Green Zone is both a physical and symbolic demarcation between occupiers

and occupied.

Surrounded by walls with entry limited to gates guarded by tanks, the Green Zone

was both a dangerous place for civilians and a demonstration of US military strength. The

Republican Palace was the CPA’s headquarters where it “enacted laws, printed currency,

collected taxes, deployed police, and spent oil revenue.”35 Journalists “embedded” in Iraq

have written extensively about life inside the Green Zone.36 Jerry Palmer, a news media

specialist, has written about the role of ‘fixers’ in the Iraq war. His work is based on

interviews with British and French journalists who worked in Iraq and interacted with

fixers.37 He notes the degree of dependence these journalists have on their fixers, as well as

looking at how the fixers act as intermediaries and the ways they intervene (whether

intentionally or not) in the journalistic process. There are a number of books by journalists

about the Iraq War, but perhaps two of the most well-known are The Assassin’s Gate (2005)

by George Packer, a writer for The New Yorker, and Imperial Life in the Emerald City (2006)

by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, an editor for The Washington Post. Packer’s book focuses more

on the politicians and policies that ultimately led to the war, while Chandrasekaran’s focuses

on the operations of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Both texts also focus on how

the invasion impacted the lives of Iraqi people, as well as life both inside and outside the

Green Zone.

The Green Zone is a political and politicized space. During the time of the

occupation, it was heavily guarded and entry required appropriate identification and

screening to pass through the US-controlled checkpoints. While many US Americans lived

and worked inside the Green Zone, many of the Iraqis who worked there lived outside of it.

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After the invasion, the US faced steady opposition from anti-occupation groups and militias

who targeted the CPA as well as any Iraqi people or groups cooperating with them. For US

Americans and expatriates, passing through checkpoints was an inconvenience, but for Iraqis

and other workers it required daily searches and questioning. Ibrāhīm lives inside the Green

Zone but acknowledges the daily threat to those who live outside it. He says,

It was dangerous for the translators who would leave the Green Zone to go

back to their homes because of those lurking outside the fences. I considered

myself lucky to live here even though it is a city without a heart, and

everything in it is artificial (asṭanā‘ī), calm (hādi’a) on the outside but boiling

(taghlī) inside, a volcano that could erupt at any moment.38

Colonel David offers Ibrāhīm a place to live in the Green Zone because he trusts him, but

Ibrāhīm acknowledges that he is lucky and this is not the norm. He sees the Green Zone as

completely divorced from what is taking place outside it. For those inside the Green Zone, it

is a space of relative comfort, order, and safety; the “Red Zone,”39 on the other hand, is a

space of chaos and violence. Ibrāhīm, however, draws attention to its unacknowledged

internal tensions, which he perceives as ready to explode.

The increasing presence of Iraqis within the Green Zone was a source of anxiety for

the CPA, the US military, and the contractors working for them. The heavily guarded gates

and tanks posted at entrances were meant to make the Green Zone invulnerable to attack.

However, Chandrasekaran notes that Iraqis working for the US were subject to suspicion:

The population of Iraqis in the Green Zone was increasing by hundreds a day,

according to one rumor, a sure sign that legions of bad guys had infiltrated the

supposedly secure bubble. Americans began to question the allegiances of

their Iraqi interpreters and secretaries. One internal assessment estimated that

as many as 60 percent of the Iraqis working for the CPA were compromised.

The problem was that the Americans did not know which ones were. The

90

Americans believed that Iraqis assumed to be loyal to the CPA had the lives of

their families threatened by insurgents, who wanted to know where Americans

went when they left the Green Zone. The Iraqis had no confidence that the

CPA would protect them if they reported threats.40

The simultaneous dependence on and suspicion of Iraqis to maintain the US occupation

resulted in mistrust on both sides. Interpreters—visible and highly-targeted by insurgents—

faced perhaps the most danger, and the widespread inability of US soldiers to speak Arabic

only served to increase this sense of mistrust. After Vivian is kidnapped, Ibrāhīm can trust

neither the US forces nor the militias to help him because of his role as an interpreter.

The way Ibrāhīm describes the Green Zone—calm on the outside but boiling on the

inside—also characterizes his relationship with the Marines. The fictionalization of the

relationship between the Marines and the interpreters explores many of the larger issues

between the US forces and the Iraqis who worked with them. It is not an easily defined

relationship, involving both camaraderie and enmity. When Ibrāhīm and his friend and fellow

interpreter Murād pass through the main gate, Neil, one of the Marines, “jokes (yamāziḥ)”

with them by insulting, questioning, and searching them before letting them enter.41 This

interaction displays the power dynamics between the interpreters and the soldiers, which

appears friendly but is tense. Neil tells them, “we are friends, but orders are bigger than us,”

reminding them that he (and by extension, the US forces) are the ones in control, not the

Iraqis who work with them.42

Interpreting, Sound, and War

As discussed in chapter two, representing the verbal act of interpreting pushes the

boundaries of text; both The American Granddaughter and Al-minṭaqa al-khaḍrā’ aim to

91

represent music, sound, and speech textually. Al-minṭaqa al-khaḍrā’ highlights the

prevalence and significance of sound, music, and dance during the Iraq War. Music in

particular plays an important thematic and intertextual role in the novel: it acts as a medium

through which the soldiers express themselves, a shared interest among the interpreters and

the soldiers, and as an element of what J. Martin Daughtry terms “belliphonic violence.”43 It

is also important to note that both music and interpreting are oral/aural. This difficulty in

representing sound and music in text mirrors many of the difficulties that arise in the act of

translation and interpreting; the transfer from one context to another presents obstacles to

comprehension. In the case of Al-minṭaqa al-khaḍrā’, not only language but also sound,

music, and dance are potential avenues of shared interest between the Iraqi and Marine

characters, but all ultimately fail. The representations of sound, language, and music in Al-

create tensions formally that underscore the tensions present in the plot; the text generates in

the reader a sense of dissonance between Arabic and English, and between text and sound

that highlights the tensions between the characters.

Like The American Granddaughter, Al-minṭaqa al-khaḍrā’ uses English at strategic

moments; however, unlike The American Granddaughter, nearly all of these moments

emphasize the seemingly insurmountable barrier between the Iraqi interpreters and the

Marines. One of the most striking examples is the use of the lyrics (in both English and

Arabic) of AC/DC songs as well as “soldier rap.” The use of song lyrics creates dissonance

on multiple levels: first, the translated words are written in fusḥā and thus do not retain the

informal quality of the lyrics; second, the lyrics are not represented in full, and they are

represented without their accompanying music and are thus incomplete; third, although

music is a shared interest of the soldiers and interpreters, the aggressive lyrics underline their

92

strained relationship; and fifth, the AC/DC songs used—“Hells Bells” and “Shoot to

Thrill”—were reportedly used to torture prisoners during the Iraq War. Representing the

modality of music through the medium of text, and further translating it into another

language exemplifies the always incomplete process of translation and interpreting, and the

complex negotiations that occur when moving between modalities.

The soldiers Ibrāhīm interacts with write rap music during much of their downtime.

These soldier-rappers—Bachelor, Richard, Batista, and Neil aim for their music to capture

the “pulse of the Iraq War (nabḍ al-ḥarb al-‘irāqiyya)” in the same way that Jimi Hendrix’s

and Jim Morrison’s music did during the Vietnam War.44 Nūrī draws these names from

actual soldiers who wrote rap music while in Iraq, and includes some of their lyrics translated

into Arabic in the novel.45 Despite this potential connection, the lyrics, the soldiers’ actions,

and the occupation reinscribe the violence of their relationship.

Majānīn Būkā (The Madmen of Camp Bucca, 2012), another novel by Nūrī, is

similarly preoccupied with sound, particularly as a weapon of torture. In it, he describes the

“disco,” which is a large container into which music is blasted at an extreme volume as a

method of torture. Some of the musicians whose music was reportedly used for this purpose

include Metallica, Rage Against the Machine, AC/DC, Nine Inch Nails, Eminem, and David

Gray.46 These references to AC/DC’s lyrics are thus not accidental. Neil sings “Hells Bells”

as a sort of anthem for the people going through the gate:

I won’t take no prisoners, won’t spare no lives

Nobody’s putting up a fight

I got my bell, I’m gonna take you to hell

I’m gonna get you47

93

Right before this, Ibrāhīm says that the soldiers “believed that music tempers brutish

violence, but they resort to violence to defend themselves; flawed logic we must accept.”48

His friend Murād has difficulty understanding the song because “the Americans swallow

words (yabt‘alūn al-kalamāt)” and the song is in vernacular English.49 Additionally, the

song’s Arabic translation is in fusḥā (Modern Standard Arabic), which formally draws

attention to the difficulties of translation between English and Arabic, specifically in terms of

literary and spoken language. The songs’ lyrics are in colloquial US English and rendering

the translation in the more formal fuṣḥā adds a sense of formality that is not present in the

English lyrics. It also underscores the cultural and linguistic differences between the

interpreters and the soldiers. Neil later sings AC/DC’s “Shoot to Thrill” as a way to cope

with, and prepare for, the experiences of war:

I’m like evil, I get under your skin

Just like a bomb that’s ready to blow

Cause I’m illegal, I got everything

That all you women might need to know

Hour after hour, for days on end50

As he sings, Ibrāhīm watches Neil and the other soldiers transform into “wolves…baring

their teeth…ready to shoot anyone just because they don’t like how they look or talk, or how

they react to being searched.”51 The song’s lyrics sexualize violence, repeatedly referring to

shooting a gun as an assertion of masculinity. Daughtry writes that

troops relied upon music…to attain the mildly altered state of heightened

awareness and aggression that they deemed a necessary part of being an

effective warrior. It was extremely common for those who regularly engaged

in combat and patrol missions to construct…‘battle playlists,’ which helped

them ‘pump up’ before leaving base.52

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He further remarks that often, soldiers chose songs in which “musical and lyrical aggression

were fused together,” as is the case in the two AC/DC songs.53

The transformation precipitated by “Shoot to Thrill” mirrors Ibrāhīm’s own when he

performs al-zīrān. The zīrān is a dance performed on top of burning coals by people in

Ibrāhīm’s village before a big action, and what emboldens Ibrāhīm to perform a suicide

attack. Ibrāhīm decides to carry out the attack in the ballroom where the tango parties were

held. Achille Mbembe writes that

The ‘suicide bomber’ wears no ordinary soldier’s uniform and displays no

weapon. The candidate for martyrdom chases his or her targets; the enemy is a

prey for whom a trap is set. Significant in this respect is the location of the

ambush laid: the bus stop, the café, the discotheque, the marketplace, the

checkpoint, the road—in sum, the spaces of everyday life.54

Although the Green Zone itself is an exceptional space, for the occupying forces it is the

space of everyday life. It reproduces aspects of “American comfort” to normalize the space

for US soldiers; in the text, those same spaces often serve to alienate Iraqis. Throughout the

text, the tango parties produce feelings of anxiety isolation in Ibrāhīm and Vivian. His attack

is described as a dance that mixes tango and zīrān, with the zīrān overpowering the tango,

symbolizing Ibrāhīm’s victory over his fear and the occupiers. The zīrān motivates, while the

tango is a reminder of occupation and oppression.

Both Majānīn Būkā and Al-minṭaqa al-khaḍrā’ highlight the warping of music into an

instrument of war. Daughtry notes that “for American service members, music was a

technology of the self that enabled them to fine-tune their mental and emotional states, while

simultaneously harassing the enemy with unwanted sounds.”55 Music thus has the double

function of superficially connecting Ibrāhīm and the soldiers while also evoking US violence

and power. The US soldiers have “tango parties” in one of the palace ballrooms, and

95

although they are invited, Ibrāhīm and Vivian never participate in the dancing, because they

see it as the “dance of the occupation (raqsat al-iḥtilāl).”56 Colonel David makes this

explicit; Ibrāhīm recalls his comparison between tango and occupation:

Whoever does not know the tango does not know how to rule. It’s a marriage

dance between the US Americans and the Iraqis, because occupying any

country requires two dancers. The dance cannot be completed without them

both, as the occupation cannot be completed without the occupier and his

agents (‘umalā’ihi).57

‘Umalā’ means collaborator, and in this context is used derogatorily to mean

agents/informers or traitors. After this, Ibrāhīm and Vivian wonder if they are agents of the

occupation but decide that they are not; they are simply powerless.58 Earlier in the novel,

Ibrāhīm notes that the US forces want to turn them into informers:

They uproot us like trees without their soil and plant us in the Green Zone, ask

us to provide information; but this isn’t consistent with the contract [that we

signed]. We are not informers, we are translators.59

Colonel David and Ibrāhīm’s comments make plain the occupation’s reliance on Iraqis for

intelligence. It also alludes to the CPA-appointed Iraqi Governmental Council, many of

whom had been living outside of Iraq and were often called “native informants.” Hamid

Dabashi writes about this extensively in Brown Skin, White Masks (2011) but deliberately

does not use this term to “refer to those translators in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Palestine—

collaborators paid for their incorporation into the massive military-intelligence machinery

that facilitates the daily operation of the occupation.”60 However, Ibrāhīm shows anxiety over

any association with this term.

Madame Betty’s character openly accepts her role as an ‘agent’ of the occupation,

and actively uses her relationship with Colonel David to improve her position. She begins as

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an interpreter herself, then becomes a secretary, then head of security for the interpreters.61

She researches all of the Iraqi interpreters (looking into their pasts, sending informants to ask

about them in their old neighborhoods, etc.). Even though they have to undergo regular lie

detection tests, she still does not trust them; she says, “Iraqis can fool the devil, to say

nothing of a lie detector.”62 She suspects that some of them are infiltrators working for the

resistance, and she is determined to enforce safety and order in the Green Zone.

In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Gayatri Spivak focuses on the figure of the

native informant in philosophy, literature, history, and culture. She sees this figure as “a

blank, though generative of a text of cultural identity that only the West (or a Western-model

discipline) could inscribe,” as both “needed and foreclosed.”63 During the Iraq War, the US

government relied on ‘native informants’ to give the invasion of Iraq “narrative authority”

and “global validity.”64 The native informant, according to Dabashi, “tells the conquering

power what it needs to know in order to better dominate.”65 In Spivak’s view, the native

informant is needed for the ‘knowledge’ they can provide, but they are foreclosed from “the

position of narrator.”66 This figure parallels the Iraqi interpreter, who similarly mediates

between the occupier and occupied, and who is also foreclosed from the position of narrator.

Suicide Bombing

In the Western imaginary, suicide bombing is viewed as antithetical to liberal values.

Biopolitical regimes, which “make live and let die,” as Foucault put it, insist and depend

upon control over the life and death of their subjects. In On Suicide Bombing, Talal Asad

notes that suicide bombers are often painted as “pathological.”67 Nicholas Michelsen

observes the similar use of “contagion” to describe suicide bombing. Within biopower’s

97

concern over “the administration of life-processes” and the “healthy circulation of individual

bodies,” suicide bombing is a disease.68 He goes on to note that what horrifies about suicide

bombing is “not just dying and killing (or killing by dying)” but also

the violent appearance of something that is normally disregarded in secular

modernity: the limitless pursuit of freedom, the illusion of an uncoerced

interiority that can withstand the force of institutional disciplines. Liberalism,

of course, disapproves of the violent exercise of freedom outside the frame of

the law. But the law itself is founded by and continuously depends on coercive

violence.69

While suicide bombing shocks and horrifies, US violence on a massive scale is “exceptional”

and often legitimated by law. Deepa Kumar elaborates on this point in Islamophobia and the

Politics of Empire:

the same people who call the actions of suicide bombers unjustified legitimize

the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have caused the deaths of

hundreds of thousands. In short, only the violence of certain groups is

highlighted and coded as a product of those groups’ religious affinity.70

Politicians consistently use suicide attacks to condemn Islam as a violent and irrational

religion. While some social scientists analyze suicide attacks through rational choice theory,

Roxanne L. Euben argues that this “tends to assimilate and disfigure…religious practices.”71

Al-minṭaqa al-khaḍrā’ uses suicide bombing as an analog to the impossibility of translation.

By focusing on the psychological toll that the occupation takes on Ibrāhīm, the novel shows

the conditions that lead him to believe that his only option is suicide bombing. Ibrāhīm is

motivated by the capture and (presumed) murder of his wife and for the innocent victims of

the war. He sees suicide bombing as both an act of vengeance and a way to regain his

dignity. Jasbir Puar writes that “[s]elf-annihilation is the ultimate form of resistance, and

ironically, it acts as self-preservation, the preservation of symbolic self enabled through the

98

‘highest cultural capital’ of martyrdom, a giving of life to the future of political struggles.”72

Ibrāhīm decides to perform a suicide attack because of the daily humiliation he experiences

at the hands of US soldiers and the unceasing violence and death of the occupation; he says

that the bombing is a “test of [his] dignity (imtiḥān karāmtak)” and an act of vengeance.73

Before his suicide attack, he asserts that he acts on behalf of the victims of the war, including

both US and Iraqi casualties. He says, “I avenge all the victims (antaqam li-kul al-

ḍaḥāyā)…Murād, Richard, Bachelor, Vivian and all the bodies deposited in the central

morgue.”74

In Yasmina Khadra’s Les Sirènes de Bagdad (The Sirens of Baghdad), the unnamed

protagonist decides to participate in an attack after a series of encounters with the occupiers.

Both protagonists are motivated by revenge: the narrator of The Sirens of Baghdad by the

multiple acts of violence he experiences in his village; and Ibrāhīm by the kidnapping of

Vivian and the innocent people killed during the occupation. In The Sirens of Baghdad, the

narrator repeatedly insists on the importance of honor for him as a Bedouin, so when soldiers

humiliate his father in front of him, he vows to avenge him. By eliminating religious

motivations, Nūrī and Khadra present another mode of radicalization resulting from US

violence in Iraq; Ibrāhīm says that the US “makes terrorists in their labs (yasn‘aūn al-

irhabiyyīn fī mukhtabarātihim).”75 Both of these novels examine the consequences of the US

military’s occupation, focusing on the narratives of two individuals. By zoning in on the

individual who suffers at the hands of the US these two novels present a more complex

portrait that unsettles the widespread representation of suicide bombers as irrational and

fanatical.

99

Ibrāhīm’s motives resist easy categorization. He is simultaneously facilitator and

opponent of the occupation, and there are moments of friendship and even affection towards

his colleagues. Ibrāhīm sees the Marines not as “criminals (mujrimīn)” but as parts of a larger

“machine (’āla).”76 This recalls Zayna’s language in The American Granddaughter, where

she says that Iraqis consider US soldiers to be doing their “military duty” whereas Zayna is

seen as a traitor. Both Zayna and Ibrāhīm minimize the responsibility of the US soldiers in

Iraq, instead depicting them as cogs in the US imperial war machine. Ibrāhīm’s village, Tal

al-Yaqūt, is one of the most active in anti-occupation attacks; Colonel David consequently

blames Ibrāhīm for the actions of his village.

Ibrāhīm compares the invasion and occupation of Iraq to the Gulf War. He evokes the

constant dropping of bombs that occurred during the Gulf War, but seems to see it as a less

human war than the invasion and occupation:

He was not ready for a war where invisible soldiers turned into real soldiers of

flesh and blood with their uniforms, equipment, and machine guns. They were

no longer dropping bombs from planes in the sky and returned safely to their

bases. Now they occupy our streets and our government buildings, staring at

our faces and killing whoever they want.77

In this passage, he sees the invasion and occupation as something like the next phase after the

Gulf War. Ibrahim Aoudé writes that, indeed, the Iraq War was “part and parcel of a unified

US strategy that began with Desert Storm in 1991 to re-establish its hegemony in the Middle

East.”78 Ibrāhīm also points to the difference in the nature of warfare in the Gulf War

compared to the Iraq War: he conveys a sense of distance and detachment regarding the Gulf

War (“invisible soldiers,” “planes in the sky”) whereas the occupation takes place in Iraq’s

streets and buildings with “real soldiers of flesh and blood.” He juxtaposes what he sees as

the impersonal nature of the Gulf War with the almost intimate violence of the occupation.

100

Further, the “flesh and blood” soldiers conjure images of the dead bodies that so disturb

Ibrāhīm as well as living bodies.

Ibrāhīm does not belong to any kind of insurgent group, and in fact is targeted

because of his work with the US. He is, Masmoudi writes,

captive in a zone where he is considered a traitor and a potential terrorist and

where he might be killed by the militias, and at the same time he has no

expectation of protection by the Americans. The life of this Iraqi translator is

subject to death threats from both the inside and the outside. His death is

almost decreed, and so he feels like the living dead man, in between two

worlds where he is neither fully living nor fully one of the deceased.79

Ibrāhīm’s situation exemplifies that of many Iraqi interpreters: mistrusted by the US forces,

and targeted by militias, he concludes that he has no option except to avenge the victims of

the occupation. Translators and interpreters are essential to waging war but produce anxiety

in the US Americans because of the widespread inability to understand and consequently

“control” their language. They therefore try to exert power and control in other ways—in Al-

minṭaqa al-khaḍrā’, through the ways they treat Iraqis.

When he goes with the soldiers to the morgue to look for Bachelor’s body after his

death in an explosion, Ibrāhīm feels like he is looking at a “cans of sardines” because of the

number of bodies packed into the space.80 Many of the bodies are “without identification,

without names, without faces” and remain unclaimed.81 Ibrāhīm is shocked by the number of

bodies and by their states of deterioration. The visit to the morgue displays the massive and

horrific loss of human life caused by the Iraq War, which the US frequently reduces to

“collateral damage.” Iraqi bodies are not mourned in the same way that US American bodies

are. Judith Butler observes that while Iraqi deaths are erased from public representation, “the

101

US’s own losses are consecrated in public obituaries that constitute so many acts of nation-

building.”82 She continues,

Some lives are grievable, and others are not; the differential allocation of

grievability that decides what kind of subject is and must be grieved, and

which kind of subject must not, operates to produce and maintain certain

exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human: what counts as a

livable life and a grievable death?83

Although Al-minṭaqa al-khadrā’ features an Iraqi protagonist, the text calls attention to the

inequalities between the ways US Americans are treated compared to Iraqis.

In Tourists of History, Marita Sturken engages the “narrative of innocence” that

allows “US global interventions to be understood in a framework of benevolence rather than

imperialism.”84 Part of this narrative of innocence is, as Butler notes, the ways US deaths are

publicly mourned. After 9/11, then-mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani had dust

collected from the site of the attacks and sent to families of the dead. Sturken argues that

[b]y this ritual, the dust was transformed into a substance that was understood

to be sacramental and ceremonial (handled with white gloves), moved from

drums (indicating refuse) to urns (indicating individuals, ashes, the remains of

ife), yet that was also official (accompanied by police escort) and national

(covered by flags).85

This dust comprised of not only ashes of bodies but also building materials (including

asbestos), furniture, lead, and fluorescent bulbs, among other substances; it is, Sturken writes,

“simultaneously ashes, refuse, evidence, and a fatal contaminant.”86 This sacramental, ritual

treatment of dust that Sturken describes demonstrates the ways in which “the tragedy of the

deaths of these innocent bystanders were…exploited in ways that used innocent victimhood

as a justification for further violence.”87

102

The Marines whom Ibrāhīm works with assume that even people walking in the street

are “terrorists who must be hunted like rabbits in the wild.”88 Rather than viewing these Iraqi

civilians as fellow human beings, they reduce them to “terrorists (’irhābiyyīn)” and “rabbits

(’arānib)” who deserve death. Ibrāhīm repeatedly draws attention to the ways in which

violence becomes common in Iraq, not “exceptional.” Jasbir Puar notes that

state of exception discourse doubly foster claims to exceptionalism: the

violence of the United States is an exceptional event, antithetical to

Americanness and thus by extension, US subjects emerge as morally,

culturally, and politically exceptional through the production of the victims as

repressed, barbaric, closed, uncouth, even homophobic.89

Ibrāhīm points to precisely this demonization of the enemy other, and the novel shows the

many ways in which it is the US forces who are “barbaric.” They inflict violence

indiscriminately and asymmetrically while painting Iraqi “enemies” as dangerous and

irrational.

Ibrāhīm’s character allows for a broad exploration of many of the anxieties produced

by the Iraq War. His work as an interpreter highlights the tensions he experiences as both a

part of and separate from the US military; as inside and outside of the Green Zone, and

against but also supporting the Iraq War. Through its characters (both Iraqi and US

American), the novel gives voice to the profound material, psychological impacts of the war

on individuals while also showing the far-reaching decimation of Iraq’s infrastructure.

103

ENDNOTES: CHAPTER THREE

1 Executive Order 13769, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States”

2 There are two SIV programs available to Iraqis: one for those who worked for at least a year as translators

and/or interpreters, and one for those who worked for the US government in Iraq in some capacity. The SIV

program for translators and interpreters offers permanent resettlement, while the other program is temporary.

3 Blackwater changed its name twice: first to Xe, and then to Academi (the name by which it is presently

known). Because it was Blackwater during the Iraq war, that is the name I use.

4 In the introduction, I use “translators” as an umbrella term to mean translators and interpreters. Elsewhere, I

use “interpreters” when I am referring specifically to those dealing with speech as opposed to written text.

5 Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, Linguist Support Services in Theater, 2009, 5.

6 Titan was not a part of L3 at this point. L-3 acquired Titan in 2005.

7 Commonly known as the 9/11 Commission.

8 National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States., The 9/11 Commission Report : Final

Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 1st ed. (New York: Norton,

2004).

9 Ibid.

10 “Local national” designates an Iraqi citizen; “third country national” designates anyone who is neither an

Iraqi nor US citizen.

11 Reasons for working as interpreters for the US forces varied but often included “a sense of obligation to bring

home income; a hope for individual professional advancement, which held the promise of family advancement

in the long run; or a desire to qualify for refugee resettlement and to immigrate to the United States, which also

held the promise of helping family in the form of immigration petitions for ‘family reunification’” (Campbell

10).

12 Madeline Otis Campbell, Interpreters of Occupation : Gender and the Politics of Belonging in an Iraqi

Refugee Network, First edition. ed., Gender, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (Syracuse, New York:

Syracuse University Press, 2016)., 68.

13 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press, 1998), 83, 82.

14 Ikram Masmoudi, War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 142.

15 Linguist Support Services in Theater, 31.

16 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Get Political (London: Pluto, 2008), 8-9.

17 Mathieu Guidère, Irak in Translation: De L'art De Perdre Une Guerre Sans Connaître La Langue De Son

Adversaire (Paris: Editions Jacob-Duvernet, 2008).

18 While this dissertation focuses on Arabic-English interpreters, Kurdish, Turkmen, and Neo-Aramaic

languages are also spoken.

104

19 Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, 1st ed. (New York:

Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 202.

20 Her real name is Bāsima Francis.

21 Shākir Nūrī, Al-minṭaqa al-khadrā’ (Abu Dhabi: Thaqāfa, 2009), 119.

22 Madeline Otis Campbell, Interpreters of Occupation: Gender and the Politics Of belonging in an Iraqi

Refugee Network, First Edition. ed., Gender, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East, 67.

23 Campbell, Interpreters of Occupation : Gender and the Politics of Belonging in an Iraqi Refugee Network,

67.

24 Nūrī, Al-minṭaqa al-khadrā’, 58.

25 Masmoudi, War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction, 166.

26 Nūrī, Al-minṭaqa al-khadrā’, 52.

27 Ibid., 101.

28 M. Inghilleri, ""You Don't Make War without Knowing Why" The Decision to Interpret in Iraq," Translator

16, no. 2 (2010): 177.

29 In particular, Phil Klay, Kevin Powers and Brian Turner have received significant praise and attention for

their books on the Iraq War. Only recently has Iraq War literature by Iraqis (Hasan Blasim, Ahmed Saadawi,

Sinan Antoon) begun to receive attention in the US, and even that is relatively limited.

30 M. Lynx Qualey, "The American Soldier in Arab Novels," Full Stop Quarterly (July 2018): 20.

31 Ibid., 22.

32 The term “al-minṭaqa al-khaḍrā’” is a calque of the English “the Green Zone,” a name given by the US

forces. Before the invasion, the area was known as Karādat Maryam or al-ḥay al-tashrī‘.

33 Nūrī, Al-minṭaqa al-khadrā’, 95.

34 Alain Badiou, "Fragments of a Public Diary on the American War against Iraq," Contemporary French and

Francophone Studies 8, no. 3 (2004): 228.

35 Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, 11.

36 The tactic of “embedded journalism” was very popular during the occupation of Iraq. The US military

“embedded” journalists in various units, seemingly to give them “on the ground” access but in reality, as an

attempt to sustain the US-sanctioned narrative of the occupation.

37 “Fixer” generally designates an interpreter who works with a journalist; however, fixers also help with tasks

that interpreters typically do not, such as securing interviews, gaining access to local networks, navigating the

security situation, etc.

38 Nūrī, Al-minṭaqa al-khadrā’, 128.

39 The use of this term is not accidental; it invokes the French term “Zone Rouge,” which was an area declared

unfit for habitation after World War I.

105

40 Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, 201-02.

41 Nūrī, Al-minṭaqa al-khadrā’, 15.

42 Ibid., 17.

43 Daughtry defines “the belliphonic” in Iraq as “the imagined total of sounds that would not have occurred had

the conflict not taken place.” J. Martin Daughtry, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma and Survival in

Wartime Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3-4.

44 I am using common US English spellings for their names rather than transliterated spellings. Nūrī, Al-

Mintaqa Al-Khadra', 19.

45 In fact, a section of the novel is an adapted translation of a Newsweek article about these soldiers entitled

“Soldier Rap, The Pulse of War” by Scott C. Johnson. http://www.newsweek.com/soldier-rap-pulse-war-

119661

46 Suzanne Cusick specifically mentions the two AC/DC songs that appear in the novel—“Hells Bells” and

“Shoot to Thrill”—as “motivational” songs for soldiers in preparation for the siege of Fallujah (see Suzanne G.

Cusick, "'You Are in a Place That Is out of the World...': Music and the Detention Camps of the 'Global War on

Terror'," Journal of the Society for American Music 2, no. 1 (2008).). Daughtry also notes, “within this

environment of vulnerability, musical sound presented yet another paradox: it was, in many manifestations, an

effective wartime tool and a victim of wartime violence” (20). Clive Stafford Smith, "Welcome to 'the Disco',"

The Guardian 2008.

47 Quoted in Nūrī, Al-minṭaqa al-khadrā’, 15.

48 Ibid., 14-15.

49 Ibid., 15.

50 Quoted in Ibid., 21.

51 Ibid., 21-22.

52 Daughtry, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma and Survival in Wartime Iraq, 229.

53 Ibid., 232.

54 Achille Mbembe and Libby Meintjes (translator), "Necropolitics," Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 36.

55 Daughtry, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma and Survival in Wartime Iraq, 20.

56 Nūrī, Al-minṭaqa al-khadrā’, 117.

57 Ibid., 114.

58 “maghlūbūn ‘alā ’amrinā,” Ibid.

59 Ibid., 110.

60 Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks (New York: Pluto, 2011), 18.

61 Nūrī, Al-minṭaqa al-khadrā’.

106

62 Ibid., 56.

63 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 6.

64 Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 36.

65 Ibid., 22.

66 Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, 9.

67 Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing, Wellek Library Lectures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007),

41.

68 Nicholas Michelsen, "Liberalism, Political Theology and Suicide Bombing," Millennium: Journal of

International Studies 42, no. 1 (2013): 204.

69 Asad, On Suicide Bombing, 91.

70 Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (Chicago, Ill.: Haymarket Books, 2012), 54-55.

71 Roxanne L. Euben, "Killing (for) Politics: Jihad, Martyrdom, and Political Action," Political Theory 30, no. 1

(2002): 8.

72 Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Next Wave (Durham: Duke

University Press, 2007), 216.

73 Ibrāhīm is speaking to himself. Nūrī, Al-minṭaqa al-khadrā’.

74He trusts neither the US forces nor the insurgents, and neither help him to secure Vivian’s release; he

ultimately concludes that the insurgents have killed her. Ibid., 200.

75 Ibid., 203.

76 Ibid., 18.

77 Ibid., 64.

78 Ibrahim G. Aoudé, "The Iraq War in the Context of Global Capitalism," International Journal of

Contemporary Iraqi Studies 10, no. 1&2 (2016): 139.

79 Masmoudi, War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction, 176.

80 Nūrī, Al-minṭaqa al-khadrā’, 135.

81 Ibid., 138.

82 Judith Butler, Precarious Life : The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London ; New York: Verso, 2006),

xiv-xv.

83 Ibid.

84 Marita Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 16.

85 Ibid., 165.

107

86 Ibid., 166.

87 Ibid., 7.

88 Nūrī, Al-minṭaqa al-khadrā’, 43.

89 Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages : Homonationalism in Queer Times, Next Wave (Durham: Duke

University Press, 2007), 113.

108

CHAPTER 4: BAGHDAD BLOGGERS: RIVERBEND AND SALAM PAX AS

CULTURAL TRANSLATORS

Introduction

This chapter looks at the role of Iraqi cultural translators on a global scale.

Specifically, it examines the blogs of Riverbend and Salam Pax to analyze the ways these

bloggers consciously perform the role of cultural translators and the effects of their language

choice. Both blogs rose to popularity during the invasion and occupation of Iraq for their

frank, personal style, and their discussions of daily life in Iraq. These two blogs were among

the rare narratives by Iraqis to receive widespread public attention.

Riverbend and Salam Pax both seek to disrupt orientalist representations of Iraqis.

Riverbend misses aspects of her life before the occupation, when she had a job as a computer

programmer, and much more freedom (of movement, of dress). She started the blog in

August 2003 as a space to talk about being a woman, an Iraqi, a 24-year old, and a war

survivor.1 As Krista Hunt notes, “Iraqi women are almost completely absent from the media

narratives of the invasion of Iraq because the figure of Arab femininity only serves the

imperialist project as a silent figure of oppression in need of rescue.”2 Riverbend not only

intervenes in these media narratives, but also unsettles this imperialist vision of Arab

femininity.

109

Salam Pax (alias of Salam Abdelmunem/Al-Janabi) began his blog in December 2002

as a way to keep in touch with his friend, Raed, who had moved to Amman.3 Salam, like

Riverbend, also faces problems of misrepresentation: he lambasts the title of the book version

of his blog4—Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi—for the words

“clandestine” and “ordinary,” neither of which he feels reflects the blog. To prove his point,

he quotes one of his earlier blog posts, where he says “neither I nor Raed are ‘regular joes.’

Actually most regular joes would look at us suspiciously.”5 A reviewer writes that Salam “is

not an ordinary Iraqi by any stretch of the imagination. He’s gay, irreligious, western

educated, and has spent half his life outside Iraq. This is an ordinary citizen of Iraq? I don’t

think so.”6 Salam, however, says that “the things the reviewer saw as negatives…are really

the basis for the common things between us. You and me, we have this dialogue because of

them.”7

In her discussion of the translation of Fatima Mernissi’s memoir, Sanaa Benmessaoud

writes that in translation, “a text can be re-organized and re-packaged, and aspects of its

content can be emphasized or de-emphasized in the process of translation, depending on the

author, the translator, and the target readers.”8 While Riverbend and Salam Pax’s blogs are

translated into a different media rather than a different language, the book versions change

the form of their blogs and package them in ways that change their reception. A Publishers

Weekly review quoted on the back cover of Baghdad Burning I reads, “passionate, frustrated,

sarcastic, and sometimes hopeful….[Riverbend] offers…a perspective too often overlooked,

ignored, or suppressed.”9 Amira Jarmakani argues that this kind of framing of the blog still

depends upon the stereotyped silent Arab woman, to which Riverbend is seen as an

exception.10

110

The Feminist Press published Riverbend’s blog in two book volumes, Baghdad

Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq I & II. Salam Pax’s blog was also published by Grove Press

as a book called Salam Pax: Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi. Both of these titles

reflect a conscious marketing of Iraqi writers to a US audience. “Baghdad Burning” is the

title of Riverbend’s blog, and “from Iraq” underlines her status as an “insider.” The use of

“clandestine diary” in the title of Salam’s book appeals to US forensic interest in Iraq, but it

also erases the original medium—the blog—and instead replaces it with “diary.” The term

diary suggests a much more personal, intimate form of writing than the very public form of

the blog and further, diaries traditionally deal with a person’s thoughts and feelings about

their own life, while Salam writes about his own life as well as global politics and news.

Riverbend’s gender is mentioned in the title of the book but her name is not, while Salam’s

name is mentioned but his gender is not.11 Both began their blogs anonymously, yet only

Salam Pax’s pseudonym is used in the title. The term “girl” in Riverbend’s title is

problematic, as is its use as an adjective: “girl blog” not “a girl’s blog.” The gendered

implications in the titles of the books is emblematic of larger responses to and by the two

bloggers. These changes shape the ways readers interact with the text and the bloggers’

identities.

Both bloggers frame their blogs as truthful, insider perspectives on Iraq and as

counternarratives to US news media. This chapter reads the two blogs as acts of cultural

translation and Riverbend and Salam Pax as cultural interpreters. I approach cultural

translation as an ongoing process that involves constant negotiation, rather than as a singular

outcome. These two bloggers continually shift the way they perform their own subjectivities

111

and their writing reflects a constant shifting of their own positionalities in regard to the

occupation, the US, and the US military.

The Form of the Blog

Weblogs, more commonly known as blogs, emerged in the 1990s but it was not until

“after 9/11 that the phenomenon spread rapidly.”12 Scholars have noted that the Internet in

the Middle East has provided a space for citizens to anonymously raise their voices against

patriarchal and authoritarian systems.13 Since the early 2000s, bloggers in Iran have used

blogs as a site of resistance and political discussion. Iranian bloggers focused on dialogue

with others inside Iran and most wrote in Persian. In more than one post, Salam expresses

admiration for Iranian bloggers both for writing in Persian and for the widespread use of

blogs for political discussion.

Blogs necessarily bring up questions of access and audience. Both blogger and blog-

reader must have access to an Internet-connected device and electricity; Riverbend and

Salam Pax each highlight this issue in their blogs, and their blog posts are limited by

electricity blackouts in Baghdad caused by overloading and damage to the electrical power

system. The disparity in Internet and electricity availability in Iraq versus the US and other

countries highlights the material, daily conditions Riverbend and Salam faced living under

occupation. Both bloggers come from educated, upper middle-class backgrounds and live in

areas of Baghdad that had more reliable access to electricity than others, but still deal daily

with scarcity of resources.

In her monograph Blogging from Egypt, Teresa Pepe analyzes blogs as a form of

digital literature. While her analysis focuses on Egyptian blogs in Arabic, many of her

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insights are relevant to Middle Eastern and Arab bloggers more broadly. Not only do blogs

combine writing with other media, but the “absence of gatekeepers on the Internet [allows]

bloggers to experiment with a writing style that mixes elements from the vernacular, standard

Arabic, youth slang and English, in a way that finds no precedent in modern Arabic

literature.”14 While blogs are generally considered to be a democratic medium, Riverbend

and Salam Pax draw attention to the issues of access (to an Internet-connected device,

electricity) that arise in blogging. She also links the blog to the rise in dystopic fiction in the

Egyptian context, which has parallels to Iraqi literature. Her analysis poses interesting links

between developing technologies and the ways they have influenced new literary forms and

representations of future technologies in literature.

The published book versions of the blogs and the blogs themselves present two

distinct reading experiences. Traditional printed literary texts emerge whole in a concrete

form; the two blogs, on the other hand, are serial, shifting, and unpredictable. While the

books do attempt to reproduce the basic formatting of the blogs, they cannot display the

links and media that the blogs incorporate. On the blogs, the most recent entry appears first

on the webpage, whereas the books are organized chronologically, staging an entirely

different interaction between reader and text than the blog. At the time of their publication,

the bloggers engaged with their readers and other bloggers, and the updates gave the blogs a

live quality that is lost in book form. Further, each update alters the form of the blog

slightly: it causes a shift in the entries, and the most recent entry automatically appears at

the top of the webpage.15 While this change may seem trivial, over time it alters the way the

reader interacts with the blogs and its entries, and it differs from the experience of reading a

physical book, which cannot change in the same way. Both bloggers frequently respond to

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comments, emails, or news stories in their posts, reference other bloggers, and give links to

other websites. They also have regular access to and knowledge of computers and can write

in English because of their educational backgrounds. Both bloggers have written about their

roles as cultural translators/interpreters, and much like their ambivalent views towards

translators and interpreters, they have mixed feelings about their own roles as well.

The fictional texts in this dissertation all contain plots and central characters, and in

general have a timeline that follows some kind of narrative logic (including flashbacks,

etc.). While the novels are divided into chapters, the blogs are more episodic. Many of the

blog posts follow a particular theme or event, and there are people, themes, and events that

appear throughout, but they are not crafted as a narrative whole in the same way that fiction

is. Riverbend and Salam Pax both have a larger goal—namely, to intervene in public Iraq

War narratives—but they approach this goal as a process rather than a single end product.

This approach reflects the incomplete and always shifting process of cultural translation.

The serial nature of the blogs also changes the ways they are received. Riverbend’s

blog is single-author, and Salam Pax’s blog is a kind of conversation between himself and

Raed as well as an outlet for Salam’s thoughts. Blog readers thus gain a more enduring look

into the bloggers’ lives because they are reading from the same person (or few people)

repeatedly. This creates a narrative not only of their personal lives, but also of the effects of

war on the bloggers themselves and globally. This parallel narrative and the continuous

nature of the blogging personalizes the Iraq War in ways that few other sources have. On the

other hand, the serial nature of the blogs also means that absences affect the reading

experience. The cumulative process of blog reading creates a sustained relationship between

blogger and reader. As noted earlier, power outages often affected when and how often the

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bloggers posted. Salam Pax sent Word documents to a friend for posting on at least one

occasion, and both bloggers note the worried responses of readers when they go a long period

of time without posting. Unlike other serialized forms, new posts are not on a set schedule

and are often influenced by external factors. During these unforeseen and sometimes

protracted absences, readers express concern over the bloggers’ wellbeing and indeed, lives.

Blogging and Media

The turn towards blogs as a source of news increased after 9/11, when US publics

sought alternatives to mainstream news media. Riverbend and Salam Pax write to share their

perspectives on the invasion of Iraq, which they do not see represented in Western media.

Campbell and Howie write,

It was against this backdrop of social, cultural and political change that the

Iraq blogosphere emerged as an important communicative space where

witness accounts of the war were told and where the unofficial version (the

version not told by embedded western journalists) found an international

audience.16

Embedded journalism, which I mention briefly in chapter three, rose to popularity during the

occupation in order to prop up the US narrative of the Iraq War. By embedding journalists in

military units, the US government and military were able to influence what journalists did

and did not see; at the same time, being embedded in a military unit provides a sense of “on

the ground” access and thus lends legitimacy to their accounts. This sense of on the ground

experience also promoted Riverbend and Salam Pax’s popularity. In Blogging, Citizenship,

and the Future of Media, Mark Tremayne discusses this phenomenon:

Blogs give readers the impression that they are getting unmediated raw

information. In the case of eyewitness bloggers, this is almost true. Blogs

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provide not only the news event but also instantaneous commentary on

it…Blogs allow feedback from readers in the form of comment functions

available at many blogs.17

As Tremayne notes, technological developments like blogs have led to changes in the ways

war is “seen” and reported. The Gulf War is commonly referred to as the first televised war,

and as Tremayne notes, technologies have continued to develop that allow for the near

instant sharing of information via the Internet. During the First Gulf War, Paul Virilio wrote

that “televised or written – live or delayed – any self-respecting news source always needs

time to reflect, that is, needs at least some minimal delay to verify sources, a delay that no

longer exists with live transmissions.”18 This skepticism about the quality of news media in

the age of the 24-hour news cycle was prescient, particularly for the Iraq War. Melani

McAlister writes that “American media coverage of the invasion was, from the beginning,

remarkably credulous—so much so that in 2004, both the New York Times and the

Washington Post issued public apologies for their handling of the war.”19 It was in this

context that the genre of “warblogs” grew in popularity, including Riverbend’s and Salam’s.

Riverbend sees the constant barrage of US media in Iraq as a kind of extension of

warfare—and indeed, it is in line with the tenets of counterinsurgency. Virilio discusses the

US news media “under the sway of the Pentagon,” arguing that it “performs a key role in this

stealthful and intensive conflict where telecommunications satellites will have played a

prominent role both during the course of operations and in the presentation of news in the

mass media.”20 The government’s control over communications and influence on the media

shaped the narratives about both the First Gulf War and the Iraq War.

Riverbend describes a scene in which a person wakes up in the morning, turns on the

TV and “settle[s] on the pleasant face on the screen—the big hair, bright power suit, capped

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teeth, and colorful talons-blandly reading the news. The anchoress is Julie Chan. The

program is CBS’s The Early Morning Show (Live from Fifth Avenue!).”21 She then asks her

readers to guess the nationality of the viewer: “Three guesses. American? No. Canadian? No.

British? Japanese? Australian? No, no and no. The viewer is Iraqi… or Jordanian… or

Lebanese… or Syrian… or Saudi… or Kuwaiti… or… but you get the picture.”22 The scene

she describes is part of her own daily life as well as part of the lives of people across the

Middle East; rather than national or regional news media, US news stations are the norm. She

sees the ubiquity of US news media in the Middle East—and Iraq particularly—as an

extension of war. She writes,

Two years ago, the major part of the war in Iraq was all about bombarding us

with smart bombs and high-tech missiles. Now there’s a different sort of war-

or perhaps it’s just another phase of the same war. Now we’re being assailed

with American media. It’s everywhere all at once.23

She deliberately uses language that evokes war to draw a comparison between the launching

of bombs and missiles to the assault of US media in Iraq. This highlights the constant,

unilateral imposition of US technologies—whether weapons or media—on Iraq. Debjani

Ganguly takes a similar perspective on war technologies in her book This Thing Called the

World; she writes,

If print technology in the late eighteenth century enabled the imagination of

war at a distance, digital technology brings war physically into civilian homes.

Technological innovations in our era wage war at the same time as they

mediate it. They are both death-delivering and sensitizing. They both destroy

and inform.24

Riverbend also notes that the Arabic language news channel Alhurra, which was established

in 2004, is US-owned and is “news about the Arab world with the American twist.”25

Riverbend finds the sanitized, oversimplified style of reporting on the US news upsetting; she

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says, “we sat there watching like we were a part of another world, in another galaxy.”26 Her

critical take on news channels illustrates not only the extent of US cultural imperialism, but

also the extent to which US news media manipulates the narrative of the Iraq War in very

particular ways. The blog allows Riverbend to respond quickly and directly to television

news media and to the events in Iraq in a way that is more personal than traditional print

media, and more efficient than traditional print publishing.

For Riverbend, television images—even mediated images—force her to relive the

experience of war. She has trouble sleeping and has dreams of being buried, which she

ascribes in part to “the fact that every day we relive a little bit of the war—on television, on

the radio, on the internet.”27 Even though she lives under the daily violence of the

occupation, seeing it on television is a different kind of experience for her. Virilio writes that

because of “instantaneous coverage” of war,

we all find ourselves engaged, willingly or not, in the atrocity of the attacks;

and, more importantly, we all find that we have become involved in the nature

of the combat, be it ‘conventional’ or ‘nonconventional,’ with the ethical risks

and thus the political risks that this implies.28

War media becomes another source of trauma for Riverbend: it forces her not only to

remember her own experience of war, but also to confront new images. In the current

moment, much of the information we receive about other parts of the world comes from the

media rather than from experience. Even though Riverbend is herself in Iraq, she, too, relies

on media for information about other parts of Iraq.

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Constructing Riverbend and Salam

In order to discuss how the bloggers engage in cultural translation, it is necessary to

first examine how the bloggers construct themselves and their audience. This section exams

the ways in which the bloggers position (and reposition) themselves in relation to Iraqiness,

language, and gender. Perri Campbell and Luke Howie argue that blogs facilitate the creation

of a “digital self” who can use a different name, make criticisms that would not be possible in

other spaces, and reflect on relationships that emerge in digital spaces.29 Their choices to

blog anonymously30 protects them from backlash over what they write, but it also gives them

a space to construct their identities in particular ways. Riverbend evokes particular aspects of

her identity strategically at different moments on her blog. Her blog is emblematic of miriam

cooke’s notion of “multiple critique,” which is a “multilayered discourse” derived from

Abdelkebir Khatibi’s double critique and Deborah K. King’s “multiple consciousness” that

allows women “to engage with and criticize the various individuals, institutions, and systems

that limit and oppress them while making sure that they are not caught in their own

rhetoric.”31 Riverbend criticizes patriarchal structures in Iraq as well as the occupation,

shifting how she identifies in relation to various communities; she “[transforms her]

particular, often marginalized viewpoint into a universal by strategically labeling [herself] as

other while knowing that [she] is not.”32 Riverbend is able to write her blog because of her

subject position as an English-speaking Iraqi woman from a (presumably) upper-middle class

background; she is an Iraqi ‘insider,’ but she also has access to technology and multiple

languages because of her upbringing. Riverbend often uses the plural “we” when speaking

about herself and other women, Iraqis, and Muslims; Wesley Attewell notes that she

“downplays the importance of her positionality and class privilege by aligning herself with

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the ‘true Iraqis.’”33 Riverbend takes for granted who belongs to and who is excluded from

this category.

While Riverbend sees herself unquestioningly as Iraqi, Salam has a more complicated

view of relationship to Iraq and Iraqi identity. Both bloggers spent significant periods of time

living in other countries, and for Salam this leads to a sense of dislocation. He writes,

There was a time when I thought that one of the best things that have

happened to me is that I have not been “rooted” anywhere. I felt that I will

manage to feel at home wherever I go. Culture, as in my cultural heritage, was

not something I could betray because it was not part of how I saw myself.34

Before the occupation, Salam seems to define his identity by mobility rather than by

belonging to a specific place. After the occupation and starting his blog, Iraqi identity is

thrust upon him. Riverbend feels firmly rooted in her identities as Iraqi, Muslim, and woman,

and thus speaks as a member, and sometimes on behalf of, those groups. Salam, however, is

often reluctant to claim any particular identity (not wanting to be a “spokesman for anyone”)

and thus feels uneasy when he starts writing articles for the Guardian. He says that he was

asked to write for them because he “had the good fortune to know decent English and know

enough about western culture to be able to connect with the mostly western readers.”35 Both

learning English and the ability to connect with Western readers are not solely the result of

‘good fortune,’ but of cultivated skill.

Sharing their perspectives as Iraqis motivates both bloggers, but they have differing

relationships to Iraq. While Salam openly disagrees that he is an “ordinary” Iraqi, Riverbend

invokes and constructs Iraqiness in strategic ways. When asked about her English, she writes:

I am Iraqi- born in Iraq to Iraqi parents, but was raised abroad for several

years as a child. I came back in my early teens and continued studying in

English in Baghdad- reading any book I could get my hands on. Most of my

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friends are of different ethnicities, religions and nationalities. I am bilingual.

There are thousands in Iraq like me- kids of diplomats, students, ex-patriots,

etc.36

She highlights her identification with Iraq—she is an Iraqi born to Iraqi parents—and

comments on the diversity of her community. Her reference to her “friends…of different

ethnicities, religions, and nationalities” evokes an idealized pre-occupation Iraq in direct

contrast to the sectarian conflict that escalated after the occupation. Further, she normalizes

her experience living abroad and learning English; there are “thousands” in Iraq like her.37

Iraqiness for the two bloggers has different, shifting, and sometimes nebulous

meanings. Often, Riverbend defines herself and her own Iraqiness in exclusionary terms

against extremists, foreigners, and occupiers. She characterizes “true” Iraqi identity as a

sense of unity, mutual respect, and tolerance. She writes that in Iraq,

We all lived together before- we can live together in the future. Iraqis are

proud of their different ethnicities, but in the end, we all identify ourselves as

"Iraqi". Every Iraqi's nightmare is to wake up one morning and find Iraq split

into several parts based on ethnicity and religion. Salam said it best when he

said, “There are no lines and none should exist…”38

She sees the umbrella of Iraqi identity as encompassing all of the different ethnic and

religious communities in Iraq. By describing the splitting of Iraq proposed by the GC as

“every Iraqi’s nightmare” she excludes anyone in favor of the splitting from being an Iraqi.

She quotes (and links to) Salam’s post on the same subject, where he writes “Yes I know

identity is important but you see my father is Sunni, my mother is Shia and our neighbors for

years Kurds…it is all one Iraq for me.”39 For both of them, fundamental to Iraqiness is the

shared sense of mutual respect and understanding among these communities. Riverbend, in

fact, sees this as the cornerstone of ‘civilization’:

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the majority of Iraqis have a deep respect for other cultures and religions…

and that's what civilization is. It's not mobile phones, computers, skyscrapers

and McDonalds; It's having enough security in your own faith and culture to

allow people the sanctity of theirs…40

The way she frames what civilization is not shows that she believes this to be the “dominant

notion of civilization,” which she is debunking; this allows her to “simultaneously reveal the

construction of the category of civilization and to rewrite Iraq into the category.”41 Even as

she undermines the capitalist underpinnings of Western ‘civilization,’ she situates Iraq’s

claim to civilization within prevailing ideas about what it is.

In addition to this idealized vision of acceptance and belonging that the bloggers

associate with Iraq, language is another important signification of belonging. Riverbend and

Salam generally participate in what Naoki Sakai calls “homolingual address,” “whereby the

addresser adopts the position representative of a putatively homogeneous language society

and relates to the general addresses, who are also representative of an equally homogeneous

language community.”42 Riverbend and Salam Pax address a “coherent” audience of English

speakers despite their own more complex understandings of their own identities, they see

themselves as a belonging to a separate, distinct group.43 When Riverbend uses the pronoun

“we,” she has her own understanding of who does and does not belong to that we.

“Heterolingual address,” in contrast, allows for the construction of a “we” where the

individuals are “distant from one another because [their] togetherness is not grounded on any

common homogeneity.”44 The bloggers write to and for an anglophone audience whom they

see as a group separate from themselves. Although they write to contribute Iraqi voices to

public narratives, their intended audience influences how and what they write.

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Riverbend, Salam, and Raed all criticize the politicians vying for power, whom they

do not see as “Iraqi.” After watching a speech by Al-Sharif Ali bin Husayn,45 Salam

criticizes him, noting he “can’t even speak my language” and seems like he is reading “an

english [transcription] of arabic words because they sound so wrong.”46 Salam excludes Al-

Sharif Ali from Iraqiness through the repeating of “my country” and “my language.” Salam

demonstrates a sense of ownership of and belonging to Iraq grounded in both place and

language: he denounces Al-Sharif Ali because of his poor Arabic and for never setting foot in

Iraq.47

Both Riverbend and Salam Pax write about the complexities of being consumers of

Western culture, speakers and writers of English, and Iraqis, which affects how they interact

with and view their audience. Riverbend recognizes the consumption of Western culture in

Iraq but separates that from her critique of foreign policy. For Salam, untangling the two is

more problematic. He writes to Raed:

I am all the arguments we used to have about us being attachments to western

culture rolled into one.

This is not the dialogue of equals we used to talk about; I keep referencing

their everything because I am so swallowed up by it. Look; I have been

sending you emails in English for the last year, how sad is that.

Shame on me.48

Salam feels “swallowed up” by the hegemony of Western culture and disappointed in himself

for failing to use Arabic in his emails to Raed. He cites arguments he used to have with Raed

about their relationship to Western culture and laments the fact that he is becoming what they

argued against. In a post years later, he cites this letter to Raed but his view has shifted:

Salam identifies the importance of his role as a “cultural interpreter,” and cites the negative

comments from a reviewer as sources of connection. He recognizes that finding connection

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across cultures and languages is becoming more and more difficult and finds hope and

significance in the small connections that people find over Iraqi food or on Iraqi blogs. He

does “not feel ashamed of standing in the middle anymore.”49 The “middle” he writes about

alludes to his feelings of in-betweenness cultural interpreter, trying to bridge different

cultures, languages, and communities. However, he recognizes that by writing in English, he

perpetuates the “dominant/subordinate culture” paradigm; it is Salam and Riverbend who

reach out to try to connect with an anglophone audience, to try to find points of shared

interest and relate to them, not the other way around.50 In this way, we see Salam’s

recognition of inhabiting a barzakh-like space of being a cultural interpreter; as an occupied

subject attempting to bridge the gap between himself as an Iraqi and himself as a consumer

of Western culture, between Iraq as he experiences/sees it and Iraq as it is represented in the

anglophone world, he constantly navigates multiple aspects of his identity, finding difficulty

in ever fully inhabiting any of them or merging them into a coherent whole. Like the

interpreters in the novels, the bloggers navigate both the ‘original’ language and culture and

the ‘target’ language and culture, present in both but never able to merge them completely.

Riverbend’s experience of war—and thus her writing of it—reflects her gendered

position. In addition to examining her own experience of war, she also examines the act of

writing, rewriting, and remembering war. The ways she writes about herself as an Iraqi,

writer, Muslim, shift and change in relation to one another. Riverbend frequently reflects on

the ways the invasion changes her life as a woman in Iraq. She writes,

For those of you wondering, YES, it annoys me beyond anything that, at my

age, I have to get parental permission to leave the house. It’s a trend that

started after the war and doesn’t look like it’s going to abate any time soon. I

comfort myself with the thought that it’s not specific to my household or

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even my gender – all parents seem to be doing it lately…where are you

going? To do what? Who is going with you? What time will you be back? Is

it absolutely necessary?51

She frames the difficulties in going out as a safety issue common to parents, rather than

because she is a woman. The comfort she feels that others have difficulty leaving the house,

too, shows the pervasive fear that spread after the invasion, while emphasizing that it is not

specific to women. Riverbend repeatedly and consciously depicts herself (and “Iraqi

women”52) as independent and intelligent. Both Riverbend and Salam are conscious of

representations of the Middle East and of Iraqis in the US, and they respond to and speak

against those representations.

Nadine Sinno argues that Riverbend resists the homogenization of what Chandra

Mohanty describes as the “third world woman” by insisting upon her agency in pre-

occupation Iraq.53 Because she does not wear the ḥijāb and worked as a computer scientist

before the occupation, she does not fit US perceptions of Iraqi women. In her essay “Under

Western Eyes,” Mohanty describes the homogenized third world woman as leading “an

essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and being

‘third world’ (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, religious, domesticated,

family-oriented, victimized, etc.).”54 Riverbend defies and subverts these stereotypes: she is

educated, seemingly financially comfortable, and supports secular laws in Iraq; she is also

religious and family-oriented, but in terms that do not fit this narrative of the “third world

woman.” Riverbend makes clear to her readers that she practices Islam because it is what she

believes and because she chooses to, and frequently refers to the ways her life and mobility

have been curbed by the invasion and resultant chaos.

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Scholars like Denise Ferreira da Silva and Etienne Balibar argue that “the cultural

seems to have displaced the nation and the racial to become the governing political signifier”

in the latter half of the twentieth century.55 This is particularly apparent with the rise of

Islamophobia in the US, which although religiously based is usually framed through Islam’s

‘incompatibility’ with liberal humanist (Western) values.56 The demonization of Islam and

Iraqis by the Bush administration influenced how Riverbend and Salam Pax’s readers viewed

and interacted with the bloggers.57 Colin Powell, for example, said before the invasion that

Iraqis are “working hard to deceive you, to hide things and make it harder for you to get the

truth.”58 Riverbend and Salam’s reiteration of particular forms of Iraqi and Muslim identity

stem in part from a desire to debunk these myths.

The Work of Cultural Translation

While interpreters during the Iraq War were often expected to act as cultural advisors

(or cultural interpreters),59 Riverbend and Salam Pax take up this task voluntarily. They

intervene in public narratives of the Iraq War that deliberately obscure and often fabricate the

conditions and experiences of Iraqis. Riverbend and Salam Pax60 both choose to write in

English over Arabic, which indicates the desire to speak to a global anglophone audience.

In many cases, the success or failure of cultural translation is just as important as

linguistic translation. Talal Asad uses the concept of cultural translation in his 1986 essay

“The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology” to describe social

anthropologists’ role of “translating” the cultures they study and the asymmetric power

relations involved in that translation. The term has been adopted and adapted in literary and

translation studies. It became extremely important in translation studies in the early 1990s,

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when there was a focus on translation as a complex negotiation between cultures (rather than

just languages). Homi Bhabha uses the term in his essay “How newness enters the world” in

The Location of Culture, arguing that “translation is the performative nature of cultural

communication.”61 Bhabha’s use of the term expands the meaning of translation to

incorporate hybridity, border crossing and “third space.” Rather than thinking about

translation as movement of texts, he links it to movement of people (migration).

Waïl Hassan uses the term in Immigrant Narratives in the context of what he calls

“translational literature,” which he describes as “texts that straddle two languages, at once

foregrounding, performing, and problematizing the act of translation.”62 He uses cultural

translation as a framework to understand both the role of anglophone Arab writers and the

translation the text itself is doing. He writes, “in performing acts of cultural translation in the

‘original’ itself, translation literature…problematizes the notion of the ‘original.’”63 The

primary texts for this project all strategically use multiple languages within the text, which

alienates the reader if they do not speak those languages; multilingualism affords a certain

power while forcing the monolingual into a position of ignorance and incomprehension. The

texts thus focus thematically on the tensions, complexities, and difficulties of translation

while also performing those difficulties. Just as Hassan interrogates the notion of ‘original,’

so these bloggers illustrate the complications of identifying a ‘source culture’ and a ‘target

culture’ when discussing cultural translation. Edward Said defines culture as “a sort of

theater where various political and ideological causes engage one another” as well as

all those practices like the arts of description, communication, and

representation, that have relative autonomy from the economic, social, and

political realms and that often exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose principal

aims is pleasure.64

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Riverbend and Salam both “translate” Iraqi and Middle Eastern cultural practices in different

contexts. Riverbend and Salam frequently offer explanations of and commentaries on events

in Iraq as well on things holidays, social organization, and education; Riverbend also

frequently translates Arabic proverbs into English.

In the study “Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere,” researchers for the Internet and

Democracy Project classify Levantine bloggers who use English and (or instead of) Arabic as

“bridge bloggers,” who “form a ‘bridge’ to the international English language

blogosphere.”65 Interestingly, however, they also note that even though Iraqi bloggers have

received considerable media attention, they represent a small segment of the Arabic

blogosphere and are more embedded in the population of “English bridge” bloggers. This

terminology is notable firstly for the co-optation of a common metaphor used for translation

and secondly for the underlying logic that English functions as a bridge. While this is in line

with Riverbend and Salam Pax’s own goals, it reinforces the metaphor for translation as a

bridge but erases the power dynamics that frame the interaction between the bloggers and

their audience.

Although Riverbend and Salam Pax take up this role consciously, they write in

English against hegemonic discourses about the Middle East, Iraq, and the Iraq War.

Youngmin Kim argues that cultural translation should “bring closeness and remoteness

together by balancing the distance towards each other’s languages and cultures in order to

liberate the language for cross-cultural and transnational exchange of human emotion and

understanding.”66 Indeed, Riverbend and Salam Pax both do this in their blogs, but they are

also the ones responsible for cultivating that closeness.

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While this chapter focuses on cultural translation in the blogs, it is interesting to note

the ways the two bloggers talk about translators and interpreters. Reflecting on the role of

translators in Iraq, Riverbend writes,

During raids, a translator hovers in the background inconspicuously—they

don’t bring him forward right away to communicate with terrified people

because they are hoping someone will accidentally say something vital in

Arabic, thinking the troops won’t understand, like “Honey, did you bury the

nuclear bomb in the garden like I told you?!”67

In this passage, Riverbend genders the translator as male; this may reflect her own

experience of translators as male, but it also masculinizes the role. She sets up a clear

dichotomy between the troops and the Iraqis. Riverbend clearly mocks the army for thinking

Iraqis would say something like “Honey, did you bury the nuclear bomb in the garden like I

told you?!” but also homogenizes the US soldiers. Riverbend notes that the translators “hover

in the background”—neither soldiers nor citizens. Her suspicion of translators is notable

given her own decision to act as a translator—both literally and figuratively—between Iraqis

and US Americans. Salam also mentions interpreters more than once, and the way he

portrays them reflect his own role:

The Iraqi interpreters in many cases end up as spokesmen for the American

Forces, having to justify whatever mess they have created somewhere and

why this or that person was arrested. Most people will not see them as just

interpreters but they will start [accusing] them.68

Like Salam himself, the interpreters he mentions become reluctant spokespersons, with the

critical difference that they have to explain and justify what the Americans have done and

why. This is almost a reversal of Salam’s role: while he tries to convey what is going on in

Iraq to (mostly) Americans, the Iraqi interpreters have to explain to Iraqis what the

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Americans are doing. Both Salam and the interpreters are made to speak on behalf of other

groups and are subsequently blamed by those groups.

One of the more explicit examples of cultural translation in Riverbend’s blog is a

series of posts in which she provides commentary on the Iraqi Draft Constitution that was

submitted to the UN in September 2005. In these posts, she details the differences between

the English and Arabic versions of the constitution, noting many inconsistencies between

them:

There are, as far as I can tell, three different versions. There are two different

Arabic versions and the draft constitution translated to English in the New

York Times …The differences aren’t huge- some missing clauses or articles.

Then again, this is a constitution- not a blog… one would think precision is a

must.69

She first notes the existence of multiple forms of the Arabic constitution, an English

translation that does not match any of them, and a Kurdish version that she cannot read. She

notes that “precision” is “a must” concerning the translation of a constitution, which she sees

as a textual form of higher prestige than a blog. By providing extensive commentary on

various articles of the constitution, she explains not only the inconsistencies between the

Arabic and English versions, but also “translates” the meaning of the articles into a culturally

specific context. For example, she translates Article 2, which says that “Islam is the official

religion of the state,” “no law can be passed that contradicts the principles of democracy” and

that all individuals are granted religious freedom.70 She follows up her translation with an

explanation of what this law means practically in order to illustrate its broader implications.

She expresses misgivings that she, as a practicing Muslim, has about the difficulties in state

implementation of Islamic law. Further, she takes a pluralistic view of the validity of

interpretations; she does not seem to be arguing for one “correct” interpretation, but rather

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for the impossibility of there being a “correct” interpretation. Not only does she (literally)

translate the article, she unpacks the legalese and renders its consequences into terms that her

readers will understand. By explaining them to her readers, she informs them about particular

aspects of the articles, but her commentary is also limited and influenced by her subject

position. The multiple versions and translations of the Constitution and Riverbend’s

commentary on the meanings of the various articles exemplify the always incomplete process

of translation.

While Riverbend’s cultural translation usually takes on an explanatory or literal form,

Salam’s cultural translation is usually to offer an opinion on an event or the way it was

reported, rather than language. Salam has a complicated relationship with Arabic and with

his choice to write a blog in English, but does not translate words, phrases, or proverbs with

the frequency that Riverbend does. Salam’s post on the decision to change the Family Law71

in Iraq shows their differing approaches. He posts an article in Arabic by Azzaman,72 and

writes:

It is really worth taking a look at if you can read arabic, I do apologize to non-

arabic readers, the article is quite long and tricky to translate.

UPDATE: Riverbend has posted about the issue at 5:48 in the morning! talk

about issues not letting you get the sleep you need.73

Salam apologizes to his non-Arabic readers and explains the reason he has not gone through

the labor of translating the article for them. He then later updates the post, quoting and

linking to Riverbend’s post on the same topic. Although Salam sees himself as a cultural

interpreter, there are things he finds difficult or impossible to translate. This is a literal

example—he chooses not to perform the labor that translation requires—but he also shows

this in other posts through his frustration over misinterpretations of what he writes. Although

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the bloggers find many ways of communicating with their audience, the misinterpretation of

their words and the occupation itself illustrate that the work of cultural translation is never

complete.

Ṣumūd in Iraq

During both the Gulf War and the Iraq War, tensions arose in Iraq between those who

stayed and those who left. Riverbend finds particular difficulty in accepting politicians who

are literal outsiders in that they lived outside Iraq for many years, as well as those who are

figurative outsiders in that their socioeconomic status alienates them from the general Iraqi

public. Riverbend’s blog reflects her lived experience of war as someone who stayed, while

the fictional texts I discuss in previous chapters are necessarily distanced from this

experience in terms of both form and geography. Interestingly, Riverbend’s “authenticity”

has been questioned because she writes in English and under a pseudonym, leading some

readers to believe that she is not actually Iraqi. So while the insider/outsider distinction

sometimes depends on physical location (literally inside or outside of the country) it can also

be determined by other factors such as language or socioeconomic status. The concept of

ṣumūd is also relevant to the idea of the native informer or native intellectual. Riverbend is

particularly critical of members of the GC who left Iraq because she sees them as out of

touch. However, she and Salam both use the authority they derive from remaining in Iraq to

address their mostly Euro-American audience.

The concept of sumūd originated in Palestine to describe those who stayed in

Palestine after the Six Day War in 1967. It invokes the steadfastness, tenacity, and resilience

of staying in one’s home(land) during occupation. Many writers and scholars view ṣumūd as

a form of resistance to occupation: it is a “resilient resistance” that “represents living despite

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the occupation, or even living to spite the occupation, rather than living with the

occupation.”74 One of the foundations of ṣumūd is remaining in the face of impossible

circumstances; Riverbend, I would argue, belongs to this tradition. On her blog, Riverbend

expresses distaste towards those who leave Iraq, and she recognizes that this objection is

largely instinctive; intellectually, she recognizes that it is a necessity for some people. Her

argument is that by leaving the country, Iraqis are leaving their place of belonging and taking

their expertise—which they could use to restore the country—elsewhere. When she hears

about anyone leaving or thinking about leaving Iraq, she “[wants] to beg them to stay…a part

of [her] wants to scream ‘But we need you here! You belong here!’” but also recognizes that

some of them have no other options to support themselves and their families, and others

leave to escape the occupation.75

Riverbend derives a sense of authority from remaining inside the country and has

firsthand experience that makes her blog unique for an anglophone audience. She describes

not only the politics of Iraq and major events of the war, but also how the occupation affects

her daily life: how many hours of electricity they have, what they eat, whether or not her

young family members are able to attend school, or when she can go out to run errands. The

details of her daily life illustrate to her readers the everyday, seemingly simple tasks that

become impossible, restricted, or dangerous during war. She lives to spite the occupation not

only by performing these (like shopping and visiting friends and relatives) as often as she

can, she also makes these struggles public via her blog.

Riverbend’s work is nonfiction, but it has a literary quality that transcends mere

reportage. Riverbend and Salam Pax are the only writers among those discussed in this

dissertation who lived in Iraq at the time of writing,76 but they are also very much invested in

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questions of exile, citizenship, and belonging. Although Riverbend remains in Iraq, it is

defamiliarized by the presence of occupying forces; it creates, as Rosemary George writes, a

“narrative of diminished authority in the face of a deep affiliation to the country left behind,

an attachment we easily recognize as diasporic.”77 Riverbend’s feelings of living in another

country even when she is physically in her own home speak to feelings of the loss of her

country, so ṣumūd functions as a way of retaining her attachment to Iraq as she envisions and

remembers it and remaining in the face of the occupation. In Culture and Imperialism,

Edward Said writes that

just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely

free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and

interesting because it is not only about solders and cannons but also about

ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.78

Riverbend’s images and imaginings of Iraq create an Iraqi identity that transcends the

physical space so when she is forced to leave, her Iraqi identity is intact, and partly defined

by her diasporic/exilic subjectivity. For writers in exile who are not experiencing the daily

realities of war—like Kachachī, Saeed, and Nūrī—fictional accounts allow them to grapple

with their status as Iraqi exiles during wartime. Because they live far from the physical

conflict it makes sense that they would draw on their experiences of other wars like Vietnam

and the First Gulf War, even if they experienced those wars at a distance as well. Roger

Luckhurst reads this phenomenon through Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional

memory, which is meant “to draw attention to the dynamic transfers that take place between

diverse places and times during the act of remembrance” as well as looking at “how

remembrance both cuts across and binds together diverse spatial, temporal, and cultural

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sites.”79 While Luckhurst reads texts about other wars as commenting on and affected by the

Iraq war, his argument extends to accounts of the Iraq War itself.

Riverbend, like Zayna in The American Granddaughter, feels compelled to express

her own experiences of war, partly as a way of coping with them. Riverbend, however, writes

for the public as a way of giving a voice to her underrepresented experience; The American

Granddaughter uses Zayna’s diary-like perspective as a way of working through and trying

to make sense experiences of war. By writing her blog in English, Riverbend clearly targets

English speakers, whom she believes do not have an accurate image of the war. By

articulating her experience, Riverbend adds her voice to the chorus of Iraqis discussing their

own narratives of the invasion. Riverbend initially writes as a source of emotional relief;

however, it evolves into a way of bringing attention to Iraqi experience.

The bloggers try to take back the largely US-controlled narrative of the Iraq War as

illustrating the material conditions of post-invasion Iraq. Hamid Dabashi has written

extensively about native informers who use their “insider” knowledge of Iraq to facilitate and

strengthen US imperialism and its public justifications.80 He explains the critical role of

native informers for the US government, writing,

For the American imperial project to claim global validity it needs the support

of native informers and comprador intellectuals with varying accents to their

speech, their prose, and politics. Supported only by white men and women,

the project would not have the same degree of narrative authority. But

accounts from targeted cultures and climes orientalize, exoticize, and

corroborate all at the same time…81

Unlike native informers, both bloggers use “multiple critique” to criticize the occupation as

well as unjust systems in Iraq. They are also highly critical of Iraqis put in power who parrot

US doctrine. Riverbend views the Iraqi politicians appointed to the GC whom she refers to as

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the “Puppets,” as in line with the native informers Dabashi describes. At various moments,

Riverbend draws on her relationship to many different communities as a form of belonging

and also as an authority to her critiques.

In Not Like a Native Speaker, Rey Chow discusses the figure of the native informer as

well as the figure of the translator, although she, too, uses the term in a way that goes beyond

the literal. She writes,

In invoking translation at this juncture, I should quickly add that I am not

adhering strictly to the common definition of the translator as a professional

word worker who carries meanings from one language into another. Instead, I

would like to explore translation and translator by way of something

(ap)proximate—namely, the notion of an arbiter of values, as embedded in

disparate cultural literacies or systems… (My exploration is thus itself a

translation of the more conventional understanding of translation as a transfer

of words, whether intra- or interlinguistically).82

Chow’s definition focusing on the translator as an “arbiter of values” is especially useful

when thinking about the roles of Riverbend and Salam Pax; if not as explicit arbiters of

value, both bloggers see it as their mission to translate Iraqi attitudes politics, language, and

other sociocultural practices, for an anglophone audience. Because the bloggers are among

the very few Iraqis who received significant attention during the Iraq War, the carrying of

meaning from one context to another results in their becoming—for many of their readers—

an analog for all Iraqis.83

In one of his posts on Salam Pax’s84 blog, Raed remarks on the reduction of the

occupation to a choice between Iraq or the US, with no gray area. He identifies the two

options given to Iraqis: oppose the occupation and be declared a Ba‘athist, or support the

occupation and therefore US imperialism. He writes,

136

DO YOU WANT AMERICANS TO LEAVE?

Yes = hmmm.. you baathist pro saddamist bastard .. arrest him

No = OK! Here we have another evidence how much Iraqi people want us to

stay.85

Using all capital letters and boldface emphasizes the loaded nature of the question, and his

yes/no responses with corresponding political stances point to its absurdity. Both Riverbend

and Salam Pax are accused at different moments of being pro-Saddam, seemingly because of

their opposition to the occupation. The choices for Iraqis are thus reduced to anti-occupation

and therefore pro-Saddam, or pro-occupation and thus pro-imperialism and betraying Iraq.

None of the bloggers subscribes to these binary, overly simplified stances. Raed points to the

erasure of Iraqi voices with regard to the invasion:

Why didn’t anyone ask us whether we wanted the war or not? Whether we felt

comfortable with the GC or not? Why no one asks if the game of jumping

from plan to another with no vision is amusing or not? But everyone comes

now and ask .. do u want ‘them’ to leave or stay?86

In these two passages, Raed identifies the reductive ways that pro-occupation and anti-

occupation Iraqis are perceived. Raed points to the futility of asking Iraqis if they want to

leave after the US has invaded and occupied their country and almost unilaterally installed

the Governing Council. The post also calls attention to the de-Ba‘athification of Iraq after the

invasion, and the widespread arrests for members of the Ba‘ath Party. While Saddam was in

power, Ba‘ath Party membership was required for nearly all high-ranking positions in the

country, as well as for things like university admission and thus a necessity for social

mobility for many Iraqis. By associating an anti-occupation stance with pro-Ba‘athism, Raed

notes the dangers of speaking out against the occupation.

137

In a 2018 essay in the New York Times, writer and scholar Sinan Antoon recalls a

petition that he and several hundred other Iraqis in diaspora signed that condemned Saddam

Hussein but also opposed the invasion of Iraq; he writes that “[o]ur voices were not

welcomed in mainstream media in the United States.”87 Riverbend identifies a similar

problem:

The world isn’t in black and white- there are plenty of people who were

against this war, but also against Saddam. They aren’t being given a chance.

Their voices aren’t heard because they weren’t in Washington or London or

Teheran.88

Condemning both the occupation and politically oppressive conditions under the Ba‘ath party

while also affirming that the occupation has drastically worsened their living conditions

proves thorny for both bloggers. Even though Riverbend and Salam are relieved that Saddam

Hussein is no longer in power, they denounce the way he was removed, the invasion, and its

ruinous aftermath. In the same New York Times piece mentioned above, Sinan Antoon writes

that “in American media, Iraqis had been reduced to either victims of Saddam who longed

for occupation or supporters and defenders of dictatorship who opposed the war.”89

Salam Pax criticizes the hypocrisy of the US military claiming to “liberate” and offer

“humanitarian aid” to Iraq while simultaneously bombing them and using the invasion as an

opportunity to test weapons. In one scenario that he recounts, Iraqis shouting in support of

Saddam take over the distribution of the Red Crescent’s materials while the soldiers stand by

and do nothing. Pax says this makes him “laugh with delight,” because of its irony: as the US

and UK ineffectively distribute aid because of a situation they caused, the Iraqis shout their

preference for the previous government. He writes that Iraqis were shouting the slogan “bil

rooh, bil dam, nafdeek ya [S]addam (we sacrifice [our] soul[s] and blood for you,

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Saddam),”90 which illustrates the resistance to the US forces as well as the post-invasion

nostalgia for the previous regime.

Salam reads and responds to US soldiers who read his blog. In one instance, a US

soldier he refers to as “Mr. Somewhere-in-the-north-of-Iraq” asks Salam what he thinks the

“right answer” is: to have been better prepared with “a truly United, worldwide coalition”

and “master-plan for the post-war” or to leave Saddam in power “isolated from the

international community, and basically allowing the maintenance of the status quo.”91 Salam

responds, “it is pointless to debate what should have been done. There was a war almost a

year ago and we have to deal with its consequences, there was time for debate much

earlier.”92 In spite of this declaration, he goes on to present the United States’ role in

supporting Saddam, the mistakes they made after the First Gulf War, and the ways that the

sanctions consolidated Saddam’s power over Iraqis. Even though Salam recognizes the

futility of trying to answer questions like the ones posed by Mr. Somewhere-in-the-north-of-

Iraq, he responds nonetheless. His view is much more optimistic than many Iraqi writers. He

ends by asking Mr. Somewhere-in-the-north-of-Iraq whether or not he has a blog,

demonstrating his willingness to read and engage with the perspectives of US soldiers.

After receiving emails accusing her of anti-Americanism, Riverbend repeatedly states

that she is not anti-American, but is critical of US foreign policy, Bush, and the occupation.

She justifies herself in multiple blog posts. In 2003, she writes, “I don’t hate Americans,

contrary to what many people seem to believe. Not because I love Americans, but simply

because I don’t hate Americans, like I don’t hate the French, Canadians, Brits, Saudis,

Jordanians, Micronesians.”93 In this post, she feels compelled to explain her attitudes towards

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US Americans. After repeated comments questioning her anti-Americanism, she adopts a

more forceful tone; she writes,

Why does American identify itself with its military and government? Why

does being anti-Bush and anti-occupation have to mean that a person is anti-

American? We watch American movies, listen to everything from Britney

Spears to Nirvana and refer to every single brown, fizzy drink as ‘Pepsi.’ I

hate American foreign policy and its constant meddling in the region…I hate

American tanks in Baghdad and American soldiers on occasion…why does

that mean that I hate America and Americans? Are tanks, troops and violence

the only face of America? If the Pentagon, Department of Defense and Condi

are ‘America,’ then yes – I hate America.94

She notes that a critique of the US military and foreign policy, in the popular imaginary,

equals “anti-Americanism.” That she feels obliged to respond to such comments attests to the

power and perceived weight of such a label; she lives under occupation, but assures her

readers that she is not anti-American. Rather than refusing to respond to the anti-American

claims or confirming them, she insists on separating US foreign policy from anti-

Americanism. Raed, Salam, and Riverbend refuse to adhere to the us/them rhetoric that their

readers seem to demand, but they also take the time to respond to and address their readers’

accusations. Even though they are living under occupation, they try to find sources of

connection with their audience in empire.

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ENDNOTES: CHAPTER FOUR

1 Throughout this chapter, I use the Internet blogs themselves rather than the published books. Riverbend’s blog

is available as of writing at http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com; Salam’s blog is hosted at

http://dear_raed.blogspot.com. For simplicity, ability to find citations across both the blogs and the books, and

because links to posts sometimes migrate or become unavailable, I will use RB and the date of the blog post to

cite Riverbend, and SP and the date of the blog post to cite Salam Pax for all subsequent citations. RB August

17, 2003.

2 Krista Hunt and Kim Rygiel, (En)Gendering the War on Terror: War Stories and Camouflaged Politics,

Gender in a Global/Local World (Aldershot, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 92.

3 Hence the blog’s title, “Where is Raed?” (referring to Raed Jarrar).

4 Salam Pax, "Where Is Raed?," https://salampax.wordpress.com. In the same post, he also criticizes the

German title, Let’s Get Bombed: Schöne Grüße aus Bagdad (Let’s Get Bombed: Greetings from Baghdad).

5 Ibid., January 24, 2005. Throughout this chapter, I retain Riverbend’s, Salam’s, and Raed’s original writing,

including the use of “‘arabīzī” (code-mixing), and deviations from standard English without notation. The

casual, conversational tone of the blogs is an integral part of their form. For clarity, I edit typos that may

interfere with understanding between brackets.

6 Ibid., January 25, 2004.

7 Ibid.

8 Sanaa Benmessaoud, "The Challenges of Translating Third World Women in a Transnational Context," The

Translator 19, no. 2 (2013): 189.

9 Back cover of Baghdad Burning, from Publishers Weekly

10 Amira Jarmakani, "Narrating Baghdad: Representing the Truth of War in Popular Non-Fiction," Critical Arts:

A South-North Journal of Cultural and Media Studies 21, no. 1 (2007): 41.

11 The title of Riverbend’s book is the same as the title of her blog; Salam’s blog, however, is entitled “Where is

Raed?” which is not indicated at all in the book’s title.

12 Thomas Johnson and Barbara K. Kaye, "Blog Readers: Predictors of Reliance on War Blogs," in Blogging,

Citizenship, and the Future of Media, ed. Mark Tremayne (London ; New York: Routledge, 2007), xii.

13 see Wheeler 2017; Tassie and Givens 2015.

14 Teresa Pepe, Blogging from Egypt: Digital Literature, 2005-2016 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,

2019), 3.

15 This is, at least, the case on most blogs.

16 Perri Campbell and Luke Howie, "Fractured Lives, Digital Selves: Writing the Self in Post-Invasion Iraq,"

Journal of Sociology 52, no. 2 (2016): 237.

17 Mark Tremayne, Blogging, Citizenship, and the Future of Media (New York: Routledge, 2007), xiii.

18 Paul Virilio, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light, trans. Michael Degener (London: Continuum, 2002),

69.

141

19 Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and Us Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 294.

20 Virilio, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light, 113.

21 RB April 3, 2005.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

24 Debjani Ganguly, This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (Durham: Duke

University Press, 2016), 152.

25 RB April 3, 2005.

26 Ibid.

27 RB April 4, 2004

28 Virilio, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light, 82.

29 Campbell and Howie, "Fractured Lives, Digital Selves: Writing the Self in Post-Invasion Iraq," 235.

30 Salam later revealed his identity, but initially blogged anonymously.

31 miriam cooke, "Multiple Critique: Islamic Feminist Rhetorical Strategies," Nepantla: Views from South 1, no.

1 (2000): 100.

32 Ibid., 109. Original emphasis.

33 Attewell 626

34 SP December 29, 2002.

35 SP August 23, 2003.

36 RB August 24, 2003.

37 Although she mentions typically privileged groups.

38 RB December 8, 2004.

39 SP January 6, 2004.

40 RB February 25, 2004.

41 Jarmakani, "Narrating Baghdad: Representing the Truth of War in Popular Non-Fiction," 41.

42 Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On "Japan" And Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press, 1997), 4.

43 Ibid., 6.

44 Ibid., 7.

142

45 Leader of the Constitutional Monarchy Movement; believes himself to be the rightful king of Iraq.

46 SP December 22, 2002.

47 Ibid.

48 SP December 21, 2002.

49 SP January 25, 2004.

50 Ibid.

51 RB March 27, 2004.

52 This is a category that she uses repeatedly in her posts.

53 Sinno, Nadine. "Deconstructing the Myth of Liberation @ Riverbendblog.Com." In Feminism and War:

Confronting U.S. Imperialism, edited by Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Minnie Bruce Pratt,

131-42. New York: Zed Books, 2008.

54 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminist

Review 30 (1988): 65.

55 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, Borderlines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 2007), xxxii.

56 There is debate about whether or not Islamophobia is a form of neo-racism.

57 A clear example of this occurs on Riverbend’s recipe blog. After posting a recipe for summag (summāq)

salad, a reader contacts Riverbend to ask if her recipe “is an evil trick…to poison the Americans” because some

species of the plant are poisonous (http://iraqrecipes.blogspot.com). The reader’s reaction demonstrates the

suspicious attitude cultivated in US public discourse towards Iraqis.

58 https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB372/docs/Underground-Apparatus.pdf

59 We also see this in The American Granddaughter, where Zeina is expected to be a “mustashār thaqāfī” in

addition to an interpreter.

60 As well as a handful of other bloggers, including HNK and “Neurotic Iraqi Wife,” aka “Neurotica,” and

“Aunt Najma.”

61 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 228.

62 Waïl Hassan, Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab

British Literature (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 32.

63 Ibid., 33.

64 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 1993), xii.

65 Bruce Etling, Robert Faris Kelly, and John Palfrey, "Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture, and

Dissent," (Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University, 2009), 14. They include bloggers from

Iraq within the Levantine/English Bridge category.

143

66 Youngmin Kim, "Cultural Translation and World Literature in Korea," Comparative Literature Studies 54,

no. 1 (2017): 94.

67 RB September 19, 2003.

68 SP July 21, 2003.

69 RB September 17, 2005.

70 1) Islam is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation, and no law that contradicts its

fixed principles and rules may be passed. 2)No law can be passed that contradicts the principles of democracy,

or the rights and basic freedoms outlined in this constitution. 3) The constitution respects the Islamic identity of

the majority of the Iraqi people, and guarantees the full religious rights for all individuals and the freedom of

creed and religious practices. (Riverbend’s translation). The UN Draft is worded as follows: First: Islam is the

official religion of the State and it is a fundamental source of legislation: A. No law that contradicts the

established provisions of Islam may be established. B. No law that contradicts the principles of democracy may

be established. C. No law that contradicts the rights and basic freedoms stipulated in this constitution may be

established. https://www.uscirf.gov/reports-briefs/special-reports/iraqs-draft-permanent-constitution-september-

2005

71 Also called the Personal Status Law.

72 The link to the article he posts no longer functions, and the article is not in Azzaman’s online archives.

73 SP January 20, 2004.

74 Caitlin Ryan, “Everyday Resilience as Resistance: Palestinian Women Practicing Sumud,” International

Political Sociology 9 (2015): 313.; see also Shehadeh 1982; Khalili 2007.

75 RB March 19, 2004.

76 In 2007, Riverbend moved to Syria (then subsequently to two other unnamed Arab countries) but during the

entirety of her blog (except for her last entry “Ten years on”), she is living in occupied Iraq.

77 Rosemary Marangoly George, "(Extra)Ordinary Violence: National Literatures, Diasporic Aesthetics, and the

Politics of Gender in South Asian Partition Fiction," Signs 33, no. 1 (2007): 145.

78 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 6.

79 Roger Luckhurst, "In War Times: Fictionalizing Iraq," Contemporary Literature 53, no. 4 (2012): 724.

80 Dabashi makes clear that by “native informers,” he is not referring to translators and interpreters; he does,

however, see them as “collaborators paid for their incorporation into the massive military-intelligence

machinery that facilitates the daily operation of the occupation” (Dabashi 18).

81 Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks (New York: Pluto, 2011), 36.

82 Rey Chow, Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience (New York: Columbia

University Press, 2014), 65.

83 Salam Pax writes in a Guardian article, “There are 25 million Iraqis and I am just one.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/sep/09/iraq.biography

84 I refer to the blog as Salam Pax’s blog because the vast majority of the posts are by Salam, not Raed and in

fact, Salam started the blog to write to Raed.

144

85 SP (Raed) January 16, 2004.

86 Ibid.

87 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-anniversary-.html

88 RB August 28, 2003

89 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-anniversary-.html

90 SP May 7, 2003. Bil-rūḥ, bil-dām, nafdīk yā Ṣaddām; functional, not literal translation.

91 SP February 12, 2004.

92 Ibid.

93 RB August 22, 2003.

94 RB April 14, 2004.

145

CONCLUSION

Iraq continues to suffer the consequences of the US invasion and occupation. The

occupation inflamed sectarian conflict, destroyed Iraq’s infrastructures, the US military killed

hundreds of thousands of civilians, and the chaos of the occupation facilitated the rise of

Dā‘ish. The protracted history of war and violence has been taken up by many Iraqi writers,

and particularly after 2003, there has been a rise in literary experimentation. In recent years

English translations of Iraqi writers like Sinan Antoon, Hasan Blasim, and Ahmed Saadawi

have received increased attention in the US. This project takes a broad view of “Iraq War

literature,” but moves away from soldier narratives that construct the invasion and

occupation as “almost exclusively American events.”1

All of the texts analyzed in this dissertation share an engagement with both the Iraq

War and with translation in various forms. They address the critical role of translation in

warfare, occupation, and intelligence gathering. The texts’ thematizations of translation

speak to larger-scale issues that have arisen out of the Iraq War and the global war on terror.

In order to wage these wars, the US both depends on and fears translation. The military has

put a great deal of funding into the research and development of machine translation. Having

a machine translator in place of a human would eliminate the need for language training and

present a completely “neutral” translation. These texts insist on the manifold political,

ethical, social, cultural complexities of the human translator. They illustrate the ways in

146

which the power of human translators comes from their ability to translate between both

languages and cultures, which a machine cannot do. By focusing on literary representations

of interpreters as well as cultural translation, I examine the ways interpreters influence

interactions between parties. Rather than translation as a ‘bridge,’ many of these texts use

translation as a field of war that reinforces the power dynamics of the occupation. Even the

texts that take a more optimistic view of translation also demonstrate its difficulties and the

impossibility of ‘pure’ communication.

The figure of the interpreter moves between languages, communities, and loyalties.

Over the course of The American Granddaughter and The Sweetness of Tears, the

protagonists shift how they perform their identities, reconsider their roles in the occupation,

and confront the limits of translation. Al-minṭaqa al-khaḍrā’ focuses on the Iraqi interpreter

to highlight the intense anxiety that reliance on translators and interpreters produced during

the Iraq War. In the blogs, Riverbend and Salam Pax constantly negotiate their multiple and

shifting identities, particularly as Iraqis speaking to an anglophone audience. These texts also

use translation as an element of form. In the novels, the use and designation of multiple

languages serve as constant reminders of the process of translation. In the blogs, Riverbend

and Salam Pax perform cultural translation in the ways they relate their experiences to their

audience. Although this project focuses on three novels and two blogs, translation appears in

other Iraq War texts and forms of artistic production. The focus on the process of translation

and the figure of the translator/interpreter during the Iraq War shows the ways this figure is

used as a vehicle for exploring other marginalized identities, bringing attention to the

‘realities’ of translation, and understanding the ongoing negotiations translators and

interpreters must constantly make.

147

There has been a recent rise in fiction dealing with the occupation and its aftermath.

Iraqi writers have featured prominently on the International Prize for Arabic Fiction longlists

and shortlists since 2009 and they are frequently contenders for other prizes such as the

Katara Prize, Almultaqa Prize, and the Sheikh Zayed Book Award.2 Kachachī’s novels

Tashārī and Al-Nabīdha were also shortlisted for the prize3 and Tashārī’s French translation

by François Zabbal, Dispersés, won le Prix de la littérature arabe in 2016. Although her

intended audience is arabophone, the translations of her work into several languages and the

multiple IPAF nominations have resulted in public attention for Kachachī. The consistent

presence of Iraqi writers on these prize lists reflects the increased literary output of Iraqi

writers and shows that the juries for these prizes value contemporary Iraqi literature and its

role in the evolution of contemporary Arabic literature.

In the years following the invasion, many Iraqi writers have turned to science fiction,

speculative fiction, and horror in their writing. Hasan Blasim and Ahmed Saadawi have both

garnered public attention in the US for their work, which incorporates elements of horror and

the grotesque. In these works, the violence is often so extreme as to be unbelievable, and its

abundant use reflects the extreme and persisting nature of violence in Iraq under occupation.

Haytham Bahoora looks at the recurrence of terror and dismemberment in the work of Hasan

Blasim, Sinan Antoon, and Ahmed Saadawi, arguing that it is an outlet for speaking violence

that is unspeakable. In Saadawi’s Frankishtayn fī Baghdād (2013)4 for example, a junk-

collector collects and assembles a human body from parts of corpses. The creature, called

“Shisma” (or “Whatsitsname”), avenges the deaths of the people from whom he takes his

body parts; he starts to decay and resorts to murdering others in order to replace his rotting

limbs.

148

Zayna and Jo deal, in many ways, with issues that parallel those of Shisma; all three

characters begin in pursuit of what they believe to be justice, but ultimately fail and realize

that they are instrumental to the very systems they aimed to resist. Zaynab in “Lizards’

Colony” becomes an interpreter to pay for her daughter’s medical treatments (in other words,

to ameliorate the suffering of someone else) but then Zaynab herself inflicts harm, and

indeed death, on Ahmad. Ibrāhīm, too, perpetuates the endless violence he so deplores.

Riverbend and Salam Pax voice their Iraqi perspectives on the invasion and occupation but

they write within the discourses they want to debunk. The American Granddaughter, The

Sweetness of Tears, “Lizards’ Colony,” and Al-minṭaqa al-khaḍrā’ are more realist texts and

Frankenstein in Baghdad more horror/fantasy, but they all share concerns about violence and

complicity.

Ferial Ghazoul notes that Iraqi fiction has long “veered towards the fantastic, the

surrealist, the Kafkaesque, the labyrinthine, the uncanny, not out of renunciation of the real

but out of verisimilitude,” echoing Saadawi’s own sentiment that “fantasy is not an escape or

alienation from reality. It is rather a way to reach a greater depth in this reality.”5

Frankenstein in Baghdad, along with other contemporary works of Iraqi fiction, links the

dismemberment of bodies to the dismemberment of Iraq. The Shisma, perversely, sees

himself as the perfect Iraqi citizen because he is made up of bodies across religious, ethnic,

tribal, and class boundaries.

Iraq’s history of conflict has influenced not only the appearance of violence as a

central element of many Iraqi texts but has also led writers to experiment in how to represent

it. In Iraq + 100, an anthology of speculative fiction edited by Hassan Blasim, Iraqi writers

imagine life in 2103, one hundred years after the invasion. Some of the stories in the

149

collection, including Anoud’s “Kahramana” Hassan Blasim’s “Gardens of Babylon,”

translated by Jonathan Wright, and Hassan Abdulrazzakh’s “Kuszib” contain translator or

interpreter characters, employed to diverse ends. In his preface to the collection, Blasim

writes, “it was difficult to persuade many Iraqi writers to write stories set in the future when

they were already so busy writing about the cruelty, horror, and shock of the present, or

trying to delve into the past to reread Iraq’s former nightmares and glories.”6 Much of

contemporary Iraqi literature is concerned with the issues Blasim mentioned, but they are

also receiving attention for their formal innovations as well. Haytham Bahoora writes that

“literary recourse to the metaphysical, whether through the subconscious, nightmares, or the

supernatural, are frequent stylistic conventions of post-2003 Iraqi literary production,

narrating a terrain of unspeakable violence and its many afterlives,” an observation that is

affirmed by the stories in Iraq + 100.7 Another recent collection of work by Iraqis is

Baghdad Noir, a part of Akashic books Noir series.8 Edited by Samuel Shimon, it includes

work by Muhsin al-Ramli, Nassif Falak, Layla Qasrany, Sinan Antoon, Ahmed Saadawi, and

many others. Iraq + 100 and Baghdad Noir are distinct in that they are commissioned works:

the stories were written and translated for these two collections.

While the texts in this dissertation are in the social realist vein, it is important to at the

ways Iraqi literature is changing and developing after 2003. As scholars have noted,9 the

scale of destruction and violence during the invasion and occupation has forced writers to

find new ways to represent what seems unrepresentable. Shimon remarks that after 2003,

almost 700 novels have come out of Iraq—more, he notes, than in the whole of the 20th

century.10

150

In all of the texts discussed in this project, translation is supposed to mitigate

violence, cultivate understanding, and facilitate communication; however, it is translation

itself that acts as an obstacle to understanding. The fictional interpreters aim to effect change

within the institutions of the occupation, and increasingly realize their own roles as a

necessary part of its machinery. This dissertation engages with texts that question the

common conception of translation as a ‘bridge’ and instead confront its limits; the texts

ultimately posit translation during the Iraq War as prohibitive of pure communication and the

translator’s task as ‘mediator’ as an impossible one. Although some of the texts are more

optimistic than others, my analysis illustrates the repeated obstacles to communication and

understanding that occur in representations of translation in Iraq War literature. Translation

functions as a battleground where the texts explore the difficulties of various kinds of

negotiation and communication. In The American Granddaughter and The Sweetness of

Tears, the protagonists idealize their own roles as Arabic-English interpreters during the

occupation, but progressively realize the implications of their work and their ultimate failures

as interpreters connected to the US military. In Al-minṭaqa al-khaḍrā’, Ibrāhīm recognizes

possibilities of connection or shared interest with the Marines, but increasingly understands

that imperial occupation governs life inside the Green Zone and exerts control over its Iraqi

workers and inhabitants. Riverbend and Salam Pax also aim to voice their own perspectives

on the Iraq War, but are frequently fighting against popular narratives, stereotypes and

eventually have to flee the violence in Iraq.

While this project is limited to literary texts that foreground interpreters and/or

translation, there are many other works of Iraqi cultural production, including literature and

visual art, in which translators, interpreters, or translation appear. Hayv Kahraman’s

151

exhibition Audible Inaudible features a re-imagining of the US military’s “Smart Cards,”

which were guides passed out to US soldiers with “cultural information” to assist their

interactions with Iraqis. Other Iraqi novels like Ali Bader’s Ḥāris al-tibgh (2008), Mahdi Issa

Al-Saqr’s Riyāḥ sharqiyya, riyāḥ gharbiyya and Alia Mamdouh’s Al-tashahhī (2007) also

use translation as a central element, although in different contexts than the Iraq War. The

preoccupation Iraqi writers (and Arabic writers more broadly) with translation suggests a

recognition of its importance in this globalized world and the diverse forms it can take.

152

ENDNOTES: CONCLUSION

1 Elliott Colla, “The Military Literary Complex,” Jadaliyya. http://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/30908/The-

Military-Literary-Complex

2 Shortlisted Iraqi writers include: In‘ām Kachachī (2009, 2014, 2019); Shahad Al-Rawi (2018); Saad

Mohammed Raheem (2017); Ahmed Saadawi (2014, winner); Sinan Antoon (2013). Longlisted Iraqi writers

include: Ali Bader (2009, 2010), Muhsin Al-Ramli (2010, 2013), Ali Ghadeer (2017), Zuheir Al-Hiti (2017),

Maysalun Hadi (2019), Janan Jasim Halawi (2016), Abdel Khaliq Al-Rikabi (2014), Hadia Hussein (2015),

Hawra al-Nadawi (2012), Hazim Kamaledin (2016)

3 In 2014 and 2019, respectively.

4 Translated into English by Jonathan Wright as Frankenstein in Baghdad, 2017.

5Ferial Ghazoul, “A Forest of Symbols: Iraqi Fiction Today, Banipal 1 (2002): 3.; Harith Al-Qarawee, “Reading

Frankenstein in Baghdad,” Al-Monitor (2014).

6 Hassan Blasim (editor), Iraq + 100 (New York: Tor Books, 2017).

7 Haytham Bahoora, "Writing the Dismembered Nation: The Aesthetics of Horror in Iraqi Narratives of War,"

Arab Studies Journal 23, no. 1 (2015): 185.

8 Most of the stories are by Iraqis, but there is one story by a US American, one by a Tunisian, and one by an

Iranian, and one by a Lebanese. All of the non-Iraqi writes, Shimon says, “spent time in Baghdad and know the

city well.” The series also includes Beirut Noir and Marrakesh Noir.

9 Bahoora, Ghazoul, Masmoudi.

10 Samuel Shimon, Baghdad Noir, Akashic Noir Series (New York: Akashic Books, 2018), Introduction.

153

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