TY - CHAP
T1 - Third Parties in “Third Spaces”
T2 - Reflecting on the Role of the Translator in Oral History Interviews with Iraqi Diasporic Women
AU - Jones-Gailani, Nadia
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2013, Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki.
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - In the heat of an Amman summer with the smell of jasmine thick in the air, I sat back and surveyed the porch cluttered with hookah pipes and the branches of ripe figs overhead, while my stepmother, Om-Yasameen,1 argued in Arabic with the fortune-teller. We were in the midst of an interview, when the participant, the fortune-teller, abruptly turned to me and, with my coffee cup in hand, began to tell me my fortune. As she delivered promises of future wealth and happiness, she also carefully, even cunningly, wove into the “reading” threads of her personal experiences and memories of Iraq, uncovering a very painful past. Her revelations about the persecution of the Armenian minority in Iraq became a narrative in defense of her people’s suffering and a testament to her own experiences of displacement, loss, and trauma. My stepmother, a Sunni Muslim of elite background, did not agree with her, prompting a heated exchange. I listened carefully as the two women went back and forth, fighting over competing versions of Iraq’s national history and making their respective claims to indigeneity, an old debate that has acquired new meaning in the aftermath of the Saddam Ba’th regime.2 As with many of the oral histories conducted for my research, these negotiations between Arabic and English, past and present, and collective and counternarratives of national memory, resulted in women’s life histories being formed within this symbiotic exchange of views and experiences. These complicated negotiations between participant and translator in the interview space are the focus of this chapter.
AB - In the heat of an Amman summer with the smell of jasmine thick in the air, I sat back and surveyed the porch cluttered with hookah pipes and the branches of ripe figs overhead, while my stepmother, Om-Yasameen,1 argued in Arabic with the fortune-teller. We were in the midst of an interview, when the participant, the fortune-teller, abruptly turned to me and, with my coffee cup in hand, began to tell me my fortune. As she delivered promises of future wealth and happiness, she also carefully, even cunningly, wove into the “reading” threads of her personal experiences and memories of Iraq, uncovering a very painful past. Her revelations about the persecution of the Armenian minority in Iraq became a narrative in defense of her people’s suffering and a testament to her own experiences of displacement, loss, and trauma. My stepmother, a Sunni Muslim of elite background, did not agree with her, prompting a heated exchange. I listened carefully as the two women went back and forth, fighting over competing versions of Iraq’s national history and making their respective claims to indigeneity, an old debate that has acquired new meaning in the aftermath of the Saddam Ba’th regime.2 As with many of the oral histories conducted for my research, these negotiations between Arabic and English, past and present, and collective and counternarratives of national memory, resulted in women’s life histories being formed within this symbiotic exchange of views and experiences. These complicated negotiations between participant and translator in the interview space are the focus of this chapter.
KW - Iraqi Refugee
KW - Muslim Woman
KW - National Memory
KW - Oral History
KW - Oral History Interview
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84996796781&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1057/9781137339652_10
DO - 10.1057/9781137339652_10
M3 - Chapter
AN - SCOPUS:84996796781
T3 - Palgrave Studies in Oral History
SP - 169
EP - 183
BT - Palgrave Studies in Oral History
PB - Palgrave Macmillan
ER -