Géopolitique Parle-Femme: Iraqi Female War Memoirists

This research employs a comparative study design to analyze the political, sociological, and physiological impacts that Iraq-Iran and Iraq-America war had in shaping the literary approach that the Arab/Iraqi female war memoirists use. The Arab/Iraqi war memoirists including Haifa Zangana and Dunya Mikhail try to bring out the violent effects of the oppressive space as considered the concept of subjectivity, which they live. The Arab/Irqi war memoirists portray themselves as authoritative spears in the war whether they were acting as civilians or soldiers to overcome the aggression, where they take a transgressive move by attacking gender roles and taking up masculine roles such as leading activists’ groups. The current research is based on the premises that from a geopolitical point of views, Zangana and Mikhail are found to rewrite the scripts of war as a reflection of the gendered experiences, while they open up new approaches to the themes of war in literature and narrative.

Kelly Robin Adams in her doctoral dissertation “Literature Practices in Women’s Memoirs of the Civil Rights Movement “(2012) carried out a research on the literate practice in women’s memoirs of the Civil Rights Movement, where the researcher highlights the participatory roles that women played in the movement including their ability to act publicly in a movement remembered mostly for its male leaders. On the other hand, Johnson M. Alison in his book, Histories of War: Representations of Silence in Woman’s Vietnam/American War Narratives (2016) draws on the feminist rhetorical theories of silence, listening, and praxis to interrogate traditional psychoanalytic through thought by investing how America, Vietnamese, and Vietnamese-American women who experienced the war provide a different model for narrating the war and coping with trauma. On her part, Amy Kathleen Sininger with The Truth in Comedy: Representations of Postfeminist Success and American Culture in Women’s Comedic Memoirs (2015) researched on the representations of postfeminist success and American culture in women’s comedic memoirs. The researcher carried out an in-depth analysis of how the increasing prominence of comedic is memoir is indicative of American cultural changes, particularly in relation to women and feminist, as women prove to dominate the genre. Consequently, Jenny Young Kijowski in Gender and Trauma from World War I to the War in Iraq: Narrative in the Aftermath of Loss (2015) analyzes the theme of gender ad trauma from World War I to the war in Iraq. The studies portrayed are correlated in some way because they provide the avenues with which the authors could express their experiences with the war while taking a transgressive move to portray themselves as agent of destruction of the symbolic order that privilege the masculine in literature.

The variations in the geopolitical orientations of the Arab/Irqi female war memoirists provides readers with the information about how the space they occupied influenced their selection of language and style of approaching about the war events in the Iraq-Iran and America-Iraq war. These geopolitical orientations form the foundation for the selection of the theoretical perspectives that can be used to read the Arab/Irqi female war memoirs. This research employs “Geocriticism” approaches by theorists like Bertrand Westphal, and Robert Tally, and philosophers like, Henri Lefebvre with his Production of Space to analyze the relation existing between the subjects and space in literary terms with critics such as Hélèn Cixous the concept of écriture feminine.

From a geocriticism approach, the Arab female war memoirists are found out to rewrite the scripts of the Iraq-Iran and the Iraq-American war as a reflection of the gendered experience, where they open up new approaches to the theme of war in the literary world. The audience of the studies can therefore track the foundation for creating knowledge in terms of how space, land, and spatiality within the jurisdiction of Arab female war memoirists influences their style of approach in portraying the events of the war.