In addition to the defragmentation of identity through the act of narration, for Iraqi North American women in this study, relationality also allows them to uncover and reconnect with fragments of themselves in order to form more cohesive selves that are able to overcome trauma and displacement. Relationality in these texts is not limited to gender-based relationality or the connections with parents or loved ones, but it is inclusive of other people in the community who share their need to reconnect to their originary homes and selves in the Iraqi diaspora. These life narrators find ways of relating and connecting themselves to their cultures and histories, and thus redefining their own understanding of their Iraqi and Iraqi North American identity. Miller and Tougaw explain this phenomenon:
The culture of first-person writing needs to be understood in relation to a desire for common grounds—if not an identity-bound shared experience, then one that is shareable through identification, though this too will vary in degrees of proximity. The memoir and all forms of personal testimony not only expand the boundaries of identity construction and the contours of the self but also lay claim to potential
the extreme experiences of solitary individuals can sometimes begin to repair the tears in the collective fabric. (2-3)
The text that most apparently deals with relationality in this group of memoirs is Leilah Nadir’s The Orange Trees of Baghdad. Nadir’s whole memoir depends on the concept of relationality, as this study has already explored in previous sections. Nadir’s work brings a number of relational ties into the frame of the memoir: her parents; her relatives; and her friend and photojournalist Farah Nosh. Relationality in the text is, therefore, not limited to people but to a specific place in the memory of the people that Nadir relates to. She is unable to recollect her paternal, Iraqi past or the Iraqi experience of war without telling the stories of her family members; the complete memoir, with the exclusion of minor sections, is built on these stories.
Nadir portrays a vivid picture of a home that she was never a part of and has only seen in pictures. She states, after a paragraph that describes her father’s home garden in Iraq:
That is not my recollection. The picture is hidden inside my father’s memory. . . . I feel Iraq in my bones, though I have never been there. I have never lazed in the shade of the date palm on a stifling hot day or underneath the grape leaves hanging on the vine in the evening. I haven’t smelled jasmine or orange blossom scenting a Baghdad night. I’ve never tasted mango pickle with masgouf—the speciality fish dish of Baghdad—at an open air restaurant on the banks of the Tigris. . . . I sense the garden only through my family’s stories; words and pictures about its smells, the searing heat, the light, the butterflies, the storks, eating the Baghdadi delicacy of buffalo cream there. (16)
through relationality.
However, as a young girl, Leilah is introduced to her father’s family and culture during their visits to her home in Surrey, England. She recalls these visits fondly stating, “Without realizing what they were doing, my father’s relatives immediately transformed the English house usually run by my mother into an Iraqi home run by all the women” (21). Leilah elaborately retells her experience of these visits by describing each family member, their exotic cuisine, their language that was strange and “sweetly foreign” (22), and more importantly the atmosphere of Iraqi culture. She goes on to describe her own sense of belonging after her grandmother sends her a “traditional Arab costume” (25). She explains, “I felt different compared to all the other times I’d played dress-up. My dark brown eyes and brown hair looked right underneath the black scarf. My features that hadn’t looked pale enough in my maroon English school uniform
suddenly felt like they had a place” (25). By connecting with her paternal family, she also connects, for a short time, with her Iraqi self; this self contradicts and complicates that image of herself that she describes earlier as a “typical English schoolgirl” (20) Thus, she is able to defragment her identity by realizing that she is able to establish an identity that is British and Iraqi at the same time. She does not have to sacrifice one or the other in order to feel that she belongs.
In Mikhail’s Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea, the concept of relationality is similar, but differs in who she chooses to portray in her memoir. For Mikhail, her relationships with other writers are very important because they make up the only community to which she feels she belongs. She relates their stories by characterizing them, talking about their own literary
paper and plastic bags consecutively; she tells her readers “All of my letters I kept in a paper bag” (67) and later she says, “My photos I kept in a plastic bag” (68). These two bags, along with her poetry, seem to be the only things that travel with her from Baghdad to Amman and then finally to the United States. However, the attachment that Mikhail has to these letters and pictures is not an attachment to objects; instead Mikhail seems to carry a community of people (writers and others) with her by adding their letters and pictures to these bags. She imagines that by putting the pictures together in the bag, she not only carries them with her, but she allows the people in the pictures to connect to each other as well. She writes: “In my bag of pictures, all my friends are close/ to me and to one another/ no matter how far they were in real life” (77).
In the second part of the book, Mikhail recalls the memories of her loved ones and acquaintances by looking through the pictures and letters, and eventually retelling her experiences with the people in them. For example, she writes
My mother in her wedding dress looks much younger than my father.
“I didn’t see him until the wedding,” she told me. “In those days husbands were like fish in the river— you couldn’t know if they were good or bad.
But thank God, your father was the best person in the world.” Sometimes my mother wears kimonos or short skirts in the pictures. “Those were the good old days,” she says. (70)
Mikhail’s mother and father.
The pictures and letters also address the more personal issues in her life, like when she writes of her experience of love. She relates:
Of all my letters, there was one that I read again and again. It was a love letter. Of all my pictures,
there was one that I stared at for long stretches: Mazin and I at college, with two of our friends. Arwa and Hassan introduced me to Mazin
when he was visiting from the battlefield in Al-Faw He had clipped some of my poems from newspapers and saved them.
Mazin gave me the letter when we were walking in the rain from the College of Liberal Arts to Baghdad’s Central Library. While we walked he repeated the first line of Al Sayyab’s poem
“The Song of the Rain”: Your eyes are two palm-tree forests in early light. (72) Although the stanza ends with images of love and intimacy, the line immediately after disrupts these visions and memories. Mikhail states, “When I left Iraq, I didn’t know if Mazin was alive or dead” (72). The letter and the picture become the medium for recollecting past memories of hope, even when the present situation is fragmented with loss, loneliness, and uncertainty.
Relationality in Mikhail’s poetic prose also allows her to tell the experiences of other Iraqis living under fierce dictatorship. The images bring about not just happy recollections of
He was easily surprised and laughed suddenly and loudly. But secretly he was a sad person.
His brother had refused to join the army and was killed by the government.
His family was not allowed to mourn the death, and they had to pay for the price of the bullet that was used to shoot him. (79)
The memories that Mikhail narrates through her character descriptions are not all her own
memories; they are the stories that she was told by her friends and family members, but they help her re-establish an image of her own identity from the fragments of letters and pictures in her bags. In How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (1999), Paul John Eakin suggests that relationality not only presents “the autobiography of the self but the biography and the
autobiography of the other” (58). In Mikail’s work, as in the work of Salbi and Nadir, the representation of the self is tightly connected to the representation of others. The description of each of the people in her letters and photographs all contribute to her understanding of herself in relation to all the people that have influenced her understanding of herself as an individual. Finally, the pictures play a role in the memoir as they come to symbolize her own collective self that has found its place in a liminal space between her past life and her present one.
Like Mikhail, Salbi’s relational ties to her mother help to reconstruct her past, and in turn her identity, as addressed in an earlier section of this chapter. However, Salbi’s second husband Amjad Atallah also has a significant role in helping Salbi reconstruct her relationship to men and
her own sense of self. Her relationship with Amjad becomes equal to a healing process, through which she is able to confidently confront her past traumas. In her memoir she writes:
I found myself talking to him about Fakhri because, despite my vow to leave my past behind, I felt he deserved an explanation. I remember looking at his face for some reaction: a rejection? But I only saw kindness in his eyes. So I kept on talking. . . . for the first time. I realized what it felt like just to tell someone openly about my feelings and my own life. I cried at some points and laughed at others. It was healing and reassuring, and it felt so good that I found myself telling Amjad almost everything I had vowed to myself to keep secret, so he would understand how important it was for me to start over on my own. (201-02)
By relating her story, Salbi invites Amjad into her world and allows him to help her heal from the trauma and displacement she felt in the past. As an Arab man himself (Palestinian-
American), he is able to rebuild her image of Arab men, like her father and her first husband, as he comes to represent the opposite of both. Amjad, through his relationship with Salbi, becomes an agent of defragmentation himself as he accepts her past and works with her to construct her future.
Through relationality, Iraqi North American women are able to reconnect with their pasts and the pasts of their family members, friends, and communities. The narration of the self is thus bound with the narration of others’ lives and experiences. Their experiences influence the