swalef bibi: storying the everyday in Iraq

In this project I trace a silhouette of Iraqi storytelling practice by using my grandmothers’ storytelling methodology as guidance. I invite William Benjamin’s “Storyteller” as a companion throughout this journey. I look at Iraqi oral history interviews, literature, published memoirs, journalistic anthologies, cartographic stories, and video. I argue that personal memory and life narrative storytelling have become an important register of knowledge in a country whose cultural wealth has been ravaged through decades of colonial violence, dictatorship, sanctions, and multiple wars. The life story in its capacity to hold the affect and everydayness of experience lives on as a, breathing, resilient tradition that is able to respond to systematic violence in liberatory and enduring ways.