Third Parties in “Third Spaces”: Reflecting on the Role of the Translator in Oral History Interviews with Iraqi Diasporic Women

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.