Towards an Understanding of Kurdistani Memory Culture: Apostrophic and Phantomic Approaches to a Violent Past (Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict) 3031375130, 9783031375132

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CULTURAL HERITAGE AND CONFLICT

Towards an Understanding of Kurdistani Memory Culture Apostrophic and Phantomic Approaches to a Violent Past Bareez Majid

Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict

Series Editors

Ihab Saloul University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands Rob van der Laarse University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands Britt Baillie McDonald Institute of Archaeology University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK

This book series explores the relationship between cultural heritage and conflict. The key themes of the series are the heritage and memory of war and conflict, contested heritage, and competing memories. The series editors seek books that analyze the dynamics of the past from the perspective of tangible and intangible remnants, spaces, and traces as well as heritage appropriations and restitutions, significations, musealizations, and mediatizations in the present. Books in the series should address topics such as the politics of heritage and conflict, identity and trauma, mourning and reconciliation, nationalism and ethnicity, diaspora and intergenerational memories, painful heritage and terrorscapes, as well as the mediated reenactments of conflicted pasts.

Bareez Majid

Towards an Understanding of Kurdistani Memory Culture Apostrophic and Phantomic Approaches to a Violent Past

Bareez Majid Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies Heidelberg University Heidelberg, Germany

ISSN 2634-6419     ISSN 2634-6427 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict ISBN 978-3-031-37513-2    ISBN 978-3-031-37514-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37514-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

To my mother, Sabiha Khalid Latief, the embodiment of resilience and determination, this book is dedicated. ‫سوپاس سەباوی گوڵ‬ In loving memory of my father, Mohammed Kader Majid, whose brief but impactful presence in my life was filled with unwavering support, love, and encouragement. ‫سوپاس بابە گیان‬

Note on Transcription and Translation

The transcriptions of Sorani-Kurdish used in this book do not strictly follow a transliteration system, but have been modified to ensure that they are easy to pronounce for English speakers. The names of museums, as well as the titles of primary literary sources, appear once in Sorani-Kurdish, but when referenced in the text, the English translation is used. The names of authors whose work is well-known in the English-speaking world will appear in the same way as the translation. Preferred transcriptions have been used for individual names, and place names are transcribed from Sorani-Kurdish using the same style. To enhance readability, all quotes from Sorani-Kurdish have been translated directly into English by the author. In some cases, when a translation was already provided by others, this is mentioned, and the translator’s name is cited if known. The interviews have all been conducted, in Sorani-­ Kurdish, by the author. Fragments of these interviews, translated by the author, appear in this book in English.

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Acknowledgments

It takes a village to write a book, and I am incredibly grateful to have been surrounded by such caring and supportive individuals without whom this book would and could not have been written. My debts are many, and it is a great pleasure to acknowledge them here. First and foremost, I want to express my deepest thanks to all my respondents in Sulaymaniyah and in Halabja. These beautiful souls, despite their hardships, opened their hearts and doors to me, and for that, I am truly grateful. I can only hope that I have done justice to your stories. Also, I cannot overstate the importance of my family in Kurdistan in supporting me through this journey, both practically and emotionally. No matter where I go and how long I am away, your warm embrace always brings me back to the feeling of being home. In its rightful place here, I would like to thank the Museum of Amna Suraka and its team for having granted me unrestricted access since 2014. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the museum’s director, Ako Ghareeb, for welcoming me and treating me as part of the team, and to the museum’s creative director, Dlshad Majeed Qadir, for his invaluable support and insights based on his extensive experience working in the museum. The Amna Suraka Net Cafe served as a sanctuary for me throughout my research, offering a serene atmosphere in which I could focus on my work. I am appreciative of the cafe staff who kindly prepared the delectable shfta sandwiches every day for me. The Zheen Archival Center in the city of Sulaymaniyah proved to be a crucial source of information during my research, and I am grateful to ix

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Rafiq Salih, Sidiq Salih, as well as Ako Wahbi for allowing me to access and navigate through their extensive archives. My time in Halabja was made all the more special by the hospitality and generosity of Soeran Khaan and her family. From inviting me into their home to sharing delicious meals and engaging conversations, they made me feel like a part of their community. Moreover, visiting the Halabja Monument and Peace Museum was a humbling and profound experience. Witnessing the resilience and fortitude of the Halabja community left me in awe, and I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to bear witness to their strength. I am thankful for the opportunity to have met and learned from Akram Mhamed, Saman Ahmed, Ali Mustafa Ahmed, Serkhel Khafar, and Ibrahim Hawramani, as well as the survivor Soiba Mhammed Saeed Qadir. Your stories have touched my heart and forever changed me. I would like to thank Leiden University, particularly the Centre for the Arts in Society, for providing me with a valuable and fulfilling research experience. I want to express my appreciation to Anthonya Visser and Stijn Bussels, who served as my sounding board throughout my research. Additionally, I am deeply indebted to Sara Polak and Frans-Willem Korsten, whose help was absolutely essential. I would also like to thank Yra van Dijk, Kitty Zijlmans, and many others who were directly or indirectly involved in my academic journey. To Isabel, Sabina, Astrid, Yasco, Nicole, Nynke, Lieke, Anna, Looi, Judith, Marcela, Sary and Viola: thank you for making the university a welcoming place. To the late Kavien, one of our students—a fellow Kurdistani at Leiden University—I want to say: you will not be forgotten. I am thankful to my friends Bestoon, Anke, Didi, Mischa, Dodo, Hares, Renas, Thijs, Eva, Alessia, Nasrin and Nele for lending me their sympathetic ears whenever I needed to complain about the solitude of doing research. To my dearest friends, Charlotte and Eline: thank you for the many walks, drinks, dinners, cries and laughs we shared throughout the years. You are my most critical and yet my most empathetic mirrors. I hold you dear. I express my deep love and appreciation to my family: Babe gyan, Sabaw gyan, Dade Bakcha, Kak Sardar, Yaad, Mimi, Kak Kosar, Laas, Wiena, Dade Shapol, Joop, Narine, Nashmile, Dade Shara, Alan, Helane, Kake Twana, Boeke, Lani, little Daran, and Dana lief, I love you. Thank you for being with me every step of the way.

 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

xi

Hanneke, Adri, Daniel, Nadia, Yara, Isis, Judith, Christiaan, Isaak, Nathan, Rachel, Machteld and Marije, thank you for making me part of your family. The gezellige moments we share are very dear to me. As for my life partner, Mathijs. There are no words to describe how much joy you bring into my life. I love our numerous travels to Berlin, working side-by-side in German libraries and cafes. Thank you deeply for the many hours we spent talking and discussing my research. Your quick wit and humor always bring a smile to my face. Mathijs, you ground me. Please stay as generous and beautiful as you are. Lastly, to the victims and the missing ones who are no longer with us, I offer my deepest respect. This book is a tribute to your existence, and I hope it serves as a reminder of the injustices that must never be repeated, and a celebration of the lives you lived. * * * Credit for the image on the cover of this book goes to photographer Rezhin Nawroz. I gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for supporting me in carrying out this research at Leiden University. Additionally, the generous support of the VolkswagenStiftung played a critical role in bringing this book project to fruition at Heidelberg University. I extend my thanks to Johannes Becke for his support during the completion of this book.

Contents

1 Introduction:  Kurdistani Memory Culture  1 1 The KRI’s Memory Struggle  1 2 The Apostrophic and the Phantomic  7 3 Memory Studies 13 4 Trauma Studies 17 5 Kurdish Studies 22 6 Methodology and Positionality 25 6.1 Methodology 25 6.2 Fieldwork and Interviews 28 6.3 Positionality 34 7 Levels of Witnessing 38 2 Master  Narratives: Kurdistani Memory Culture and Educational Textbooks 43 1 Education and Ideology 43 2 Struggles for Identity in the Iraqi Education System 47 2.1 Education Policies Before and During the Ba’ath Regime 47 2.2 Education and the Hegemony of ‘the’ Arab Identity 49 2.3 The Kurdistan Region Education System Between 1991 and 2003 53 3 Education After 2003  55 3.1 Education Reform and Foreign Donors 55 3.2 The Textbook Quality Improvement Programme 57 4 Kirmanj’s Analysis 59 xiii

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Contents

4.1 The Second Generation of Textbooks 59 4.2 ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ 60 4.3 International Forces 62 4.4 Exclusion 63 5 Humiliated Silence 65 5.1 Halabja and Anfal 65 5.2 Forgetfulness 68 6 Interlude: The Problematic Position of Jash 71 7 Forgetfulness and Reconciliation 78 7.1 Disarming the Mind 78 7.2 Family and Collectivity 81 7.3 Forgiveness and Human Rights 85 7.4 Democracy and Future Hope 88 7.5 Postmemory 89 8 Two Narratives 91 3 Resisting  Master Narratives: Kurdistani Memory Culture and Two Literary Texts by Bachtyar Ali 95 1 A Utopian Place 95 2 Literature and Identity 98 2.1 Literature, Oppression and Nationalism 98 2.2 Allegorical Approaches to Kurdistani Literature100 2.3 A Novel Telling Us Who the Kurds Are104 2.4 ‘A Hasty Flight to (Allegorical) Meaning’107 3 My Uncle Jamshid Khan108 3.1 A Summary of the Story108 3.2 An Allegorical Reading of JM109 3.3 An Affective Reading of JM110 3.4 Putting Experiences into Words113 3.5 A Plethora of Meanings115 3.6 Art and Escape116 4 The City of White Musicians119 4.1 Mourning and Disappearance119 4.2 Magical Realism122 4.3 Messianic, Biblical and Cyclic Temporalities126 4.4 Third-Time and the Unraveling of the Self128 4.5 Us Versus Them130 4.6 Ghosts and Phantoms133 5 Different Forms of Escapism135

 Contents 

xv

4 The  Apostrophic: Amna Suraka, in Order Not to Forget139 1 No Friends but the Mountains: The Referendum and an Apostrophizing of Kurdistan139 2 The Material145 2.1 Nora’s Three Aspects145 2.2 A Brief History of the Building146 2.3 The Building Itself148 2.4 The Prison Cells153 3 The Functional159 3.1 In Order Not to Forget159 3.2 Interlude: Historical Context162 3.3 Detailing the Anfal Campaign165 3.4 Detailing Rakrdn166 3.5 Mourning and Sharing169 3.6 Recognizing the Present179 4 The Symbolic181 4.1 Kurdistani Culture and Folklore181 4.2 Kurdistani Heroes185 5 An Entwinement of History and Memory190 5.1 ‘Our true history’190 5.2 Manipulation and Appropriation194 6 Material, Functional and Symbolic199 5 The  Phantomic: The Halabja Monument and Peace Museum203 1 The Phantomic203 2 Museums and Prosthetic Memories208 2.1 Holocaustal Events208 2.2 History, Memorial and Memory Museums210 2.3 Prosthetic Memory212 2.4 Milieux and Lieux de Mémoire215 3 The Material217 4 The Functional220 4.1 In Order Not to Repeat220 4.2 In Order to Mourn223 4.3 In Order to Document and Convince226 4.4 Photographs and Dioramas as Prosthetic Memory234 4.5 Prosthetic Memories in a Phantomic Museum241

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Contents

4.6 A Political Function247 4.7 Politicizing Prosthetic Memories249 4.8 The Prosthetic Replacing the Phantomic252 5 The Symbolic254 5.1 Symbols of Peace and Unity254 5.2 Kurdistani Culture as a Symbol of Strength and Vulnerability256 5.3 The Journalist as a Symbol of Justice and Heroism258 5.4 The Garden: A Continuation of Symbolism261 5.5 Replacing the Functional with the Symbolic263 6 A Struggle for Meaning Haunted by Ghosts from the Past265 6 Conclusion:  Memory as an Agent of Change269 1 Synthesizing Overview269 2 Parki Azadi274 3 Bottom-Up and Top-Down Approaches277 4 A Scholarly Contribution281 Works Cited283 Index301

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6 Fig. 4.7 Fig. 4.8 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3

“An image of the town of Halabja during the chemical attacks” [fourth-­grade Social Science textbook, translation by Bareez Majid] 66 “An image of Raparin” [sixth-grade Social Science textbook, translation by Bareez Majid] 86 Map of Amna Suraka in the museum’s brochure 149 Writings on the walls of the prison complex (photo by Bareez Majid)154 Blankets in the prison complex (photo by Bareez Majid) 156 Door with lock (left), sculpture of woman with child (right) (photo by Bareez Majid) 157 Visitors taking photos with artillery in Amna Suraka’s courtyard (photo by Bareez Majid) 171 Sculptures representing a scene of torture (photo by Bareez Majid)173 Sculpture representing prisoner (photo by Bareez Majid) 175 Mannequin representing a Peshmerga in a wheelchair (photo by Bareez Majid) 188 The Halabja Monument and Peace Museum, seen from a distance. Surrounded by Kurdish flags and one white flag (photo by Bareez Majid) 218 Two men sitting on the graveyard with empty graves, near the HMPM (photo by Bareez Majid) 223 Photograph in the HMPM showing Zimnako Mohammed Salih with his own grave (photo by Bareez Majid) 225

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xviii 

List of Figures

Fig. 5.4

Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6 Fig. 5.7 Fig. 5.8 Fig. 5.9 Fig. 5.10

Pen that signed the death sentence of Ali Hussein Majid (left), placed next to a Gobarok that belonged to a victim of the gas attacks on Halabja (center), and the rope used to hang Ali Hussein Majid (right). The sign tells the date of his execution (photo by Bareez Majid) 231 Diaroma representing the picture known as ‘The Silent Witness,’ showing Omari Khawar cradling his son (photo by Bareez Majid) 236 The photo ‘The Silent Witness,’ in the HMPM (photo by Bareez Majid) 237 Statue of ‘The Silent Witness’ in the museum’s garden (photo by Bareez Majid) 238 Diorama representing a truck with bodies (photo by Bareez Majid)239 The photograph itself, in the HMPM (photo by Bareez Majid) 240 Akram pointing at his young self on the photograph of Fig. 5.9 (photo by Bareez Majid) 244

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Kurdistani Memory Culture

1   The KRI’s Memory Struggle This book focuses on the memory culture of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). More specifically, it considers representations of traumatic events in this region’s recent history in the context of Saddam Hussein’s counter-­ insurgency campaign, code-named Anfal, and the chemical attacks on Halabja, both of which targeted the Kurdistani population. The former took place in eight stages in 1988, and continued for six and a half months, attacking six different areas.1 The precise number of civilian deaths is contested and incomplete until this day (Hiltermann 134–35), but it has been estimated that, during Anfal, between 50,000 and 100,000 civilians were killed,2 60,000 people fled to Turkey, and another 100,000 to Iran (‘Genocide in Iraq’ xii). One week after the first Anfal operation, on 16 March 1988, the gassing of Halabja took place.3 This chemical attack, often characterized as the ‘Hiroshima of the Kurds’ (Bengio, Kurds of Iraq 124) or the ‘Guernica of Kurdistan’ (Kanie), targeted the small town with a population of c. 60,000 inhabitants, located on the border with Iran. The chemical attacks in Halabja caused the immediate deaths of c. 3200 civilians (Bengio, Kurds of Iraq 181)4 and left many others wounded and homeless. This book is not, however, primarily concerned with providing a historical analysis of the Anfal campaign or the chemical bombardment of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Majid, Towards an Understanding of Kurdistani Memory Culture, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37514-9_1

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Halabja. Instead, it analyzes how these events are remembered, commemorated, imagined and represented in the present. The word ‘present’ refers, in this context, to the era that roughly spans the last 20 years, beginning in 2003 and ending in the ‘now’ (2021): the objects on which this study focuses were all created during this period, and therefore form specific manifestations of the memory culture of the KRI after the US-led invasion of Iraq, which resulted in the fall of Saddam in 2003. As will be shown throughout this book, this ‘present’ is characterized by a struggle for memory: different agents claim, frame and instrumentalize representations of the past. This often happens by embedding these representations in political discourses, many of which are part of a process of nation-making: in Article 17 of the Iraqi Constitution of 2005, the KRI was recognized as a federal region, with the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) as its primary governing body.5 Since then, it has existed as a ‘quasi-­ state’ (Natali, The Kurdish Quasi-State) or a ‘state within a state’ (Bengio, Kurds of Iraq). Furthermore, since the area where the Kurdistanis lived was divided between four countries—Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria—by the 1916 Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Treaty, today Kurdistan is characterized as the biggest ‘stateless nation’ in the world, including some 30 million people.6 Due to the complexity of the Kurdish issue and the various competing perspectives on it, different terms are used to refer to the diverse ethnic groups that inhabit Kurdistan regions. In this book, the term ‘Kurdistani’ will often be used instead of ‘Kurdish’ or ‘Kurds’ to acknowledge the various ethnic groups that inhabit the same territory. As will become more clear throughout my discussions of the various understandings and experiences of Kurdistani identity, however, my use of the term is not based on a strictly territorial approach to Kurdistan. Rather, it is meant to avoid placing unnecessary emphasis on Kurdish ethno-nationalism (often implied by the terms ‘Kurds’ and ‘Kurdish’) and to include the wide variety of experiences, ideologies and subject-positions that are linked, in different ways, to the idea of what it would mean to be a Kurdistani.7 It is important to mention, however, that the original terminology of other scholars will be used when citing their work. Considering the abovementioned ‘statelessness,’ the suffering that took place in the recent past is frequently employed by the KRG to argue in favor of constituting Kurdistan as a sovereign nation.8 As Joost Hiltermann points out in his impressive 2007 book, A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja,9 Kurdish leaders have sought “to parlay

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the Halabja and Anfal tragedies into the foundations of their hoped-for state. […] It is out of such deep emotions and national traumas that identities are forged or reinforced and, sometimes, that nations are born. These are certainly the factors that have given rise to the Kurds’ strong sense of entitlement today” (226–27). Andrea Fischer-Tahir observes that this has resulted in a narrative that portrays ‘the’ Kurdistanis as an ‘endangered group of people’ who are in need of—and therefore deserve—an independent nation. In her analysis, the dominant Kurdistani political discourse is that “any Arab regime’s purpose is to exterminate the Kurdish nation” (‘Searching for Sense’ 234); a nation only protected by the brave Peshmergas, a word used for Kurdistani freedom fighters that literally translates as ‘those who look death in the eyes.’ This politicization of past suffering, in turn, often results in a repression of seemingly collective, but also particularly painful, memories, since the ideological narratives in which representations of this suffering are embedded foreground certain aspects and exclude others. As Karin Mlodoch observes in her 2012 research on Anfal-women survivors: Currently, the process of dealing with the past is hampered by the ongoing occupation, and continuing violence and fragmentation within Iraqi society. Regarding the political agenda, priority is being given to the process of national dialog and unification, while the debate on developing strategies for dealing with past crimes is being neglected. (‘Fragmented Memory’ 226).10

This observation indicates that in the struggle for meaning that characterizes the KRI’s memory culture, politicized representations of the past are also often linked to suffering experienced in the present. This concerns suffering caused by threats and acts of aggression by neighboring countries and the Iraqi government, like that which occurred after the referendum for an independent Kurdistan Region in 2017, and during the recent war against Daesh (Islamic State). Thousands of Kurdistanis, both civilian and military, have died in the war with this extremist terrorist movement. What makes the memory culture of the KRI even more complex is that these recent experiences of suffering and violence not only cause new traumas but also trigger and perpetuate old ones, resulting in ongoing cycles of violence and hatred. These ‘old’ traumas concern experiences of oppression under Saddam’s Ba’ath regime, of which Anfal and the Halabja

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massacre formed part. Memories of this aspect of the area’s history are especially persistent, furthermore, because they often concern people who have disappeared. Their bodies were buried in mass graves, and many have not (yet) been recovered and/or identified. This makes it difficult for survivors to mourn those who have been lost, memories of whom continue to haunt them. To explore the multifaceted nature of this complex memory culture, four different objects and practices are analyzed in this book. These have been chosen to specifically include various narratives about and representations of the past and to show how these representations are driven by different ideals and/or aims. This makes it possible to emphasize the existence of a variety of approaches to the past in the KRI’s memory culture. In Chaps. 2 and 3, text is central: Chap. 2 focuses on books used at Kurdistani primary and secondary schools that were produced between 2007 and 2012 by the KRG with the help of UNESCO. A specific focus lies on educational textbooks since, as is argued in more detail in this chapter, school curriculums shape a form of ‘official knowledge’ (Apple, Ideology and Curriculum 54) that often comes to function as a tool employed by different political and social actors involved in its construction. Indeed, textbooks constitute representations of the area’s past that are driven by KRG ideals and various external actors, including UNESCO. Chapter 3 focuses on literary representations of conflict, war, suffering and trauma in Kurdistani author Bachtyar Ali’s 2010 novella, My Uncle Jamshid Khan Whom the Wind Always Carried with Itself (‫جەم�شید خاین‬ ‫)مام کە هەمیشە اب ەلگەڵ خۆی دەیبات‬, and his 2005 novel, The City of White Musicians (‫)شاری مۆ�سیقارە �سپییەاکن‬. This focus on novels as objects of analysis should be understood as an extension of the extensive research already conducted on the relationship between literary texts and the complex entwinements of memory and identity (see the works of Neumann, Erll, Rigney, Lachmann, and Basseler & Birke). Ali’s literary works have played an important role in nurturing the growth and promotion of the Sorani-Kurdish language, simultaneously enriching Sorani-Kurdish literary traditions. Since my research focuses primarily on the depiction of collective traumas and is written in English, however, my exploration of these linguistic aspects of Ali’s literary texts is limited. The inclusion of Ali’s two novels in this monograph is primarily driven by the observation that they shape a unique perspective on the traumatic history of the KRI. This perspective, as is shown more extensively in Chap. 3, does not excessively rely on allegories or sensationalized

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depictions of suffering. This, as is argued in Chap. 3 as well, sets Ali’s oeuvre apart within the Kurdish literary landscape. More specifically, the two selected literary works, both written after the fall of Saddam Hussein, employ the captivating style of magical realism, shedding light on various socio-political issues that rose in two different moments in the KRI’s recent past. The City of White Musicians, written shortly after the American-­ led invasion, delves into the themes of justice and reconciliation. My Uncle Jamshid Khan, penned years later, explores complexities surrounding the pursuit of justice and reflects on the shortcomings of political structures. Chapter 3’s extensive literary analysis of both works will shed light on the unique and delicate ways in which art in general, and literature in particular, can shape and suggest approaches toward representing and processing past atrocities. By focusing on these literary texts, Chap. 3 foregrounds an approach to the past, made possible by the employment of various literary techniques, that conflicts substantially with the one discussed in Chap. 2. This implicitly means that these two textually oriented chapters form counterparts to each other: whereas the first presents hegemonic and official narratives about the past, driven by memory agents like the KRG and UNESCO, the second concerns more ungraspable, fragmented and destabilizing representations of past events that are, to a large extent, unique to the realm of literature. The latter aspects form yet another reason why analyses of literary texts have been included in this book: the two literary texts by Ali are understood in Chap. 3 as providing us insight into the KRI’s collective memory, but also as a place where hegemonic and essentialist master narratives are destabilized and countered with particular and singular explorations of memory, trauma and suffering. Nevertheless, Chap. 3 will also argue that the realm of literature, in this case Kurdistani literature, is often politicized as well. Indeed, in this chapter, the two literary texts by Ali will be embedded in the context of Kurdistani memory culture. In The Lebanese Post-Civil War Novel: Memory, Trauma, and Capital, Felix Lang makes the following helpful observation on the tension between the reluctancy to reduce literature to its socio-­ political contexts on the one hand, and the tendency to explore the ties between the literary realm and its socio-political leanings on the other: [A]cademic tradition and the recent political developments work together to place the scholars of literature in a rather peculiar position: on the one hand we are busy severing all the manifest connections literature as a cultural

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artifact has with the conditions within which it is produced—because, in the end, it is the text that is important. On the other hand, our analyses are driven by a belief that this literature be in some way or other relevant in a sociopolitical sense and we try to reconnect the text to the social on a generalizing conceptual level. (2).

By exploring the complex relationship between the two literary texts by Ali and the memory culture of the KRI, Chap. 3 revolves around a similar tension as discussed by Lang. The chapter not only foregrounds the unique position that literature may carve out within complex postcolonial societies like the KRI, mainly by describing how Ali’s texts try to escape from overly reductive readings that aim to reduce these texts to their socio-political contexts and to hegemonic narratives about Kurdistani identities or politics. It simultaneously highlights the specific manner in which these texts, by constituting this form of escapism, paradoxically also embed themselves in the KRI’s memory culture and destabilize the abovementioned hegemonic narratives. In Chaps. 4 and 5, two physical locations form the epicenters of analysis, which means that these chapters examine attempts to monumentalize the region’s past. In the descriptions of these two physical locations, arguments developed in Chaps. 2 and 3, regarding different ways of representing the KRI’s past, return. As Andrea Bieler points out in her analysis of memory museums: [O]fficial national memorial museums have been steeped in deep controversies, as they carry the weight of atrocious violence caused by preceding governments. Accordingly, the question of how stories of violent conflicts, genocide, and enduring structural violence are depicted and interpreted becomes an issue of political identity formation in the present. (342).

To a large extent, Chaps. 4 and 5 revolve around similar observations. It will be shown that both museums constitute official and hegemonic narratives about the past that, as in the school curriculum, are permeated with political and ideological values. At the same time, they also contain elements that, as in Ali’s literature, create the possibility of (partly) escaping from these narratives and to even criticize them. It is in this way that observations developed in Chaps. 2 and 3 return in Chaps. 4 and 5. The first of the locations on which this book focuses is the Museum of Amna Suraka: In Order Not to Forget (‫ ات ەلایدمان نەچێت‬:‫)مۆزەخانەی نیشتامیین ئەمنەسوورەکە‬.

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The museum is hosted in the former buildings of an infamous political prison constructed in the city of Sulaymaniyah under Saddam’s regime, made into a museum in 2003. The second location is the Halabja Monument and Peace Museum (HMPM) (‫ )مۆنۆمینت ومۆزەخانەی ئا�شیت ھەڵەجبە‬This site also opened its doors to the public in 2003. It commemorates the chemical attacks on the town in which the museum is located. The construction of both sites was initiated by the political party Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) after the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and the fall of Saddam Hussein. In the case of both museums, it will be shown that this political party is one of the main ‘memory carriers’ that drives the representations shaped by the museums, constituting the process of ‘political identity formation’ mentioned, above, by Bieler. This means that both museums are not only driven by the aim to preserve and represent historical events and protect collective memory against historical amnesia, but also that they have a profound impact on state politics and play important roles in the legitimization of specific political movements. This research particularly focuses on Amna Suraka since this site, being a pioneering museum in the region, has set precedent for other commemorative sites, such as the Anfal Museum located in the city of Chamchamal. Analyzing the representation techniques employed in Amna Suraka, this means, provides insight into the representation techniques and socio-political dimensions present in other museums in the region. The Halabja Memorial and Peace Museum is analyzed, in turn, not only because of its controversial history, which will be addressed later, but also because of the active involvement of the community in its construction and functioning. The site’s community-driven approach has resulted in a unique and distinctive representation of the community’s traumatic past, the analysis of which enables me to foreground specific aspects of the KRI’s memory culture, especially its phantomic elements.

2   The Apostrophic and the Phantomic Besides exploring this memory culture, this book also introduces two theoretical notions: the apostrophic and the abovementioned phantomic. These notions are developed to be able to characterize and analyze the complexities of the KRI’s memory culture, but they can also be employed in other cultural, historical and geographical contexts.11 The two notions are mainly discussed in the second part of this book, which concerns the two abovementioned museums: Chap. 4 characterizes Amna Suraka as

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primarily apostrophic, and Chap. 5 describes the Halabja Monument and Peace Museum as primarily phantomic. The notion of the ‘apostrophic’ is borrowed from the realm of poetry analysis, but it is interpreted in this book in a specific manner by embedding it in the fields of Memory Studies and Museum Studies. In his influential 2002 article, Alan Richardson develops a helpful understanding of this poetic figure, which is “classically defined as a diversion or ‘turning away’ of a speaker’s utterance from a primary addressee to a second auditor (who might be absent, dead, or imaginary)” (364). An example of addressing such a ‘second auditor’ can be found in ‘Ey Reqîb,’ a 1938 poem written by Kurdish poet Yûnes Ra’uf (known as Dildar) while he was tortured and imprisoned in Iran. It became the national anthem of the short-lived Republic of Mahabad, an unrecognized Kurdish state in present-­day Iran that, supported by the Soviet Union, declared itself autonomous in 1946 but only existed for less than a year. After the Soviets withdrew under pressure from Western countries, the Iranian army dismantled Mahabad; its leader Qazi Muhammad was hanged in 1947. In 1992, the poem became the official anthem of the KRI. Its title means ‘Oh Enemy,’ thus apostrophizing the enemies of the Kurdistanis and linking this apostrophizing to a specific understanding of what it would mean to be Kurdistani. The poem reads: Oh, enemy! The Kurdish people live on, They have not been crushed by the weapons of any time. Let no one say Kurds are dead, they are living. They live and never shall we lower our flag. We are descendants of the red banner of the revolution. Look at our past, how bloody it is. Let no one say Kurds are dead, they are living. They live and never shall we lower our flag. The Kurdish youth rise bravely, With their blood they colored the crown of life. Let no one say Kurds are dead, they are living. They live and never shall we lower our flag.

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We are the descendants of the Medes and Cyaxares. Kurdistan is our religion, our credo, Let no one say Kurds are dead, they are living. They live and never shall we lower our flag. The Kurdish youth are ready and prepared, To give their life as the supreme sacrifice. Let no one say Kurds are dead, they are living. They live and never shall we lower our flag.              (Ra’uf; translated by Gulalys)

In this poem, ‘the’ Kurds are presented as united by a common history that is linked to the Medes; a narrative that returns in the education textbooks analyzed in Chap. 2. By apostrophizing the enemy of Kurdistanis, who is only directly mentioned in the poem’s title, this poem emphasizes the threats of multiple Others, as well as Kurdistani bravery in the face of these threats. As such, and this forms one of the continuing threads of this book, it constitutes a specific Kurdistani identity; an ‘Us’ that is contrasted with a ‘Them.’ What specifically characterizes the museum of Amna Suraka, as discussed in more detail in Chap. 4, is that instead of enemies or Others, this site apostrophizes Kurdistan itself. To understand why this is the case, the notion of the ‘overhearer’ of the act of apostrophizing is crucial. Again, Alan Richardson’s arguments are helpful in this context: with help of Lakoff and Johnson’s influential study Metaphors We Live By, Richardson emphasizes the importance of the apostrophe in everyday language, in which the figure is often employed to refer to a wide range of phenomena. He observes: It is by no means uncommon to apostrophize the dead at a funeral—“X, we will miss you”—and the effect is anything but embarrassing. Everyday apostrophes may be still more common among certain religious communities. A colleague who grew up in a predominately Catholic neighborhood, for example, recalls her friend Maureen’s mother, Mrs. Flanagan, frequently making remarks along the lines of, “Jesus! don’t let these girls drive off a bridge on their way home from that party,” a plea or warning to the girls issued in the form of an apostrophic prayer. … However, the everyday analog to apostrophe does not require a mute, inanimate, dead, or divine

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addressee. Whenever a conversation takes place before a third party, for example, the speakers will ordinarily tailor their remarks to take the presence of an overhearer into account. (367).

Following the latter idea, Richardson argues that some apostrophic remarks “may be primarily intended for the overhearer” (367). The apostrophic, in his view, therefore provides an opportunity to involve the listener or overhearer in an indirect manner: “to turn aside from one listener to another does not mean to turn one’s back on the former” (368). Chapter 4 translates this idea to the field of Memory Studies and employs it in the context of the KRI by arguing that Kurdistan is apostrophized in this region’s memory culture by ‘turning aside’ from several overhearers, such as the international community, Kurdistanis themselves and, more concretely in the context of the museum: visitors. As such, this process or movement plays different roles in the area’s memory culture: the attempt to apostrophize the ‘non-state nation’12 of Kurdistan can be understood, for example, as a way of shaping a harmonious identity. If the memory culture one belongs to continuously alludes to something that does not actually exist, after all, then one might be encouraged to participate in this addressing oneself and adopt the identity that does the apostrophizing. The second notion introduced in this book is that of the ‘phantomic.’ This notion forms a manifestation of another ‘metaphor we live by’: that of the specter or ghost. In The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility, Esther Peeren describes how the ‘spectral turn’ resulted in analytical tools that help us better understand various processes in different fields, ranging from those already associated with ghosts (such as Gothic horror or psychoanalytical analyses of the uncanny) to new perspectives within, for example, post-colonialism or cultural memory (see Peeren 9–10).13 Peeren’s analysis of the metaphor of the specter is based on the observation that Jacques Derrida, whose 1983 Specters of Marx played a crucial role in constituting the spectral turn, employed this metaphor in a rather general manner. In his writings, she observes, specters point toward an ungraspable form of radical alterity that, Derrida argues with help of references to the ghostly dimensions of Hamlet, might replace hegemonic and static understandings of ontology with a more critical and elusive hauntology (11). Although highly creative and influential, Peeren writes, Derrida’s approach made this metaphor rather similar to other

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forms of difference or alterity described by the French philosopher, such as ‘mark’ or ‘trace,’ robbing the spectral of its specificity. In her book, Peeren therefore sets out to describe more specific aspects of spectrality, not only by distinguishing different kinds but also by linking them to representations—in literature, film and television series—of undocumented migrants, mediums, servants or domestic workers and missing persons (16). In these representations, she shows, these persons are turned into ‘living ghosts,’ neither alive nor dead, often provided with an agency that only ghosts can have. As living ghosts, after all, they to some extent have the ability to escape from hegemonic narratives and, instead, occupy liminal positions from which they can haunt and destabilize the realm of the living (16–18). To be as precise as possible, Peeren describes various kinds of spectrality, such as the ghostly, the spooky, the phantasmatic and the spectral itself. She writes about these concepts: Since part of my aim is to counteract generalizing uses of the spectral metaphor that assume all ghosts are alike, these terms will be taken as closely related but not identical in meaning and figurative force. ‘Specter’, for example, strongly invokes something visible, even spectacular, through its etymology (from Latin specere, ‘to look, see’) and tends, in everyday speech, to refer to something terrifying and horrific, while ‘phantom’ is primarily associated with the illusionary and ineffectual, and ‘spook’ seems archaic and rather innocuous when used as a noun to describe literal ghosts, but, as an adjective, conjures discomfort and fear. (4–5).

Since Peeren mainly focuses on what she characterizes as ‘living ghosts,’ as well as on the different kinds of agency that ghosts may gain as they occupy the realm between life and death, the notion of the ‘phantom’ does not return as frequently in her analysis as that of the specter or the ghost.14 It is precisely this term, however, that I employ in this book to grasp the specifically ‘phantomic’ aspects of the KRI’s memory culture. These aspects concern memories of Kurdistanis who were targeted by the Ba’ath regime, went missing, and whose remains have never been found— they might still be buried in anonymous mass graves that have not yet been excavated. Within the KRI’s memory culture, these victims have gained a phantomic status, I argue in Chaps. 3 and 5, which is (almost) devoid of agency. Therefore, the vulnerable, ungraspable and rather ineffective characteristics that Peeren links to the ‘phantom’ make this notion

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of the ‘phantomic’ the most fitting to describe their ungraspable existence between being and not-being.15 Chapter 5 shows that the notion of ‘phantomic’ has been chosen for another reason: referring to the phenomenon of a ‘phantom limb,’ it is introduced as a critical response to Alison Landsberg’s concept of ‘prosthetic memory,’ itself a reference to prosthetic limbs. Landsberg argues that memory museums can re-create memories about a traumatic past with help of various techniques that provide visitors the illusion that they might, to some extent, adopt these memories as their own, making them into prosthetic memories. Chapter 5 criticizes this idea by showing that in the Halabja Monument and Peace Museum the prosthetic qualities of these memories are destabilized by rather ungraspable and highly vulnerable memories of a phantomic nature. As such, their prosthetic qualities are surrounded, as it were, by a phantomic layer that emphasizes the absence of those who disappeared, in analogy with the absence of a phantom limb and its contrast with the presence of a prosthetic limb. The vulnerability of the phantomic also plays a third role in this book; this role concerns the relationship between the apostrophic and the phantomic and reintroduces the tension between the hegemonic narrative described in Chap. 2 and the more ungraspable and destabilizing representations discussed in Chap. 3. Chapters 4 and 5 argue that within the context of the two discussed museums, a tension between the apostrophic and the phantomic might arise: those parts of the museums that apostrophize Kurdistan as an independent nation might instrumentalize the traumatic memories of the past, including those of disappeared loved ones, by embedding them in the narratives discussed in Chap. 2. Processes of mourning, this suggests, are often adopted and appropriated by political powers to tell a specific story about the past that, in the case of the KRI, is linked to an idea about how past Kurdish suffering justifies the constitution of a future Kurdistan and forms the basis of a Kurdish identity. As Cheryl Lawther observes in a discussion of ghosts, hauntings and representations of a violent past in the context of Northern Ireland: “Claiming ownership of the dead and the victimhood of the living […] constitutes a powerful political resource” (159). Again, the fact that the memories discussed in this book are rather ineffective and fleeting (which is why they are ‘phantomic’ instead of ‘spectral’), makes them vulnerable to forms of political and ideological appropriation. The other way around, however, Chaps. 3, 4 and 5 also describe instances of phantomic aspects implicitly

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criticizing or rejecting acts of apostrophizing, which happens in the HMPM but also in the literary texts of Ali.

3   Memory Studies The notions of the apostrophic and the phantomic are critical contributions to the various fields in which this book is embedded. They are born, for example, in the observation that two influential conceptual distinctions, which often return in the field of Memory Studies, are destabilized in the context of the KRI’s memory culture. The first is the distinction between ‘communicative memory’ and ‘cultural memory,’ developed by German Egyptologist Jan Assmann. The second distinction concerns the contrast between milieux de mémoire and lieux de mémoire, described by French historian Pierre Nora.16 This makes the notions of the apostrophic and the phantomic into critical ‘bridges’ between foundational texts by Assmann and Nora, and the more contemporary analyses discussed throughout this book. Taking Maurice Halbwachs’s 1925 work, Social Frameworks of Memory, as a point of departure, scholars active within Memory Studies effectively show, after all, that the narratives people live by shape the ways in which they interact and exist within communities, creating collective forms of memory.17 Approaching the past in a socio-constructivist manner, Jan Assmann argues in several texts published in the early 2000s that a ‘collective memory’ is shaped by desires, expectations and ideological notions that exist in the present and that, in turn, link this representation of the past to an image of the future. The past, this implies, is not an ‘object’ that can be studied in a neutral manner, but is something that is shaped by frameworks and ideas rooted in the present, permeating the ways in which people commemorate events (Cultural Memory 20). With help of the notions of the apostrophic and the phantomic, this book re-assesses three specific aspects of collective memory highlighted by Assmann, destabilizing the abovementioned distinction. The first of these aspects concerns the idea that collective memory is the result of a long process, which Assmann describes as consisting of a ‘communicative’ and a ‘cultural’ part. This extended process spans about three generations (or 80 to 100 years), Assmann suggests, and is shaped by the ways in which individuals pass on their personal memories about specific events through their everyday interactions and communication. During this phase, a collective memory is fluid and unofficial. After this time period, however, it

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gradually becomes more rigid and turns into an institutionalized memory of past events. This memory is constituted with the help of so-called ‘mnemotechnic’ in the form of museums and commemoration practices. These ‘specialized carriers of memory’ form the foundation of a cultural memory that, in turn, plays a vital role in the creation of a collective whole to which everybody feels they belong because they share these same memories, even though they took place several generations ago (‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’ 2008, 111). Before Assmann, Nora developed the second distinction mentioned above. In his three-volume collection, Les Lieux de Mémoire, he aimed to describe the process through which a collective memory passes when it moves from what he calls milieux de mémoire to lieux de mémoire. In ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,’ which in 1989 introduced Nora’s ideas to the Anglophone academic world, he argues that ‘places of memory’ are constituted in an era in which the living and vibrant memories of events—milieux de mémoire—are dying out (7). To save these memories, either from complete forgetfulness or from turning into fossilized and ‘dead’ history, Nora claims lieux de mémoire are created: “There are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory” (7). Whereas Assmann, this means, argues that ‘communicative memory’ gradually transforms into ‘cultural memory,’ Nora positions a specific form of ‘mnemotechnics’—the constitution of lieux de mémoire—on the border between what he calls ‘memory’ and ‘history.’ The former, according to his analysis, is active and alive, and the latter is what memory is replaced with after the ‘will to remember’ has died out. Nora uses the term lieux de mémoire to refer to a wide range of different phenomena, including “museums, archives, cemeteries, festivals, anniversaries, treaties, depositions, monuments, sanctuaries, [and] fraternal orders” (12). Moreover, he describes three very specific aspects of lieux de mémoire; Chaps. 4 and 5 explore how these three aspects make his theory particularly valuable in analyzing the memory sites of Amna Suraka and the Halabja Monument and Peace Museum in a structured and systematic manner. It is, therefore, undeniable that Nora’s ideas, in addition to those of Assmann, play an important role in this book. Nevertheless, the notions of the ‘apostrophic’ and the ‘phantomic’ are introduced to criticize the theories of the two authors as well. The former notion, after all, indicates that, in the context of the KRI, the distinctions between communicative and cultural memory, and between milieu and lieu de mémoire, are rather

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‘blurry.’ In this area those who belong to the milieu de mémoire and who shape the KRI’s communicative memory are still alive, yet at the same time various lieux de mémoire are already constructed to apostrophize Kurdistan. Furthermore, as indicated by Derrida’s hauntological references to the observation that ‘time is out of joint’ in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (see Peeren 11), the notion of the ‘phantomic’ destabilizes the linear understanding of time that implicitly shapes the ideas of a progression from milieu to lieu and from communicative to cultural memory. By emphasizing the idea that phantoms from the past can haunt the present within a lieu de mémoire like the Halabja Monument and Peace Museum, this book foregrounds the ‘blurriness’ of the lines between the different concepts introduced by Nora and Assmann. This blurriness comes about because of the specific postcolonial, political and historical contexts of the KRI: as mentioned above, the area is not only characterized by continuing threats (e.g., by neighboring countries or Daesh), but also by various attempts to process and work through different experiences of violence and trauma that took place in the recent past and that are entwined with various processes of postcolonial forms of nation-building. This blurring, and especially the role of apostrophizing techniques, cannot be understood without foregrounding the second aspect of ‘mnemonic labor’ around which this book’s analysis revolves. This aspect concerns the idea that, again in the words of Assmann, “mnemotechnics guarantee continuity and identity, the latter clearly being a product of memory” (Cultural Memory 72). To analyze this process, Assmann observes, in line with Halbwachs, that we shape our identities within and through continuous interaction with other people. During this interaction, people not only become who they are as individuals, but also come to embed themselves in a social context (116). This happens when we are made aware, through various memory practices, of the culture and history that a ‘we’ is presented as sharing as a collective. Assmann writes: “Identity is a matter of consciousness, that is of becoming aware of an otherwise unconscious image of the self. This applies both to individual and to collective life” (111). He furthermore observes that this collective aspect provides the notion of remembrance with a normative dimension: “If you want to belong, you must remember” (‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’ 2013, 41). The way in which we commemorate the past, this suggests, is linked to the constitution of an identity in the present. Memory scholar Yael Zerubavel argues that ‘master commemorative narratives’ often focus on

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turning points in history, and mark the emergence of groups as independent social entities with distinctive collective identities that present a notion of what it means to belong to one specific collective with one specific history (6). Further, master narratives like these, according to Assmann, must be continuously reactivated, circulated and spread through commemorative practices, so they do not die out and become ‘dead memory’ (‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’ 2013, 37). This is done, for example, in and by the education textbooks discussed in Chap. 2. In his insightful analysis of collective memory, Michael Rothberg argues that this cycle of reactivation and circulation often makes a collective memory multidirectional in nature, as it uses cross-references and borrows different discourses (Multidirectional Memory 3). An example of such multidirectionality is formed by the abovementioned characterizations of the Halabja-gassings as the ‘Hiroshima of the Kurds’ or the ‘Guernica of Kurdistan,’ which provide these attacks with a specific meaning by referring to other traumatic events in different parts of the world and in other historical contexts. Since representations of these events, furthermore, are linked within the KRI to an apostrophizing of Kurdistan, processes of identity formation in this region indicate that, to rephrase Assmann’s observation cited above, if you want to belong, you must apostrophize. This introduces a third aspect of mnemonic labor: it concerns processes associated with turning communicative memory into an ‘officially’ accepted version of ‘the’ past, and with materializing a milieu into a lieu de mémoire on the border between memory and history. This links these processes to power dynamics prevalent in communities and in broader societies,18 suggesting that memories are mediated by political ideologies that highlight specific understandings of a cultural and social identity and exclude others. An explicit example is formed by the anthem mentioned above, which shapes a dichotomy between a Kurdish ‘Us’ and various ‘Others.’ The three aspects dealt with above all come together in different aspects of the memory culture of the KRI. In this culture, as mentioned, commemorations of past suffering, as well as references to external threats, are frequently linked to political ideas about the necessity of constituting an independent Kurdistan. Furthermore, this is often done by linking an apostrophizing of Kurdistan as a nation to an idea of ‘the’ Kurdistani identity. This is realized by trying to accelerate the process through which Assmann’s ‘communicative memory’ fossilizes into an uncontested and official ‘cultural memory,’ which is frequently supported by the

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construction of ceremonial sites that Nora characterizes as lieux de mémoire. Again: since this process is embedded in a context defined by the experience of ongoing threats, continuing collective traumas that haunt the present, as well as ongoing attempts at nation-building in the area’s postcolonial context, Assmann and Nora’s distinctions are destabilized in the KRI.

4   Trauma Studies In the context of this book, the ‘traumatic memories’ mentioned several times above mainly concern experiences related to the genocidal Anfal campaign and the chemical attacks on Halabja, but also other aspects of Kurdistani existence under Saddam’s Ba’ath regime. This means that this book is embedded in a second academic context: Trauma Studies. An influential understanding of the notion of ‘trauma’ can be found in Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience. In this 1996 study, a trauma is defined as a ‘wound’ that forms as a “response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena” (91–92). A trauma, Caruth claims, is not truly experienced the moment it takes place. Instead, it is repressed and sometimes even ‘forgotten,’ after which it continues to haunt the traumatized self in different ways; an idea that forms one of the foundations of my notion of the ‘phantomic.’ In 2014, I interviewed a guide in the Amna Suraka museum who told me about the ways in which threats in the present, mainly by Daesh, perpetuate and/or overshadow old traumas and create new ones. He told me the following: If your arm breaks here [points at his arm], even though this happened a year ago, then the pain remains, even though the pain is now in a different place [points at a different place on the same arm]. Koraw [the traumatic Kurdish mass exodus of 1991], even though it is, in my eyes, the most important event in the history of our people, has a lesser impact because people now see that the same is happening again somewhere else. I used to see people [visitors to the museum] cry when they saw photographs of Koraw. Now they see the same suffering every day on different media channels.19

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This guide’s reference to pain caused by a healed bone fracture that is now invisible to others but continues to plague the self in the present, resonates with Caruth’s claim that direct representation of, communication about, and access to traumatic experiences is difficult to constitute (124). Furthermore, it emphasizes the distinction between the visible and present prosthetic, and the invisible and almost absent phantomic, discussed in Chap. 5. As the Kurdistani poet and scholar Choman Hardi writes, also in the context of the traumas Kurdistani people experienced under occupation in Iraq and other countries: It may be difficult for others to understand what it feels like to be forcibly deported, to see your homes given to “settlers,” to witness the renaming of your neighbourhoods and towns. It may be difficult to imagine what it is like not to be allowed to speak your mother tongue, to witness public assassination of your people, to grow up with images of mass graves, gassed victims, hanged leaders. It is even more difficult to describe what it is like to see history repeat itself when you witness your defeat again. (‘Poetry’s Power’)

Caruth’s analysis returns in the third chapter of this book, which examines the literary texts of Bachtyar Ali. Caruth’s specific concern with representations of trauma makes her work particularly useful, after all, in showing how literary techniques can be employed to refer to the phantomic and sometimes almost ungraspable aspects of traumatic memories. It is crucial to note in the context of this book that Caruth’s use of the notion of ‘trauma’ does not only refer to individual experiences, but also to an experience that might be collectively shared by communities at large. She makes this claim by entwining what she calls ‘history’ with trauma: “history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own, … history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (24). It is therefore important to emphasize that although this book sometimes refers to individual memories or personal accounts of trauma—mainly in the context of interviews conducted in the region—it is primarily concerned with collectively shared representations of the past, as well as collective traumas. This constitutes a link between Trauma Studies and the emphasis on collectivity that characterizes Memory Studies. In this context, sociologist Ron Eyerman describes the notion of a ‘cultural trauma’ as “a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear of the social fabric, affecting a group of people who have achieved some degree of cohesion. In this sense, the trauma

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need not necessarily be felt by everyone in a group or have been directly experienced by any or all” (23).20 Eyerman borrows the notion of ‘cultural trauma’ from Jeffrey Alexander, who argues that it occurs “when members of a collective feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever, and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways” (‘Cultural Trauma’ 1). Alexander writes that if traumas become collective, they can be “conceived as wounds to social identity,” which means that processing them becomes “a matter of intense cultural and political work” (Trauma 1). This reference to memory as ‘political work’ resonates with the ‘mnemonic labor’ discussed above. The cultural traumas constituted by the Anfal campaign and the chemical attacks on Halabja are entwined with the different ways in which a Kurdistani identity is built around representations of the past. One of the techniques employed to do this is apostrophizing an independent Kurdistan. This also means, as Eyerman contends, that political power is involved in the process of recollecting and representing traumatic events. He writes: “cultural trauma can be understood as a meaning struggle, where individual and collective actors attempt to define a situation by imposing a particular interpretation on it” (42). Pointing at similar processes, Judith Butler observes that a traumatic event that permeates the experience of a collective can be framed in different ways (Frames of War 5–12). What these observations all imply is that a collective trauma is strongly mediated by social, cultural and political structures—that which Butler calls ‘frames.’ Collective experiences of a traumatic event are continually retold in the form of narratives represented in different ways, an observation that is also shared within Memory Studies. These narratives do not merely reproduce past events, but are characterized by an ongoing involvement in reconstructing the tragedy and pain involved with the traumatic event in the past in order to understand and make sense of these overwhelming experiences in the present. Furthermore, as Nora noted, by materializing these narratives in lieux de mémoire, they can be turned into official versions of the past with help of what Assmann defines as a “thoroughly prepared and vetted” process that often results in the constitution of an identity (Cultural Memory 40). Observations like these imply that Caruth’s claim—namely, that trauma cannot be directly accessed, narrated or represented, and remains a ‘vacuum’ or ‘hole’ within an individual and/or collective memory—is also

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problematized in this book. The following chapters demonstrate, in different ways, that cultural traumas are continuously shaped, framed and forged in the KRI by linking them to political ideals, to a Kurdistani identity, and to an apostrophized Kurdistani nation.21 For instance, the two memory sites studied in Chaps. 4 and 5 contain various objects—sculptures, paintings, dioramas, photographs—that do represent these traumas in specific ways. Even though trauma itself may be difficult to describe in ordinary terms or concepts, artistic, political or collective articulations of traumatic experiences can play a role in assimilating these experiences, albeit with different results (see Mazza). This means that this book implicitly follows Wulf Kasteiner and Harald Weilnböck, who argue that Caruth’s claim that trauma is ‘unspeakable’ and ‘unrepresentable’ is not entirely convincing since it contradicts “the consensus in psychotherapy studies that narration is an indispensable tool for healing” (229–40). In different ways, narratives of trauma return in the objects studied in the different chapters of this book. Nevertheless, as mentioned above, Caruth’s ideas still also echo through my notion of the ‘phantomic,’ which emphasizes the idea that we should be critical of overly direct and hegemonic narratives of trauma that repress or exclude the vulnerable, particular and fleeting aspects of traumatic memories. Another way in which this book enriches the field of Trauma Studies is by setting in motion, largely with help of the notions of the apostrophic and the phantomic, a process of decolonization. In his helpful study Postcolonial Witnessing, Stef Craps argues that most studies hitherto developed within Trauma Studies are rooted in a European context and concern an engagement with the memory culture of the Holocaust. Although scholars sometimes suggest that their ideas can be applied to collective traumas in other parts of the world, Craps observes, most aspects of their analyses are still specifically limited to what he characterizes as a ‘Western’ context. He discerns four characteristics of this context, which all return in the following chapters, and responds critically to Caruth’s analysis of trauma: Remarkably …, the founding texts of the field (including Caruth’s own work) largely fail to live up to this promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement. They fail on at least four counts: they marginalize or ignore traumatic experiences of non-Western or minority cultures, they tend to take for granted the universal validity of definitions of trauma and recovery that have developed out of the history of Western modernity, they often favour or

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even prescribe a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation and aporia as uniquely suited to the task of bearing witness to trauma, and they generally disregard the connections between metropolitan and non-Western or minority traumas. As a result of all of this, rather than promoting cross-cultural solidarity, trauma theory risks assisting in the perpetuation of the very beliefs, practices, and structures that maintain existing injustices and inequalities. (2).

In his own work, Craps therefore sets himself the task of decolonizing the field of Trauma Studies. He does this by showing that traumas in what he characterizes as ‘non-Western’ or minority populations must be approached on their own terms (19). Specifically helpful is Craps’s critique of ‘event-based’ models of trauma (4): the main problem with the model that, in Craps’s view, dominates the works of Caruth, is that it focuses too specifically on traumas that are presented as caused by one single catastrophic event. In line with Claire Stocks, he argues that this event-based model assumes a psychologically healthy subject as a unified, integrated whole, and that “healing from trauma consists of overcoming the fracturing of the self and the resulting division in identity caused by an extremely disturbing event.” However, such an approach is limited to only specific kinds of trauma, according to Craps (33). Similar interpretations return throughout this book: in the memory culture of the KRI, it is difficult to characterize the Anfal campaign and the chemical attacks on Halabja as distinct events that took place in the past. Their commemorations, as mentioned several times above in the context of the apostrophic, are continuously linked in the KRI to present-­ day threats, wars and struggles. Furthermore, as the notion of the phantomic indicates, traumatic memories, especially of missing loved ones, continue to haunt this society as well. This problematizes the idea that the collective traumas that characterize the region’s postcolonial and post-­ conflict memory culture are limited to the past. In fact, this situation makes it more apt to, instead of characterizing the KRI as a post-conflict society, argue that it remains in what Britt Baillie calls ‘conflict-time’ (300). Writing about the Croatian city of Vukovar, Baillie uses this concept to refer to a space that is “defined not by the presence or absence of violence, but rather by a heightened sense of unease and contestation. Here, memory is long on the wounds of war but short on the period of peaceful co-existence which predated it” (301). Descriptions of a similar ‘sense of unease and contestation’ should, throughout this book, be understood as part of a process of decolonizing Memory Studies,

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especially since the notions of the apostrophic and phantomic emphasize how a society remaining in ‘conflict-time’ is characterized by different and often conflicting experiences and senses of conflict, trauma, nationalism and identity formation. It is important to note in this context, however, that Craps’s analysis suffers from a weakness as well. Although he criticizes several authors for their limited approach to trauma, and especially their exclusive concern with the memory culture of the Holocaust, he is not able to transcend this focus either. As Veronica Austen observes in her review of Craps’s study: “with two of its four literary chapters devoted to narratives that address the Holocaust, Postcolonial Witnessing remains largely centred on the Holocaust. … By devoting attention to even more diverse experiences, this text could have more effectively accomplished its goal of ‘decolonizing’ the field” (336). A similar goal drives this book: its research on Kurdistani memory culture aims to contribute to a decolonization of Trauma Studies. As is shown in more detail in Chap. 5, this also means that this book aims to critically revise several theories and concepts developed within the discipline of Museum Studies, such as the abovementioned ‘prosthetic memory,’ ‘memorial museum’ and ‘memory museum.’ These terms are of limited use in the KRI context because they are rooted in the distinctions between on the one hand the personal and on the other the collective, the so-called ‘communicative memory’ and ‘cultural memory,’ and between milieux and lieux de mémoire that are destabilized in and by this same context. It is for this reason, again, that the notions of the ‘apostrophic museum’ and ‘phantomic museum’ are developed in Chaps. 4 and 5.

5   Kurdish Studies This book not only contributes to the fields of Memory Studies and Trauma Studies (and, to some extent, Museum Studies), but also to Kurdish Studies. To contextualize the latter contribution, Garnik Asatrian’s observation should be taken into account, made in his 2009 article ‘Prolegomena to the Study of the Kurds,’ that “[h]ardly any other field of Near Eastern Studies has ever been so politicised as the study of the history and culture of the Kurds, having produced an industry of amateurs, with few rivals in other domains of Orientalistic knowledge” (1–2).22 This is a rather extreme assessment: many strong and detailed analyses have been developed about different aspects of Kurdistani culture.

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Still, Asatrian’s assessment does not entirely miss its mark. In a comparable analysis of Kurdish Studies, Kurdologist Ofra Bengio indeed affirms Asatrian’s observation, and argues that an explanation may be rooted in the absence of a Kurdistani nation. Especially when the ideal of the nation-­ state became dominant, she writes, this often resulted in theoretical perspectives that overlooked the Kurdistanis: “Throughout most of the century, few books about the Kurds per se were written in Western languages. As the land of the Kurds were divided up between five states (Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the Soviet Union) in the aftermath of World War I, scholars mainly treated the Kurds as an integral part of those nation-­ states. At times, the Kurds were ignored all together” (Kurds of Iraq 6). With respect to the Kurds in Iraq, she continues: As demonstrated by the “classic” books on modern Iraq, the nation-state narrative was the dominant one until the early 1960s. This was due to a number of factors: Iraqi Kurds, and Kurds in general, were far from the limelight of scholarship, which was focused on postcolonial state-building efforts. Their own inhabitations, caused by political or cultural shackles, prevented them from contributing significantly to the field. There was a dearth of printing presses in the Kurdish region, which remained quite acute until the late 1950s. And perhaps most importantly, a widely held perception prevailed among scholars and analysts that Iraq as a nation-state of which the Kurds were an integral part, and not a state in which two national movements (the Arab and the Kurdish) were vying for influence. (6–7).

As an example, Bengio mentions Eric Davis’s 2005 Memories of State, which presents an idealized conception of Iraq as a nation-state and ignores altogether that Kurdistanis have been striving and continue to strive for independence (8). Another explanation for the often underdeveloped nature of Kurdish Studies is that for long periods of time the region was inaccessible to outsiders. As Hamit Bozarslan and Jordi Tejel note in Writing the Modern History of Iraq, especially since the 1968 military coup, but also before this time, research could only be undertaken in Iraq under strict supervision, which made it next to impossible to explore archival material or perform fieldwork (501). An example is provided by Dutch Kurdologist Maarten van Bruinessen in his dissertation, Agha, Shaikh and State: The Social Political Structures of Kurdistan, which was completed in 1978 and published in 1992. In the latter version, Van Bruinessen describes the

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difficulty of doing research in the region, writing that his study area was restricted due to political factors, which meant that he ultimately managed to do research in Iraqi Kurdistan for only six weeks (5). Yet another explanation for the underdevelopment of Kurdish Studies rests in the influence of wars and, more generally, international political developments and shifting power dynamics between nations and cultures (Bozarslan and Tejel 502). For example, Peter Sluglett observes that Saddam was seen for a long time as a progressive and democratic leader by Western countries: “especially in the late 1970s and the early 1980s … Saddam Hussein’s regime seemed to be all that stood between ‘us’ and the mullah in Teheran” (3). This often resulted in rather uncritical and one-­ sided analyses of political tensions in the region. A trilogy about Iraq’s history by the Iraqi Arab scholar Majid Khadduri is particularly exemplary. The trilogy’s first two volumes, 1960s Independent Iraq: A Study in Iraqi Politics from 1932 to 1958 and 1969s Republican Iraq: A Study in Iraqi Politics since the Revolution of 1958, especially express what Bozarslan and Tejel call an ‘adulatory’ attitude toward Saddam’s Ba’ath party (503). Bengio observes that this also had implications for the book’s discussion of the Kurds: “Independent Iraq … almost totally ignores the Kurds while pursuing a pure nation-state narrative” (Kurds of Iraq 6). Bozarslan and Tejel describe how international power dynamics continued to distort analyses of the area after the fall of Saddam. Political and military decision-makers, they observe, used and simplified academic research “as operational knowledge without taking into account the necessity of ‘methodological doubts’ or internal contradictions in order to gain a better understanding of the history and politics of Iraq” (502). For example, they explain how in many studies Iraqi society was reduced to three homogeneous groups—Sunnis, Shi’ites and Kurds—and that this overly simplistic categorization had problematic consequences when Saddam was removed from power, since it led to “the indiscriminate repression in those Sunni areas which were considered to constitute the social base of Ba’athism” (502). Given the politicized and often myopic character of analyses like these, Riccardo Bocco and Jordi Tejel argue in Writing the Modern History of Iraq that scholars who study the area should adopt an approach that results in critical revisionist readings of its history. This should be done, they argue, by analyzing the many different aspects of Iraq’s society from various perspectives, such as the local, regional and global, and by critically comparing internal and external approaches. Only in this way, they claim,

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can the tensions and ideologies that characterize modern-day Iraq’s complex society be understood accurately (xvii). This book is inspired by this idea and aims to contribute to Kurdish Studies by analyzing the four abovementioned artifacts of the KRI’s memory culture, and to do this with evidence gathered through extensive fieldwork conducted in the area.

6   Methodology and Positionality 6.1  Methodology By infusing Kurdish Studies with the critical and reflective dimensions prevalent within Memory Studies, I aim to preserve a continual critical awareness of the ways in which my analysis of the region’s past is influenced by my own positionality as a researcher in the present. The specific methodology employed in this research is situated within the critical, reflective and decolonizing frameworks of Memory Studies, Trauma Studies and Kurdish Studies, as described above. Chapters 2 and 3 primarily use the methodology of close reading to analyze educational textbooks and the selected literary texts by Bachtyar Ali. In these chapters, these interpretations are furthermore embedded in references to similar (and dissimilar) analyses to reflect on the specifics of the employed methodology. The research approach to Amna Suraka and the Halabja Monument and Peace Museum differs, however, which is why I reflect more extensively on my fieldwork in this last section. To study the memory culture of the KRI by analyzing these two sites, I adopted an approach that enabled me to both describe individual memories and personal accounts of traumatic events that I gathered in interviews, and also to embed them in within the context of the wider memory culture of the KRI, based on readings and observations I made during my fieldwork. Furthermore, I also needed to translate these findings into more general terms to effectively embed the complex interplay between individual accounts and collective contexts within an academic framework. The methodology employed to navigate between these different perspectives, standpoints and approaches was inspired by Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures. In this seminal 1973 work, the American anthropologist argues that instead of presenting an empirical means that enables the researcher to arrive at general facts about a culture, the ethnographer has a ‘double task’ (27). He explains this double task with the help of his influential distinction between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ descriptions.

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After immersing themselves within a culture and placing themselves in the shoes of those who are studied, Geertz argues, ethnographers must develop a ‘thick description’ that enables them to translate their findings to outsiders who are unfamiliar with the studied culture. This can be done by embedding ‘thin descriptions’ of findings in explanatory frameworks that enable outsiders to understand the meaning of the ethnographer’s findings within a wider cultural discourse.23 Since these concern descriptions, Geertz concludes, anthropological writings are “themselves interpretations … [and], thus, fictions; fictions, in the sense that they are ‘something made,’ ‘something fashioned’ … not that they are false, unfactual, or merely ‘as if’ thought experiments” (15). This suggests that even though ethnographers will never arrive at one objective or essential truth about the studied culture, the interpretation that they develop is still rooted in observations and substantiated with analyses and arguments that are explained in detail to the reader. It is not, in other words, overly reductive or a falsehood. In this book, this approach is combined with James Clifford’s theory of ‘partial truths.’ Observing that ethnographies present an ‘in-between’ system of meaning that should be understood as inscriptions that are constructed and later objectified (2), this American scholar argues that it is crucial that the ethnographer approaches cultures as the “interplay of voices, of positioned utterances” (12). According to Clifford, undertaking ethnography is an inherently partial and fragmentary endeavor, in which the ethnographer “decodes and recodes, telling the grounds of collective order and diversity, inclusion and exclusion. [Ethnography] describes processes of innovation and structuration, and is itself part of these processes” (2–3). More than Geertz, Clifford emphasizes the necessity of critical self-­ reflection. Since ethnographers do not hold the “unquestioned rights of salvage” (Clifford 16), they should recognize their own role as interpreting subjects and realize that they will only arrive at ‘partial truths’ (7). I adopted a similar approach during my fieldwork at Amna Suraka and the Halabja Monument and Peace Museum. The analyses that I developed, and that form the foundation of a close reading of these two memory sites in Chaps. 4 and 5, originated in the course of my many conversations with local community members in and around the two museums. More specifically, I interviewed various employees of Amna Suraka and the HMPM, both in the museums as well as in informal settings. My findings are based on analysis of these interviews using theories that enable me to understand and interpret the specific cultural meaning

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manifested in my interviewees’ observations to someone who is not from the area. Furthermore, I linked these interviews to analyses of objects exhibited at the sites, their architecture, routes that visitors must follow, and other cultural elements, eventually arriving at ‘partial truths’ about the memory culture on which this book focuses. Although the methodology employed in this book is informed by those of other scholars, there are three aspects that distinguish its approach, particularly from those defended by Geertz and, to some extent, by Clifford. The first is that while Geertz is chiefly concerned with understanding cultural symbols and traditions by interpreting what he witnesses and observes as an anthropologist, this book also frequently refers to what is not seen: aspects of the past that do not fit within the narrative presented by the memory sites and are therefore left out, meant to be forgotten. It is precisely those omissions that help us understand how the analyzed culture shapes meaning. Further, Geertz argues that scholars can develop an interpretation of what takes place in a society and what generates meaning within a studied social structure by putting oneself in the shoes of those belonging to the studied culture. I disagree. As alluded to above, this is especially problematic in the context of a memory culture that revolves around highly traumatic memories that are difficult to put into words, and that are often shaped and forged by hegemonic ‘master narratives’ presented by political discourses and lieux de mémoire. These discourses and narratives might obscure specific aspects of traumatic memories or permeate them in such a way that they are changed or adapted to affirm ‘official versions’ of the past. Furthermore, the factual details in accounts of traumatic memories tend to be unreliable (see Laub, ‘On Holocaust Testimony’ (135); Hardi, Gendered Experiences 10). Reflecting on the difficulties of analyzing the stories of Holocaust survivors, Dori Laub contends that one should, in the case of victims of trauma, be very careful about interpreting testimonies and not immediately reject them as untrustworthy if they contain factual errors. Laub reflects on the importance of finding a balance between historiography and a concern with the ‘survivor’s perspective’: As fundamental as the pursuit of factual accuracy in the context of Holocaust research undoubtedly remains, it may well threaten to drown out the voice of a survivor and can put the entire testimonial effort in jeopardy. On the part of the historian it was important to insist on a historiography of the

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Holocaust that would not too easily fall prey to deniers. On my part it was just as important to speak in favor of the survivor’s perspective and to demand a hearing for it. (‘On Holocaust Testimony’ 134)

Agreeing with Laub that the testimonies of traumatized victims demand to be heard, I have adopted the role of an empathic listener, and recognize the importance of their lived experiences in my analyses and interpretations. This means that I have not dismissed accounts provided by my interviewees as false if they contained factual errors. Since it is also crucial to recognize that facts about the ‘true history’ of the Kurdish genocide remain largely unknown and widely disputed within the highly politicized context of the KRI, I have combined this role with a perspective that does not overlook the importance of paying careful attention to the demands of historiographers. Otherwise, as Laub notes in the passage cited above, stories told about the attacks can ‘fall prey to deniers,’ as frequently happens in the context of the KRI. Still, the analyses that are developed throughout this book should therefore be considered only as ‘partial truths’ and not as definitive and objective claims about the KRI’s memory culture. This is related to the third difference between my approach and those developed by Geertz and Clifford. The former frames the task of the ethnographer within a dichotomy of ‘insiders’ (the Western scientist) and ‘outsiders’ (the non-Western objects of study), which implicitly perpetuates a colonial gaze. To some extent, this is different in the case of Clifford, who argues that an ethnographer should involve those who belong to the studied culture as co-authors. Nevertheless, this still implicitly suggests that the ethnographer originally holds an ‘outsider’ position. Because I am from the region that I am studying, and because I speak the language (Central Kurdish/Sorani), my position is substantially different. I am more than an interpretative outsider; instead, I am a critical interpreter who is both insider and outsider. To show what this specifically entails, I describe the conditions of my fieldwork in the following section. 6.2   Fieldwork and Interviews The first period of my fieldwork took place between October 2014 and January 2015, when I studied Amna Suraka in the city of Sulaymaniyah. I was introduced via an acquaintance to the museum’s director, Ako

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Ghareeb. This contact proved to be very useful, as it allowed me to conduct unrestricted research. Between 6 March and 16 May 2018, I returned to the region and studied both Amna Suraka and the Halabja Monument and Peace Museum. Since this was my second visit to Amna Suraka, I had already built up a wide social network in the area, providing me with direct access to the museum and its social context. During this second visit, I studied the several new exhibitions that had been added to this museum, the most extensive centered around the war with Daesh. This second visit enabled me to renew and refine the analyses I developed during my initial fieldwork in 2014. In the two periods I spent in the KRI, I not only studied the two memory sites in detail but, as mentioned above, also interviewed guides working in the museums, the museums’ directors and several persons who experienced the traumatic events on which this book focuses, including those who had been imprisoned in Amna Suraka and a woman who survived the attacks on Halabja. In total, I conducted 39 interviews and collected 28  hours and 44  minutes of recorded material. These interviews took place in Sorani, but I have translated the passages that I cite specifically in this book into English. Except for the guides and employees of both museums, whom I asked if I could mention them by name, all participant interviews have been anonymized. These interviews were driven by the idea that, in line with the notion of ‘collective memory’ as described above, I could develop what Clifford calls ‘partial truths’ about the memory culture of the KRI. These ‘truths’ are patched together by going back and forth between meaning-giving cultural horizons, political structures, individual testimonies and cultural objects. This is also why Chap. 2 includes parts of a text by a Kurdistani woman living in diaspora in the Netherlands. As indicated in that chapter, I asked her to openly write down her memories of the Kurdistan school system during Saddam Hussein’s regime.24 My field research can be characterized as a combination of qualitative methods, consisting of the so-called narrative approach to interviews, and participant observation. In their 2000 book Doing Qualitative Research Differently: Free Association, Narrative and the Interview, Wendy Hollway and Tony Jefferson describe qualitative research as an approach “in which the researcher’s responsibility is to be a good listener and the interviewee is a story-teller rather than a respondent … In the narrative approach, the agenda is open to development and change, depending on the narrator’s experiences” (31). I adopted this approach to interviews instead of a more

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structured method because I wanted to be as open and flexible toward the memory culture of the KRI as possible, and to let that which Hollway and Jefferson characterize as ‘the narrator’s experience’ guide my interviews. This resonates with Clifford’s emphasis on critical self-reflection. Instead of using a predetermined list of questions, which would steer the interview in a specific direction or might implicitly value certain interpretations or ideas about the museums and/or the past that they represent over others, I tried to be as sensitive as possible to my interviewees’ voices, inviting them to tell their stories and encouraging them to proceed by asking about details or their feelings in certain situations. As shown in Chaps. 4 and 5, this approach specifically enabled me to foster situations in which those plagued by traumatic memories felt comfortable enough to share their experiences, often in associative and fragmented ways. Regarding Amna Suraka, I met many of the people whom I interviewed in the museum. Often, I initiated conversations with random visitors, asking them where they are from and why they visited the museum. Then, I told them that I was undertaking research about the museum and asked if I may interview them. Sometimes they were former inmates. During my first visit, the museum was preparing a new exhibition dedicated to prisoners of war who were detained at the site of the now-museum. The museum’s director Ako Ghareeb would also frequently have visitors, often former inmates of the prison, and he would usually reach out to me so I could meet them as well. These visitors would then refer me to others they knew, creating that which Hardi characterizes as the ‘snowballing technique’ in her 2011 study of female Anfal victims, Gendered Experiences of Genocide (8). In the context of Amna Suraka, the narrative approach to interviews proved to be beneficial. In Hardi’s experience: After years of recounting their stories to each other and to various strangers—journalists, researchers, governmental and NGO workers—survivors have developed long and cultivated narratives. Without stopping or waiting for questions they immediately start talking about their Anfal experiences. It is almost like pressing the play button on a tape recorder. (9).

This passage adequately describes my experience with many people I interviewed. In the beginning of our conversations, it often felt like my interviewees presented me with a ‘fossilized’ story about the past, bombarding me with names of people that they thought I would, and should,

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know. I let them talk without intervening, however, and then asked them about details that would, as it were, ‘break open’ their ‘official’ accounts, resulting in different and more personal narratives. For example, I asked former inmates if they could tell me about how they spent their days with their friends. This proved to be very important, especially because the pre-­ scripted narratives that people often told me about the sites were influenced by their vision on Kurdish politics, whether positive or negative. The more ‘mundane’ details of their day-to-day experiences were not colored by these overarching politicized dynamics. Because of the museum director’s links with the PUK, and because of the latter’s dominant presence in Sulaymaniyah and Halabja, almost everyone I met and interviewed was affiliated with this political party. Although I also interviewed several former inmates who were affiliated with the Communist Party of Kurdistan, this does limit my conclusions about the memory culture of the KRI. Consequently, further research in the north-­ western part of the Kurdistan Region, where the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) is more dominant, is required; I briefly return to this observation in this study’s conclusion. It was also difficult to meet former female inmates in the museum or to talk with them in an open way. For example, through acquaintances I met a woman who was imprisoned in Amna Suraka when she was 19. I visited her at home, but when I tried to speak with her about her experiences, she decided that she did not want to share anything. I met her again several times after, but every time she decided at the last moment that she did not want to talk. She had never been to the museum, she told me, and seemed to have completely shut this door to the past. In cases like hers, I did not press further. I am not a psychologist and thus unequipped to offer the support these survivors may have needed to tell their stories. Furthermore, I was afraid that I would actually re-­ traumatize them by triggering certain memories. In Halabja, it was more difficult to build up a network of people whom I could interview. Conducting research in Halabja is not an easy task for several reasons. In contrast with Sulaymaniyah, the city in which Amna Suraka is located, the social, political and religious environment of Halabja is more delicate and more complex, which is probably related to the more dominant presence of the Kurdistan Islamic Movement. Almost all women in the city wear headscarves and I, as a woman with a Kurdistani background, was subject to the same religious and cultural rules. This made it difficult to move around freely; people would have found it strange if I stayed in a hotel alone, for example.

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Moreover, there is considerable hesitation and skepticism among the people of Halabja concerning journalists or politicians expressing interest in their past and their experiences. Often, journalists and individuals affiliated with political parties visit the city, but the general sentiment of the populace appears to be that these visitors merely use their suffering to appear virtuous and engaged, but ultimately do nothing for the people. I witnessed this myself on the annual Memorial Ceremony on 16 March 2018. As in previous years, in the run-up to that day, Halabja was visited by almost all Kurdish television channels, who screened special editions about Halabja and the commemoration ceremony, interviewing people who had been interviewed many times before. Afterwards, however, life returned to normal again, which implied that the complaints voiced countless timed by Halabja’s inhabitants remained unheard. Still, the city lacks financial and psychological support from the KRG, and even three decades after the attack parts of the city lie in ruins—a material reminder of the events that the HMPM commemorates. This situation is discussed in more detail in Chap. 5. This social, cultural and physical environment results in a situation that I had to consider when conducting interviews in the region. As mentioned above, the politicized context of the KRI makes it necessary to reflect on the ways in which interviewees represent and talk about their traumatic memories. During the yearly commemoration, many survivors are asked to tell their stories on television. I was present during two of these interviews and it was peculiar to witness, as Hardi does in the passage cited above, that most traumatic stories were narrated by survivors in an unemotional and automated manner, like stories that had been told many times before in exactly the same way. Most of these interviews ended, furthermore, with survivors asking the government for social, psychological and financial help. These stories, in other words, served different purposes. Survivors did not share them only to commemorate and remember, but also linked these stories to the benefits they hoped to claim because of their victimhood. It was only by gaining the trust of people in the area, spending time in the museum and conversing with various people in their mother tongue, that enabled me to conduct the interviews that now form the basis of my Chap. 5 analyses. In order to do this, I needed to find a cultural broker who could function as a key to the community and who enabled me to combine my narrative approach to interviews with the second methodology mentioned above: the participant approach. Gary Allan Fine writes about this

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methodology that “[t]his style of data collection involves the active engagement of the researcher with the members of the community that he or she wishes to study, typically as an equal member of the group” (530). I adopted this approach because it allowed me to be as sensitive as possible to the experiences and perspectives of those belonging to the memory culture that I studied, while simultaneously being from this same community. In the words of Fine, again: Participant observation supports the demand of Max Weber to produce research that is characterized by verstehen, or a personal, knowing understanding. In this way, participant observation with its emphasis on both participation and observation adds to lived knowledge. By directly involving the researcher in the activity, one can understand from an immediate level the dynamics and motivations of behavior. The observer crossed the boundary between outsider and insider. While research projects differ significantly on this dimension of direct experience, involvement has advantages for a verstende [sic] analysis that other approaches cannot match. (530, emphasis in original).

I adopted this participant approach in both Sulaymaniyah and Halabja, developing it in the latter city with help of one of my uncles, Hassan Noori, who worked as the head of the Ministry of Education in Halabja between 2004 and 2014. He has a considerable social network, and thus provided me with an opening to the community. He also introduced me to a single woman, Shahla (pseudonym), who helped me find my way in and around the city. I gained the trust of the guides working in the museum through my personal relationship with Shahla and my uncle. The fact that I was introduced to Shahla by someone she trusted, my uncle, facilitated my intensive and open collaboration with her. Because of my contacts with Shahla, a teacher and founder of a school for children with special needs who is actively involved in her community, the guides in the HMPM eventually approached me likewise as a member of their community. They allowed me to conduct research in the museum and assisted me whenever I needed help. Furthermore, since Shahla was familiar with my work in Amna Suraka, she considered it very important that I was given a chance to understand the events commemorated by the HMPM from the perspective of those who were directly affected by these events. In her view, it was necessary for me to stay in the city for as long as possible, and to speak with several people, including a female survivor, Soiba Saed Qadir, who

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testified against ‘Chemical Ali’ in court.25 My host made the effort to introduce me to her relatives as well, with whom I shared a meal. Once home, Shahla told me about her personal history. During these conversations, I realized the extent to which the tragedy of Halabja still plays a role in the lives of the people in this area. This was exemplified when, during my stay, one of Shahla’s nephews died suddenly of a heart attack in March; he was only in his twenties. At his funeral, I noticed that all attendants repeated the phrase “March keeps returning as a month of sorrow,” referring to the attacks on Halabja, which had also taken place in March. This stands in sharp contrast with other Kurdistani communities, for whom March is connected to the New Year celebration of Newroz. The role that the attacks still play in the city was also illustrated by something that one of my respondents told me: he said that Halabja is still shrouded in immense sadness that is noticeable as you walk through the city. In his words: “At the market, for example, you will find simply dressed people. People here don’t wear exuberant clothing. Their houses are not as luxurious and beautifully designed and built as one might find in Sulaymaniyah. Everything here is more sober.”26 That he shared an observation like this, I believe, was specifically because of my role as a community insider, combined with the narrative interview technique that I employed while embedded in the KRI as a participant observer. 6.3  Positionality To understand the ways in which I employed these techniques, I reflect here on my own position within the memory culture on which this book focuses. With respect to positionality, Sherry Otner observes that Geertz’s interpretative ethnography “established how important it is to consider the effect the personality or presence of the researcher has on what he or she investigates” (787). In light of this, I end this chapter with some personal anecdotes and stories, meant to illustrate how I, as a researcher who holds an insider/outsider position, am particularly embedded within Kurdistani memory culture. I begin these personal reflections by returning to Laub, who identifies three levels of witnessing in relation to undertaking research about experiences of the Holocaust, namely: “the level of being a witness to oneself within the experience; the level of being a witness to the testimonies of others; and the level of being a witness to the process of witnessing itself”

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(‘Event Without a Witness’ 75). Regarding the first level, he argues that this form of witnessing stems from his experiences as a child survivor. He describes how he remembers details that are not based on somebody else’s memories, like his deportation and arrivals at concentration camps. However, he continues, these childhood memories were simultaneously embedded in the understanding he developed as an adult, because some aspects of his memories exceed the capacity of a young child to cope with such experiences. One therefore must reflect on the different levels of these forms of witnessing, Laub argues (76). Although Laub reflects here on different kinds of memories that form part of a different memory culture, and that are voiced in a different language and that revolve around a different traumatic past, I cannot help but notice a certain resemblance with my own story as a researcher, especially with respect to the ungraspable character of one’s memories of a childhood filled with trauma, memories that can be triggered or recalled during one’s research. I am originally from Sulaymaniyah in the KRI and, coming from a very protective family as the youngest daughter, I was shielded from much of the horror that took place outside the walls of our home. My memories are a collage of (fabricated) images that alternate with those of actual events and threats. For example, I remember that Saddam Hussein was discussed often in our house. This person, with the fear he provoked, had become an imaginary figure who would look over me during the night, preventing me from falling asleep. I also have several fragmented and scattered memories of events that clearly impacted me deeply. One concerns my mother and I coming back by bus from the south of Iraq after visiting my sister, who lived there on campus. Somewhere along the way a man was shot, and the bus driver decided to transport him. I remember that the adults were shouting and screaming, maybe because they had different ideas about what to do with this injured man. All my mother did was hold me in her arms, covering my eyes with her hands. I fell asleep and when I awoke, I saw a pool of blood in the bus, but the injured man was gone. I still do not know what happened to him, but people acted like nothing had happened. I have no memories at all of the specifics of this injured man; the only thing I can recall is my mother’s warm body, pressed against which I felt safe. I also remember having to wear nametags, or maybe I was told about this later by my siblings who would joke about this as my father’s solution to air raids. Although this act now seems insignificant, it was his act of resistance. After witnessing the aftermath of a chemical bombardment of a

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Kurdistani village, he became acutely aware of the possibility that this could also happen to us. The only action that he could take to protect us was to make our bodies identifiable, so that we would at least be buried respectfully if we were killed in a bombardment. One of my most vivid memories is of the mass exodus (Rakrdn or Koraw) in March 1991, on which I focus more systematically in Chaps. 2 and 4. I remember that we were eating dinner when one of my uncles came to our home and told my parents to leave the city as soon as possible: everyone feared that Saddam’s troops would chemically attack the city. My memory of the first moments of Rakrdn itself concerns waking up on top of a pile of blankets. When I try to rise, my head hits the roof of a car. We must, at some point, have left the car, since my next memory is of walking together with some of my relatives. It is dark, cold and muddy because of the rain, and we are looking for a house where we can spend the night. I am wearing only one shoe, the other is missing. My mother carries my brother, since he is younger and can barely walk. I am walking behind a person wearing an abba, who I believe is my mother. When she looks back at me, however, I realize that I have been following the wrong person. I then sit down and begin to cry. Some grown-ups, all seeming gigantic, are looking down on me with pity, but no one helps. After a while, I don’t know how long, my mother runs toward me. Later she told me how she had begun to run back and forth after she realized that I was missing. She shouted my name, and although I was not far from her, I did not hear her over my crying. She found me with help of a woman who pointed at me, and told her that I might be the child she was looking for. Every time my mother tells this story, she ends it with the following observation: “And now you are here! It could have been worse.” Not long after these events, my father came to the Netherlands as refugee, together with one of my sisters. The pile of letters that we exchanged during this time shows two different worlds: the world of the adults (my adolescent sisters) worrying about safety and financial problems, and the world of us, the youngest children. My mother and my older siblings write about the political situation (the ongoing civil war, for example) and financial insecurities (poverty due to the economic embargo of Iraq by Western countries), while my father and my sister wrote about their experiences, which I now describe as traumatic, during the two months that it took them to reach the Netherlands. My younger brothers and I, furthermore, only write about how terribly we miss our father and how we long for the day we can be hugged by him again. In one of his letters, my

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youngest brother writes to my father that he has terrible news to share: “I have lost the blue pen you sent me, Babe gyan.” Meanwhile, I was obsessed in a childish way with the day on which we would be allowed to fly to the Netherlands. The only reality I was familiar with was that of 1990s Kurdistan, with checkpoints everywhere. I feared that we would be stopped in the air by another airplane. A wooden plank would then be placed between both planes, I believed, and military men would ask us to cross so that they could search our bodies. This was my reality: even in the air there were checkpoints. When we were reunited one and a half years later, we continued with our lives, like many other Kurdistani families. Living in diaspora meant more than ever that it was crucial to ‘get over’ our past in order to be able to face new struggles. This also meant that we never talked about the past and our memories. In some way, I still identified as ‘Kurdistani’ in these early years. Not because I was brought up with nationalistic ideas, or because my family was politically engaged in the Kurdistani struggle, but because being different was simply my reality. I did not speak the same language as a fellow classmate from Baghdad, for example. Still, I was paired with this classmate because, my teachers thought, we were both from Iraq and she could therefore function as my interpreter. In my scholarly work, I dedicate myself to unraveling this complexity. The position I tried to maintain, as mentioned above, has been and still is one of both insider and outsider; a person with intimate knowledge of the group of people that I once was part of and still am, to some extent, but also a group of people from whom I distanced myself in different ways as I grew up in the Netherlands. When writing this book, this position continuously made me realize that it is not simply a history that I am writing about, or an event that took place in the past and that has now ended. The war with Daesh, for example, not only made it difficult for me to undertake fieldwork in the region, but also rippled through the Kurdistani diaspora, of which I am still a part. I noticed how it triggered traumas among both older and younger generations, who linked the presence of a fatal threat to their family and loved ones in Kurdistan to their identities. However, what truly foregrounded the fact that I was, and am, studying memories was my mother’s cerebrovascular accident in the last years of the research on which this book is based. When, after two months, she awoke from a coma, her reality was distorted; time and space did not make any sense to her. In her reality, we were often visited by my father and by other relatives who had long passed away. More than living with the ghosts

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of people she had loved and cared for, however, she was haunted by traumatic memories. In the Dutch rehabilitation center where she stayed, she relived the war. She whispered to me that I should close the curtains, so that our house would not be bombarded. So there I was, sitting in total darkness with her, because I could not make her believe that we were safe. When a male nurse would come to her room, she would start panicking, thinking that he was from the Ba’ath regime. One time, when she knew that my youngest brother was on his way to the rehabilitation center, she begged me to tell him not to come, because there was a lockdown (this was before the COVID-19 pandemic) and a young man like him would be taken away by the military service. Once she returned home, she had one particular delusional thought that I still find difficult to understand. She was convinced that she had two young children who were missing. She referred to them as the young versions of me and my brother. They were always on her mind and every time she talked about them, she would sob uncontrollably. The most difficult part was that my presence was insufficient for her to realize that these younger versions did not exist. The psychologists that we consulted could not do anything for her: they said her trauma was overly complex and her mental state was too instable for therapy. All we could do ourselves was continuously show her pictures of her children, counting, recalling and writing down our names. Our efforts would work for a short while, only for the false memory to return again. My mother’s mental instability was, of course, not based on real events, although it might be related to the time I went missing during Rakrdn. More generally, this obsession with two missing children gave me glimpses of the insecurity and precarity that she must have experienced during the war; of the feeling of not being able to provide safety to those who needed her and depended on her. Amidst the war, and even after, in her full-time job as a school principal she had been preoccupied with meeting the basic needs of those around her. The immense feeling of being lost herself, it seems, was something that she could only experience belatedly.

7  Levels of Witnessing As this introductory chapter has hopefully shown, it is impossible (for me) to adopt an external or ‘objective’ position from which to analyze Kurdistani memory culture. In this culture, communicative memory, cultural memory, milieux de mémoire and official representations shaped by lieux de mémoire all battle for hegemony, sometimes contradicting, and

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sometimes overlapping or complementing each other. Embedded in these fields are fragmented personal accounts, which sometimes are completely excluded and sometimes brought to the forefront; sometimes distorted and sometimes empowered. These accounts, furthermore, are often infused by and entwined with anxiety caused by more recent attacks by neighboring countries or by Daesh. Carving out my own position as a researcher within this memory culture meant that I had to work on all three of the abovementioned levels of witnessing described by Laub. Regarding the second level, which concerns the idea that one witnesses the testimonies of others, it is important to recognize that I did not have the luxury of completely maintaining distance from my studied object. I tried to protect myself from being traumatized by the stories that I heard when interviewing survivors of the chemical attacks on Halabja, or the former inmates of Amna Suraka, but in order to adopt the narrative approach as fruitfully as possible, I had to engage with their stories in a comprehensive manner. Further, during these interviews, I could not prevent that some of my own memories, or memories told to me by relatives, were triggered by that which I heard. This made it necessary to include what Laub characterizes as the third level of witnessing, during which “the process of witnessing is itself being witnessed” (‘Event Without a Witness’ 76). Laub describes this from a first-person perspective: “I observe how the narrator, and myself as listener, alternate between moving closer and then retreating from the experience—with the sense that here is truth that we are both trying to reach, and this sense serves as a beacon we both try to follow” (76). This alternative and joint responsibility—of becoming an empathic listener to survivors’ stories and to be a narrator of them, in order for a ‘partial truth’ to (re)emerge—forms the guiding thread of this book. By embedding it in Memory Studies, Trauma Studies and Kurdish Studies, it continuously reflects on ‘partial truths’ and substantiate the third level of witnessing with theoretical analyses and approaches to memory cultures and collective traumas. It goes without saying, therefore, that this research does not cover all aspects of the traumatic experiences of Kurdistanis, nor does it include all painful stories that individuals within the Kurdistani community carry with them. This book should therefore be understood as a humble attempt to explore many different sides of the region’s memory culture, by not only showing and explaining why personal and vulnerable stories of trauma are so often excluded by political ideologies, but also arguing why it is important to open up a space for these stories to be included in a critical rewriting of Kurdistani history.

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Notes 1. For a more comprehensive discussion of Anfal, see Human Rights Watch Reports from 1991, 1993 and 1995. 2. Kurdish sources themselves estimate the number of Anfal victims around 182,000. Karin Mlodoch writes that this figure “is based on the number of villages destroyed during the Anfal Campaign and the average village population and is generally used by Anfal survivors, Kurdish politicians, and local academics” (‘Indelible Smell of Apples’ 352). 3. Technically, Halabja was not part of the Anfal campaign, since it targeted Peshmerga forces who, with the support of the Iranian Revolutionary Army, had been able to retake Halabja and drive out the Iraqi Army (Hiltermann 124). 4. Again, the exact numbers are contested and incomplete. About the number of victims in Halabja, Karin Mlodoch writes: “No accurate body count could be made at the time. The casualty figures are based on the testimonies of survivors, Kurdish peshmerga and Iranian soldiers, Iranian medical personnel, and journalists present in the immediate aftermath of the attack … Human Rights Watch researcher Shorsh Resool collected 3200 individual names of victims in interviews with survivors [Human Rights Watch, ‘Genocide in Iraq’ 108]. Kurdish and Iranian estimates ranged between 4000 and 7000 victims at the time … Today, the figure of 5000 victims is commonly used by Iraqi Kurdish sources and in the national Kurdish discourse and referred to in official memorial ceremonies and monuments such as the Central Halabja Monument” (‘Indelible Smell of Apples’ 349). 5. The KRI consists of the four governorates of Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, Duhok and Halabja and covers approximately 40,000 square kilometers. Its current president is Nechirvan Barzani, who succeeded Masoud Barzani in 2019. 6. Bengio writes the following about the Kurdistani population: “The questions as to who is a Kurd and what is the size of the Kurdish population are no less controversial. While governments seek to play down the numbers, Kurdish nationalists tend to inflate them. As the governments do not publish statistics on this matter, we must rely on estimates; in 2006 the number of Kurdish people in the world was considered to be 30 million” (Kurds of Iraq 3). 7. It is important to note that in some discourses the term ‘Kurdistani’ also has specific political and ideological connotations. In this context, Jafer Sheyholislami (2011) analyzes how this term emphasizes the idea of a territorial nation consisting of multiple ethnic groups that live in different countries. He observes, for example, that KRG officials often employ the term ‘Kurdistani’ to indicate the KRG’s desire for greater territorial and

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political autonomy. (128). In Chap. 2, the KRG’s quest for political and territorial autonomy, often linked to a specific understanding of what it would mean to be ‘Kurdistani,’ will be further explored. 8. This chapter discusses several observations that are included in my co-­ authored book entitled Exploring Hartmut Rosa’s Concept of Resonance (2022), which focuses on Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance. This book specifically aims to show how resonating experiences are constituted in the postcolonial context of the KRI. 9. This book frequently refers to Hiltermann’s study, which it presents a highly critical analysis of the different actors in the chemical attacks on Halabja. Hiltermann embeds these traumatic events in a geopolitical field which shows that the US cleared the way for the use of chemical warfare by Saddam’s forces. What distinguishes the approach adopted in his book from my own, however, is that Hiltermann presents a historiography of what happened in the past, whereas I am concerned with ways in which past events are remembered and represented in the KRI and contribute to forms of trauma processing and identity formation. 10. See also Mlodoch’s ‘We Want to be Remembered’ and ‘The Indelible Smell of Apples.’ 11. I am currently developing the notion of the apostrophic museum further, based on analyses of Amna Suraka, the Museum for Underground Prisoners (Jerusalem) and the Yasser Arafat Museum (Ramallah). 12. For more information on the historical background of the non-state nation of Kurdistan in Iraq, see ‘The Iraqi Kurds: Historical Backgrounds of NonState Nation’ by Ferhad Ibrahim Seyder. 13. An example is formed by the above-mentioned Lebanese Post-Civil War Novel, in which Lang deploys the metaphor of the specter to show how the ghosts of the Lebanese civil war disrupt solid spatiotemporal frameworks by haunting the protagonists and narrators of the post-civil war novels he analyses (see Lang 177–78; see also Bieler 247). 14. The notion of the ‘phantom’ is mentioned several times by Peeren in the context of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s psychoanalytical reading of this notion and that of the ‘crypt.’ The authors use these two terms to refer to the ways in which traumas can be transmitted from generation to generation (see for example Peeren 32). On this psychoanalytical approach, see also Kagoyire et al. 345. 15. Peeren does describe missing persons, for example those she describes as the “missed missing” (178) mourned by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Again, however, she does provide them with a certain agency, not only by focusing on the process of “self-spectralization” (see 173–179) but also by emphasizing how the missing of those who are missing provides the latter with a certain power. Since memory is contested and manipulated by different forces and agents within the KRI, however, the more vulnerable notion of the ‘phantom’ will be used in this book.

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16. For a more detailed overview of Nora’s project in French and English contexts, see Tai 906–22. 17. For an explanation of this idea, see Buckley-Zistel 74. 18. For more on media and memory, and especially the involvement of power dynamics, see Garde-Hansen. 19. Personal communication with the author on 26 October 2014. 20. For more on collective trauma and cultural fragmentation, see Neal 112. 21. Developing a similar analysis, Bahar Baser and Mari Toivan characterize the Anfal as a ‘chosen trauma;’ a term they borrow from Vamik Volkan, who uses it to refer to “the shared mental representation of a massive trauma that the group’s ancestors suffered at the hand of an enemy” (qtd. in Baser and Toivan 413). As Baser and Toivanen explain, in line with Volkan: “the chosen trauma changes function and becomes more than a memory over generations—it unites and becomes a significant group marker of ethnic identity that can then be reactivated by political leaders to reconfirm such identity” (413). In the context of the KRI, the authors observe that a chosen trauma is used to develop a “Genocide Recognition Politics,” not only within the KRI but also by KRG bureaus of representation in diaspora (420). 22. Perhaps the most caricatural manifestation of the external and Orientalist perspective long employed within texts about ‘the’ Kurdistanis is Karl May’s Durchs wilde Kurdistan. As Slavoj Žižek notices about this classic 1892 novel: “Well over a hundred years ago, Karl May wrote a bestseller, Through Wild Kurdistan, about the adventures of a German hero, Kara Ben Nemsi. This immensely popular book established the perception of Kurdistan in central Europe: a place of brutal tribal warfare, naïve honesty and sense of honour, but also superstition, betrayal, and permanent cruel warfare. It was almost a caricature of the barbaric Other in European civilization” (Žižek). 23. For a helpful exploration of Geertz’s theory, see Dadze-Arthur 37. 24. As explored in more detail in Chap. 2, including passages from this interview enriches my exploration of the school curriculum, since prior analyses do not take the experiential aspects and first-person perspectives of what it was like to receive a Ba’athist education as a Kurdistani student into account. Of course, this interview only provides insight into the experiences of one person (and is not used to develop any general claims about the curriculum), but I nevertheless hope that its inclusion illustrates the fruitfulness of such an approach for further exploration in future research. 25. Her testimony, together with her picture, is shown in the last exhibition room of the HMPM, where official documents are displayed. 26. Personal communication with the author on 14 March 2018.

CHAPTER 2

Master Narratives: Kurdistani Memory Culture and Educational Textbooks

1   Education and Ideology This chapter presents a first exploration of the memory culture of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI): it revolves around the ways in which this region’s often traumatic past is represented in, commemorated by, and plays implicit and explicit roles in educational textbooks used at Kurdish schools. Furthermore, it describes the various agents that play a role in the coming about of representations of the area’s past, such as the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), political parties such as the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), as well as international agents like UNESCO. As such, this chapter forms the foundation for the development of the notion of the apostrophic: Chap. 4 shows that aspects of the hegemonic political and ideological narratives shaped within the education textbooks discussed below, driven by the ideals of the KRG and UNESCO, return in the apostrophic elements of the museum of Amna Suraka. This especially concerns narratives revolving around the dichotomy between a unified Kurdistani ‘Us’ and various ‘Others’; a dichotomy constructed in the Kurdish anthem ‘Ey Reqîb,’ described in Chap. 1. The approach adopted to analyze the narratives created by the educational textbooks in this chapter is based on existing research within Education Studies on the role that education systems, often alongside forms of citizenship- and nation-building, play in the constitution of an © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Majid, Towards an Understanding of Kurdistani Memory Culture, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37514-9_2

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identity. For example, Mario Carretero, who has extensively researched history education, analyzes the ways in which school history curriculums frame our understanding of the present through the lens of the past. He distinguishes this type of history from two others: academic history, which is cultivated by historians at universities; and everyday embodied and inscribed history, which articulates “shared narratives about identity, value systems and common beliefs” (3). The purpose of history taught at schools, according to Carretero, is to help students understand the present through knowledge about the past. Thinking historically is crucial, in his view, because “not to have such capacity would mean taking the risk of a ‘hollow’ reading of reality” (20). Education theorist Michael Apple argues that this way of framing the present through knowledge of this past introduces an ideological element to history curriculums. Although educators tend to perceive knowledge as a relatively neutral ‘artifact’ (Official Knowledge 44), he observes that educational practices are never neutral in nature (Ideology and Curriculum 17). In his view, the ways in which ‘official knowledge’ is organized and selected from available social knowledge should be regarded as a political tool that serves “the interests of particular classes and social groups” (Ideology and Curriculum 54 and Official Knowledge xiii). By producing an ‘official knowledge,’ Apple continues, textbooks connect knowledge to power: “what counts as legitimate knowledge is the result of complex power relations and struggles among identifiable class, race, gender, and religious groups. Thus, education and power are terms of an indissoluble couplet” (Ideology and Curriculum 44). This process reflects “both continuities and contradictions of that dominant culture and continual remaking and relegitimation of that culture’s plausibility system” (Official Knowledge 53). Apple therefore vehemently rejects processes of depolitization that substantiate views based on the naïve presumption that institutions would thus become inherently neutral. In another helpful analysis, Howard Mehlinger also underscores the political role that can be played by school curriculums. He argues that textbooks concerning history, geography and civics “are responsible for conveying to youth what adults believe they should know about their own culture as well as that of other societies” (287). One’s cultural perspective, this suggests, determines not only how one perceives one’s own society, but also other societies (288). As an example, Mehlinger discusses the notion of ‘the Third World’ as used in American textbooks. This term, he observes, embeds the countries that are labeled as such in an ideological

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discourse, since it is based on ideas about what it means to be ‘advanced’ or ‘developed,’ and therefore presents normative claims about ‘progressing’ or ‘slipping backward’ (288). What is especially important for this chapter, is that the abovementioned analyses suggest that textbooks often contribute to a form of self-­ understanding that revolves around an ‘in-group’ that is contrasted with an ‘out-group’; a dichotomy between a ‘Self’ and various ‘Others.’ In this way, textbooks may manifest the struggles for meaning alluded to in the previous chapter; struggles during which the state might try to legitimize its influence and maintain its hegemonic position by presenting the past in a specific manner. Carretero asserts in this context that history taught at schools is a vehicle through which nation-states legitimize their existence. He writes: History taught at school offers contents that are structured as an official narrative of an experienced common past, besides an important emotional charge which is destined to create identification (with the motherland’s national heroes and forefathers) and a feeling of loyalty and belonging, strengthened by the use of patriotic symbols, icons and anthems in daily school routine. (6).

In conflict and post-conflict societies, or societies that remain in what has been defined in Chap. 1 as ‘conflict-time’ (see Baillie), this ‘feeling of loyalty and belonging’ can be leveraged by school systems in different ways. Thea Reda Abu el-Haj, for example, observes that in wartime, the edges of belonging and not-belonging—which are based on pre-existing boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in relation to national imagination—can be sharpened (5). Others, however, emphasize that history education can also enhance peace and can be utilized in the service of reconciliation. This is possible, according to Karina Korostelina, because a history curriculum can challenge “single perspectives supporting and justifying conflicts with alternative interpretations, multiperspectivity and … the development of common historical narratives” (19). The latter idea is examined in detail in three impressive volumes that together form a series called (Re)constructing Memory edited by James Williams (all three volumes), Wendy Bokhorst-Heng (volume two), and Michelle J.  Bellino (volume three). Particularly relevant for the current chapter is the third volume in this series: (Re)constructing Memory: Education, Identity, and Conflict (2017), which analyzes the ways in

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which collective identities are re-imagined through textbooks in conflict and post-conflict societies. This volume highlights the importance of teaching youth about conflicts in postcolonial contexts where education can be used as a medium to enhance and promote peace and tolerance. Reconciliation pedagogies are therefore praised in this volume for their ability to stimulate historical reflection on both an individual and collective level, and to encourage young people to process legacies of war and violence that characterize the society in which they live. Reconciliation pedagogies therefore have, in the words of Cathlin Goulding, the potential to “heal the impact of violent conflict and disrupt cycles of aggression, rage, and retribution” (243). It is for this reason, the volume shows, that reconciliation pedagogies can be used as a tool to shape a positive form of citizenship. The following discussion uses several insights developed in (Re)constructing Memory to explore the memory culture of the KRI as it is expressed in social science textbooks, used in the region, which cover history, geography and citizenship. The ways in which the past is represented in these books are shaped by the ideals and perspectives of two key social actors: the KRG and UNESCO. Both actors produce a system of discursive framing to represent and process problematic and traumatic aspects of the past, resulting in two distinctive narratives. One of the aims of this chapter is therefore to show that there is not one single version of the past in the KRI; instead, several narratives are shaped within the education system. Since these narratives are driven by the aims and ideals of the KRG and UNESCO, they not only make it difficult to include more ambivalent and personal aspects of traumatic experiences of individuals within the KRI, but also exclude those aspects of the area’s history that are problematic or considered to be controversial from the perspective of these actors. Before developing an analysis of the textbooks, this chapter provides a historical overview of Iraq’s education system, showing how this system has always engaged in a ‘struggle for meaning’ within the broader context of geopolitical movements. This overview relies extensively on Amir Hassanpour’s comprehensive Nationalism and Language in Kurdistan 1918–1985, as well as the complex analyses of the Iraqi education system by Jordi Tejel, on Sherko Kirmanj’s studies on textbooks used in the Kurdistan Region, and on Achim Rohde’s discussions of Iraqi textbooks produced after 2003. As such, this chapter not only presents an initial exploration of the region’s memory culture and the struggles for meaning that permeate it, but also provides historical details about the KRI’s past.

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2   Struggles for Identity in the Iraqi Education System 2.1   Education Policies Before and During the Ba’ath Regime After the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1917, British authorities revised the education system in Iraq, introducing a model based on the French system. This model formed an early illustration of the idea that education can be used to shape a collective identity, an ‘imagined community’ that revolves around an oppositional ‘Us’ and ‘Them.’ According to Hassanpour, foreign powers “assigned the non-Arabic spoken languages an inferior status.” This perception was applied to Kurdish, Turkish, Armenian, Assyrian and Hebrew, and resulted in a model that allowed ‘teaching in vernacular’ only on the primary school level alongside Arabic, thus marginalizing minority groups (306). In 1925, the League of Nations decided that the Kurdish language should be recognized as an official language, resulting in a Local Language Law that allowed teaching Kurdish in the area’s schools (306). However, Hassanpour notes, teaching in Kurdish continued to be presented as inferior to Arabic: schools in Kurdish areas did not, for example, receive the same financial provisions as other schools (310–312). Furthermore, Arabization policies were carried out by Mandate authorities and the Arab government: especially in oil-producing areas such as Kirkuk and Khanaqin, Kurdish farmers were replaced with poor Arab tribesmen from the south with the goal of initiating a slow process of ethnic cleansing. As Bengio observes about the Arabization (ta’rib) of Kirkuk: “the policy of Arabization had started as early as 1929, using this very term (ta’rib) because the Arabs in that oil-rich region accounted for only 20 percent of the population” (Kurds of Iraq 57). Hassanpour notes that, in a different way, this policy also echoed though the field of education, as schools ignored the Local Language Law: from primary school onwards, pupils were still instructed in Arabic instead of Kurdish (Hassanpour 306). Furthermore, he refers in this context to processes of “changing textbooks, appointing non-Kurdish teachers, [and] alluring students to shift to Arabic” (312). During the Mandate Period (1920–1932), Monarchical Period (1932–1958) and Republican Era (1958–1961), demands by Kurdish nationalist movements to receive education in their mother tongue grew stronger (306–318). These demands formed part of the same ideologies

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that eventually resulted in the autonomist war of 1960. At the Second Congress of Kurdish Teachers in that same year, the instigation of a de-­ Arabization process within the Kurdish education system, including the introduction of native-language education at secondary school level and eradication of illiteracy, was set in motion (317). Iraqi officials initially ceded to these demands, but action was ultimately obstructed by the outbreak of war in 1961 between Peshmerga forces and the Iraqi government. When, through a coup d’état, the second Ba’ath government came into power in 1968, Saddam’s regime promised to cater some of the demands voiced by Kurdish nationalists (319). A breakthrough was achieved on 11 March 1970 with an agreement that the Kurdish language must be recognized as an official language alongside Arabic in the Kurd-­ majority provinces of Erbil, Sulaymaniyah and Duhok (Kirmanj, ‘Kurdish History Textbooks’ 370; Hassanpour 319). Still, the education system proved to be a useful medium for the Ba’ath regime to consolidate its power. During the Eighth Regional Congress of the Ba’ath Party in 1974, it was decided that this system should reflect the Party ideology. Therefore, as Nabil Al-Tikriti describes, the government “changed the ideological basis of the educational system from the promotion of a general sense of Iraqi nationalism towards the rhetoric of the Ba’ath Party and especially of its leadership” (352).1 This education reform, completed around 1981, was implemented to “cleanse educational faculty and staff from anti-Ba’athist elements and revamp all course materials … the party described its goal of shaping a ‘new Arab man’ who would protect the ideals of its revolution throughout society” (351). As a manifestation of the post-1974 education reforms, a book entitled al-‘Irāq fı ̄ al-ta’rı ̄kh / Iraq in History was published in 1983. In this book, according to al-Tikriti, the Ba’athist view of Iraq’s history is centralized. Again, it describes Iraq as an essentially Arab Semitic region “effectively devoid of sectarian identities, and the Kurds are not seen as possessing any particular characteristics distinct from the Iraqi people as a whole” (352). Between 1972 and 1985, relations between the government and the Kurdistani national movement deteriorated, and once again Arabization policies were carried out. Bengio observes: The Baath policy was unique in that it had a twofold aim: settling Arabs and evacuating the Kurds. Responding to the charge of Arabization, Saddam went as far as to justify it by saying: “Nothing prevents members of the larger [Arab] nation from moving to live on the land populated by members

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of the smaller nation which enjoys self-rule.” To think otherwise, he said, indicated “a chauvinistic mentality … whose goal is separatism.” (Kurds of Iraq 57)

These Arabization policies also targeted primary and secondary schools. Moreover, as al-Tikriti illustrates in the passage cited above, even when Kurdish textbooks were used, their content reflected the Ba’athist ideology and vision. 2.2   Education and the Hegemony of ‘the’ Arab Identity Because many of the schoolbooks used in the Kurdistan Region during the reign of Saddam’s Ba’ath Party have not been archived, and since most research—including Hassanpour’s—undertaken on this topic only provides a general overview of their content, the following discussion uses excerpts of a testimony written by one of my respondents, a Kurdistani woman born in 1971 who lived in the KRI until 1995, which means that she received a Ba’athist education. Instead of asking her specific questions, I invited her to write down everything she remembered about her experiences with, and within, this education system, from books, to teachers, to events. Although her testimony is, of course, constructed in retrospect and cannot be considered complete, especially because it concerns the perspective of only one person, it is worth including in this chapter: her narrative makes it possible to put flesh on the bones of the analyses of Hassanpour and other scholars. Moreover, it highlights elements of the experience of participating in this education system as a child. My respondent notes in her testimony that, in contrast with the textbooks used at secondary school, her primary school textbooks were beautifully colored editions. About the textbooks she used in secondary school, she asserts that although the texts were in Kurdish, the content was still Ba’athist: In these books we mainly learned about the history of Islam and Ba’athism. I personally think that Saddam wanted to present himself as the one and only leader of Iraq. Contemporary history (including other leaders) simply did not fit into his narrative. Additionally, these two histories, that of Ba’athism on the hand and of Islam on the other, were presented as linked together. In this way, Saddam could portray himself as a new Messiah and legitimize his war with Iran. He did so, for example, by naming the war

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against Iran the new Qadissiya. That is how this war was described in our textbooks. This name also refers to the Islamic war against the Persian Empire. The Persians were never called Iranians in these textbooks, but always “the Foers” (fire worshippers) and “the pagans.”2

Similar elements return in Rohde’s analysis of the representation of the Iran-Iraq War in Arabic textbooks used in Iraq. This analysis is important because it emphasizes the connection these textbooks make between Ba’athism and Islam. Rohde writes: The Iran-Iraq war was referred to by inserting short paragraphs into the existing curriculum for history, patriotic education and other subjects, depicting it as a modern version of the battle of Qadissiya, which occurred during the days of the early Muslim conquests and in which Muslim armies had prevailed over the Sassanid (ancient Persian) empire. This portrayal, thus, effectively depicted the Ba’thist regime as the torchbearer of true Islam against pagan Persians. By implication, Saddam Hussein was turned into a leader whose Islamic credentials equaled those of the early Muslim war heroes. (‘Identity Discourses in Iraqi Textbooks’ 284)

The analyses below show that the contents of schoolbooks used in Kurdistani and Iraqi-Arab contexts were indeed very similar: both presented a pan-Arabic curriculum in which the history and culture of the ethnic majority Arab Sunnis was prioritized. Some steps, however, were taken to acknowledge the multiethnic reality of Iraq. By 1985, for example, teaching and textbooks in all subjects were made available in the region’s Kurdish dialect (Sorani), from primary school through to the completion of secondary school. Furthermore, in the schoolbooks used during this period, original Kurdish poetry and literature were incorporated (Kirmanj, ‘Kurdish History Textbooks’ 370). My respondent writes that she entered secondary school in 1981, and that during this schoolyear her textbooks were translated into Kurdish. In the following years, however, there were no printed versions available; instead, booklets were distributed among the pupils. Although the policy had changed, the fact that it took so long for the central government to print Kurdish textbooks, my respondent observes, might have been a way to weaken the Kurdish education system: “Not printing and distributing the new books gave us the impression that what we received at school was not a priority for the state.”3

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Although all subjects were taught and textbooks were written in Kurdish, curriculum content was still formulated from a primarily Arabic Sunni perspective, which excluded Kurds.4 Hassanpour indeed cites al-­ Rubaiy’s statement that Iraqi school curriculum “revealed a clear absence and a lack of appreciation of the history and culture of minority groups comprising the Iraqi society” (182). By creating these hierarchies within Iraqi society, those who did not belong to the dominant group were left without a voice or perspective. This was used, in turn, to justify the discrimination perpetrated against those who were already voiceless; against those who were presented as ‘Them’ or as ‘Others.’ Kirmanj argues that this process of silencing continues today: In the entire historical account presented in the current Iraqi history textbooks (2003–12), the only mention of Kurds appears to be a typesetting error: The reference to the “chemical bombardment of the city of Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan where thousands of Iraqi people became victims” is placed in an utterly unrelated section of the textbook, titled ‘The 1956 Uprising and the Revolution of 1958,’ discussing the two events as well as some contemporaneous political developments in Egypt. In one of the passages, the discussion is suddenly interrupted by the two lines referring to Halabja. At the end of the two lines, the passage returns to its narrative relating to the 1956 uprising and the revolution of 1958. (‘National Identity’ 310)

My respondent makes similar observations. She asserts, for example, that her geography lessons exclusively contained material about Arab countries. In contrast with her parents’ generation, she knew nothing about the rest of the world. The world ended in these schoolbooks at the outer borders of Arab countries. Reflecting on these matters with regard to her self-understanding, she discloses: I would say that my Kurdish identity has hardly been formed by my education. Because of my educational background I know little about Kurdish history. And the things that I know are fragmented. It was when I started to study in an Arabic city that I become aware of the fact that what I was taught in school in no way reflected who I was as a person. I became more aware of this through the contacts I had with Arab students. It was then that I, for the first time in my life, noticed that there were people who could identify with what they were taught at school. In contrast to myself, who always experienced education as external to my life and experiences, many of them

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were able to view history from a personal angle. For example, they were very proud to speak of what was called “the revolution of the 1920s,” a reference to the resistance against colonial England in the 1920s. They came up with stories about their relatives who had fought in that war. It was only then that I understood that what you are taught at school can actually be something that can give you, as a person, an idea of who you are and what your identity is, or that history can teach you something about your own past. Only then did I begin to understand that my identity was, and had always been, different from those who consider themselves Iraqis.5

The power of the regime, my respondent continues, was not only reflected in the content of textbooks but became tangible and concrete in everyday reality. The subject called ‘Nationalist Education’ especially instilled fear in her: This subject was always taught by people from outside our city and was the only subject that was not taught in Kurdish. The teachers were always non-­ Kurds and representatives of the Ba’ath regime. The focus of this subject was the history of Ba’athism. I found this course quite frightening, as we were always asked to join the party. We were examined on the content and were obliged to take this subject until university level.6

The abovementioned excerpt shows again that the education system was used by the regime as an instrument to consolidate and legitimate their authority. This did not only occur through schooling, but also through rituals and commemoration practices in which the pupils were obliged to partake. My respondent writes: During my intermediate years, but also during the last years of my secondary education, there were compulsory activities that students were forced to participate in. The day that Saddam had been in our city was celebrated every year and broadcasted live on television. This was the case in all major cities. Since there were no elections, and Saddam never had to be re-elected, people were forced to go to the streets every year to show their loyalty to the leader. We had to ask him, as it were, if he was willing to lead us again.7

Hassanpour describes how, in the later 1970s, students began to protest against the school system:

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Within the Autonomous Area, students and/or their parents were forced into signing petitions in favour of Arabic language teaching … this led to student protest, especially in Sulaymaniyah, where on October 18, 1977 they marched on both the Education Office and the Governor’s office and informed the authorities that they would not accept Arabization, at the same time tearing up their Arabic textbooks. In many schools Arabic textbooks were set on fire by protesting students. (322–23).

That there were also teachers who used the education system to proactively resist and subordinate the regime is another returning element in my respondent’s story. For example, she remembers that she never had to take part in the abovementioned compulsory activities: “we had a very kind and protective principal who never forced us to participate.”8 She also reminisces about teachers who felt the need to include topics that were not covered by the textbooks. One was a teacher in her third year of intermediate school who introduced students verbally to other material, such as modern history not presented from a Ba’athist perspective. She also describes several other teachers, like the principal of her secondary school, as loving and caring especially for the children of Peshmerga fighters, and who were very understanding toward Anfal children. In her own words: “Despite the state’s prohibition against allowing those children to receive an education, she allowed Anfal children to enter her classes. This act was terribly risky and could have resulted in her execution.”9 2.3   The Kurdistan Region Education System Between 1991 and 2003 After the implementation of the no-fly-zone above the Kurdistan Region in 1991, various social and structural segments of Kurdish society directly underwent fundamental changes. Kurdistanis, who had been marginalized in the past, now started to reorganize themselves; in 1992, for example, the region held its first elections. At this time, the general demand was not to be separated completely from Iraq, but rather to create a democratic Iraq and implement a form of federalism. As Bengio writes in The Kurds of Iraq: “Though the Kurds were cautious in displaying their national emblem and did not fly their flags or issue Kurdish stamps at this stage, they did use the Kurdish national anthem on different occasions” (218). Within the liberated semi-autonomous area of the KRI, furthermore, processes were set in motion to construct a renewed understanding and

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representation of ‘the’ Kurdish identity within the education system. For example, the Kurdish festivity of Newroz was widely and extensively celebrated in schools. Efforts were also made to purge textbooks of content that was regarded as chauvinistic, pro-Arab and Ba’athist-oriented, and to provide a more inclusive understanding of Kurdistani history. These efforts were obstructed, however, by the economic and political situation, and by armed conflicts between the two ruling parties in Kurdistan, the KDP and PUK. This conflict eventually culminated in a civil war (Brakuzhi in Kurdish, meaning ‘Brother killing’) that broke out in 1994 and lasted until 1997. Around “3000 people, both fighters10 and civilians, lost their lives and tens of thousands were displaced” (Rogg and Rimscha ‘The Kurds as Parties’ 829). Bengio explains that the civil war was symptomatic of a weak common identity, and the absence of a strong national movement (Kurds of Iraq 213). She also notes that authors have developed different explanations for its outbreak: whereas some link it to rivalries between tribes, others refer to divisions between urban and rural areas or between Badini and Sorani regions (209). The civil war resulted in the withdrawal of many foreign NGOs and also affected life in the cities. As Michiel Leezenberg describes, “Arbil especially descended into an ever-­ greater chaos and anarchy. Fights around the Kesnezan checkpoint led to the repeated shelling, and even the looting, of Arbil’s nearby main hospital. Local strongmen could set up their own checkpoints in the city, and kidnappings and other forms of extortion reached a high point” (638). The United States inserted itself into reconciliation processes between the two Kurdish parties. Before American involvement, Egypt and Turkey had likewise taken part in peace negotiations. For several ideological and political reasons, however, Turkey and other Arabic countries were unsuccessful in brokering peace. US involvement was also met with skepticism. On their part, the US government was afraid that they would be left out of peace talks, but also hoped to use alignment with the Kurdistanis to unsettle the Central Government of Iraq. As Bengio observes, the US recognized that the Kurdistanis were “the strongest, and perhaps also the most reliable, of the anti-Saddam opposition groups,” which in turn motivated the Clinton administration’s significant effort to broker peace between the region’s warring factions (Kurds of Iraq 265). The new relations between Kurds and Americans were expressed through symbolic gestures, including a commemoration of the eleventh anniversary of the Halabja chemical attack. The gesture marked a conspicuous change in the American position toward the region, considering the initial international

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disregard of the 1988 attack (265).11 After the civil war, the two Kurdistani parties continued as two competing governments: the KDP ruled over Erbil, while Sulaymaniyah came under the PUK’s control. Internal conflicts hampered further development of the education system; because of the two governments, this system could not be centralized nor standardized. During this phase, therefore, limited attention was given to the education system and educators were forced to improvise; I myself remember that Ba’athist content was literally ripped from schoolbooks. This was done, for example, with the portrait of Saddam that was contained in all textbooks. During his dictatorship, pupils were instructed not to damage this page: both students and the school could get into trouble if this happened. Furthermore, Kurdish educators themselves produced booklets “to replace the titles, subjects and sections that had been removed from the Iraqi textbooks” (Kirmanj, ‘National Identity’ 311). Since these booklets have not been preserved and archived, they can unfortunately not be discussed in this chapter.

3   Education After 2003 3.1   Education Reform and Foreign Donors Little change took place until the fall of the Ba’ath regime in 2003, when the KDP and PUK began to cooperate more and the KRG was fully functioning. Following Saddam’s removal from power in May 2003, the whole of Iraq, including its educational system, fell under control of the Coalition Provisional Authority and Foreign Occupation (Santisteban 67). A de-­ Ba’athification policy was implemented by this Authority, designed to ‘purify’ the new government and society of elements that could be linked to past atrocities and crimes committed by the former dictatorial regime.12 The education sector was affected heavily. As Miranda Sissons and Abdulrazzaq Al-Saiedi describe in their analysis of this process: [The Ministry of Education] had 18,064 senior party members—four times more than that any other ministry. This is not surprising given the ministry’s large size and the regime’s emphasis on propaganda via the education ­system. Almost all senior party members (16,149) were dismissed before June 2004, with another 1355 dismissed in the next 16  months … The impact on schools and administration was so severe that the CPA ordered

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many thousands reinstated in April 2004—although there is no easy way of knowing how many were reinstated. (22)

Furthermore, the education system was radically revised via two programs. The first, the so-called Revitalization of Iraqi Schools and Stabilization of Education (RISE), launched in 2003. It was implemented by the private for-profit organization Creative Associates International Incorporated (CAII), which was contracted by the US through the Agency for International Development (USAID). The primary aim of the program set up by this organization was to rebuild the infrastructure, curriculum and administration of Iraqi schools, either directly by CAII or by subcontracted organizations (Saltman 25). Kenneth Saltman discusses at length that the no-bid contract of CAII was highly condemned in the media, but the neoliberal and neocolonial strategy implemented by CAII was not discussed at all, nor were its implications for Iraqi society. This is remarkable, he claims, since in its second contract CAII set the stage for privatization of the Iraqi education system by “strengthening a decentralized education structure” (56). According to Saltman, the RISE project adopted a strategy to use the education system less to create a participatory democratic culture than to install what he, in agreement with Zygmunt Bauman, refers to as an ‘individualized society’ that “benefits capital interests in the US and the economic elite of the nation in question. If privatization is the first major aim of ‘democracy promotion’ programs,” Saltman continues, “then making the right kind of individual subjects for the privatized economy and state is the second” (33). The program therefore installed a system that treated students as consumers of the education system, a strategy modeled on the privatized (and privatizing) American system (58). At the same time, however, the new education programs were presented as progressive encouragements of civic participation. By doing this, Saltman contends, these programs were driven by a new form of colonialism that he characterizes with help of the following passage from Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism: “We used to have vulgar colonialism,” says Shalmali Guttal, a Bangalore-­ based researcher with Focus on the Global South. “Now we have ­sophisticated colonialism, and they call it ‘reconstruction.’” … If anything, the stories of corruption and incompetence [in rebuilding] serve to mask this deeper scandal: the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that

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uses the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering. (qtd. in Saltman, ‘Creative Associates International’ 57)

Indeed, these observations can be applied to the aims and objectives of the RISE project, which drained the public sector of resources. A report from 2016, published by the Iraqi non-profit organization Al-Bayan Center for Planning and Studies, describes the resulting crisis in the public sector: “classrooms are overcrowded, school buildings are reported to be old and unsafe and there is a lack of facilities. Up to one third of schools are forced to run on a multiple system, with some even teaching triple or quadruple shifts” (4). Another result of this crisis, the study shows, is that many parents sought alternatives, and since the private sector provided a higher quality education, an influx of Iraqi children now attend private schools (6). This means that, due to the involvement of the US and its support of the CAII, the division between rich and poor, and the quality of public and private education, has increased. It is worth considering the impact of policies like these on Iraqi society as whole, and analyzing how different curriculums, many developed by foreign organizations—the British International School in Sulaymaniyah, for example, follows the Cambridge International AS & A Levels curriculum—have influenced identity formation, especially of Iraq’s elite. However, these curriculums will not be discussed further in this chapter, which is limited instead to books used in the public sector. 3.2   The Textbook Quality Improvement Programme The books on which this chapter focuses resulted from the second program implemented after 2003 by UNESCO and USAID. Appointed by the Coalition Authority, funded by USAID and assisted by Authority-­ assigned Iraqi educators, UNESCO set in motion the Textbook Quality Improvement Programme (TQIP). Its aim was to revise and rewrite the school curriculum between May/June 2003 and May 2004, resulting in a first generation of new schoolbooks.13 The results of the revision process were first published in a draft version in April 2004, and later as a final report in March 2005. The following discussion briefly describes the different objectives and statements regarding the revision process included in both versions of this report. This is done to illustrate the non-transparent

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workings of foreign donors and problematic aspects of their ideological approach. The draft version of the report states that the general objectives of TQIP are “to provide immediate support for basic education in Iraq by revising, editing, printing, and distributing math and science school textbooks that are gender appropriate, politically neutral, and free from bias” (Commisso 15). According to UNESCO, the draft report tells us, after many years of dictatorship, Iraq’s education system is in dire need of emergency revision. Textbooks can help to create a new Iraqi identity, the report continues, because a “textbook is not only a means of transferring knowledge but also a way to transfer bias and ideology, and if the politics change, the values incorporated in the textbooks also change” (11). In total, UNESCO revised and distributed 8.7 million mathematics and science textbooks. This program, the draft of the report postulates, concentrated only on mathematics and science books because these “required less modification, and they are more neutral than other textbooks such as history or civics” (Commiso 21). This statement, however, does not appear in the final official report. This might have to do with the fact that although the education reform targeted math and science books, in this ‘emergency’ phase topics that were considered controversial were also removed from books discussing other subjects. As Christina Asquith observed in The Guardian: “Saddam’s hand was heaviest in history, but his touch was everywhere. Some books lost sentences or paragraphs. In modern history, half of the text was deleted.” Since the report does not contain any references to these changes, it is impossible to track down what UNESCO actually revised in social sciences textbooks. The draft report does, however, describe the types of material removed from officially targeted textbooks. This included “Saddam Hussein’s cult of personality; discriminatory statements against ethnic, religious, and other groups; politicized information from the previous regime; references that suggest inequality of the sexes; [and] references encouraging violence” (Commisso 23). Moreover, other topics considered controversial, such as the Gulf War in 1991, all references to the treatment of Kurdistanis, as well as the ecological destruction of the marshlands, were removed as well. The draft states, “the texts were required to be free from any religious references in order to comply with the American constitution. This served as basis for progressive communication between donors and UNESCO principles of universal values” (Commisso 23). Again, the final official report fails to mention this latter point. This means that the

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values on which the revision process was based—specifically, those of the American constitution—are not officially recognized in this final report. Jeff Bridoux argues that the revision process was intrusively controlled by American advisers with very little input allowed from Iraqi education officials (125). In line with Klein’s observations above, this lack of transparency about the process, and limited input from local advisers can also be described as neocolonial strategy, since the stories and histories of Iraq’s peoples are subordinated to foreign values that are explicitly presented as objective and ‘neutral,’ a term that is found several times in the draft report. Further, whereas the draft notes that discriminatory statements against the USA and Israel were removed from the textbooks, this is not mentioned in the final report either. In light of Apple’s reflections on school curriculums and their ability to produce ‘official knowledge’ and shape political ideologies, however, one should be very careful with claims of neutrality.

4   Kirmanj’s Analysis 4.1   The Second Generation of Textbooks The following section focuses on the second generation of textbooks produced by the Ministries of Education of Bagdad and the KRG, in collaboration with the UNESCO Iraq Office, the UNESCO Office in Doha, other UNESCO entities such as the International Bureau of Education (IBE), and in consultation with Iraqi education authorities and stakeholders. The project, entitled Developing New Iraqi Curricula, was officially launched in 2010 through a workshop held in Doha, Qatar (9–10 October), during which the program’s three-year implementation plan was discussed. In this workshop, it was decided that a common ‘Iraqi Curriculum Framework’ would be established for both Bagdad and the Kurdistan Region. Stemming from this collaboration, the 2012 ‘Iraqi Curriculum Framework’ report was published by UNESCO. Its objectives are presented as follows: “our children are the key to our future. Our curriculum must empower them to work together to build the Iraq of the future” (12). Although this document contains goals and strategies for curriculum development, there is no information available about the editing process, and the role played by foreign donors in the production of this generation of books is unobtainable. All that can be analyzed, therefore, are the textbooks themselves.

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In these textbooks, history, geography and citizenship are integrated into one overarching category: social science, or Social Studies. This subject is described in the document as a “carrier-area for promoting citizenship and Human Rights education” (‘Iraqi Curriculum Framework’ 32), and includes many sections on the suffering that Kurdistanis experienced under the Ba’ath regime. As Bengio observes, for example, the books discuss “the Ba’athi policies of ethnic cleansing, deportation, displacement, and Ba’athification. As expected, the Anfal campaign was added to the school textbooks” (Kurds of Iraq 285). Bengio also emphasizes that the textbooks “avoid giving too much space to the Ba’th Party or Saddam Husayn [sic]” (‘Reclaiming National Identity’ 375). 4.2   ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ This section focuses on the specific omission of Saddam and the Ba’ath Party in this second generation of school social science textbooks through a discussion and critical evaluation of Kirmanj’s analysis published in the abovementioned Multiple Alterities: Views of Others in Textbooks of the Middle East. The guiding theme of this edited volume, the first extensive study of textbooks and curriculums produced and employed in the MENA region, is that these textbooks functioned, and still function, as vehicles for the constitution of collective memory, identity and self-understanding, by contrasting an ‘Us’ or ‘Self,’ as well as a cohesive national identity, with representations of multiple ‘Other(s)’ (Alayan and Podeh 8). As such, it is rooted in several ideas developed within Memory Studies, discussed in Chap. 1, especially in Assmann’s seminal works. In the context of the KRI, Kirmanj examines history textbooks (eight in total), taught at elementary school level (years four through nine). At the first level, history, geography and citizenship are discussed in the abovementioned Social Studies textbooks. At the second, preparatory school level (years ten through twelve), history is taught as an independent subject. Kirmanj’s approach to the textbooks is quantitative in nature; he marks certain words and quantifies how frequently particular messages, values, names, places or dates appear in the textbooks. He also provides a qualitative historiographical, visual, structural and discourse analysis. Through these approaches, Kirmanj convincingly shows how the dichotomy between Self and Other is prominent in the ways in which secondgeneration textbooks construct a notion of ‘the’ Kurdistani national identity, as shaped “through historical narratives, self-image,

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differentiation, and identification of geographical, ethnic, linguistic, and political boundaries between the Kurds/Kurdistan and outsiders, be it in ethnic, national, or geographic terms” (‘National Identity’ 312). These textbooks aim to show, Kirmanj eloquently concludes, that throughout history there has always been an ‘essence’ of ‘the’ Kurdish identity or Self (‘Kurdish History Textbooks’ 373). A clear example of this aim, Kirmanj writes, is found in a discussion of the Kurdish calendar in the history section of a fourth-grade Social Studies textbook. This calendar, the book tells pupils, is six centuries older than the Gregorian calendar; it was developed around 700 BCE by the Medes. By presenting the Medes as the ‘forefathers of the Kurdish nation,’ and by discussing how the Medes have always lived in what is now called ‘Kurdistan,’ this segment implicitly suggests that Kurdistan is ‘the’ land of ‘the’ Kurdistani people, since the ancestors of the Kurdistanis—the Medes—had lived in this area for more than 5000 years. This foregrounds notions of togetherness and belonging, focusing on a Self that has continuously and solidly existed throughout time and space (‘National Identity’ 313). Passages discussing these issues, Kirmanj argues, contribute to the construction of this Self by repeatedly contrasting it with Others. First, the textbooks suggest, these Others were Semitic groups like the Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians. They later became Arabs, medieval Ottomans and Safavids, and later, modern Arab-Iraqis, Iranians and Turks. Although some of these Others are described in a negative manner—successive Iraqi regimes that ruled between 1921 and 2003 are described as “treacherous, deceptive, oppressive, and fascistic” (‘National Identity’ 320)—most are presented in a somewhat respectful manner. Still, a notion of the Self is continuously formulated, Kirmanj asserts, in contrast to the representation of these regimes; for example, “Kurdish protests, demonstrations, and movements, either nonviolent or armed … are seen, implicitly, as national movements struggling for the liberation, emancipation, and independence of Kurdistan” (‘Kurdish History Textbooks’ 378). The narrative presented by the textbooks distinguishes the Arab-Iraqis as the dominating Other from the Kurdish Self, and, as Kirmanj notes, “Nowhere in the textbooks is Iraq portrayed as a homeland for Kurds, but rather as ‘[an] Iraqi Arab nationalist state’” (‘National Identity’ 320). The theme of victimization also permeates the textbooks as well, which portray Kurds “as the victims of the adversary Iraqi regimes” (‘National Identity’ 314). In this way, Kurdistanis are presented as a unified group who “never

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experienced problems among themselves. It was always the others that provoked conflict among the Kurds” (‘National Identity’ 325). 4.3   International Forces What Kirmanj does not mention, however, is that in the textbooks the notion of the Other is also applied to international forces, including colonial powers in the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as the international community that, as these books emphasize, did not help the Kurdistanis during their suffering in the 1990s. About the former, the textbooks teach us that after the decline of the Ottoman Empire, British colonial powers took over. This period is described as one of the darkest eras in Kurdistani history wherein the will of the people was broken by colonialists (‘Social Studies: Sixth Grade’ 108). With the Treaty of 1930 between Iraq and Britain, the Kurdistani question was ignored, it is furthermore stated. The Kurdistanis, including those living in Kirkuk, formed one front against the newly established country and, out of discontent, decided not to take part in the Iraqi Parliamentary elections of 1930. A demonstration against a group of 30 people who were willing to vote in the election took place in the city of Sulaymaniyah. Soon, the textbook tells us, the Iraqi army began to execute the demonstrators. The moral of this traumatic history is explained in the following way: “Dear pupil, on this tragic day a number of demonstrators were killed, but the tragic death of these martyrs illustrates the truth that Kurds are not willing to give up” (‘Social Studies: Sixth Grade’ 108).14 The textbook used in the ninth grade focuses particularly on the 1916 Sykes-Picot Treaty (discussed in more detail in Chap. 4) and the series of other international treaties in which the Kurds were promised independence. The text again emphasizes the failure of the international community in granting the Kurdistanis sovereignty. This description of Kurdistani political history is alternated with reflections on the intellectual history of the Kurdistanis, which includes the topics ‘Language,’ ‘Religion,’ ‘Education’ and ‘Proverbial Wisdom.’ The textbook argues that none of these four aspects of Kurdistani culture could flourish under colonial and dictatorial regimes. Kurdistanis, however, were still determined to establish their own country, and built printing presses to publish their own writings (‘Social Studies: Ninth Grade’ 209–13). A similar interpretation is presented by an assignment box in this ninth-­ grade textbook which asks pupils the following: “A series of treaties

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discussed the Kurdish case and acknowledged the rights of its people. What is the reason why the international community does not permit these rights? For the next class, students must show that they have reflected on this in five sentences” (‘Social Studies: Ninth Grade’ 193). In doing so, the textbook teaches pupils that present-day Iraq is the outcome of geopolitical decisions made by Others, and that it would thus not be wrong to ask foreign states to take responsibility and grant the Kurdistanis autonomy. 4.4  Exclusion Although Kirmanj does not discuss these references in Social Studies textbooks to the roles played by international forces, his following observation is correct: The KRG history textbooks create a core political message that the Kurds, as a national group in the world of nation-states, have the right to self-­ determination and statehood. Indeed, it may be safely argued that the main discourse contained in KRG history textbooks is the need to create a nation-­ state either within or outside the Iraqi “nation-state.” (‘Kurdish History Textbooks’ 384)

Kirmanj is also right when he claims that “the collective self-image presented in KRG textbooks is, at best, incomplete, and at times even misconceived” (‘National Identity’ 326). He observes that while the region is depicted as multiethnic and multicultural, “despite this display of pluralism, being Kurdish is core to the definition of the Kurdistani national identity,” which means, in his view, that “the textbooks confuse and conflate significant concepts such as ethnicity, nationality and citizenship” (316). The Kurdish Self, and the achievements of this Self, in other words, are sometimes inaccurate and overly romanticized in the textbooks. The conclusion that a Kurdistani Self is shaped in an overly romantic manner in the textbooks is indeed substantiated by the fact that several historical events are ignored, including, most importantly, the intra-­ Kurdistani conflicts that took place between 1994 and 1997. Different scholars have shown, furthermore, that during the war with Iraq, but also after the war and especially during the civil war, the KDP and PUK both sometimes allied with Saddam’s regime. The KDP, for example, collaborated with Saddam’s forces to retake Erbil during the Kurdish Civil War.

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During this operation, which carried the code-name Al-Muawikkil Al Allah (‘Relying on God’), the KDP troops were able, with the help of the Iraqi army, to ‘liberate’ Erbil from the PUK. Bengio observes that Saddam “presented the action not as its own initiative, but as a response to a call for help by Iraqi patriots fighting against treason […] when Bagdad announced the withdrawal of its forces shortly after the occupation of Erbil, it also initiated a series of actions to signal that the central government was there to stay. One symbolic move was raising the Iraqi flag” (Kurds of Iraq 237). Kirmanj argues that omitting these inter-Kurdistani conflicts from the textbooks is “probably due to the unwillingness of nationalists, who enjoyed great influence over the development of the KRG textbooks, to present a negative image of themselves and their role in a conflict that claimed many lives and paved the way for the commission of crimes against many others” (‘National Identity’ 326). Inclusion of these events would have provided a more comprehensive perspective on history that recognizes the suffering that different groups in Kurdistani society experienced for different reasons. According to Kirmanj (who uses the rather problematic word ‘neutral’): “Kurdish civil conflict from textbooks cannot erase the scars from Kurds’ memories and lives; it would be much better to address the conflict, its implications and dimensions in school textbooks and to provide a neutral perspective to schoolchildren” (‘National Identity’ 327). A relevant analysis of a similar process, albeit in a different context, can be found in Thema Bryant-Davis and Carlota Ocampo’s discussion of what they characterize as “moral disengagement.” According to Bryant-­ Davis and Ocampo, “If we deny the existence and impact of trauma, then we are relieved from the duty of having to respond to it” (485). Moreover, they conclude that “Until the existence and impact of … trauma are recognized, healing cannot take place” (495). Indeed, by linking traumatic memories to narratives revolving around victory, martyrdom and the perseverance of Kurdistani identity, the school curriculum obscures and overlooks the specific ways in which those who share the memory culture of the KRI are plagued by what happened in the past, and continues to take place in the present. This issue is discussed in more detail in the next chapters, mainly in the context of the phantomic.

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5  Humiliated Silence 5.1   Halabja and Anfal While Kirmanj is right that discussion of inter-Kurdistani conflicts should have been included in the region’s elementary school textbooks, his analysis does not provide a comprehensive understanding of why some historical details have been excluded. The only explanation for erasure that Kirmanj offers is that discussing problematic events that took place in the past may undermine the legitimacy of the Kurdistani political elite and corrode the solidity of the Kurdistani Self shaped by the textbooks. But this analysis does not take the various aspects of the memory culture of the KRI into account. The following section therefore develops two alternative analyses of the erasure of these aspects. Firstly, this erasure is embedded in a context characterized by humiliation and guilt. Secondly, the implications are foregrounded of the fact that other actors than the Kurdish political elite were also involved in the textbook revision process. One of these, as mentioned above, was UNESCO. In order to make this point, the depiction of two main traumatic events in the second generation of textbooks is discussed: the gassing of Halabja and the Anfal campaign in a fourth-grade history textbook, which are analyzed using a method of close textual reading. The textbook’s discussion of Halabja is introduced with the following paragraph: “Halabja was chemically bombarded on the 16th of March, 1988 (killing more than 5000 people immediately and leaving 15000 injured). The city itself was totally ruined” (‘Social Studies: Fourth Grade’ 60). This paragraph is followed by an iconic photo of a Kurdistani child, carrying her small sibling on her back, accompanied by the following caption: “a photo of the gassing of Halabja” (see Fig. 2.1). The text continues in the form of two boxes: an assignment and an information box. The assignment box asks the following question: “Did the chemical attacks leave a mark on Kurdish society? Discuss this with your fellow classmates” (60). Two aspects of this box are important: firstly, pupils are encouraged to discuss what a ‘mark’ means. The phrase ‘leave a mark’ is especially noteworthy, because it acknowledges that past suffering continues to haunt the present in the form of cultural trauma. Although this question seems to invite pupils to freely discuss and reflect on this issue, its meaning is guided by the following information box: “The Kurdish genocide, at the hands of

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Fig. 2.1  “An image of the town of Halabja during the chemical attacks” [fourth-­ grade Social Science textbook, translation by Bareez Majid]

the Ba’ath regime, was brutal and barbarous. This regime has been a black scar on the face of history, a catastrophe that will not be forgotten” (60). Furthermore, by actively engaging students, pupils are not just presented with an overview of historical events by this assignment. Instead, they are made part of an ongoing and living narrative by simultaneously ‘remembering’ these events (even though the pupils themselves did not experience them) and linking the commemoration of these events to the ways in which they think about themselves and the society in which they live. It is the importance of this event in the collective memory of Kurdistanis, and the role that it therefore plays in the master narrative presented by the textbooks, that makes it possible to create an active link between this memory and the pupils addressed by the textbooks. Using photos of Kurdistani children running away from the gas attacks, these pupils are encouraged to identify with the victims of Anfal and make themselves part

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of the narrative presented by the textbooks. It is also important that all photos used in the textbooks present Kurdistanis wearing traditional garments, although these clothes are primarily only worn in the countryside and during festivities. It could be argued that this emphasizes their ‘Kurdistanyati’ or ‘Kurdistani-ness.’ Another way in which the text encourages pupils to engage with ‘their’ remembered past is found in another activity box, which follows the discussion of the Kurdistani calendar, briefly discussed above: “Mention one of the most fun or most sad days that you have experienced or that you have been told about, and that made an important impression on you. Talk and reflect on this day with your classmates” (50). The ‘correct’ way of completing the assignment is again presented one page later. Below a photo showing people walking on a road alongside cars and trucks laden with belongings during the Kurdish mass exodus of 1991 (briefly mentioned in Chap. 1), pupils read the following in an assignment box: “On the tragic but important day of Koraw in March 1991, all of the citizens of Kurdistan left their possessions and their houses, heading towards an uncertain future. And yet, they preferred this over accepting a brutal regime. What were the results of Koraw for the Kurdish people?” (51). What passages like these illustrate is the need of the Kurdistani community to provide its young citizens with a tool to process the legacy of war. This is done, however, in a very specific and highly politicized way. Every representation of past suffering and of deeply traumatizing events is linked, after all, to an emphasis on the determined and heroic character of ‘the’ Kurdistani people, who did everything in their power, the texts suggest, to protect their existence as Kurds; to protect their Self against a dangerous Other. This conclusion seems to substantiate Kirmanj’s assertion that, under pressure by the KRG’s political elite, certain problematic aspects of the area’s history have been left out of school textbooks. However, the following section shows that this observation does not take certain aspects of the KRI’s memory culture into account, especially the guilt and humiliation still experienced by those who were unable to protect citizens from Anfal and the gas attacks. Since these people form part of the same elite that Kirmanj discusses, foregrounding these aspects enables us to develop a more inclusive and extensive understanding of the erasure of certain events than that which only focuses on the political ideology of the elite.

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5.2  Forgetfulness To grasp the specific character of this erasure, it is helpful to turn to the notion of ‘forgetfulness.’ In his influential article ‘Seven Types of Forgetting,’ British anthropologist and memory scholar Paul Connerton describes what he calls a ‘repressive form of erasure’ (60–61) to characterize the manner in which certain historical events are sometimes ignored by official narratives about the past, which are told in such a way that these events will eventually be forgotten. Connerton observes that these forms of erasure are often instigated in totalitarian regimes, but also claims that they do not always come about in a negative manner and can be carried out without any type of violence (60). The omittance of historical events that Kirmanj describes can be characterized as such a form of ‘forgetfulness.’ Particularly fruitful in the context of this chapter is Connerton’s discussion of what he characterizes as ‘humiliated silence,’ which he develops in a discussion of post-WWII Germany. Connerton observes that after the Second World War, the German people were confronted with demolished cities that, he argues, reflected a crisis in the consciousness of those who lived through the war and felt (partly) responsible for the horrors that happened under the National Socialist regime. Furthermore, the ruins reflected traumatizing experiences of destruction and death. He observes that the rebuilding of these cities could be understood as a way for Germans to cover their wounds, hide their pain, but also to forget what happened and ignore complicated feelings of responsibility, guilt and humiliation (67–69). In his own words: [T]he German people after 1945 can be seen to have been engaged not only in replacing one destroyed material fabric with a new one, but as engaged in the wholesale process of covering up their most recent past, the signs of their wounds; their economic miracle, in other words, was a form of forgetting, an effacement of grievous memory traces. The thud and hammer of building accompanied a humiliated silence. (68).

Although he develops the notion of ‘humiliated silence’ in a different context, and despite the necessary caution that should be taken in drawing historical parallels (especially in this context), this notion can be employed to cast a slightly different light on the possible motives behind the KRG’s inability to work through traumatic and problematic aspects of the past that materializes in the ‘forgetfulness’ initiated by the history textbooks.

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This is illustrated by the contrast between two published collections of interviews. The first collection is in Kurdish, consists of two volumes that came out in 2012 and 2013, and is entitled Bo Mezhw (For History). These volumes, edited by Soran Osman, contain transcribed testimonies of Peshmergas, recorded during interviews conducted by Khak Press and the Media Centre Kurdsat Channel. These two volumes clearly illustrate the tendency to link the suffering that took place in the past to a narrative revolving around heroism, as also identified in the textbook described above. In the foreword of the first volume, for example, the following passage can be found: Facing death, we stood up claiming our right to be reborn … The most unthinkable was thinkable because of the acts performed by the Yaketi Nishtimani Kurd [PUK]. They shone like the sun in the night, how could such an act not make the enemy go crazy? It is now time to tell the stories of the heroic fights that the Peshmerga forces proudly fought. I am sure that most people are unaware of these days, and that they think that we are narrating made-up stories. (11; my translation).

Compare the tone of this passage, of which many return in the book, with some passages in the same author’s Anfal: Kurdish Genocide published in 2014, likewise by Khak Press and Media Centre Kurdsat Channel, this time in English. Although this latter book was sponsored and initiated by Hero Ibrahim Ahmed, affiliated with the PUK, it contains subtle forms of critique of the Peshmergas. One such example is found in an overview of testimonies about the chemical bombardment on 2 February 1988 of a village called Shadala. In one of these testimonies we again find a narrative of heroism and resistance: “The mountain was boiling. Peshmerga were hiding in it, in the caves, and did not move … in fact, the bravery and heroism of Peshmerga and the villagers were unique, fighter jets and cannons were striking and showering those people with fire and lethal weapons, but they did not withdraw or leave” (31). However, in the same section a testimony of a woman named Pakiza Abdulkhaliq is included. She narrates how she awoke in the night because she heard voices outside and urged her husband to join her to look. She tells the reader: “When we went out, it seemed to us that the world was coming to an end. They were bombarding the village with chemicals. There was a group of Peshmerga staying in our tent, they knew that was chemical and went back inside the tent, but

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we did not know and stayed out until our noses were filled with chemical smell” (Osman, Anfal 36). Although ending abruptly, this passage indicates that crucial information was not provided by the Peshmergas to civilians, including the enemy’s use of chemical weapons. In several other passages in the book, we read more recollections of how the Peshmergas misinterpreted the situation. Ahmad Ali, for example, a survivor of Anfal in the village of Darwari-Khwarw, states the following about 1 April, when the Anfal attacks began: “The Peshmerga forces had to retreat from the south sector. Some families intended to leave, but the Peshmerga told them not to. They said that this battle would not last long” (101). Shawkat Ali, a survivor of Zhalay Haji Qadir, states furthermore: Towards 1988 the Iraq government gave the last notification which said, anybody staying in the rural areas (villages) would be considered as Iranian and Anfalized. The Peshmerga force was with us in the area which helped the people to stay firm, no attack could break their spirit, we were delighted to see the Peshmerga in arms and ready to fight them back, even if there were only four of them, we couldn’t bring ourselves to leave. (195).

The same survivor remembers: “The Peshmerga force was overwhelmed and could resist no longer, they retreated. That was a big shock for us, we felt very hopeless. The Peshmerga left us and headed to the north” (196). The abovementioned heroic stories leave no room for reflections on these more ambivalent aspects of the Peshmerga’s actions. This argument can be further substantiated by the observations of Fischer-Tahir. She contends that the way the notion of genocide is used within the memory culture of the KRI is often entwined with feelings of guilt and shame. Concerning accounts of the traumatic past developed by former Peshmergas, she writes: All of them referred to or spoke directly about feelings of guilt towards the civilians they could not rescue from deportation and death … Many of the authors writing about the Anfal are former Peshmerga and political activists. For them, the term genocide may also offer a kind of relief, and maybe both their desperate resistance and their suffering makes more sense in the light of this “meaningful concept.” (Fischer-Tahir, ‘Searching for Sense’ 240–41)

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The traumas caused by feelings of failure and humiliation at not being able to protect citizens made the notion of genocide helpful as a way of giving meaning to a deeply complicated and traumatizing event. Using this word foregrounded the ungraspable and inescapable nature of the aims of Saddam Hussein’s regime, and made it possible to ‘make sense’ of the traumatic realization that “Peshmerga—despite their will, their self-­ image, and their brave and desperate acts—were incapable of protecting the Kurdish people in 1988” (240). What makes Fischer-Tahir’s discussion fruitful for the analysis developed in this chapter, is her argument that the concept of genocide “helps to explain a catastrophe that is perceived as unbelievable and overwhelming, and the concept obviously serves to legitimate nationalist claims towards ‘the Others’” (240). Linked to Kirmanj’s analysis of the dichotomy between Self and Other, a more subtle and nuanced explanation can be developed about the motivations behind this dichotomy’s use, and the forgetfulness about certain historical events. This dichotomy is not only rooted in the nationalist values of the Kurdish political elite, but is also influenced by feelings of humiliation experienced by many Peshmergas who today form part of this same political elite; feelings that are unmentioned by Kirmanj.

6  Interlude: The Problematic Position of Jash The distinction between a heroic ‘Us’ and an evil ‘Them’ is destabilized in the memory culture of the KRI especially by the problematic position held by Jash, briefly mentioned in the passage cited above. This interlude discusses three recent representations of, and references to, Jash to illustrate this problematic position and, eventually, to link it to the notion of ‘humiliated silencing’ as well. The Arabic word Jash, meaning ‘donkey’s foal,’ refers to Kurdish collaborators with the Ba’ath regime. Hiltermann characterizes Jash by describing how the Ba’ath regime maintained its power “by buying off tribal leaders, whom it referred to as ‘Counselors’ (Mustasharin) and whom it charged with policing the countryside with tribal recruits called Fursan (Knights) by the regime but jahsh (little donkeys) by nationalist Kurds” (87). Their ambivalent position is illustrated by Mullah Mustafa Barzani’s claim that during the reign of Saddam, the Kurdistanis consisted of three groups: “the good, the bad and juhush” (qtd. in Bengio, Kurds of Iraq 34).

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This introduces the first example that demonstrates the difficult position of Jash in the memory culture of the KRI between Us and Them, taken from Mohammed Ihsan’s 2017 Nation Building in Kurdistan: Memory, Genocide and Human Rights. Ihsan worked as a member of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in a number of different high-­ ranking roles, including Minister for Extra-Regional Affairs from 2005 to 2011; Minister for Human Rights, President of the General Board for Disputed Areas in Iraq and International Investigator for Genocide crimes in Iraq from 2001 to 2005; and Kurdistan Representative to the Federal Government in Iraq from 2007 to 2012. In his review of Ihsan’s book, Michael Gunter astutely observes: “one wonders why the author includes eleven separate works by the Armenian genocide scholar Vahakn N. Dadrian, dealing mostly with the Armenians, yet does not even mention the more apropos studies by Joost Hiltermann and Choman Hardi on the Iraqi Kurdish genocide” (‘Book Review: Nation Building’ 130). A possible reason for the exclusion of these studies may reside in the political and ideological framework of Ihsan’s study, which links Anfal to a claim for Kurdistani independence. Hardi, for example, is highly critical of these claims and opposes victimization narratives, focusing instead on particular stories of trauma, especially as experienced by female survivors. Ihsan, on the other hand, mainly presents Kurdistanis as victims and blames international actors, such as the US, for obscuring the process of achieving peace. In contrast with American politicians, Ihsan praises Kurdistani political parties and especially the efforts of the KDP’s Masoud Barzani, who functioned as the KRG’s president between 2005 and 2017. In a characteristic passage, he writes: Masoud Barzani, the ‘Middle East Mandela’, issued an amnesty for all 450,000 Kurds living in the region who collaborated in some way with the regime. It was a very controversial and brave step because at first people, the younger generation in particular, who lived during the persecution together with the Peshmerga felt ‘betrayed’. However, it was a very wise step, because traditional Middle Eastern culture predisposed them to revenge, not to reconciliation.” (124).

Ihsan fails to reflect on the fact that the issue is much more complex: amnesty was not only promised to constitute a society characterized by reconciliation, but also to ensure that the Kurdish uprising would succeed at all. In other words, it was also a strategic move: the Kurdish uprising,

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initiated by the Iraqi Kurdistan Front (IKF) which included the PUK, KDP and six other parties, was strengthened by the support of Jash. In fact, as Bengio observes, what proved to be foundational to the success of the Kurdish intifada in 1991 is that Jash forces joined the armed Peshmerga forces: “Even before the uprising began, progovernment Kurdish auxiliaries began to join the Kurdish movement so that by mid-March some 60,000 soldiers had reportedly changed sides, bringing along their military equipment—mainly booty taken form the army” (Kurds of Iraq 197). What Ishan does not mention, furthermore, is that not only Barzani (from the KDP) but also Talabani (from the PUK) were involved in this process. In fact, Talabani’s name only occurs three times in Ihsan’s whole book, which might result from the author’s affiliation with the rival KDP. Besides, although the promise of amnesty was indeed a bold decision and certainly played a constitutive role in the Kurdistani victory, it is important to acknowledge that it also normalized the role played by Jash. Amnesty International describes in a 2005 report on human rights abuses by Peshmergas and Jash that many of the latter “remained in Iraqi Kurdistan and were gradually absorbed into the KDP and PUK forces” (67). Because of this amnesty, this normalization suggests, some of those who collaborated with Saddam’s regime even joined the ruling parties and are, together with other Peshmergas, regarded today as ‘Pshmergay Derin’ (Honorable Peshmergas). This means that they receive a pension for their work as resistance fighters. Ignoring the complicated status of Jash by presenting forgiveness as a grand task instigated by the ‘Middle-East Mandela,’ in other words, might again undermine the ability of Kurdish society to truly acknowledge the past and what caused the many traumas that still haunt those who Nora would characterize as  constituting its milieu de mémoire. This partial retelling of history still squeezes the past into a narrative that eventually revolves around a good Us and an evil Them. A second, even more striking example that illustrates the complicated role played by Jash, is found in a television interview with Dara Haji Braimi Charmaghe, broadcasted in 2020  in Rudaw’s program Panjamore (Fingerprints). Charmaghe is the son of the Ozi Tribe’s leader, and he is introduced to viewers as a “well-known and much respected figure of our society” (‘Interview part 1’ 02:10). The introduction does not mention, however, that under the Ba’ath regime he was a Mustashar (meaning ‘advisor’ or ‘counselor’): a militia commander who received arms and a salary to recruit fighters and supporters for Saddam’s government. In the interview, Charmaghe does not use this word to describe himself either.

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His role in the Ba’athist regime, he claims, was merely a symbolic one; he was only a member of the House of Parliament in Bagdad and had no real power (‘Interview part 2’ 00:59). In the interview, he also emphasizes the role that he played in the Kurdistani resistance movement and observes that although a large group of Mustahsar took part in the Anfal campaigns, and that people who committed these crimes are still affiliated with the KDP and the PUK—even now receiving a pension for former political prisoners of war—he himself is not one of them (09:29). What is striking about the interview is that Charmage continuously speaks in an admiring way about Saddam, who he personally met in 1967 and several more times thereafter. Almost with pride, for example, he reminiscences about how he asked the Ba’ath leader to restation a brutal head of Amn (the security forces) in Sulaymaniyah, which Saddam directly carried out for him (20:50). He recalls that Saddam Hussein sent him money and cars during Eid (20:45). He also tells that, after a falling out with the Ba’ath Party, he received a personal letter from the PUK’s Jalal Talabani after which he decided to support the Peshmerga forces. However, Saddam sent him a note asking Charmage to join them again, promising him that he would be given all that he could wish for. The letter said: “A father is angry with his son, but that doesn’t mean his son should turn against him” (41:10). Although Charmaghe states that he does not claim that Saddam was good or that he did not kill anyone, he does emphasize that he was a ‘loyal’ person, and that he was a real leader because he always supported his own people. Distancing himself from the accusation that he is a Ba’athist, he argues that he should simply be understood as a tribe leader who takes his conservative customs seriously. This means, he continues, that one must welcome everyone who comes to one’s door, no matter where they are from. “Even if this person is your enemy and the enemy of your people?” the interviewer asks, to which Charmage responds that he does not talk about Saddam in a political sense, but instead only in terms of personal relationships (‘Interview part 3’ 35:39). According to him, this also explains why he provided shelter to six or seven close relatives of Saddam (35:50). Charmage is then asked about his relationship with Mulazim Muhsin, a Second Lieutenant of Saddam’s Amn forces who worked in Sulaymaniyah and was notorious for his cruelty in the Amna Suraka prison. This results in the following conversation:

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Interviewer: Are you still in touch with mulazim [lieutenant] Muhsin? Charmage: [hesitating, looking down] Yes. Interviewer: So, you know where he is? Charmage: I do know where he is, yes. Muhsin is a trustworthy man. Interviewer: You mean loyal towards you? Charmage: Our relationship is merely a personal one. I am not defending him. I will not say that he did not kill people, or that he did not imprison people. Nevertheless, we do still have a friendship until this day. Interviewer: Isn’t he regretful about the things he did? Charmage: I never talk with him about that. That is none of my business. … Interviewer: If one day the KRG would ask you to hand him over, so that they could try him, would you tell them his location? Charmage: I don’t know his exact location. Interviewer: But you know that he is still alive? Charmage: Yes, I know that he is still alive. Interviewer: Have you seen him since then? Charmage: No, I have not. He got my number through friends living in diaspora, and then he called me. Interviewer: What do you talk about in your calls? Charmage: Regular stuff. We talk about Sulaymaniyah. He asks me how it is here and says that he considers himself a Sulaymaniyi citizen. Interviewer: Even after all that he did he still thinks so? Charmage: Indeed. … Interviewer: Is it true that they say he is Palestinian? Charmage: No that is not true. His mother is Kurdish, from Xanaqin, and his father is Shia. (‘Interview part 3’ 42:53; my translation)

This brief conversation indicates several things: first, that former Ba’ath members (it remains unclear whether they are Kurdish or Arabic), including those who live in diaspora—perhaps with refugee status—are still actively in contact with one another. Furthermore, Charmage does not seem to find it problematic that he is still in touch with an infamous perpetrator of war crimes, simply justifying it as an apolitical ‘friendship.’ The fact that he suggests that this, as well as his sheltering of Saddam’s close relatives, must have been known and tolerated by Kurdish political parties (43:15), emphasizes that in the memory culture of the KRI people like Charmage hold a rather ambivalent position. Since his story does not really fit in the Us versus Them narrative, he seems to escape normative

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judgment. Indeed, the interview did not cause any outrage in the KRI, and generally seemed to confirm what many already knew about Jash. At the same time, however, these observations must again be embedded in the wider memory culture of the KRI. On the one hand, the interview is certainly disturbing; one can only wonder what it must be like for victims of the former regime, especially those who were tortured by Lieutenant Muhsin, to watch it on television. On the other hand, that at least the figure of the Jash, openly represented here by Muhsin, is discussed on national television indicates that a ‘forgetfulness’ that had earlier made it impossible to talk about this issue has ended. Nevertheless, the interview indicates that the KRI’s memory culture is only just beginning to come to terms with its complex and problematic past, constituting a moral ambivalence in which this interview carves out its place, and in which specific aspects of different forms of suffering and their specific causes, are not (yet) acknowledged. Fischer-Tahir indeed notes that since the 1990s, following several peace-agreements, allusions to and discussions about Anfal take place more openly in Kurdish media (‘Searching for Sense’ 241). This not only resulted in discussions of the more negative sides of Jash, but also foregrounded the ambiguous position of Peshmergas. This position was powerfully pointed out by a former Peshmerga and doctor living in diaspora, Nasih Othman. He did this in an article published in 2008  in the Roshnamay Roshname magazine. This is the third example that illustrates the position of Jash in the KRI’s memory culture. This text is cited in full, in my own translation of its republication years later in 2020 in the diaspora magazine Tarawge, because it shows the process of change that the Kurdish community is still undergoing: No one doubts the fact that the Ba’ath regime was undeniably barbarous and fascistic, and tried on many different levels to hit the Kurds hard. But the Ba′ath regime has always been the enemy of the Kurds and provided armed resistance against the Kurds. The Kurds should have known that this regime would act barbarically against all actions of the Peshmerga, and that the Peshmerga actions would have impact in turn. In fact, Kurds themselves had noticed this gradually; the actions against the Kurds on an individual level (such as prosecutions of the families of the Peshmerga), as well as on a collective level (such as bombing villages and Arabizing the countryside), had already occurred a few times before Anfal was carried out. Understanding Anfal as a brutal act of the regime, from the perspective of perpetrator and victims, will never result in Kurds never experiencing

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such a thing again in the future. A real understanding of Anfal should lie in studying the answer to why the brutality of the regime reached such a height? … Looking into the causes of these events is not only putting emphasis on the nature of the cruelty of the Ba’ath regime, because no one doubts the cruelty and wickedness of Ba’ath toward Kurds, and the Kurdish movement understands this more than anyone I know. Instead, is it better to study the actions of the Kurdish resistance fighters days and months before Anfal, to understand whether the Kurds had any idea what awaited them in response to their actions? Or had the Kurdish nationalist movement dwelt on the idea that cooperation with a country with which Iraqi was at war at the time would have no effect on the attitude towards the Kurds? Or if the Kurdish land was to be used as a battle for the Pasdaran and other Shi’ite troops, would this lead to Saddam’s anger? … Or that if Kurdish movement supported the enemy of the state, would have taken another city than Fawl, how this would lead to the madness of Saddam? Even in a fight between two people, the attitude and consequences towards these attitudes are important. If I pelt your house with stones, you will not shoot my house, but if I shoot your house, chances are that you would use everything in your power, even bombarding, to destroy my house. In reality, the magnitude of the actions of the Ba’ath the years before Anfal was gradual. In the beginning, the least strong chemical weapons were used, and it increased more and more. Perhaps the use of chemical weapons in 1987 was a message to the Kurds not to cross their borders, but we did not understand this message until Halabja was proved to us as the last lesson and all of Kurdistan was turned into a fire. (13; my translation).15

The editor of Tarawge, Sardar Fatah Amin, told me that Othman had asked him a few years earlier to publish this article, but that he had hesitated to include it, since he was afraid that it would be considered too controversial. On Amin’s Facebook page, on which this article was eventually shared, we indeed see that not all responses are positive. Some people accuse Nasih Othman of voicing a pro-Saddam message. According to one commentator, Hoshyar Qadir Rasul, Saddam did not adhere to any law, and that it was due to the international community’s silence that he intensified his war against the Kurds. Othman’s perspective, Rasul suggested, can be read only as an excuse for the former brutal regime, and a cover-up story that blurs people’s vision of the past (commentary obtained 30 April 2020, my translation). Othman replied as follows to Rasul: “I believe that you have changed the core argument of my message. I am not trying to find any excuse for the Ba’ath regime. In fact, I am better aware of this history, since I myself

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have lived through the atrocities of Anfal. What I want to say is this: if Kurds regard their leaders merely as innocent, they will never understand their past, and their future will not be any different” (commentary obtained 9 May 2020, my translation). Rasul responds: “If this is the case, why didn’t you then say anything about that?” Another commentator adds: “I don’t believe that Doctor Nasih is making any excuse for the Ba’ath regime. If this had been the case, then he would have written articles for Ba’ath during the time of the operations” (commentary obtained 9 May 2020, my translation). The latter suggestion alludes to the fact that Rasul, the most critical reader of the text, himself published several positive articles during the time of the Ba’ath regime. Although this is not stated explicitly, everyone involved in this conversation knows what is referred to in this context. What this story, as well as the two other examples discussed above indicate, is that in the KRI dichotomies between Self and Other, Us and Them, and essentially ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ might also be driven by feelings of shame and regret, possibly resulting in a form of ‘humiliated silence.’ These feelings propel a narrative revolving around heroism and resistance on the one hand, and victimization and genocide on the other, which makes it possible to avoid difficult and problematic aspects of traumatic events that undermine this dichotomy and that might point us toward a ‘grey zone’ between good and bad. These aspects are generally ignored by Ihsan, and are addressed but critiqued by Othman, and those who respond to his message many years later. Furthermore, they are, to some extent, acknowledged by Charmage but then immediately presented within a framework that strips him of responsibility, that makes any problematization of Jash’s function disappear in the vacuum between a good Us and a bad Them.

7  Forgetfulness and Reconciliation 7.1   Disarming the Mind The other important factor that Kirmanj overlooks in his analysis of the education textbooks concerns the influence of UNESCO. In the 1990s, this organization launched a project called Toward a Culture of Peace, which emphasized the importance of peace-building projects for countries following war. In their introduction to the abovementioned Multiple Alterities, Podeh and Alayan observe that peace-building projects like

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these were “meant to transform the way people think and behave towards the Other. The idea was ‘to disarm people’s minds’ by offering preventive action in situations with the potential for violent conflict. Intercultural understanding was to replace enemy images” (7). The influence of UNESCO resulted in a similar attempt to ‘disarm people’s minds’ within the Kurdistani school curriculum developed after 2003, resulting in what can be characterized as a ‘reconciliation pedagogy’ (Zembylas et al. 409). Such a pedagogy seeks “to generate knowledge and practices about how, in the culturally complex global realities of today, we can all ‘get along’” (409). This means, in other words, that representations of suffering are not only coupled with stories of heroism and resistance in textbooks, but also to a discourse that emphasizes values like peaceful co-existence and democracy, as defined and defended by UNESCO (Firchow and Ginty 310) in a second narrative. In the context of the KRI, this attempt forms yet another explanation for the ‘forgetfulness’ described above, driven by the way the school curriculum aims to constitute a new identity focused on a better future. As such, it bears resemblance to that which Connerton describes as “a forgetting that is constitutive in the formation of a new identity” in which “the emphasis here is not so much on the loss entailed in being unable to retain certain things as rather on the gain that accrues to those who know how to discard memories that serve no practicable purpose in the management of one’s current identity and ongoing purposes” (63). Whereas Connerton mainly refers to psychological processes taking place within individuals who aim to recalibrate themselves after a traumatizing and distorting past, on a more collective level, this process is instigated by the identity formation aimed at by this second narrative in the school curriculum. This makes several observations about the colonial tendencies of the two programs implemented to revise the school curriculum relevant again. These observations can be used to develop a critical perspective on the influence of UNESCO, and to problematize positive analyses of this influence as defended, for example, by Tejel in the following passage: Since 2005, UNESCO has taken the lead of international efforts geared towards the ‘modernization and reconciliation’ in Iraqi society through the development of a new Iraqi curriculum and new textbooks based on values and orientation of the Iraqi Federal Constitution (2005) and the Iraqi National Education Strategy (2011). As a result, local stakeholders have committed themselves to developing and implementing new Iraqi curricula,

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which ought to strike a balance between a centralized curriculum and decentralized models, where local communities and/or schools are granted certain autonomy regarding the curriculum. (2578).

As this passage indicates, Tejel’s assessment of the involvement of UNESCO as a second actor is largely positive: he argues that it “might provide the impetus of a de-escalation of conflict. This should include a preliminary de-victimization of collective memories by the KRG and the central government, or, at least, a new transformation of the parameters of the conflict through curriculum reform” (2580). The use of the rather suggestive word ‘escalation,’ which seems to refer to the possibility of Kurdistanis embedding the suffering experienced in the past in a narrative revolving around national autonomy, foregrounds UNESCO’s focus on reconciliation, favoring a united Iraq over a Kurdistani claim for independence. Indeed, Tejel writes: “It is only when the Kurds and all Iraqi groups will be able to elaborate their own narratives and undergo a process of digging into a much more complex past, as well as a process of de-­ victimization, an official Iraqi history (seen as a unitary component of the Iraqi identity) will be likely to emerge” (2571). In contrast with Tejel, several other scholars have developed a more critical understanding of the role played by UNESCO. Rohde compares the textbooks developed under UNESCO’s influence with those used before the fall of Saddam. Although the textbooks that were produced and used in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq contain Sunni biases, he observes, some changes gradually appeared in the 1990s: the regime began to symbolically recognize narratives told from Shi’i perspectives, for example. One of the reasons behind this change was the regime’s aim to portray itself, in Rhode’s words, as “a mediator between the various sects and religious groups comprising Iraqi society” (‘Change and Continuity’ 725). Paradoxically, it was precisely these passages that were removed when the post-2003 curriculum was developed with the help of international organizations such as UNESCO, who excluded them out of fear of sectarianism. Rohde cites critique, formulated by UNESCO’s reviewers, that these passages “featured only poets with a Shi’i background, demanding that the ‘selected poets should represent the different groups in Iraq’” (722). As a result, Rohde asserts: The revised textbooks reflected the Sunni tradition more strongly than those published during the latter years of Saddam’s regime. This suggests

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that the international experts involved in the process either lacked an understanding of the Iraqi cultural context or were subject to contradictory policy guidelines on the part of their superiors. Interestingly, therefore, efforts directed at the de-Ba‘thification of textbooks and curricula initially did not push back Sunni influences. (726).

The post-2003 revision, in other words, reintroduced already-existing inequalities between perspectives, precisely because ethnic and religious differences were left out in response to UNESCO’s emphasis on reconciliation, peace and unity. And this, ironically, made UNESCO actually repeat instead of critique several aspects of the Ba’athist focus on unity. It was only after 2004 that more references to Shi’i Islam were again added. However, Rohde argues—again in contrast with Tejel—that real changes were yet to be made by his time of writing in 2013: “Contemporary Iraqi textbooks on religious education and Arab-Islamic history do not emphasize or examine in detail the existence of multiple and conflicting narratives or the great social and cultural diversity that exists in Iraqi society” (726). The same observations apply to Iraqi Kurdish textbooks, which focus on peace and co-existence without acknowledging ethnic differences. In contrast with Tejel’s observations, this means that this approach comes dangerously close to reaffirming discriminatory discourses developed under Saddam’s regime, which likewise defended notions of unity and community, but instead used these notions to discriminate and marginalize any groups who could then be presented as ‘external’ to this unity and community. Ignoring differences and conflicts, in other words, may result in the opposite of reconciliation and peace. This point is developed further in the following section, again through close reading of the second-­ generation KRG Social Studies textbooks. This section specifically focuses on the passages on ‘citizenship’ in books used from the fourth to the ninth grade, at the elementary school level. This analysis is structured according to the different topics covered by the textbooks. 7.2   Family and Collectivity The citizenship section in the fourth-grade textbook opens with a photo of two white doves sitting on a branch, surrounded by roses, emphasizing UNESCO’s theme of peaceful co-existence. Peacefulness is indeed continuously linked to ideas about co-citizenship, collectivity and

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reconciliation in the books. This shapes the second narrative of the textbooks, in which the idea of the Other as essentially different from the Self, according to the narrative discussed above, is replaced by a constructed and hopeful idea of a ‘we’ as fellow Iraqis. In the textbooks used in the fourth grade, following the image of the two doves, the notion of collectivity is introduced by focusing on the importance of family. Some parts of the description of different members of a family affirm traditional gender roles: the main responsibilities assigned to the mother cover domestic tasks. In contrast with the mother, the father’s identity is discussed in rather different terms: his job outside of the household is described as one of his most important characteristics. He is the one who must earn a living and provide for his family, the textbook tells us. Furthermore, he must give advice to his family members on different topics, but most importantly, he teaches them to love their fatherland and how to be a productive and trustworthy citizen. The grandfather is also described: he is old, but has achieved wisdom about life, the text tells its readers. He must give advice to younger relatives, so they will not repeat his own mistakes. He is also the one to plant the seed of love for the fatherland, it is claimed. No grandmother is mentioned (see ‘Social Studies: Fourth Grade’ 73). Besides the fact that most traditional gender roles are affirmed by this text (although at places an attempt has been made to point out that women can fulfill different roles outside the domestic sphere), it is important to note that only the male relatives are portrayed as bearers of the love of one’s homeland. Nationalism, in other words, is gendered in the textbooks and linked to masculinity and patriarchy. Since the textbooks claim that elders must ensure that younger generations do not repeat their same mistakes, and since men dominated the Peshmerga forces in the past, it could be argued that this representation presents a way of ending a cycle of violence. Past conflicts, in other words, are presented as a mistake that should not be repeated in order to establish a future of peace and reconciliation. The sections on ‘citizenship,’ in the textbooks used in the fifth grade, tell the reader how the small community formed by those who live in one’s street is embedded within a broader community or ‘nation.’ Addressing pupils, the text reads: We are all part of small families, who form villages together with other small families, which differ from one another. Different houses, belonging to dif-

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ferent streets, together form a city, and all the cities have borders. A country exists of cities and villages. In other words, a homeland is demarcated by borders, and unites all the people living in cities and villages by a shared history and past. This place where we live, where our ancestors have lived for ages, is our nation. (‘Social Studies: Fifth Grade’ 134)

It is important to note that the text itself does not mention by name Iraq or Kurdistan. The textbox following this paragraph, however, addresses the teacher with the following request: “Invite students to write down the name of their nation” (134). The next textbox asks students whether they love their homeland and why, giving them the task of discussing their love for their homeland in class (136). In this way, the textbox encourages pupils to become part of that which Benedict Anderson famously characterized as an ‘imagined community’; one that is not based on memories of a traumatic or violent past (as done in the first narrative, discussed above), but one that revolves around a feeling of pride for one’s homeland. Students are encouraged to feel love and sympathy for the piece of land on which they live. The importance of the nation, with its beauty and rich natural sources, is highlighted in the text following this section. Again, the name of the nation is unmentioned, but we do see a photo of a beautiful landscape accompanied by the following text: “a photo of Kurdistan’s natural surroundings” (135). Love for one’s nation, the textbook continues, is one of the most important aspects of being Kurdistani. However, this love obligates us to give back, again linking notions of nationalism to UNESCO’s emphasis on peace and reconciliation: pupils have a duty to contribute to the development of ‘our’ civilized society; to obey the law; to not spend money excessively; and to take care of public spaces (‘Social Studies: Fifth Grade’ 136–37). That pupils are duty-bound to give something back to their native land is expanded in the following textbox, which tells pupils how they must behave as students and what their obligations are to their schools and parents. Additionally, it is important to emphasize that the pupils are not told to partake in the collective memory of past suffering, but are encouraged instead to reflect on their acts and deeds in the present. In other words: the central message that this chapter wants to convey is that ‘we’ are members of ‘our’ nation, and that ‘we,’ as a group, must protect ‘our’ environment and ‘our’ legal institutions. This ‘we’ is specified in the last chapter

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of the book, in which the Kurdistan is explicitly mentioned by name. The Kurdish nation, this text tells us, includes all those living on the land of Kurdistan, and those who are connected to one another by history and ancestry. The text explains that all minorities living in Kurdistan are respected and that their rights are protected by the KRG. The following passage is especially noteworthy, since it undermines the idea of a gap between Kurdistanis on one side and Arabs on the other and clearly foregrounds UNESCO’s value of reconciliation: The Kurdish nation has good relationships, based on mutual respect, with neighboring countries. Kurds and Arabs have fought side by side against oppressors for a democratic Iraq. This mutual respectful relationship with other nations is based on the idea that none of these nations can exist in isolation but needs the others. (‘Social Studies: Fifth Grade’ 159)

In the textbook used in the sixth grade, a chapter is dedicated to Kurdish national holidays, which are again embedded in different ways within discussions about unity and identity. The first national holiday mentioned is the celebration of the spring equinox, called Newroz in Kurdish (‘Social Studies: Sixth Grade’ 147), which takes place on 21 March. The central ingredient of Newroz is the Kawa legend, which functions as an origin myth, promoting an image of Kurdistani national unity. According to this legend, Kawa, a blacksmith whose only surviving child was destined for sacrifice to the evil Assyrian King Dahhak, instead defeated him with a revolutionary movement and liberated the Medes who, as discussed above in the context of Kirmanj’s textbook analysis, are presented as the forefathers of the Kurds. Secondly, the textbook discusses the national holiday celebrating the agreement of 11 March 1970, which was a written declaration that promised Kurdish independence. The textbook reads as follows: “This agreement was the result of the most sacred revolution of the Kurds which took place on the 11th of September in 1961” (‘Social Studies: Sixth Grade’ 147). Thirdly, another holiday that celebrates the story of the Kurdish mass uprising is described. The text explaining this holiday reads: In response to years of oppression including the demolishment of 4500 villages, the death of 182,000 innocent victims, among them children, elderly and women, the chemical attacks on the town of Halabja as well as other

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Kurdish places, violating the human rights by the former Iraqi regime, the people of Kurdistan started an uprising on the 5th of March in 1991. During a battle that took only a few days, the whole of Kurdistan was liberated. (148).

Crucial to note is that in contrast with the first narrative discussed above, this fragment approaches this traumatic event from a different angle, shaped by the second narrative. Instead of talking about the horrific past and the ways in which people were forced to leave their homes by the Other, in this excerpt the positive outcome of Kurdistani liberation is stressed, which is why it is celebrated as a ‘holiday.’ Furthermore, in contrast with the first narrative, this paragraph also provides subtle historical context and explicitly mentions that “the former Iraqi regime” (148, emphasis added) was responsible for this event. This sense of joy returns on the following page in the textbook, which contains a textbox in which the uprising in different Kurdistani cities is chronologically represented. The photo below the text boxes, depicting a group of cheering people (including cheerful children), links a feeling of pride to this liberation (see Fig. 2.2). 7.3   Forgiveness and Human Rights The influence of UNESCO, especially the organization’s aim to provide post-war societies with a positive narrative to cling to as they work toward reconciliation, can also be discerned in the rest of the descriptions of national holidays. Instead of focusing on moments of suffering, the list celebrates those days regarded as the foundational moments of a democratic society. The fourth national day, for example, celebrates the first parliamentary elections in Kurdistan, 19 May 1992, during which all citizens went to cast their votes at the ballots (‘Social Studies: Sixth Grade’ 150). The fifth listed holiday celebrates the constitution of the KRG on 4 July 1992. After the withdrawal of the Iraqi regime, the first Kurdish parliament was then formed. The sixth national holiday mentioned celebrates the announcement of the Kurdish federal government (150–51). The text reads, “because of foreign forces, we were denied the basic right of independence” (151). After a description of what this federal status of the Kurds entails, the text ends with the following remark: “This [federal status] is the result of the great uprising, that today we have our own Parliament and government” (152). The last national commemoration

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Fig. 2.2  “An image of Raparin” [sixth-grade Social Science textbook, translation by Bareez Majid]

noted dates back to the 14 July Revolution of 1958, also known as the 1958 Iraqi coup d’état, during which the monarchy was overthrown and replaced by a regime that recognized and acknowledged the right of the Kurds to independence. However, as explicitly mentioned in the textbook, this right was ultimately unfulfilled (153). These democratic events and ideals are emphasized even more strongly in the following chapter, which describes the four founding pillars of a nation: common country, common language, common history and common cultural practices. Since all of these four pillars are, in the Kurdish reality, not a natural ‘given,’ the text serves as a medium to promote the idea that the will of the Kurdistanis as a whole has been strong enough to create a sense of unity regardless. A description of ‘common cultural practices’ is furthermore used in the textbooks to provide an argument for the claim that a sense of justice and resilience, together with a love of knowledge, forms a distinctive character of the Kurdistanis (‘Social Studies: Sixth Grade’ 154).

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This paragraph is followed by a section on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 (‘Social Studies: Sixth Grade’ 154). Seven important articles of this declaration are quoted, introducing pupils to the idea that human rights are universally valid. This section is followed by a paragraph on the Declaration of the Rights of Children and argues that children are entitled to receive an education, and to be loved and respected. That all Kurds form part of one collective is also emphasized in the seventh-­grade textbook, which teaches us that all pupils share the same background (‘Social Studies: Seventh Grade’ 94) and should work together in a respectful way, be empathic toward one another and forgive others’ shortcomings (192). Implicitly, this section in the seventh-grade textbook links the discussion of Kurdish national holidays and forms of Kurdish pride in the sixth-grade textbook to the rights celebrated by the United Nations, embedding the history of Kurdistan in the larger context of human rights and linking it to UNESCO’s aims. The notion of forgiveness is elaborated in the books used in the following school years. The eighth-grade textbook, for example, tells us that citizens should be able to forgive, and that to do so is in fact a pillar of a just society: During times of war we think of peace, and during peace we are preoccupied with our future. Every one of us should be able to forgive, in order to live peacefully. Understanding and accepting others teaches us how to work on a peaceful democracy, and also how to accept different and contrasting opinions; hope and dialogue will be our common language. (‘Social Studies: Eighth Grade’ 168)

Peace, this passage suggests, can only be achieved when people accept and respect differences in opinions and worldviews. In this way, the idea of forgiveness, although presented as a virtue, becomes an obligation; in order to participate in this community, individuals are obliged to respect their surroundings, as well as be respectful to others, the textbook tells its readers. Respect, which in this context means that one must forgive, is presented as a duty. This, after all, forms the basis of peaceful communities. Consisting of different characteristics and different people, the text states, communities are open to change (171). This is the first time that a community is described as flexible, which, it could be argued, is driven by

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the idea that societies can change for the better and that forgiveness can be realized; one of the main principles of UNESCO. This interpretation is substantiated by the fact that one of the practices most extensively discussed in this textbook is that of law. The constitution, and the formal rules that are formulated to make individuals into members of a society, are presented as binding a group of people together. The rules are there, the chapter tells us, to restrict the power of individuals and, at the same time, to give them the opportunity to voice their critiques and concerns. Pupils are encouraged to be critical toward official institutions: a distinction is made between well-informed and sophisticated groups of people, and uncritical people who do not stimulate change (‘Social Studies: Eighth Grade’ 206). The assignment box then asks pupils to fill in the word missing from the following sentence: “A capable and modern leader is a person who gets a certain position by …” (206). Two words are provided for students to choose from: force and election. It is clear that the textbox aims to encourage students to become active and critical citizens within a democratic society. 7.4   Democracy and Future Hope In the textbook used in the final year discussed in this chapter—the ninth grade—all of the topics covered in the previous years are repeated: the book again opens with the definition of a nation. Included here are discussions of different kinds of political systems, ranging from centralism to regionalism, federalism and confederalism (‘Social Studies: Ninth Grade’ 245–57). This can be understood as a continuation of the discussion of democracy in the previous year’s textbook. The former regime is presented as an example of an autocratic government: “there are many examples of dictatorships, and Saddam Hussein’s regime was one of them” (360). Saddam does not form the main subject of this chapter, however; his regime is only provided as an example. Again, instead of focusing on the conflictual past, most attention is given to the idea of democracy in general, and more specifically the right to vote, which is described as the most important right within democracies. The text provides general information on different systems throughout the world. This changes with the following textbox, which links these systems to the example of Iraq: Important knowledge: on the 20th of January 2005, the Iraqi Parliament elections took place. These were the first free elections in Iraq since 1945.

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The Kurdistan Alliance obtained 25.5% of the votes and won 75 seats in the Iraqi Parliament. The total number of seats is 275. Their main task was to develop and write the Iraqi Constitution. (‘Social Studies: Ninth Grade’ 268)

The assignment then asks pupils to answer the following question: “Why is it important that a modern Iraq should be democratic and federal?” (268). The Iraqi constitution underscores that federal Iraq is united based on democratic values that, the textbook implies, are celebrated all over the world. In this way, the textbook affirms the narrative revolving around a united federal Iraq. Autonomy and separation, in other words, are regarded as obstacles to peace and co-existence, and pupils are encouraged not to strive for independence. This final textbook also includes an overview of the role that UNESCO has played worldwide, which brings us to the end of the textbook analysis developed in this chapter. It is argued that throughout history, nations have tried to end conflicts that threatened societal destruction. One of the international organizations created to realize this goal, the text explains, is the UN, established after the Second World War. The principal reason for the UN’s establishment was that no country in the modern world should ever again experience such a harsh period of war and occupation, and that all nations should be able to live in peace. The list containing various organizations created through collaboration of different participating countries again emphasizes the notions of peace, co-existence, forgiveness, and providing help and assistance to those in need (‘Social Studies: Ninth Grade’ 286). The description of UNESCO and UNICEF, which can be found in the last part of the textbook, argues that international cooperation is necessary to eradicate poverty and war. 7.5  Postmemory Like the narrative influenced by the KRG discussed above—and this forms a steppingstone to alternative representations of past suffering, discussed in the following chapter—this second narrative shaped by UNESCO does not do justice to the complexities of Kurdistani society, and especially not to the traumatic events that Kurdistanis experienced in their troubled history. It is unable to make room for an open space in which people can explore their traumatic past without having their experiences embedded in this narrative. Whereas the first narrative, driven by the ideals of the KRG,

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links experiences of suffering to independence, victory and autonomy, the second one links them to forgiveness, citizenship and peace. Both, in other words, do not focus on these experiences themselves, but embed them in an overly one-dimensional way within an ideologically structured master narrative. This conclusion can be substantiated with a passage from Johan Franzén’s ‘Writing the History of Iraq: The Fallacy of “Objective” History’: If Iraq is really to become the pluralist, multicultural, and, crucially, democratic society that American policymakers dream of, it will only develop in that direction if Iraqis are taught that historical accounts and narratives are multifaceted and that acknowledging your enemy’s grievance and story does not mean surrendering your own account but might in the long run facilitate political reconciliation and a non-sectarian and peaceful future for Iraq. Only when communities and groups that have seen themselves as victims of political persecution for decades, for whom grievances have become an important part of their identity and self-perception, become able to develop and sustain their historical narrative for a significant time, will it be possible for them to take steps towards political and historical reconciliation. (45).

Franzén’s observations are especially urgent if we realize that the targeted audience of the textbooks that have been analyzed in this chapter is only one generation removed from the atrocities that were carried out by the former regime, and that are discussed in these same textbooks. This historical proximity makes this audience part of that which Marianne Hirsch defines as a generation who has a ‘postmemory’ of past events. This concept, in her words, “describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their birth but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right” (22). From Hirsch’s perspective, generational trauma can be passed on from one generation to the next, which means that this generation, in some way or another, must be able to process the specifics of these traumas in a thorough manner. And this can only be done, as Franzén suggests, if a space is created that does not frame these traumas through hegemonic ideals, whether they concern those of UNESCO or those of the KRG. In the following chapter, the specificity of these spaces will be explored by turning to the field of literature.

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8  Two Narratives This concludes this chapter, which has analyzed several aspects of the KRI school curriculum to show that the representation of past traumatic events is developed, within this curriculum, within different frameworks. These frameworks are driven by values that result in two narratives, each propelled by one of the special carriers or actors responsible for developing the curriculum. The ideology of the KRG has resulted in a narrative that links past suffering to ideological and political notions of heroism, resistance and autonomy. These notions are used to constitute an understanding of the Kurdish Self, presented as threatened and victimized throughout history by Others. Expanding on Kirmanj’s analysis, it is important to understand that this narrative is driven by feelings of humiliation developed in the context of traumatizing events, and not only by ideologies of nationalism defended by a political elite, as he suggests. Furthermore, the involvement of UNESCO in curriculum development has resulted in an ideological narrative that emphasizes co-existence, peace and reconciliation. This second narrative excludes discussions about the roots and effects of the conflict. In other words, why and how people were dehumanized, or why acts of discrimination were justified, are not taken into consideration. Both narratives do not do justice to the complexities of Kurdish society, and especially to the traumatic events that Kurds experienced in the relatively recent past. Nevertheless, the brief references to current attempts in Kurdish society to shine a more critical light on past events, especially those concerning Jash, show that media and the public are trying to consider and approach the past in more open and ambivalent ways. This contrasts the two narratives—one of the KRG and the other of UNESCO—with accounts that might destabilize rigid dichotomies between Us and Them, and perhaps, eventually, may create space for the inclusion of accounts that recognize the complexities of the area’s past. As the interview with Charmage cited in this chapter indicates, however, the region is only beginning to work through these aspects of its complex memory culture, and still struggles with questions regarding moral responsibility, permeated with trauma, guilt and ‘forgetfulness.’

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Notes 1. In this chapter I have, with hesitation, cited al-Tikriti’s work. According to al-Tikriti, the ideology that he describes in this passage still resonates within Iraqi society. I argue, however, that this observation is not only biased (many ethnic groups, including Kurdistanis, would disagree), but also that claims like these reproduce the discriminatory language of the former regime. Furthermore, the text contains factual errors, especially regarding Kurdish textbooks. He argues, for example, that two Kurdish parties (KDP and PUK) developed and distributed two distinctive curriculums after 1991. This is false. Al-Tikriti also claims that in the revised Arabic textbooks negative descriptions of Iran were not removed, and that only negative descriptions of Americans are deleted. Observations like these, together with his use of ‘Mr’ (353) in reference to Saddam Hussein, can be characterized as a stance of idolatry toward the former regime. It is necessary to take these reflections into account in the process of reading, especially if one wants to understand the author’s firm denunciation of the role of foreign donors in education system revisions after 2003. Since some of his observations are useful, they are nevertheless included, but only if based on arguments that can be substantiated through other, more reliable texts. 2. Personal communication with the author on 17 October 2019. 3. Ibid. 4. This observation also returns in the testimony of my respondent. 5. Personal communication with the author on 17 October 2019. 6. Personal communication with the author on 17 October 2019. Al-Tikriti cites Charles Micheal Brown and states that the “Bathist course, National Education [al-Tarbiya al- wataniyya],” entailed “a civics course aimed at socializing students to new (post-Hashemite) political loyalties,” and a “highly centralized and politicized undertaking that attempted to expose as many students as possible to the ruling ideology” (Brown 2005 cited by Al-Tikriti 2010: 351). 7. Ibid. 8. Personal communication with the author on 17 October 2019. 9. Ibid. 10. Today, these victims, like the victims of the Ba’athist regime, are referred to as Shahid (martyrs). 11. In fact, the Kurdish traumatic past was used years later by the US as a pretext for the American-led invasion of Iraq. The discussion of the Monument of Halabja, in Chap. 5, returns to this issue. It is noteworthy that Kurdistani suffering was ultimately used and appropriated by political actors in different ways. 12. Due to its openly biased and sectarian nature, this political stance has been described by observers as a discriminatory program against the Sunni pop-

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ulation. Sisson and Abudlrazzaq write, for example, that “many Sunni Iraqi Arabs considered ‘de-Ba’athification’ to be synonymous with ‘de-­ Sunnization,’ a strong and deliberate effort to marginalize the role of the Sunni” (24). 13. The project was initially carried out in Bagdad from the headquarters of UNESCO, but it was later forced to operate from Amman after the bombing of the United Nations offices on 19 August 2003. 14. All English textbook quotations in this chapter are my own translations. 15. I would like to thank Tarawge for giving me permission to republish this text in full.

CHAPTER 3

Resisting Master Narratives: Kurdistani Memory Culture and Two Literary Texts by Bachtyar Ali

1   A Utopian Place In a 2017 interview in German, the Kurdistani novelist, poet and essayist Bachtyar Ali (1960) states that in many of his novels “gibt es einen utopischen Ort, wo Schönheit und Gerechtigkeit bewahrt werden.” In the same interview, he observes: “In den Erzählungen sind diese Orte nicht unrealistisch” (qtd. in Newberry). Ali’s statement is fascinating for two reasons, which are discussed throughout this chapter: firstly, the notion of justice is linked to ideals of beauty. There is, Ali suggests, a political and moral component to his esthetics, which he describes in the same interview as one that is continually reworked and questioned, engaging the reader in a critical manner. Secondly, he embraces a paradox by stating that the places to which he refers are utopian but ‘not unrealistic.’ Considering that in Ali’s literature the ‘utopian places’ he describes are often set against a background of war and destruction that is linked, in different ways, to a traumatic Kurdistani past, both aspects are crucially important within the context of this book. This chapter forms a counterpart to the previous one: it concerns alternative ways of approaching and representing the traumatic and violent past of the KRI; ways that question, destabilize and implicitly critique the narratives constructed in the school curriculum. Put differently: it revolves around representations that, to some extent, aim to escape from these © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Majid, Towards an Understanding of Kurdistani Memory Culture, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37514-9_3

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political narratives. As such, this chapter shapes the foundation for an exploration of the notion of the ‘phantomic.’ As Andrea Bieler observes in this context: Artists who are aware of the ambiguities of aesthetic expressions in remembering a violent past are often keen to reflect on haunting memories, not only as a destructive but also as a productive force that provides a necessary unsettling drive for dealing with the past. (347).

Bieler characterizes the esthetic forms that artworks may adopt to present alternative explorations of complex traumas and memories as ‘ephemeral’ (341). In this chapter, this ‘ephemeral’ quality returns in an analysis of the various literary techniques employed by Ali, especially in references to the phantomic, which is more explicitly discussed in Chap. 5. In light of the above, the guiding thread of this chapter is formed by an exploration of the ways in which Ali’s literature relates to the theme of escapism as embedded in the memory culture of the KRI. Besides introducing the notion of the phantomic, it therefore also refers more generally to the spectral aspects of literary texts. In The Spectral Metaphor, Esther Peeren writes the following about the spectral and the notion of ‘escape’: The specter stands for that which never simply is and thus escapes the totalizing logic of conventional cognitive and hermeneutic operations. It cannot be reduced to a straightforward genesis, chronology or finitude and insists on blurring multiple borders, between visibility and invisibility, past and present, materiality and immateriality, science and pseudo-science, religion and superstition, life and death, presence and absence, reality and imagination. (10).

This definition of the specter’s ability to explore the liminal spaces between different fields and representations is driven by Derrida’s observations on spectrality as a place of ungraspable and radical otherness, mentioned in Chap. 1. Inspired by these general characteristics of spectrality, the first half of this chapter describes how Ali’s work aims to be an escape: firstly, from the socio-political context in which it is produced, which is characterized by memories of trauma and conflict that nevertheless continue to haunt his works; and secondly from the tendency to reduce his texts into vehicles for political meaning, which form an instance of the “totalizing logic of

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conventional […] hermeneutic operations” that, as Peeren observes in the passage cited above, might be countered by the spectral. This chapter develops a general overview of the latter tendency by describing five examples: 1. the first chronological overview of Kurdistani literature, Mejhui Adabi Kurd (The History of Kurdish Literature), developed by Allaudîn Sajaddî (2016); 2. Ferhad Shakeley’s (1992) interpretation of Ahmad-î Khani’s epic Mam û Zîn (1692); 3. Özlem Belçim Galip’s (2015) approach to Kurdistani literature; 4. Şaram Qewamî’s (2007) Kurdish review of Bachtyar Ali’s The City of White Musicians; and 5. three academic articles by Hashem Ahmadzadeh (2007, 2011 and 2015). The discussion of these five examples will emphasize the observation, developed in the previous chapter, that the KRI’s memory culture revolves around different ways of making sense of and representing the past. This makes it difficult for literary critics to constitute a distance between literary discourses and the historical contexts—permeated with memories of conflict, unresolved traumas and political appropriations of these traumas—in which they came about. As Esther Peeren exemplifies in different ways in The Spectral Metaphor, however, the field of literature presents a space in which themes, experiences and phenomena like these can be explored in rather ungraspable ways that refuse to be pinned down to one political or ideological essence. It is therefore that this book on the KRI’s memory culture includes an analysis of Kurdistani literature. To discuss the limits of these approaches, and to argue that Ali’s literary discourse aims to escape from it, a textual reading will be developed of Ali’s 2010 novella Çemşîd Xanî Mamim: Ke Hemîşe Ba Legel Xoyda Deybird (My Uncle Jamshid Khan Whom the Wind Always Carried with Itself ). The second half of this chapter analyzes the ways in which protagonists (try to) escape to the abovementioned utopian places within Ali’s works.1 This is done through a close reading of another novel by Ali: the 2005 Şari Mosiqare Spyakan (The City of White Musicians). Both parts of this chapter approach Ali’s novelistic discourse as a form of ‘trauma fiction,’ which according to Susana Onega in the introduction to Traumatic Memory and the Ethical, Political and Transhistorical

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Functions of Literature, refers to literature that is preoccupied with “the recovery of memory and the acknowledgement of the marginalized, repressed or forgotten” (2). Ali’s works continuously blur the lines between what is conceived as realistic and what is conceived as magical, provocatively challenging linear portrayals of history, and displacing and replacing these portrayals with fragmented representations of temporality that reject those representations that Peeren, with help of Fredric Jameson’s observations on the spectral, criticizes for being ‘un-mixed’ (10). It is important to note that this chapter does not completely separate Ali’s literary discourse from political, social and cultural contexts. In fact, it is based on the idea that his novels play a distinctive role in the memory culture of the KRI, since they shape a space in which more vulnerable, ambivalent and personal aspects of trauma can be foregrounded; aspects that sometimes border on that which will be characterized as the ‘phantomic.’ What distinguishes the approach adopted in this chapter from the ones that are critiqued as limiting or reductive, however, is that it does not reduce the meaning of Ali’s literary texts to this single dimension, and that it emphasizes that they can be interpreted in a myriad of ways. Again, his works therefore carve out an ungraspable and experimentative space that can be characterized as ‘spectral.’ To arrive at this conclusion, this analysis of the first form of escapism begins with a brief introduction to the social and political history of literature and poetry in the MENA region, gradually zooming in on the KRI and on the tendency to reduce or confine artworks to their socio-political context.

2  Literature and Identity 2.1   Literature, Oppression and Nationalism During the modern Arab renaissance, which took place in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, poetry was often utilized as a medium to constitute a form of political and cultural self-­ awareness. ‘The poem,’ George Antonius argues in his 1939 book The Arab Awakening, “was an incitement to Arab insurgence” (54). In contrast to poetry, the novel occupied a marginalized position in the MENA region for a long time. Fabio Caiani and Catherine Cobham argue that Iraqi literary fiction only began gaining importance with the inception of Iraq as a unified country (1–2). As poetry did before, the authors claim that many of the novels that were written in this time again had a political

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function: their aim, Caiani and Cobham assert, was to “engage the public, to inform and even to contribute to reforming society” (19). The idea that fiction played an important role in nation-building processes in the MENA region returns in the 2015 edited volume Novel and Nationalism in the Muslim World, in which we find 11 case studies that revolve around the claim that “different aspects of how the complex entanglement of nation, religion, and modernity, in the context of political and cultural identity formation, is probed and verbalized in prose fiction” (Özdalga 1). Since this volume focuses on Islam as the uniting element, it also includes novels written by non-Arabic minority groups living in Arab countries. One such example is the Kurdistani novelistic discourse, which is discussed in the volume by Hashem Ahmadzadeh in a chapter called ‘The Kurdish Novel and National Identity-Formation across Borders.’ Following the key theme of this collection, Ahmadzadeh embeds the rise of the novel in the MENA region within a historical and political context. He focuses on the fall of the Ottoman Empire, which led to the establishment of sovereign states in the beginning of the twentieth century (‘The Kurdish Novel’ 66). These states then entered a period of modernization, he writes, simultaneously assimilating minorities. In their article “The Continuing Crisis in Iraqi Kurdistan,” Michael Gunter and Hakan Yavuz describe this process as a form of ‘official nationalism,’ which they explain with the following quote of Hugh Seton-Watson: “The leaders of the most powerful nations … impose[d] their nationality on all their subjects—of whatever religion, language or culture … as they saw it … they were strengthening their state by creating within it a single homogenous nation” (qtd. on 123). Ahmadzadeh links this historical and political process to the growing importance of the novel in this region, arguing that the nation-building that occurred following the fall of the Ottoman Empire “was more or less accompanied by the appearance of the novel in the official languages of these new political constructs” (‘The Kurdish Novel’ 66). He cites literary works by the Iranian author Sadeq Hedayat, the Turkish Orhan Pamuk, and the Egyptian Nagib Mahfuz as examples that “provide their native and universal readers with an authentic artistic picture of their nations” (‘In Search of a Kurdish Novel’ 584). In the context of the Kurdish novelistic discourse, however, Ahmadzadeh claims that this process has not yet matured, which he explains with reference to different factors (592).

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After the fall of Ottoman Empire, he observes, Kurdistani people were divided by artificial borders that placed them in the newly emerged nation-­ states of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. Gareth Stansfield also notes about this process that Kurds were “pawns in the geopolitical arena which is home to a multitude of other states’ interests” (12). The official nationalism in these four countries resulted in the obstruction of both the development of Kurdistani identities, and the growth of their literature. In each of these four nations, Kurdish language and literature were indeed censored, and sometimes even banned and criminalized, since it was believed by this region’s governments that novels should strictly contribute to the political and ideological unity of the nation, thus impeding the establishment and continuity of the Kurdish novel. Only recently have Kurdish authors been permitted to publish their work in their native language (Ahmadzadeh, ‘The Kurdish Novel’ 67). Other factors that, according to Ahmadzadeh, explain the ‘immaturity’ of Kurdish literature, are the absence of one standardized Kurdish language, and the limited or even non-existent nature of contacts between authors from different parts of the Kurdistani region. Lastly, Ahmadzadeh points out, Kurdish books lack a stimulating market (67). In light of these limiting and oppressing factors, Ahmadzadeh’s approach suggests, it is no surprise that from the moment Kurdish literature did begin to develop toward the end of the twentieth century, it revolved to a high degree around the search for a Kurdistani identity. He cites Fredric Jameson’s influential analysis of national allegories in ‘third-­ world literature,’ which argues that “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-­ world culture and society” (Jameson 69). In line with this idea, Ahmadzadeh highlights that the Kurdistani novelistic discourse was born in a context defined by the “absence of a Kurdish nation-state as a direct consequence of the way in which the new nation-states treated ethnic minorities within their political and geographical domains” (‘The Kurdish Novel’ 66). A Kurdish identity is, therefore, often shaped within this discourse in opposition to the identity politics of the sovereign states that aimed to assimilate Kurdistani culture (66). 2.2   Allegorical Approaches to Kurdistani Literature That literary and poetic discourses revolve around the attempt to shape a Kurdistani identity is foundational to the abovementioned tendency to

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reduce the meaning of Kurdistani novels and poems to their political context. These readings can be characterized as allegorical, since they understand literary texts as allegories of socio-political situations (Attridge 60). This tendency can be explored in more detail with help of a discussion of the first example identified above, namely the first chronological overview of Kurdistani literature developed by Sajaddî (1907–1984). In his 1952 Mejhui Adabi Kurd (The History of Kurdish Literature), Sajaddî not only aspires to educate Kurdistani communities about their own cultural heritage and to raise awareness of their ‘Kurdistanyati,’ or ‘Kurdistani-ness,’ but he also aims to inform non-Kurdish communities about what Kurdistanis have to offer; an aim that embeds his overview in a socio-­ political context. Sajaddî observes that undertaking such a comprehensive study of Kurdistani literature is complicated because, unlike languages like Farsi and Arabic, there are few relevant studies available on the subject. Furthermore, Sajaddî asserts—as Ahmadzadeh does many years later— that the diversity and richness of the Kurdish language and the different dialects spoken by the Kurdistani people make it difficult to speak of a single Kurdish literature (34). This does not mean, however, that he does not take up the challenge. In fact, he describes extensively who ‘the’ Kurds are and what characterizes ‘their’ literature, which leads him to directly link Kurdistani literature to notions of a political Kurdistani identity. With this approach, Sajaddî distinguishes three forms of literature which, according to him, show the richness of Kurdistani culture: first, narrative prose that can be subdivided into dastan (epic prose) and afsoen (myths); second, idioms that he characterizes as philosophical reflections; and third, poetry (118). Sajaddi argues that the first category—narrative prose—did not develop as extensively as in Western literary traditions, because it was not regarded within the Kurdistani context as ‘high culture,’ instead considered to be mere entertainment (119). His section on poetry is therefore three times longer than his section on narrative prose. In the former section, Sajaddî discusses in detail the lives of the poets and their works. In his discussion of prose, he documents narratives adopted from the oral tradition and argues that war, love and loyalty are prominent themes within this genre, and reflect the harsh political and social reality of the Kurds (121–22). In Kurdish narrative prose, he argues, the potential and actual threats that the Kurds have experienced, and continue to experience, are emphasized. His analysis exemplifies the tendency to read Kurdish literature through a political lens, to interpret it as rooted

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in the attempt to shape allegories revolving around a Kurdistani identity born in a political context of oppression. Sajaddî indeed concludes that, within a Kurdish context, death and loss form the basic ingredients of the novel genre. The second example is formed by Shakely’s analysis of Mam û Zîn (1692), the oldest Kurdish epic, written by Ahmad-î Khani, in which the themes of death and loss likewise play an important role. In his analysis, Shakely argues that “for the first time, the poet and thinker Ahmad-î Khani formed and laid the foundation of Kurdish nationalism” (6). He claims that Kurdish nationalism can, firstly, be found in Khanî’s embrace of the Kurdish language; although he mastered other languages, including Arabic, Persian and Turkish, the author chose to write his literary works only in Kurdish (33). By doing this, Shakely argues, the author aimed to show that Kurds were able to produce intellectual and literary works (60). Secondly, according to Shakely, Kurds “have always had the reputation of being split and disunited” (84). For Shakely this stereotype does not adequately reflect reality, since there are plenty of examples of heroism in the epic and because Khanî shows that “the rulers and lords, not the poor, were responsible for the conditions the Kurdish lived in” (95). Shakely develops this argument by focusing on the content of Khanî’s epic: situated in the Kurdish principality of Botan and in the Kurdish city of Jezîra, its protagonists meet during the ancient Kurdish festivities of Nawroz (Kurdish New Year). When Botan, the Lord of Jezîra, finds out that the character Mam is in love with Botan’s sister, Princess Zîn, he imprisons him. The moment Zîn hears about the tragic fate of her lover, she dies of grief. Although Khanî wrote his epic in accordance with the principles of classical oriental epics, Shakely observes that contrary to traditional epics, Khanî criticizes the Lord of Jezîra and his actions (1992: 99). Based on these aspects, Shakely arrives at the following conclusion: “Khanî wrote the epic of Mam û Zîn in the hope of stimulating his people to rise up against subjugation and oppression and for the sake of a free and human life” (102). Adopting an approach similar to Sajaddî’s, Shakely reads this story of unfulfilled love in an allegorical manner, as a metaphor for the longing for a unified homeland of Kurdistan, which is portrayed as an unrealized dream. In his view, it is evident that the story symbolizes the suffering and the struggles of the Kurds, and that it urges them to liberate themselves and establish a grand Kurdish nation (107). Indeed, Shakely concludes: “the thought of nationalism that Khanî introduced in Mam û Zîn three

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centuries ago formed, as a whole, the idea that came to be called at the beginning of this century the right of nations to self-determination” (107, my emphasis). The third example highlights another aspect of allegorical approaches to Kurdish literature: an emphasis on the political ideals and goals of the novels’ authors. This emphasis returns in the study Imagining Kurdistan: Identity, Culture and Society by Galip. In this book, Galip analyzes the novelistic discourse written in both Turkish Kurdistan and the Turkish-­ Kurdish diaspora. She uses the concept of ‘humanistic geography,’ with a particular interest in literature as a place where meaning is constructed (7). In her own words: “Novels can be analysed for their construction of a geography that explores the interaction between people as a group, and particular places. The location or space that is drawn as geography in the novel becomes clearer and more visible with the personal sentiments projected onto it, and this personifies the landscape” (8). Employing this idea, Galip argues that the notion of a ‘home-land’ is shaped in specific ways in Turkish-Kurdish literature. However, in contrast with novels from Turkish Kurdistan itself, Galip concludes, in the diasporic novelistic discourse, the Kurdish ‘home-land’ is not described in a nostalgic manner, as to do so would underpin the fact that Kurdistan fails to be an ideal home characterized by safety, solidarity and socio-political freedom (88). She bases this claim, which again presents an allegorical reading of Kurdistani literature, primarily on information about the political leanings and ideals of Kurdish authors: Kurdish novelistic discourse is mainly shaped by the political views of the novelists, in which home-land becomes a variable ideological construct. Therefore, through ‘telling’ techniques and explicit ideological statements, Kurdish novels in general contain a central and essential political and ideological intent. … [T]he different political views, ideologies, inclinations, and deeds not only affect the themes and characterisation of the novels, but they also have an impact on the way Kurdistan and Kurdish identity are constructed. (223).

Similar aspects return in a fourth example: a review by the Kurdish critic Qewamî of Bachtyar Ali’s The City of White Musicians. Embedding the novel in a socio-political context, Qewamî argues in his Şarî Daste u Taqmekan (War Between Armed Forces) that the description of the novel’s characters and their supernatural powers, described in more detail below,

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are not realistic enough. Reading the text allegorically, Qewamî contends that it is unconvincing that the novel’s protagonist, Jaladat, scolds the ‘great leader’ Saddam Hussein, calling him a ‘son of a whore’ and proclaiming that someone will kill Saddam eventually (The City of White Musicians 166). This could not have taken place, Qewamî claims, because this statement is made by Jaladat in a time of fear and oppression. According to Qewamî, before 1991 (the introduction of the no-fly-zone and the withdrawal of the Ba’ath army) no one would risk speaking in such a way about Saddam, stating that all Kurdish novels written before Raparin (the Kurdish uprising) illustrate this fact, for they do not contain any such critique at all. That is why Qewamî believes that these words are coming from Ali himself, instead of Jaladat (Şarî Daste 38). 2.3   A Novel Telling Us Who the Kurds Are The fifth example concerns the reading of Kurdistani novels in three texts by Ahmadzadeh: ‘In Search of a Kurdish Novel That Tells Us Who the Kurds Are’; ‘Magic Realism in the Novels of a Kurdish Writer, Bakhtiyar Ali’; and ‘The Kurdish Novel and National Identity-Formation across Borders.’ Central to the latter text, as the discussion of his historical overview also suggests, is the claim that works by Kurdistani authors revolve around the question of identity and aim to construct an understanding of a Kurdish Self.2 In his conclusion, for example, Ahmadzadeh contends that all the novels he discusses, written by Mehmed Uzun, Halim Yusiv, Ata Nahayee and Bachtyar Ali, “portray the Kurds as a people suffering at the hands of oppressive regimes. The Kurdish novel is a vehicle for clearly showing the agonies of a nation” (‘The Kurdish Novel’ 74). This argument is also presented in his article ‘In Search of a Kurdish Novel That Tells Us Who the Kurds Are.’ Again, it is based on the belief that literary works in general, and the Kurdish novelistic discourse in particular, have a political as well as a social potential: novels, he claims, help to create a notion of the Self. This view on the working of literature, Ahmadzadeh postulates further, has been prevalent and accepted within literary theories that came into being in the 1980s (582). Following this view, his article presents the quest to find ‘the’ Kurdish novel that can tell us ‘who the Kurds are.’3 It is significant that these claims ignore the well-­ established literary movement of poststructuralism. To a large extent, after all, this movement was driven by the aim to liberate literature from the idea that its meaning could and should be reduced to the intention of its

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author, or to the political or social context in which it came into being (see, e.g., Barthes 142–48). That his fairly essentialist understanding of literature leads him to overlook the literary aspects of novels is demonstrated by Ahmadzadeh’s aforementioned conclusion that the Kurdish novelistic discourse has not yet ‘matured.’ He bases this claim on the argument that Kurdish writers have not yet been able to represent and address ‘native questions,’ and to link these questions to ‘universal aspects’ (‘In Search of a Kurdish Novel’ 587), although it remains rather unclear what these ‘universal aspects’ would be. Kurdish novels in general, Ahmadzadeh continues without specific examples, lack narrative techniques and style, and are characterized by a deficient language. Furthermore, characters in Kurdish novels, he observes, lack individuality and most of them can be traced back to social types (587). While his condemnation of Kurdish literature is arguably harsh, Ahmadzadeh finds one exception to this rule: Hiner Saleem’s My Father’s Rifle. This 2005 novella, of which he provides a general summary instead of a literary analysis, can tell us ‘who the Kurds are’ and what their case is. He concludes: “If Khalid Hosseini’s Kite Runner and Åsne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul inform the reader about the experienced tragedies by the Afghans, Hiner Saleem’s My Father’s Rifle tells the rarely told story of the Kurds during the 1960s and 1970s” (589). It is noteworthy, however, that My Father’s Rifle—the only novel (it is in fact a memoir) that Ahmadzadeh deems a successful example of Kurdish literature—was not written in Kurdish but in French and was later translated into 20 languages (588). This suggests that Ahmadzadeh is less concerned with what Kurdistani novels specifically have to offer regarding form, style and other literary and textual elements, and instead is more interested in works that help Western audiences understand ‘who the Kurds are.’ In this way, he implicitly perpetuates a colonialist view of non-­ Western literature. After all, Ahmadzadeh approaches Western literature, especially English novels, as the norm, and furthermore focuses chiefly on novels that have been translated into other languages.4 Kurdistani authors who have written and still write in Kurdish are not discussed in detail in his article. Ahmadzadeh incidentally refers to the literature of Kurdistani novelist Bachtyar Ali, who writes in Sorani dialect. The only aspect of Ali’s writing that Ahmadzadeh mentions, is the fact that 10,000 copies of The City of White Musicians were published and that it was truly a Kurdish bestseller. Furthermore, Ahmadzadeh continues, it was the first time in history that a Kurdish novelist received a clear-cut

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percentage in royalties for his book: a promising development, he observes (586). What makes this novel so popular, and what makes it a strong literary text, however, is not discussed. A slight change of tone and focus can be discerned in the third article by Ahmadzadeh identified above: ‘Magic Realism in the Novels of a Kurdish Writer, Bakhtiyar Ali.’ Here, Ahmadzadeh aims to first formulate and demarcate the genre of magical realism in general, and then to discuss the engagement with this genre in Ali’s novels in particular. Again, however, the magical-realist techniques used by Ali are approached by Ahmadzadeh as allusions to the reality of the Kurdistan region. He writes: “Through a clear mixture of verisimilitude and elements of the fantastic, Ali’s novels comment on incredible events and realities that co-exist in actual Kurdish society. In fact, the modern history of the Kurds is full of paradoxes” (‘Magic Realism’ 299). Ahmadzadeh highlights, for example, that Ali’s 1998 novel Parwana’s Evening, which is situated in a magical setting described as “a city whose lanes and streets are filled with blood,” can be connected to the socio-­ political reality: this “city is easily recognisable as a Kurdish city in Iraqi Kurdistan” (291). Ali’s other literary settings are reduced to socio-­political contexts in a similar manner, and Ahmadzadeh concludes that “various social, historical and political references in Ali’s novels … are clearly linked to the reality of Kurdistan. Magic realism has in Ali’s novels, become a native literary style to narrate the social and political situation of the Kurds” (298). Furthermore, not only are Ali’s works interpreted allegorically by Ahmadzadeh, but he also adopts an approach similar to the one briefly discussed above in reference to Galip and Qewamî. He claims that Ali’s use of magical realism as a literary style is justified because the author has “experienced the hardships of the Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan, and as an observer of the plight of the Kurds during the cruelty of Saddam Hussein’s brutal Anfal campaigns, has justified reasons to use magic realism as a literary mode for novels” (299). It remains unclear why the personal experiences of an author would ‘justify’ the employment of specific literary techniques, or why the use of these techniques must be ‘justified’ at all. Ahmadzadeh, again, seems to reduce the meaning of novels to only socio-­ political contexts and the author’s presumed political intentions.

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2.4   ‘A Hasty Flight to (Allegorical) Meaning’ Approaching Kurdistani literature through an allegorical lens is understandable because of the political and social contexts in which it came about, as well as the specific history of Kurdistani poetry and literature, as discussed above. We must be careful, however, to not reduce the meaning of literary texts only to these contexts.5 This point can be made with the help of Attridge’s influential analyses of approaches to J.M.  Coetzee’s novels, which are often read as depicting and commenting on post-­ apartheid South Africa. Attridge writes that allegorical readings can be enriching and informing if carried out with subtlety and responsibility (60). But, he continues, these interpretations should always “remain secondary to the singular evocation of the peculiar mental and emotional world of an individual undergoing a traumatic episode in his life, challenging us to loosen our own habitual frameworks and ways of reading and judging” (63). In contrast with strictly allegorical readings, Attridge therefore advocates for a ‘literal’ reading in which reading is conceptualized as an event during which the text is not treated as an object “whose significance has to be divined … [but as] something that comes into being only in the process of understanding and responding. That I, as an individual reader in a specific time and place, conditioned by a specific history, go through” (39). Attridge’s approach to literature is therefore concerned primarily with the actual reading process and on the specific manner in which style and form generate experiences, and does not focus exclusively on the text’s political essence. In this way he warns us, as Ernst Van Alphen articulates it in an article on allegorical and literary forms of reading, from “a hasty flight to (allegorical) meaning,” which “can only end up in the already known, in the recognition of conventional meanings” (30). Van Alphen, however, also criticizes Attridge’s hierarchical evaluation of literal reading as opposed to allegorical reading. In his view, these two kinds of reading are compatible, since it the act of reading itself requires affective investment. Once affected by a text, he explains, this experience may spark a form critical thought in the reader by, for example, encouraging them to reflect on the political meaning of a novel within that novel’s and/or the reader’s own socio-historical  context (27). This means that Van Alphen, like Attridge, values the act of reading as an event during which the style of a literary text is necessary to constitute an affective experience, but he claims in turn that these affects might touch or involve the

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reader in such a way that they might be triggered to think ‘outside of the box’ and reflect on the ways in which they are used to experiencing and perceiving the world (40). Furthermore, an emphasis on the affective qualities of a text, as is shown below, foregrounds the ways in which it may represent, narrate or circle around traumatic experiences that often have a socio-historical dimension. It is therefore precisely this combination of a focus on literary styles and methods, with an approach that embeds these styles and methods in their political, social and cultural contexts without reducing them to these contexts, that distinguishes the interpretations below from the ones critiqued above as limiting.

3   My Uncle Jamshid Khan 3.1   A Summary of the Story A close reading of one specific literary text can be used to critique the above-discussed overly political approaches to novels, which continuously return in scholarly and journalistic writings on Kurdistani literature. This text is Bachtyar Ali’s 2010 novella My Uncle Jamshid Khan Whom the Wind Always Carried with Itself (from here referred to as JM). Ali’s novella tells the story of Jamshid Khan, a man who becomes so light that he is unable to remain on the ground. It begins in 1979  in one of Saddam Hussein’s prisons, where Jamshid, only 17 years old, is held captive and tortured for being a communist. We learn that he is not really a communist for political reasons but is rather a romantic type who favors an idealist notion of a communist society because, in his view, it would allow him to have amorous relationships. At this site of torture and suffering, the first magical event takes place: Jamshid becomes as thin as a piece of paper. This enables him to magically fly away, leaving the walls of the prison behind. Nobody knows for exactly how long he has been in the air, the narrator tells us, but Jamshid manages to return to his home. His family then decides that it is best for Jamshid to remain grounded. The narrator, Jamshid’s nephew Salar, together with another nephew, Smaiel, are entrusted with the task of keeping him grounded by tying him to themselves with a rope. Despite all their efforts, however, they cannot prevent him from flying away again and landing in new places. Every time he flies away, Jamshid forgets his identity and his past. He eventually becomes a tabula rasa, with no memory and no identity, which allows him to continuously immerse himself in new ideologies and beliefs.

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During his long trips, we read, he is (mis)used as a mercenary in the Iraq-­ Iran War (by both sides), as a religious fanatic by an Islamic movement, as a worshiper and acolyte of romanticism and love who is in turn fooled by a lover, as a smuggler of refugees, and as a caged animal performing for the Kurdish political elite, amusing their wives and children. Eventually, he is exhibited in an amusement park owned by Turkish businessmen. Although he forgets his life sequences with every episode, the fact that he is a Kurd forms an aspect of his identity that he continues to remember. This aspect is also captivating; although every episode ends badly for him, instead of flying away and never coming back to the homeland that he comes to detest, he continuously feels drawn back to it. 3.2   An Allegorical Reading of JM It is not difficult to see how this novella would lend itself for an allegorical reading. Indeed, Ahmadzadeh writes in ‘The Kurdish Novel and National Identity-Formation across Borders’ that JM is about a protagonist “who has been imprisoned by the Ba’ath regime, loses so much weight he can be easily borne away by the wind. After flying to many different countries, he finally comes back to his ‘home,’ Kurdistan” (74). This reading is exactly what Van Alphen describes as ‘a hasty flight to (allegorical) meaning,’ resulting in a conclusion that is rather unsurprising in light of the abovementioned examples of scholarly and journalistic analyses: that the novella could only be about portraying Kurdistan as a homeland. In fact, his flight to the allegorical is so hasty that Ahmadzadeh misrepresents the novella’s ending: the protagonist does not come back to his ‘home’ Kurdistan at all, but finds peace in an unnamed country outside of Kurdistan. This aspect of the story is discussed in more detail below, but first it is important to show what other aspects an allegorical reading could highlight about JM. Again, this means that these kinds of readings should not be rejected completely, but instead discussion aims to show that relying on them exclusively results in interpretations that overlook other aspects of literary texts. An allegorical reading of JM could emphasize the idea that the successive phases through which the main character transforms and transverses can be traced back to the history of Kurdistan, representing the struggles and sufferings undergone by the Kurdish people in the 1980s and 1990s:

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the Iran-Iraq War; the atrocities committed under Saddam’s regime; the rise of conservative Islamism after Saddam’s fall; and the corruption and nepotism of the Kurdish government. From this allegorical perspective, Jamshid’s tendency to fly away would furthermore symbolize the many Kurdistani who fled to foreign countries in the 1990s, constituting different bonds with their old and new homelands. Such a reading would also make it possible to include the author’s own experiences and argue that similarities can be discerned between the highly politicized world of Jamshid and the political life in Kurdistan in which Ali himself was embedded. Born in the Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah, Ali studied at Salahaddin University in Erbil. He began working as a journalist in 1991, having dropped out of college due to an injury he sustained during an anti-Saddam student demonstration. He was later imprisoned for his activism. During the 1990s, amidst the Kurdish Civil War, the author fled and sought refuge in Germany, where he still lives and writes today. In an interview, Ali reminisces about his youth marked by war: “The brutality of politics at the time was terrifying. I felt as though I were a stranger in my own circles. All my friends were involved in the political movements of the time. I read a lot as a way to forget the circumstances around me” (Mills). That the protagonist of JM does not feel at home either, and the critique of Kurdish politics that can be found in the novel, could again be read from an autobiographical perspective that approaches the novel in an allegorical manner. They resonate, for example, with the view of Kurdistani literature written in diaspora as developed in the abovementioned Imagining Kurdistan: Identity, Culture and Society. Following Galip’s observations in this book, an allegorical reading would suggest that the magical-realist techniques utilized by Ali enable him to implicitly critique the socio-political reality of Kurdistan from the perspective of someone who has moved away from this same reality. 3.3   An Affective Reading of JM Although these interpretations emphasize important aspects about the context in which the novella was written, a ‘hasty flight’ to the allegorical makes us overlook specific aspects that a reading that focuses more on the text itself emphasizes. Below, three of these aspects are discussed, which all foreground ambivalence, uncertainty, critique and reflection, and destabilize attempts to reduce the novel to one essentialist political meaning. As

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such, they provide the novel with a spectral quality, understood in this context as referring to the anti-essentialist alterity grasped by Derrida’s hauntology. In part, these three aspects are still embedded in the context of Kurdistan, but they also refer to more general issues and questions relating to literature. The first of the textual aspects is accentuated by that which Van Alphen characterizes as affective reading. He contends that, besides allegorical approaches, we should also focus on what he calls the ‘affective operations’ of texts, which means, in his view, that we should analyze the way in which texts “shock us to thought” by opening “a space for the not yet known” (30). Following Gilles Deleuze and Jill Bennett’s theories about affect, Van Alphen states that “art does not illustrate or embody a proposition, but it embodies sensations or affects that stimulate thought” (22). In specific ways, he suggests, literary texts can touch us, shock us, trigger us, and encourage us to reflect on their inner workings and on the ways in which these workings are mediated by different social and historical structures (30). In the case of JM, an affective reading emphasizes aspects of the text that trigger feelings about, and reflections on, the moral ambivalence of Jamshid. This protagonist, after all, embraces different radical ideologies and ideals, undergoes torture for them, and also performs horrible deeds; his actions, and those done against him, make him an ambiguous protagonist, carving out a spectral liminal position that makes it impossible to pin him down. This position, after all, makes it difficult to characterize him as essentially good or bad, and shapes an experiential atmosphere of ambivalence and uncertainty that affects the reader in a specific way. Jamshid’s story, for example, commences in a brutal prison. We witness a process that reduces Jamshid to what Giorgio Agamben characterizes as ‘bare life’ in his Homo Sacer, and read how he is deprived of his rights, wholly without judicial protection. Treated as a ‘thing’ rather than a person—as that which Peeren characterizes as a ‘living ghost.’ The reader empathizes with him, is shocked and appalled by his fate and what is being done to him: he is made, after all, into a helpless victim of a world that he does not belong to, but that he cannot escape. Later in the story, however, we read how Jamshid becomes morally corrupt himself. He acts as a smuggler of refugees, for example, exploiting them to get rich. Furthermore, he abuses his special abilities to obtain information about people in order to blackmail them. Throughout these moments, the text’s affective elements trigger us into establishing what

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Van Alphen characterizes as a form of ‘heteropathic identification’ with someone whom we reject from a moral point of view. “Here,” Van Alphen writes, “the self doing the identification takes the risk of—temporarily and partially—‘becoming’ (like) the other. This is both exciting and risky, enriching and dangerous, but at any rate, affectively powerful” (28). During these reading moments, we are affectively touched by Ali’s novella, both appalled by Jamshid’s actions but also in some way understanding of why he does what he does: we are continually aware of his position as a creature devoid of agency who cannot escape existing power relations. In fact, the only thing he can do as someone without an identity, is embody and repeat these same relations himself. By constituting these affective responses in the reader, the realization that Jamshid sometimes acts as a perpetrator and sometimes as a victim destabilizes our beliefs about good and bad. These responses, furthermore, trigger the reader into thought on different levels: on a rather general level, the novella invites its readers to form a critical understanding of the human ability to perform evil deeds. This suggests that JM explores that which Primo Levi famously characterized as the ‘Grey Zone’ between good and bad. As Van Alphen observes: “The moral conclusion implied by the narrative event, is … of little weight when this morality is not accompanied by feeling; when it is not felt” (28). But this ‘moral conclusion’ can also be drawn on the macro-level of Kurdistan, criticizing Ahmadzadeh’s interpretation. Whereas this scholar reads JM as an allegory about Kurdistanis longing for ‘their’ homeland Kurdistan, an affective reading shows that such an interpretation is overly reductive and simplistic. We could, of course, draw parallels between Jamshid’s fate and the suffering of the Kurdish people, but the aforementioned moral ambivalence constituted through the novella’s affective operations actually encourages us to realize that it is impossible to tell one clear story about ‘the’ Kurdish suffering and ‘the’ Kurdish longing for one homeland. Such an affective reading therefore rejects narratives that embed Kurdish suffering in a nationalist discourse, and instead shows that quests to find ‘the’ Kurdish novel overlook the many aspects that make a novella like JM multifaceted and rich in meaning. This can be linked to analyses developed in the previous chapter: the narrative revolving around Kurdistani independence and a dichotomy between the Us and Them shaped in educational textbooks, are destabilized and questioned in, and by, a text like JM.

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3.4   Putting Experiences into Words The second aspect of JM that a ‘hasty flight’ to the allegorical overlooks does not concern the novella’s affective operations. Instead, this aspect explores the difficulty of putting experiences and perspectives into words. This topic is addressed by JM on two levels: one level concerns a postcolonial response to hegemonic discourses, and the second revolves around the ineffability of traumatic experiences. And again, this aspect of the text can only be discerned if we develop an analysis that focuses on the text itself, instead of on its socio-political context or the political ideals of its author. This reading can be developed by discussing Jamshid’s penultimate ‘adventure’: his work as a people smuggler at the Turkish border with Greece. He gets caught but escapes by flying into the air and goes missing for ten long years. His nephew is convinced that Jamshid must have drowned at sea and arranges a funeral for him back home. Jamshid eventually reappears after a decade of absence and only has one goal: writing down his memories and narrating how he traveled over land and sea. Although he repeatedly forgets what happened to him every time he ‘lands,’ he suggests that he might remember pieces and periods when he begins writing them down. Since Jamshid considers the narrator to be too simple and limited in his understanding of literature to be useful, he requests the help of Smaiel, the other nephew, who is familiar with literature in general and Western literature in particular. When Smaiel reads the story that Jamshid has been working on for two months, however, he is disappointed. Instead of narrating his own story as accurately as possible, his autobiography reads like an exact replica of Homer’s Odyssey, Smaiel observes, and concludes that Jamshid must have read this book during his trips in faraway lands (120). This episode in JM can be read and interpreted in (at least) two different ways. Firstly, it reflects the difficulty of telling a story and putting experiences into words in a context outside of the hegemonic discourse of Western literature. The only way in which Jamshid is able to describe his experiences of suffering, after all, is by telling them in the form of one of the master narratives of Western civilization. When Jamshid is made aware of the analogy, he burns all the pages and concludes that writing an autobiography is a useless and meaningless endeavor anyway. This conclusion implicitly resonates with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s influential claim that the subaltern cannot speak, in turn leading us to

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reflect on the literary techniques employed in JM, especially the use of magical realism in the context of postcolonial critique. Amaryll Chanady, for example, argues that “magical realism … is characterised first of all by two conflicting, but autonomously coherent, perspectives, one based on an ‘enlightened’ and rational view of reality, and the other on the acceptance of the supernatural as part of everyday reality” (21–22). In the same vein, Homi Bhabha argues that magical realism is “the literary language of the emergent postcolonial world” (7). Hence, magical realism is understood by these scholars as a politically subversive power, enabling the marginalized, silenced or subaltern to talk back to the massive imperial center with its hegemonic discourse that revolves around representations of rationalism and enlightened civilization. Whereas Jamshid himself is unable to ‘talk back’ but is usurped by a Western master narrative, Ali is able to do this with the help of magical-realist techniques that provide his texts with a certain spectral quality that enables them to haunt hegemonic discourses. A second interpretation of this passage revolves around trauma and can be developed by focusing on the intertextual relationship between Jamshid’s story and that of Homer’s protagonist Odysseus. Like Jamshid, Odysseus wandered for a decade, after the battle for Troy, before reaching his home Ithaca. In Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, American psychologist Jonathan Shay argues that the story of Odysseus sheds light on the feeling of not-belonging, experienced—in the case of his analysis—by Vietnam veterans who felt rejected, misunderstood and lost when they returned to America after the war. Shay specifically emphasizes that the moment Odysseus returns home, he learns that it is impossible to talk about his past experiences with the audience that he considers his own, “at least not to people who show themselves incapable of hearing the stories with their hearts” (17). Shay maintains that this is also the case for combat veterans “who fly into a rage when a civilian tries to tell them the meaning of their own experience” (17). This form of estrangement, illustrated by the story of Odysseus, obstructs the process of healing for those who have experienced war since, Shay claims, “recovery happens only in community” (4, emphasis in the original). In light of these ideas, Jamshid’s story gains an additional layer of meaning: Jamshid is not only unable to put his experiences into words because they are pulled immediately into a hegemonic Western discourse, but also because these traumatic experiences themselves are so particular and private that he is unable to share them. Jamshid’s narrative therefore

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resonates with Caruth’s reflections on the ‘wounded psyche,’ briefly discussed in Chap. 1. According to Caruth, trauma is a “wound of the mind—the breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world” (4). This means, she continues, that the experience of trauma cannot be approached from within existing epistemological structures, nor can it be placed within a historical timeframe. “For history to be a history of trauma,” Caruth concludes, “means that it is referential precisely to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs; or to put it somewhat differently, that a history can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence” (18). Even though, as stated in Chap. 1, Caruth’s reflections on trauma overlook the different ways in which the experience can be represented, her theory does highlight a specific interpretation of this aspect of JM: more than the physical torture by the hands of the enemy, this interpretation suggests, his inability to put his experiences into words blocks Jamshid’s efforts to be again embedded in his community. 3.5   A Plethora of Meanings The above interpretation’s emphasis on the inability to put experiences into words is closely related to a third aspect of JM that allegorical readings overlook. This aspect concerns art and escapism and can again be illustrated using a passage in the novella. After one of his many flights to escape the hands of those who want to kill him, Jamshid tumbles down into the field of a rich politician, whose philosophy is that all that is found on his property is, by definition, his. When the landowner-politician hears about Jamshid’s flying abilities, he uses him as an instrument of entertainment. Caging him as an animal, he makes him perform at parties to amuse women and children. After a while, however, he loses Jamshid in a poker game to another rich politician. When the new owner realizes that people are losing their interest in this dirty, useless creature, he locks Jamshid in a cage and forgets about him. Jamshid’s unbearable situation worsens when he is eventually sold to a group of Turkish businessmen, who force him to perform as a caged animal in their amusement park. A ‘hasty flight to (allegorical) meaning’ would interpret this passage as a comment on the Kurdish political elite, on nepotism and corruption. The politicians in this passage are portrayed as exploitative and shallow, selling their country to Turkish businessmen who are only concerned with entertainment and consumerism. This reading, however, only foregrounds one dimension of the story and fails to unlock others. Again, one way of

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unlocking these other interpretations is through the method of intertextuality: the fate of Jamshid as a caged artist resonates with that of the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s ‘A Hunger Artist.’ In this short story, Kafka describes an artist whose only goal in life is to perform his talent for starvation in front of the public. At first, his audiences show interest in his art. Yet as time passes, he loses their attention and ultimately ends up as a caged animal performing at an amusement park. The incapability of his audience to attend to him, their lack of understanding of and interest in his art, eventually result in the artist’s decay and death. Before he dies, however, he confesses that he only became a hunger artist because he could not find food that he liked (200). This intertextual relationship between Ali and the European author not only shifts the reader’s focus away from the socio-political context of Kurdistan, but might also spur us to reflect on our reception of art. Both the hunger artist and Jamshid are eventually reduced to cheap entertainment. And both are continually misunderstood by others: in the case of the hunger artist by his audience, in the case of Jamshid by his nephews. And this, in turn, might trigger reflection on the way in which Ali’s novella itself is continually misunderstood by critics, such as the abovementioned Ahmadzadeh, who aims to pin JM down to a specific socio-historical context and looks for novels that can ‘tell us who the Kurds are.’ The moment a novel is not specifically ‘Kurdish,’ as we have seen, he rejects it, as happens in JM when Jamshid’s story is dismissed for being too much like the Odyssey and not ‘personal’ or ‘authentic’ enough. Jamshid’s tendency to fly away, the intertextual link suggests, might less represent Kurdistanis fleeing from their homeland, than the fleeting meaning of the text itself, which persistently attempts to escape from critics who aim to interpret it in one specific way. As in the case of Kafka’s story, moreover, it is impossible to defend one essentialist interpretation; instead it invites various interpretations. 3.6   Art and Escape Jamshid is eventually rescued from the amusement park by his nephew, who takes him back home. But now he is more tired than ever of forgetting everything and starting over again, and begs his nephew to kill him. The narrator, Salar, who has spent his whole life serving his uncle—who, in his moral ambivalence, often treats him as a servant or even a slave—is unable to carry out this task. But Jamshid is persistent. He knows that the

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politicians’ children who have seen him perform as an animal will eventually succeed their parents and will do everything in their power to catch him again. Instead of killing him, however, Salar suggests the following: Oh, Mighty Khan, Oh, my only real and fearless hero, your body resembles a sheet of paper, I will write down your whole life on it, so that every time you fall from the sky and are left memoryless, you can read your own history. So that you will remember who you are and why you are on the run. So that you learn where you are from and why you should not return. (147; my translation)

The narrator then helps his uncle write down his life story on his body, in the hope of finding a place “where people are not taken by the wind.” His uncle flies away, and after two years of absence Salar suddenly receives letters and pictures of him. The pictures show a robust man, almost unrecognizable. In the letter, he tells his nephew that, after a long journey, he has finally settled in a place where he is taken care of, a place where people are full of love and respect for him. He also writes that, more and more, he is gaining weight and is almost becoming a “normal human being” again (150). Suddenly, however, the narrator notices that, while telling Jamshid’s story, he himself is confronted with a similar fate. Just like Jamshid before, he begins to feel weightless, and knows that only the words written on paper might help him escape this fate. On the day that he receives his uncle’s letter, however, the narrator feels a weakness overcoming him. Out of fear that he will, just like his uncle, be taken by the wind and lose all of his memories, he begins to write Jamshid’s story with greater urgency. The novella ends with the following words, which are the same words with which it opened: It was the beginning of 1979, when Jamshid Khan, only 17 years old, was imprisoned for the first time … I write this, and then I pause … I hesitate to narrate this story, for I know that those who have not met Jamshid will never take it from me that this really happened, nor will they ever be able to understand. (151; my translation).

With this ending, JM becomes circular and emphasizes its own constructed nature: the fact that it is a story narrated with the help of words. And this emphasis again triggers reflections on art and escapism. Does art

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present us with a form of escapism from a harsh reality, like Jamshid who flew away from the prison in which he was tortured? Is it merely a form of entertainment, as symbolized by Kafka’s hunger artist and Jamshid’s exhibition in amusement parks? Can it escape from reductive interpretations that aim to tie it down to one specific context? Can a character, shaped in and by a text, escape from this same text? At first glance, the fact that the narrator of Jamshid’s story comes to repeat Jamshid’s fate makes the text itself into an inescapable necessity, like the hunger artist’s confession that he only became a hunger artist simply because he could not find food that he liked. The necessity of writing is linked, in this way, to survival, which in this context might imply that one can only try to understand their present and shape their future by remembering their past, writing it down and endlessly narrating it again and again. However, the different interpretations of the story, discussed above, show that such a reading only foregrounds one aspect of JM. Returning to the notion of ‘escape,’ the novella also seems to suggest that the only way in which Jamshid could truly escape is by migrating to a world where humanity is respected. Only in a foreign country, after all, is his unnatural condition valued. Since the novella continually emphasizes its own constructed nature, however, such a reading is countered by an interpretation that suggests that Jamshid has not migrated to an existing country outside of Kurdistan, but has turned himself into his own narration and, when Salar helps him write down his story onto his own body, into his own words both literally and figuratively. Paradoxically, however, this means at the same time that he sacrifices himself for his text, surviving by reducing himself to his own narration. Since we, as readers, know the life history of Jamshid, furthermore, we know that history might repeat itself. Despite all the efforts of the narrator to write down this story after Jamshid leaves, he too might become a weightless person with no history, and hence without an identity. Reducing himself to a text that can be read by an audience might therefore also be the only way out—the only possibility to escape—for the narrator, who disappears the moment we close the novella. This analysis of JM can be concluded with a passage from a 2018 interview in which Bachtyar Ali reflects on literature and escapism: Escape helps us to question our “normal” world order and to see a nationalist partitioning of the world—which still prevails despite globalisation—as inhuman. Escape can be a good reason to liberate ourselves more and more

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from nationalism. It helps us to create a new, universal world view, a world view that has nothing to do with globalisation in the economic sense. Basically, art cannot be separated from escape because art in itself is a form of escape. It is only in art that these universal values, which were born of escape, can be embodied. (qtd. in Galler)

Only by providing a form of escape, Ali suggests in this paradoxical passage, can texts become political and emphasize what he characterizes as universal values. And only by refusing to be reduced to socio-political contexts, can literature comment on these same contexts. Again, this means that texts are still embedded in their contexts and do not float in a vacuum; what Ali therefore seems to criticize here is ‘a hasty flight to (allegorical) meaning,’ to repeat Van Alphen’s expression, which limits a text to only one meaning and overlooks the ways in which it refers to literary discourses outside of the direct cultural context from which it comes about.

4  The City of White Musicians 4.1   Mourning and Disappearance Bachtyar Ali’s references to literature and escape resonate with the second literary text analyzed in this chapter: Ali’s The City of White Musicians. In this 2005 novel, the notion of escape also plays an important role. Not only by describing a utopian place to which some of its protagonists escape—the titular ‘city of white musicians’—but also by shaping a literary universe that itself tries to escape from political narratives and ideologies that, within the KRI, absorb and therefore complicate mourning and the processing of traumatic experiences. In the case of The City of White Musicians, this mourning specifically concerns Anfal victims who disappeared under Saddam’s regime and whose bodies have never been found, or at least never identified. Before turning to a close reading of this novel and showing how it plays an escapist role, it is necessary to provide an overview of its complex context. In her 2008 article ‘Archaeology and Forensic Investigation of Recent Mass Graves,’ Caroline Steele describes Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 as a site of anarchy, in which people were “excavating mass graves with their hands, shovels and heavy equipment in search of missing friends and family members” (422). This ‘anarchy’ was driven by

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a craving for answers about the fates of their missing loved ones. What makes such disappearances into traumatizing experiences for those left behind, Avery Gordon observes in her book Ghostly Matters, is that it produces “a complex system of repression, a thing in itself. With less noise than expected, it removes people … from their familiar world, with all its small joys and pains, and transports them to an unfamiliar place where certain principles of social reality are absent. … [The missing] are people who have disappeared through enforced absence and fearful silence” (112). In Gordon’s view, it is crucial that human rights organizations do everything in their power to recover “knowledge of the disappeared and mak[e] public what has happened to them” (79). In post-conflict Iraq, however, this has not yet happened. Although “mass graves continue to be identified by the Iraqi Office of the Missing” (Steel 425–426), little effort has been made toward exhuming and returning the remains of some 300,000 Iraqis interred in mass graves to their families, throwing this society in what Baillie characterizes as an unresolved ‘conflict-time’ (see Baillie). This has resulted in a situation in which the memories of those who disappeared continue to haunt the present, a situation characterized more deeply in Chap. 5 through the concept of the ‘phantomic.’ As briefly described in Chap. 1, this notion refers to ghosts with a fleeting and vulnerable status. To briefly illustrate the ongoing trauma and uncertainty caused by the missing here, two examples are helpful. The first is the experience of an elderly woman, Soiba Saed Qadir, whom I met during a visit to Halabja in 2018. She told me that she fled from her town on foot after the bombardment of Halabja. During her flight, she had to leave her children behind one by one, thinking them dead. At that time, however, she was blinded by the chemicals used in the attack. She confessed to me that, in retrospect, she regrets her decision to leave them behind, since she cannot be absolutely sure that they were indeed dead or whether she had left them to die alone. Maybe, she told me, they were still alive and were helped by others. Maybe they were adopted and are now living somewhere else, far away from her. Either way, she told me, her children visit her every night in her dreams, asking her why she left them behind.6 The second example is the experience of Taimur Abdullah Ahmed, who was only 12 years old when his village was Anfalized in 1988. He is the only survivor of being buried in a mass grave. In an interview with Arif Qurbany, Taimur not only describes the horrific experience of escaping from the pits in which dead bodies were thrown, but also describes his

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involvement in the trial against Ali Hassan Al-Majid, who was held responsible for the Anfal operations years later. Taimur describes how the truthfulness of his testimony was repeatedly questioned during the trial. He tells the interviewer: Saddam Hussein did not open his mouth, but his lawyer was very talkative … he asked me about the dimensions, depth and size of the pits and the distance between them; my answer was the width of each ditch was about the width of the bulldozer’s blade which is two meters and a half and the distances between them was about one meter and a half. Their lawyer rejected my answer saying that a bulldozer cannot work in those small spaces. He casted doubt whether a pit of that size would take that many corpses. (111).

That Taimur’s memories about these traumatic experiences can be questioned is partly because the remains of his family, like those of countless others, have never been found. Only after the trial, Taimur recalls in the same interview, did he visit the gravesite together with a group of political representatives. As of yet, however, little effort has been put into excavating the site; his ultimate wish is to one day find the remains of his family and to repatriate them to their hometown, near the Debna Monument, which is dedicated to the victims of Anfal (Qurbany 129). These two examples illustrate the destructive role that the absence of knowledge about those who disappeared plays in contemporary Kurdistani society. This absence not only makes fragmented, individual memories and traumas into the only sources about what happened, but also makes it possible for those with different political perspectives to challenge or deny representations of these traumatic events. This is, again, why the notion of the ‘phantomic’ has been chosen: the faint and fleeting nature of the figure of the phantom makes it highly vulnerable to political appropriation. This has resulted in a memory culture that shares certain similarities with that of the Soviet Gulags in Russia from the 1930s through 1950s. In his analysis of the Gulags, Alexander Etkind observes that what characterizes “the Soviet catastrophe, apart from its massive scale, is its very uncertainty. We do not have anything like a full list of victims; we do not have anything like a full list of executioners” (10). This has resulted, Etkind writes, in the absence of a ‘reality check’ for either hope or mourning. Death, he therefore states, “could not be recognized as death, and survival could not be

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relied upon as life. The state, the source of the repressions, was also the only source of information” (18). This situation, Etkind continues, has had a devastating effect on Russian society, which he explains through the Freudian notion of the ‘uncanny’: “if suffering is not remembered, it will be repeated. If the loss is not recognized, it threatens to return in strange though not entirely new forms, as the uncanny. When the dead are not properly mourned, they turn into the undead and cause trouble for the living” (16–17). Following Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander, Etkind argues that historical studies on the Soviet Gulags should resist the temptation to follow official political narratives that cast doubt on the testimonies of survivors and ‘domesticate disbelief’ and ‘explain it away’ (12). Furthermore, they should not be about “resolving its warped contradictions in a smooth, functional narrative” (12). Instead, Etkind praises representations of the Gulag created by Russian writers and filmmakers. Their ghostly visions, he suggests, “extend the work of mourning into those spaces that defeat more rational ways of understanding the past” (18–19). This chapter follows Etkind’s suggestion and argues that, in the context of the KRI, Ali’s The City of White Musicians plays a similar role. Not only does this novel explore themes of disappearance, mourning and trauma, but it also counters ‘smooth’ political narratives about the past, thereby gaining the more general spectral quality discussed above. It is impossible to summarize the novel in its entirety within the scope of this chapter, or to discuss the narratives it shapes as a whole. To show how the novel counters ‘smooth’ representations of the past and foregrounds suffering and memories of traumatic experiences in different ways, five aspects are described instead: its employment of magical realism; its destabilization of linear narratives with help of messianic and cyclical temporality as well as ‘third-time’; its ambiguous portrayal of Us and Them that makes it impossible to cast judgments; and its references to ghosts and phantoms. In this way, the reader becomes a witness to the construction of testimonies about the past, and realizes that this past can never truly be understood, deciphered or represented through ‘smooth’ political narratives. 4.2   Magical Realism The first important aspect in The City of White Musicians (hereafter The City) concerns the manner in which historical facts are continuously questioned using magical-realist techniques. This is a feature which this novel

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shares with JM, and that can be analyzed by using a methodology developed in the context of magical realism and Holocaust representation. Jenni Adams argues that this genre’s approach to reality as miraculous and ungraspable makes it possible for writers to (re)present the ungraspable character of traumatic events, their unthinkability, and the impossibility of embedding them in ‘normal’ forms of understanding, storytelling or representing history. According to Adams, “the frequently idiosyncratic use of magic in these novels might be linked to recurrent doubts about the Holocaust’s assimilability to existing narrative paradigms” (8). What makes Adams’s observations helpful in the context of Ali’s novel, is that she especially highlights non-realistic techniques employed by postmemory authors in the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: a generation of authors who did not experience the Holocaust themselves and who are therefore dependent on the testimonies of survivors to understand this traumatic event. Adams argues that in magical-realist writings the author constitutes a dialogue with the victims in order to reconstruct the history of trauma. A similar technique is employed in The City: in this novel, however, magical realism is employed in the creation of a dialogue within the text that takes place between two narrators. The two members of this ‘team’ belong to two different worlds: the world of the living and the world of the dead. Yet, they are not presented as contradictory, thus shaping an unreliable narrative in which several characteristics of magical realism return, prompting the reader to frequently reflect on the ‘truthfulness’ of a story haunted by the dead. The City’s two narrators (and protagonists) are introduced in the beginning of the novel: the messianic Jaladat, who undergoes various traumatic episodes, and Ali Sharaf Yaar, an author who has been asked to write Jaladat’s biography. The novel opens in 1998 with Ali Sharaf Yaar at Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands. Via Damascus, he is going to Kurdistan to settle his divorce. A person named Sharwkhy Sharwkh Yaar approaches him, asking if he will take a plastic bag filled with sheet music, CDs and books about music to Kurdistan to give them to a girl named Rawshany Mustafa. Sharwkhy Sharwkh tells Ali that he cannot undertake the trip himself, because he must return to an otherworldly place, a place that cannot be seen. He urges Ali to be patient; once he arrives it will all be clarified by a man named Jaladati Kotr (meaning ‘Jaladat the Dove’), who is mysteriously characterized as “he who came back from the City of White Musicians” (9). Ali is unconvinced and thinks that the man might

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be one of the people living in diaspora who has gone mad. Nevertheless, he takes the bag with him and enters the plane (7–12). For those living in diaspora, this scene might come across as particularly familiar and realistic: during the 1990s, when Saddam was still in power, Kurdish people could not fly directly to the airports situated in the Arabic part of Iraq, but had to travel through Turkey or Syria to get to the KRI. The situation changed with the installment of Arbil Airport, which opened to the public in 2010. Furthermore, as there was (and still is) no mail service in place, those living in diaspora frequently ask travelers to take letters or packages with them. It is, therefore, not the request itself but the backstory of the request that seems strange, and that makes Ali Sharaf Yaar interpret the mysterious man’s behavior as a sign of mental illness. The emphasis on the mental state of the person who introduces the reader to the story of Jaladat foregrounds the narration’s unreliability. The fact that the notion of ‘madness’ is already mentioned in the beginning of the novel, moreover, highlights the importance of this theme in The City as a whole, destabilizing and, like Derrida’s specter, deconstructing the boundaries between the real and the magical, between fact and fiction, perception and illusion. Indeed, we are never certain that the novel’s story is not the hallucination of a ‘madman.’ The narrator then tells us that he met Jaladat a week and a half after his arrival in Kurdistan. Although he cannot yet say anything about this encounter, he states that Jaladat has made such an impression on him that for the first time in his writing career, he agreed to co-author the biography of a living person. In contrast with the observations described above that problematize the story’s veracity, this remark reminds the reader of the possibly realistic aspects of the narrative, making it unclear what is real and what is not real, what is historical fact and what is imagination or fiction. As the novel continues, the boundaries between the real and the magical are further destabilized by the two protagonists, who argue frequently about how to truthfully represent Jaladat’s life. Jaladat continually insists on the importance of an accurate description of his past, which is permeated with painful memories, but this proves to be impossible. The narrators therefore discover that they must seek refuge in the more imaginative and creative dimensions of art to tell Jaladat’s story of suffering, and to show how this suffering still permeates the present. The following passage demonstrates how this idea destabilizes the novel’s ‘truthfulness’ on different levels. In this passage, Jaladat addresses the

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reader just before he is crucified and burned alive by Kurdish politicians (below, a more detailed description of the story will follow): And then they let me walk in front of them. This is my advice to you, might this ever happen: don’t show them that you are afraid, since this will not change anything. If they are planning to kill you, they will proceed with it anyway. Instead, try to think of something else and take a moment to enjoy your surroundings. If you don’t have anything to look at, close your eyes and try to reminisce about happy times you have known. Think of the first day that you attended school, try to picture the blackboard, the windows of your classroom. While thinking this, something will crack, just like a movie that stops halfway and turns into dark. From then on you will not remember anything. You will die, without going through the dreadful path to death. Please accept this from me as someone with many years of experience in dying, and not as a novelist. (554; my translation)

The powers of imagination and memory are celebrated in this fragment; visualizing a fond memory, moments before his death, enables the narrator to die without ‘going through the dreadful path to death.’ By claiming that his advice is based on the actual experience of dying, however, the narrator contrasts these allusions to the power of imagination with ‘reality.’ At the same time, the fact that he is still narrating his own experience of dying, combined with the fact that shortly after this event Jaladat rises out of the ashes, again blurs the boundaries between what is real and what is imagined. A crucial element in this passage, furthermore, is that it emphasizes the power of memories and imagination in the face of suffering. Breaking the fourth wall, Jaladat invites the reader to a ‘secondary witnessing’ of this suffering. As discussed in Chap. 1, according to Laub the secondary witness is someone who is ‘a witness to the testimonies of others’; which means that it concerns being “the immediate receiver of these testimonies” (‘An Event Without a Witness’ 76). Laub argues that this position brings the responsibility of emotional and cognitive engagement, which in the context of the above passage could be interpreted as encouraging the reader to bear witness to Jaladat’s testimony, and to understand why the fictional, magical-realist representations of his suffering should be accepted unquestioned.

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4.3   Messianic, Biblical and Cyclic Temporalities The blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction returns in the different ways in which temporality is represented in The City. A linear representation of events, for example, is suddenly disturbed by a flashback to Jaladat’s youth, ‘pulling time out of joint,’ to again refer to Derrida’s observations on the temporal aspects of the spectral. A part entitled ‘Book One: The Story According to Ali Sharaf Yaar,’ unfolds the genesis of Jaladat’s life and describes events that are presented as fundamental for the development of his personality. They include the death of his mother Mariam Faizi in 1970, six months after his birth; the flute he inherited at age eight from a neighbor who died by suicide; the bus crash two years later at which all of his friends from music class died and of which he was the only survivor (although it remains unclear whether he actually survived); the death of his father when Jaladat was 11 years old; and the troubled relationship with his brother and sister-in-law, who were obsessed with their father’s estate and did not want to share it with him. When they refused to take care of Jaladat, he ended up on the streets. The narrator pays limited attention to the latter characters, for he proclaims that mischievous people like them are not worthy of being ‘mentioned’ or ‘remembered.’ However, people tend to be both bad and good simultaneously, the narrator continues, and for that reason it is difficult to make clear distinctions (14–21): this theme of moral ambivalence is discussed further below. What is important in the context of the novel’s temporal structures is that all the events listed above are presented as playing essential roles in Jaladat’s development, preparing him for the life that he is destined to live. As such, they are described in a way that emphasizes an understanding of time that conflicts with the rational idea of cause and effect: they give Jaladat a messianic quality and introduce a telos, an aim to his story that undermines strictly scientific views. If he had not been given the flute, the novel suggests, Jaladat would not have become a musician. If his relatives had not abandoned him, furthermore, he would not have followed his music teacher Ishaac together with his friend. The name of this teacher again highlights the novel’s messianic dimension, as it alludes to Isaac, an important figure in all Abrahamic religions.7 In the second chapter of The City, entitled ‘Book Two: The Story according to Jaladaty Kotr,’ Ishaac is presented as driven by the divine power of music, which he contrasts with the temporal and limited character of life on earth. As he tells his pupils:

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“Music is the voice of the voiceless. Music is understanding. Music is the voice of all the things that do not have a voice of their own … immortality is one of the qualities of musicians” (24; my translation). The messianic aspects of the story, and the role that art plays in these aspects, return when Ishaac and his pupils, Jaladat and his friend, are imprisoned by a group of 15 identical-looking Arab soldiers dressed in uniforms who mistake them for enemy soldiers and torture them. Ishaac’s advice to his students, foreshadowing aspects of Jaladat’s monologue cited above, is to ruminate on their inner music, despite their suffering and pain. Of the three of them, however, Jaladat is the only one who cannot completely lose himself in his Kopf-music and forget his own suffering or the suffering of others (63). One early morning, they are blindfolded and driven toward what Jaladat calls “hell on earth” (63–64). He later recalls how during that ride he began playing his flute at the request of a voice instructing him to play. Losing himself in his music, he forgets everything around him; all he remembers is that there was a hand that ‘saved’ him. Whether he is someone who has escaped death or whether he is dead again/still remains unclear. What is beyond dispute is that he is the only person who can tell the story; we learn later in the novel that in this accident everyone (but him?) was killed. Messianic and biblical elements in The City are most explicit when, later in the story, Jaladat is crucified and burned alive, and then miraculously rises from the ashes and enters the timeless City of White Musicians. This immense city can be characterized as a locus amoenus: an idealized and utopian place of sanctuary, hinted at in the interview with Ali cited above. It holds innumerable massacred artists who continue to perform their professions, as well as people who were tortured and killed by Saddam’s regime. Assigned with the mission to bring the works of the artists and letters of the victims back to life, the second half of the novel tells the story of the journeys that Jaladat undertakes between this city and the ‘real’ world. In this part, he appears not as the normative religious messenger, like Christ, but is concerned with transmitting knowledge about aesthetic values. Furthermore, he brings letters from Saddam’s victims, telling about their suffering and pain, from the City of White Musicians to their loved ones. It is only in death, the novel seems to suggest, that Jaladat can truly be of help: the fact that he himself has experienced suffering enables him to carry out his messianic task. This emphasizes the role that cyclical timeframes play in religion and myths, portraying suffering as something that

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has meaning because it is more than a historical ‘accident.’ As Mircea Eliade observes about the role that cyclical representations of suffering (used to) play in religious discourses: “Whatever its nature and whatever its apparent cause, … suffering had a meaning; it corresponded, if not always to a prototype, at least to an order whose value was not contested” (96). Portraying suffering by referencing mythical and religious narratives, this suggests, provides the suffering of the Kurdistani people with an almost sacred meaning. The traumatic and complex story of the region in which the narrative takes place, it could furthermore be argued, can only be told by way of stories that already exist, changing them slightly, however, to adapt to the specifics of the historical situation. Not only are we forced to repeat stories that took place in the past, in other words, we are also forced to repeat and/or represent these stories in the ways in which we remember them. A similar idea echoes through JM, as we have seen, more specifically in that novella’s allusions to the Odyssey. 4.4   Third-Time and the Unraveling of the Self Whereas messianic and cyclic aspects of the novel problematize linear understandings of time and question the nature of memory, in the second part of The City’s Book Two, these temporalities are themselves problematized, putting even more emphasis on the unreliable nature of memory. The novel does this by shaping what has been defined as ‘third-time’: a fragmentary perspective on temporality that comes about in ungraspable in-between, or liminal, spaces. A helpful analysis of this concept can be found in the postcolonial writings of Kukum Sangari, who argues that “broken out of the binary opposition between circular and linear,” this technique “gives a third space and a different time the chance to emerge” (176). The interplay between different understandings of time is transformative in nature, Sangari continues, and creates the possibility of introducing multiple conflicting perspectives on history. As such, this third-time shows that a unified understanding of historical events excludes other understandings and representations of the past, which means that there never is such a thing as ‘one’ history, whether it is presented as linear, messianic or cyclic.8 This form of time permeates or, more accurately, corrodes and disturbs the narratives in The City after the imprisonment of Ishaac and his pupils: from this moment on, the novel’s timeframe gradually grows more and more opaque and fragmented, and it becomes more and more unclear

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what is actually happening. The narrator states that he does not know exactly how he got there, but tells the reader that after his torture he finds himself alone and injured in a dark place that seems to be a cellar. He is helped by two characters named Dahlia and Musa. The latter, we learn later, is a doctor who has tasked himself with creating an underground museum to preserve artworks in times of war, again contrasting the world of art with the world of war and pain. The former is a sex worker who has fled her relatives and now lives in exile. It turns out that Jaladat has been brought to a brothel called ‘White Oranges.’9 His bed feels like a grave to him, in which he hears cheap Arabic music. Throughout his stay, Jaladat is unable to determine where White Oranges is geographically located. All that we know is that the brothel is situated in a city of sand, a city that is characterized as a hybrid mirage, reflecting fragments of other places and never becoming ‘real.’ At the same time, it is described as a nameless no-­ man’s town, which can only be visited by passers-by, establishing it as a liminal, spectral space floating in the third-time described above. Again, Jaladat might find himself in this in-between space, and might be able to travel between the real world and the heavenly City of White Musicians, because he is neither dead nor alive. At one point, Dahlia indeed says to him about their first moments together, drawing intertextual references with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliette or to fairy tales in which characters are kissed back to life: “You were a wounded prince whom I wanted to kiss back to life, but you didn’t come back to life. I touched your hands with my hands and felt that you were dead. You were freezing cold” (100; my translation). When she reflects on his condition, however, Dahlia urges him not to understand his situation as an illusion but as reality: “You have to promise me. Don’t think I’m telling you magical or fictional stories. You must promise not to see me as a person who believes in magic… I would hate to be labelled a magician” (98; my translation). Not only do these passages revolve around the employment of magical-realist techniques, but the latter statement also reflects on these techniques and even rejects them in the name of ‘reality.’ Despite the fact that this seems impossible, in this way the reader is confronted with two contradicting realities or dimensions—of magical realism and realism, of life and death—while the novel’s protagonist continues his task of witnessing, ‘existing’ in a fragmented third space between these different dimensions. However, since he exists in this untrustworthy and fragmented liminal space permeated with third-time, his own identity begins to unravel as

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well, reflecting the links between memory and identity. Realizing that Jaladat’s passion for music can be life-threatening because it will attract attention, Dahlia enlists the help of an Arabic teacher, Fahmi Basr. Having been tortured by the regime himself, this man has tasked himself with retraining skilled musicians to become unskilled musicians, so that they no longer run the risk of being tortured or killed. The methods he uses to extract music from his students are based on the torture practices of the Ba’athists. One such technique, which the torturers called ‘Disco room,’ exposes the victim to extremely loud noises (144). Having lost his identity as a musician, the novel again gains a spectral quality by exploring the borders between truth and lying, between realism and illusion, and again does this through the method of intertextuality: Jaladat begins to lie more and more. We read that it was not until reading Jurek Becker’s 1969 book Jacob the Liar years later that he understood the necessity of lying to survive the war. Just like Becker’s Jacob, who lies about having a secret radio and spreads optimistic stories among the people in the Łódź ghetto to keep their spirits alive, our character notices that the only way in which he is able to survive—or at least thinks he is able to survive—is by making up an alternate reality (145–47). Not only does this again create an intertextual reference to the Bible, this time to Isaac’s son Jacob who lied to his father, but it also again refers to the power of imagination and art in combining truth and fiction, reality and magic, life and death. Jaladat’s attempt to transform himself into an unskilled musician, furthermore, illustrates that war is more than the destruction of cities and people, but also robs those who survive of their civilization and of their ability to understand beauty. 4.5   Us Versus Them The ways in which Ali’s novel represents different temporalities (linear, messianic, cyclic and third-time), which influence the protagonist’s identity, are related to another characteristic of this novel: its destabilization of ‘smooth’ political narratives that revolve around the dichotomy between an Us and a Them, as discussed in Chap. 2 in the context of educational textbooks. This destabilization takes place by telling a part of the story of Jaladat—the novel’s Us—via a character belonging to Them. This character is a man who has committed the most horrible crimes against Kurds but eventually fled Saddam’s regime. His name is Samir, and Jaladat meets him when he must hide in his room at the brothel. Every night before

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going to sleep, Samir tells Jaladat about a part of his life in the form of a One Thousand and One Nights story. It is through these stories that we, together with Jaladat, come to realize that Samir played an important role in Jaladat’s life, and we are able, again together with Jaladat, to fill in the gaps in the fragmented story of his life told thus far in the novel. The scope of this chapter does not make it possible to discuss the details of these stories. What is nevertheless important about them is that the stories told by Samir lead Jaladat to begin remembering who he is and, eventually, realize that he is a prophet. Instead of shaping a dichotomy between an Us and Them, The City shows how the Us and Them come to define each other and, in a sense, are even dependent on each other. Not only does this aspect—again—deconstruct this dichotomy and cast doubt on the truthfulness of the narrative that is shaped alongside it, but it also bears witness to the idea that, in the case of traumas like the ones discussed in this novel, those who truly experienced horrors in the past are dead. As Agamben observes in his analysis of Primo Levi’s memoires of the Holocaust, the victims who have first-hand experience of the depth of these crimes cannot do so because they are no longer alive. The only way of knowing what happened in the past, Agamben concludes, is via the testimonies of those who lived on; who survived. In the words of Agamben: To speak, to bear witness is thus to enter into a vertiginous movement in which something sinks to the bottom, wholly desubjectified and silenced, and something subjectified speaks without truly having anything to say of its own (“I tell of things … that I did not actually experience”). (Remnants of Auschwitz 120)

In the case of The City, such a survivor is ironically presented via the perpetrator Samir, who testifies about what happened because the person to whom it happened—Jaladat—has forgotten everything. The dichotomy between Us and Them is destabilized even more by the novel’s ending: Samir surrenders himself to Jaladat and urges him to form a trial and judge him for his crimes. Neither believe that justice will prevail in the corrupted political climate in which they live, and therefore think that the only solution is to let victims take control of their fate and confront perpetrators themselves. Consequently, Jaladat undertakes the quest to find 12 victims who were directly affected by Samir. In the meantime, Jaladat allows his prisoner to lead a normal life, even though it will be short. He lets him marry a woman named Shazade. Before Samir moves in

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with her, he gives Jaladat a list of 12 of his victims and tells him that he will be ready when judgment day comes. Riding a white horse, Jaladat looks for the victims who now live in different parts of Kurdistan. The stories that he hears from most of these victims are not only about the pain they endured, but also about the scars that Samir left on their lives. Eventually, judgment day arrives: on the night of 15 June 1993, ten of the twelve survivors come together. Of the two missing, one is dead, and the other is a woman who was sexually abused by Samir and is not allowed to come, mirroring the taboo that female survivors of sexual abuse still face in the KRI. One by one, they narrate their stories of suffering. They testify about the horrible things Samir did to them, showing that they continue to be wounded by his actions daily and suffer from their traumas. However, the trial soon becomes a competition over who has suffered most, again mirroring victimization narratives in the contemporary KRI. All of the victims, furthermore, have different views on what to do with Samir. Some even want him to be released, feeling that his death will not lessen their pain. Eventually, however, five people vote in favor of killing Samir, four vote against it and one casts a neutral vote. Jaladat feels sorry for Samir and wants to save him, but he knows that this will not be accepted. At the moment of his death, Samir seems to be calm and tells Jaladat that he is saved because he hears music. In this way, the novel suggests, Samir is allowed to enter the City of White Musicians, blurring the boundary between Us and Them once more. In revenge for the death of her husband, Shazade informs the Kurdistani political parties that Jaladat possesses a map that reveals the sites of mass graves of Anfal victims. Soon, Jaladat is captured and is tortured for two years by different Kurdistani political groups, after which he eventually admits his guilt. He does not want to hand the map over to these groups, however, since he is afraid that they will abuse the power that they will gain by knowing where the mass graves are located, since this will enable them to instrumentalize Kurdistani suffering and grief to boost their political careers. It is then that he, as discussed above, is crucified and burned alive. After rising from the ashes, he enters the City of White Musicians and is not only reunited with his friends, but also recognizes Samir. He decides that he must return to life and bring beauty to the living. After having done this several times, having fulfilled his messianic destiny, he has one last meal with his musician friends on earth, mirroring Christ’s Last Supper, after which he disappears for good to the City of White Musicians.

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4.6   Ghosts and Phantoms A last important characteristic of The City concerns its hauntological dimension, which will return more deeply in the analysis of the ‘phantomic’ in Chap. 5. This dimension can be emphasized by discussing several events that take place before Jaladat is crucified and eventually disappears to the utopian City of White Musicians. As mentioned several times above, it remains unclear throughout the novel whether Jaladat is dead or alive. Since he has a strong influence on the story and on the other characters of the novel, Jaladat can best be characterized as a ‘specter,’ following Peeren’s claim (cited in Chap. 1) that this figure “evokes something visible, even spectacular” (5). Providing him with this status, Ali again both stresses the unreliability of the narrative that he shapes as well as the persistent nature of trauma. Specters, as Peeren and Pilar Blanco observe in their analysis of spectrality, turn into “both the objects of and metaphors for a wounded historical experience” (12). Making Jaladat into a specter, he becomes one of those traumatized literary figures who, in the words of Caruth “become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess” (60). This “appeal to the ghost,” to cite Peeren, makes Jaladat into a manifestation of the following idea: “despite being ephemeral, something is there that matters and has to be taken into account. This makes it possible to consider the social, political, ethical, psychic and affective impacts of ‘reknowing’ or ‘unforgetting’” (10). As such, to put this differently, Jaladat is provided with that which Peeren characterizes as a ‘spectral agency’ (16–24). It is also with help of another spectral being that The City shapes a space to reflect on the abovementioned difficulty of mourning those who disappeared. This being is Basim, Dahlia’s lost lover. Dahlia and Basim, we read, met at university, where Basim studied literature and Dahlia English. Because of their different ethnic backgrounds (Dahlia is Kurdish and Basim is Arabic) their love was forbidden, and Dahlia’s relatives reported Basim to the authorities for a made-up crime, which resulted in his arrest and disappearance. Throughout the novel, we read how Dahlia dedicated her life to finding him, haunted by Basim’s specter who visits her and tells her his story of torture and pain. This emphasizes that Iraqi Arabs suffered under the Ba’athist regime as well, again problematizing a strict dichotomy between Kurdistanis and Arabs, between an Us and a Them. The story of Dahlia, furthermore, shows the difficulties for women in the KRI to bear witness. In her testimony we not only read the price that she pays

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to gather more information about her missing lover by selling her body to her informants, but also how her status as a female survivor has turned her into an outcast. Jaladat sees Dahlia talking every night in the hall of the brothel to Basim’s ghost, described as a ‘darkness’: “it seems that the darkness tells his life story.” Dahlia says to the ghost: I have done everything in my power. Everything … But I can’t find you. I don’t know where you are. Nobody knows where you are … but only I know you are still alive. You must hold on. You must endure the torture, loneliness, and pain even longer. I will not give up. (203; my translation)

Dahlia and Jaladat follow the darkness of Basim every night the following week, again exploring a liminal space that is now filled with those who were murdered during the Anfal campaign: Thousands of children could be found in the darkness. Some children died dancing. They danced. And the earth, as if not willing to torment them, gulped them down. Some of the dead held hands and sang together, the more entangled they became with the earth the louder they began to sing. Some of them hugged each other so closely that they merged before being absorbed by the earth. Some of them had a white dove, as if they were trying to make eternal peace with death, or if they wanted to deliver a message from the desert of death … some of them wrote with their blood before they died, they wrote their name and residence, some made peculiar drawings, some just cleaned their bloody hands on the earth and left. But the wind picked up and took their message grain by grain to eventually spread it across the desert. (214; my translation)

Whereas both Jaladat and Basim can be characterized as specters, given their effective and affective agency, the beings described here are phantoms: they are elusive and fleeting, mainly characterized by powerless suffering. It is in this context that the reader is again reminded of Jaladat’s spectral and messianic nature, which he gains here through his status as a witness. During his pursuit of Basim’s specter, he sees a mass of thousands of phantoms screaming. Their scream is deep and poignant. On the other side of the desert, he sees people being buried alive and realizes that he

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and Dahlia actually belong to the group of victims. Dahlia tells Jaladat that he is the only eyewitness of these Anfal crimes, and that no one else survived, casting doubt on her own status as alive/dead/spectral. She urges Jaladat to stay alive, not only to tell the story, but also because he can do things that others cannot (125). Dahlia tells Jaladat: “Only our eyes can capture. When there is no more proof, the only proof is the inner part of man. Yes, my love, only the scream in our minds can serve as proof. Our life becomes proof” (217; my translation). As such, the spectral agency of Jaladat is contrasted with the ineffectiveness of the suffering phantoms, who require a medium—in this case a specter himself—to let their scream be heard.

5  Different Forms of Escapism This concludes this chapter: with respect to his novella My Uncle Jamshid Khan: Whom the Wind Was Always Taking, it has shown that Ali’s literature encourages its readers, to some extent, to transcend—and escape from—limiting socio-political interpretations. Although allegorical readings of Kurdish literature shed light on the specific socio-political context in which it is born, these readings tend to be overly limiting. Applying this idea to My Uncle Jamshid Khan, this chapter has shown that this novella’s employment of different affective techniques, and its references to texts by Homer and Kafka, constitute the possibility of liberating the text from narrow allegorical readings, and instead to allude in different ways to trauma, legacies of war, moral ambiguity and the constructed nature of textuality and memory culture. Through this approach, JM escapes to a world of literary imagination. At the same time, however, this chapter has not tried to completely disconnect this world from the Kurdistani memory culture to which it refers in various ways; a literary text does not exist in a vacuum, and literary and allegorical readings should therefore be combined so they may complement each other. The second half of this chapter analyzes The City of White Musicians, showing that this novel’s dimensions allude to escapism as well: an escape from ‘smooth’ hegemonic or political narratives about the past. Instead, Bachtyar Ali’s novel suggests that a traumatic past cannot be represented clearly, thus problematizing the notion of time, destabilizing linear and cyclic temporal frameworks, and introducing a third-time in which unified temporal developments are replaced by fragments, memories and hallucinations about which it is never clear whether they actually took or take

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place. Furthermore, the novel gains a Derridean spectral quality by destabilizing a clear dichotomy between a unified Us and a unified Them, not only shaping a narrative that makes it possible to identify with a character belonging to the Them, but also by showing how both sides of such a dichotomy are dependent on each other to constitute each other’s stories and identities. In-between these dichotomies and forms of time, the novel locates different ghosts, who haunt the present, pull protagonists back to previous memories, and refuse to be pinned down or repelled. In discussion of these aspects, the notion of the ‘phantomic’ has been mentioned several times, which returns more extensively in Chap. 5. In the context of Ali’s The City of White Musicians ghosts make both the reader and the book’s protagonists aware that the KRI’s memory culture is haunted by people who did not survive and were thus unable to testify: the victims of Anfal. In Ali’s novel, Jaladat witnesses the phantoms of Anfal victims being buried alive and executed, and when he acquires a map of the places where these victims were buried, he loses it to politicians; this might be interpreted as our inability to tell all the stories and hear all the different sides of the traumatic past if they are appropriated by political ideologies. An acknowledgment of the past, The City of White Musicians therefore stresses, may only come about when victims are properly commemorated and when the perspectives of trauma are heard in ways that embody critical reflections on the fragmented characteristics of memory, rather than turned into a cathartic conclusion. This process therefore begins with commemorating the dead, listening to survivors of both sides and helping them reconcile with their past. It is by contributing to an open memory culture that reflects on the difficulty of mourning loved ones whose fate is unknown that Ali’s references to the phantomic open up a space to begin this mourning process. Ali’s novel can therefore best be described, in the words of Dori Laub and Daniel Podell, as a site that does not aim to “come to an ‘objectively real’ depiction of an event, but to create a space wherein the remembrance of the traumatic experience can begin” (993). In this way, he might create the possibility of introducing multiple conflicting perspectives on the past and of showing that the notion of ‘truth’ is difficult to maintain in a post-­ conflict societies or societies stuck in ‘conflict-time.’ At the same time, it is crucial to emphasize that within his literary discourse this only seems possible in the imaginary utopian place of the City of White Musicians, implicitly suggesting that the constitution of such a space is still extremely difficult in the reality of the KRI’s memory culture.

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Notes 1. The notion of ‘escape’ does not have a negative connotation in this chapter. Instead, it has primarily positive dimensions, which it gains in relation to the specific contexts from which the texts and protagonists that are discussed aim to escape. 2. In ‘Between Honour and Dignity: Kurdish Literary and Cinema Narratives and Their Attempt to Rethink Identity and Resistance,’ Joanna Bocheńska analyzes several contemporary Kurdish novels and films, arguing that they present a new Kurdish identity that is embedded in moral explorations of various kinds of Otherness (see Bochénska). This would result, according to her, in a specific understanding of dignity. 3. To some extent, this quest is similar to descriptions of ‘the’ Kurds and what characterizes ‘their’ literature in Sajaddî’s classic study. Sajaddî also adopts an allegorical approach, linking Kurdistani literature to notions of a political Kurdistani identity (121–22). 4. In fact, Bachtyar Ali’s novel I Stared at the Night of the City, originally published in 2008 under the title Ghazaldnus and the Gardens of Imaginations, was translated to English in 2016 by Kareem Abdulrahman. In reaction to the fact that this was the first Sorani-language novel ever translated into English, Ali stated: “Unfortunately, translators in Europe are not respected as they should be. Few translators make a living on translations. This can’t be done without institutional support” (Abrams). 5. Such a reduction can also be found in Shakely’s analysis of Mam û Zîn, in which he argues that this story of unfulfilled and tragic love presents a metaphor for the longing for the unification of an independent Kurdistan, which is portrayed in the epic as an unrealized dream. In Shakely’s view, it is evident that the story symbolizes the suffering and struggles of the Kurds, and that it urges them to liberate themselves and establish a grand Kurdish nation (102), ignoring the fact that the epic was written long before the advent of nationhood on the region’s geopolitical stage. 6. Personal communication with the author, 15 March 2018. This is not improbable, because lost children continue to be found. One famous example is the story of Maryam Barootian (born as Hawnaz), who was lost during the chemical attacks by her mother, who believed she was dead. Hawnaz, however, was brought to Iran, where she was adopted by an Iranian family. Twenty years later she returned and, through DNA testing, was reunited with her biological family (Golpy). 7. Genesis 22, for example, narrates the story of how God tests Abraham’s faith by commanding him to sacrifice his only son Isaac on Mount Moria. Abraham, who aims to follow God’s command, is eventually stopped: God sends an angel to prevent him from killing his son and the angel redirects

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him to a nearby ram which is sacrificed instead. Within the Judeo-Christian tradition, Abraham’s willingness is often regarded as symbol of unswerving faith. Known as ‘father of the faithful,’ God promises him in return to bless his descendants, and through them all men (i.e., followers of the Abrahamic faiths; see, e.g., Berman). 8. This means that the concept of ‘third time’ is, to some extent, similar to Baillie’s observations on ‘conflict-time,’ in-between conflict and post-conflict. 9. The descriptions of this brothel show similarities to French dramatist Jean Genet’s play The Balcony. Like the house of illusion described in Genet’s play, White Oranges contains infinite mirrors and theaters where different roles are formed that reflect different social power relations. Moreover, the outside world forms a threat to the microcosmos inside the brothel.

CHAPTER 4

The Apostrophic: Amna Suraka, in Order Not to Forget

1   No Friends but the Mountains: The Referendum and an Apostrophizing of Kurdistan This chapter focuses on the memory site that is officially named the National Museum of Amna Suraka: In Order Not to Forget. This museum is located in Sulaymaniyah, in a former political prison constructed during Saddam’s regime. It aims to pay tribute to the suffering of its former detainees, as well as to Kurdish resistance against Ba’ath rule and, more recently, against the rise of Daesh. Furthermore, the museum celebrates Kurdistani folklore, making it a hybrid of different cultural, political, societal and experiential representations. It is within this hybrid that the apostrophic dimensions of Amna Suraka are shaped. These dimensions can be contextualized with help of a phrase often heard when Kurdistanis describe their history: ‘We have no friends but the mountains.’1 Although Kurdistanis speak different dialects and practice different customs and religions, what binds them, this phrase suggests, is a shared history of oppression experienced in the countries of which they became part.2 Moreover, it reflects the impression that, when these forms of oppression resulted in genocide and caused extreme forms of suffering, the international community did not intervene. Time and time again, it was therefore only the Kurdistani knowledge of the mountains that enabled their survival, it implies. This claim, therefore, attributes the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Majid, Towards an Understanding of Kurdistani Memory Culture, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37514-9_4

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geographical aspects of their native land with an active role in Kurdistani survival and ongoing existence, making the mountains into an important symbol of the imagined homeland of a Great Kurdistan. This idea, as well as the meaning of the phrase, cannot be understood without referring to the events set in motion in the aftermath of World War One. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, as mentioned in Chap. 2 as well, the Anglo-French Sykes-­Picot Treaty was secretly signed in 1916, dividing the Middle East into various nations without taking into account the differences between peoples, ethnicities and communities. The area in which Kurdistanis lived—the imagined homeland of a Great Kurdistan— was also divided over four countries: Turkey (the southeastern region referred to as ‘Bakur’ or ‘Northern Kurdistan’); Syria (the northern region called ‘Rojava’ or ‘Western Kurdistan’); Iraq (in the north, known as ‘Bashur’ or ‘Southern Kurdistan’); and Iran (the northwest area called ‘Rojahalat’ or ‘Eastern Kurdistan’).3 Following this Treaty, as well as the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, Kurdistanis tried several times to constitute an independent nation. In 1920, for example, Sheikh Mahmud Barzinji, who had been appointed governor of Sulaymaniyah as part of the Kingdom of Iraq under British Administration, declared Kurdistani independence in Sulaymaniyah and made himself its king. He was soon removed from power and deported by the British administration, but rebelled again in 1924. He was defeated eight years later and, as Zeynep Kaya writes: “After this, the British sent a memorandum to the Council of the League of Nations to legitimise their denial of Kurdish right to self- determination” (88–89). Attempts to create an independent Kurdistan continued, and still continue, to permeate Kurdistani culture, often by referring specifically to Sheikh Mahmud Barzinji and the Sykes-Picot Treaty. As described in more detail below, the Sheikh is given a prominent position in Amna Suraka, for example, in which the reference to the mountains being the sole friend of Kurdistanis returns as well. The important role that the Treaty plays in the KRI’s memory culture, furthermore, was illustrated by a demonstration on 17 May 2016, during which a group of demonstrators gathered around the citadel in the Kurdish city of Erbil and symbolically ‘buried’ the Treaty in a casket that read ‘Sykes-Picot’ (‘Kurds Bury Sykes-Picot’). These demonstrators argued that the artificial division of the area is unsustainable, and that Kurdistanis no longer wished to be part of Iraq. The Treaty also returned in the discourse surrounding the referendum for an independent Kurdistan Region on 25 September 2017. In the

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run-­up to this referendum, then-president Masoud Barzani expressed the Kurdistani wish for independence as follows: “I think that among themselves, [world leaders] have come to the conclusion that the era of Sykes-­ Picot is over. Whether they say it or not, accept it or not, the reality on the ground is that” (qtd. in Chulov). Again, he linked the idea of a deserved sovereignty to the claim that ‘the’ Kurdistanis form one culture and should therefore form one nation: “From world war one until now, we are not a part of Iraq … It’s a theocratic sectarian state. We have our geography, land and culture. We have our own language. We refuse to be subordinates” (qtd. in Chulov and Johnson). Notably, in the same article Barzani is quoted as saying that the new Kurdistani nation-state would not be delineated according to ethnicity—thus recognizing the region’s ethnic diversity, which tends to be obscured in the discussions of non-­ Kurdistanis—but rather by citizenship. Denying the right to independence, Barzani claimed, is no longer acceptable, as Kurdistanis will not surrender their fight for independence, just as they have never surrendered it in the past (Chulov and Johnson). Of the five million eligible voters, the turnout on the day of the referendum was 72 percent and the ‘yes to independence’ vote won with 93 percent. As predicted, however, it was rejected as unconstitutional by the central government of Iraq. As a form of retaliation, furthermore, Baghdad punished the KRG by instigating a military operation to retake disputed areas that had been part of the KRI since the war with Daesh in 2014. With help of the pro-Iranian al-Hashd al-Shaabi militia, Kirkuk was retaken by the central Iraqi government on 16 October 2017.4 This military action was carried out with American artillery and weapons supplied by the US to fight Daesh (Zucchino and Schmitt). Looting took place in the reclaimed areas, Kurdish properties were damaged and houses were set on fire (Amnesty International, ‘Iraq: Fresh Evidence’). Out of fear of retaliation, Kurds and Sunni Arabs left Kirkuk and Tuz Khumarto en masse. According to available data, 165,780 individuals were displaced and sought refuge in Kurdistani cities still ruled by the KRG (UNCHR, ‘Iraq Situation’). The loss of oil-rich Kirkuk, furthermore, was regarded not only as damaging for the KRI’s financial stability, but was also a great symbolic loss because of the city’s history of Arabization.5 Before the referendum, Barzani met the leaders of various Western allies, lobbying in the hope that they would express their support. However, although Barzani put considerable trust in support from the international community, no one intervened when the KRI was attacked

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by Baghdad. Following the silence of the international community, Barzani asked: Is it a crime to ask our people to express themselves over what they want for the future? It was surprising to the see the reaction from the international community. Where is your democracy now? Where are the UN charters? Where is the respect for freedom of expression? After the big sacrifice of the Peshmerga and breaking the myth of ISIS, we though they would respect this right. (Chulov and Johnson).

Again, Barzani suggests here, the Kurds have no friends but the mountains: they are either threatened by various Others or abandoned when they are attacked. As such, various elements of one of the narratives shaped by the education textbooks, discussed in Chap. 2, return in Barzani’s representation of Kurdish history and ‘the’ Kurdish identity. A similar narrative, discussed more below, is shaped in Amna Suraka. To characterize as accurately as possible the way in which this is done in, and by, this site, this chapter introduces the abovementioned notion of ‘apostrophizing,’ briefly discussed in Chap. 1 with help of Alan Richardson’s observation that this poetical figure is “classically defined as a diversion or ‘turning away’ of a speaker’s utterance from a primary addressee to a second auditor (who might be absent, dead, or imaginary)” (364). Chapter 1 mentioned the anthem ‘Ey Reqîb’ as an example, which apostrophizes ‘the enemy’ of ‘the Kurds,’ in the process shaping a Kurdish identity. A similar technique is used in another Kurdish anthem, called ‘Har Kurd ebîn’ (‘We Always Will be Kurds’), written by Ibrahim Ahmed in 1981. It reads: Hate filled invaders. Savages without conscience. You can’t force us not to be Kurds. We have always been Kurds and always will. be Kurds. Before Islam. Before Fire worshipping. During imprisonment and in victory. We have always been Kurds and always will be Kurds. I am not an Arab, not an Iranian and not a Mountain Turk. History will sing with me.

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That I am a Kurd, a Kurdistani. ………………………………. All peoples are my brothers. Only my oppressors are my enemy. I am not demanding anyone’s land. ………………………………. Even if you flatten the Mountains Qandil. Ararat and Shirin to the ground. You can’t force us not to be Kurds. We have always been Kurds and always will be Kurds. (qtd. in and translated by Fischer-Tahir, ‘Reconfiguring the Kurdish Nation’ 309)

Again, apostrophizing an aggressive Other—‘invaders,’ ‘oppressors’ and even ‘savages’—the anthem declares that ‘the’ Kurdistanis have their own history, culture and geography, presented as fundamentally different from that of other nations, cultures, religions and peoples living in the area. It does, however, identify those others who are not the enemy, as ‘brothers’; this marks the Kurdistanis as distinct from those around them, but not openly hostile without provocation. Similarly, as Fischer-­Tahir observes about this anthem, it implicitly shows the effects of the act of apostrophizing: These rhymes clearly address the colonialism under Arab, Iranian, and Turkish regimes, these invaders represented in metaphors of ‘hate’ (literally: ‘the heart filled with hate’), ‘savagery’ (derinde), and ‘absence of conscience’ or ‘unscrupulousness’ (bêwîjdan). Without being explicitly stated, Kurds are imagined as the opposite of all that: they are kind- hearted, civilized, and have good consciences. (‘Reconfiguring the Kurdish Nation’ 310)

Furthermore, referring to the Qandil Mountains in the border-area between Iraq and Iran, and to Mount Ararat in Eastern Turkey, the text alludes not only to the proverb of mountains being the only friends of Kurdistanis, but also to the idea that Kurdistan transcends borders since it, and the people themselves, have ‘always’ existed. As briefly mentioned in Chap. 1, what specifically characterizes the museum of Amna Suraka is that instead of Others, this site apostrophizes Kurdistan by ‘turning aside’ from several ‘overhearers.’ Two of these overhearers are the international community and Kurdistanis themselves,

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which can be illustrated with help of the 2017 referendum. In a context experienced as revolving around silence and passivity, apostrophizing Kurdistan by what Richardson characterizes as ‘turning aside’ from the international community might be a way of indirectly but critically addressing this community. Addressing an independent Kurdistan, with this community as an ‘overhearer’ or witness, after all, not only foregrounds this overhearer’s passive stance and the idea that the only friends of the Kurdistanis are the mountains, but simultaneously recognizes the importance and projected existence of this addressed nation, which already exists in the imagination of ‘the’ Kurdistani people. Furthermore, by apostrophizing Kurdistan collectively, this shapes the impression that Kurdistanis are united in their fight for this imagined country. As such, this act of apostrophizing might also obscure that this unity over the referendum’s question—that of a sovereign Kurdistan—was not the reality, as became clear in the process leading up to the referendum. For example, the meeting at which the referendum’s date was settled by its initiator, Barzani’s KDP, was boycotted by the KRI’s third biggest political party, the Gorran Movement, as well as the Islamic Group, who share a combined 30 seats of 111 in parliament. Gorran’s leader, Rabun Maarouf, not only criticized the referendum on local TV, but also urged people to vote against independence. Both political parties claimed that while they were in favor of the referendum itself, they wanted it postponed because it was already considered unconstitutional by the Iraqi Central Government, and feared it would prompt condemnation by Baghdad and neighboring countries like Turkey and Iran (MacDonald). Although this critique was formulated in terms of timing, it also seemed to be a result of power struggles within the KRI: Gorran and Islamic Group regarded the referendum as a way for Barzani to consolidate his power. Although the PUK, the KDP’s main rival, showed their ‘conditional’ support, they likewise did not express that they were explicitly in favor of the referendum (Rudaw ‘PUK Conditions Support’). This changed only two days before it took place, when PUK and Gorran issued a joint statement supporting the referendum. It was then also agreed that it would be carried out in the area between Erbil and Bagdad, which included the disputed Kirkuk Province. However, as their endorsement was provided only a few short days before the referendum, many people did not know what to do or whom to follow since loyalty towards political parties often plays an important role in the KRI (Mccaffray van den Toorn).

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What these disagreements and conflicts indicate is that ‘the’ Kurdistani Self to which the school curriculum refers (as discussed in Chap. 2), and ‘the’ Kurdistani people who harmoniously long for and deserve a truly independent Kurdistan, do not actually exist as such. It is in light of this that the attempt to apostrophize this non-existing nation should be understood as a way of shaping a harmonious identity. Chapter 1 quoted Assmann’s claim that “If you want to belong, you must remember” (‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’ 2013, 41) and argued that, in the KRI, this claim can be translated into the observation that if you want to belong, you must apostrophize. This observation will now be substantiated with help of an analysis of the apostrophic elements of Amna Suraka. Like Chap. 2, this analysis also contains an interlude, this time to explain the specific historical context of Anfal.

2  The Material 2.1   Nora’s Three Aspects The primary framework within which Amna Suraka is analyzed in this chapter is formed by Nora’s distinction between milieux and lieux de mémoire. Despite its focus on Franco-European culture, his analysis has been adopted by a wide range of scholars working within Memory Studies to analyze commemoration practices in contexts in other parts of Europe, in North America and in Asia.6 In the following, this framework is likewise used within the context of the KRI, especially because Nora describes three aspects of lieux de mémoire that make it possible to structure my close-reading of Amna Suraka in a systematic manner: namely, the material, the functional and the symbolic. In ‘Between Memory and History,’ he illustrates the interconnectedness of these aspects as follows: [T]he three aspects always coexist. Take, for example, the notion of a historical generation: it is material by its demographic content and supposedly functional – since memories are crystallized and transmitted from one generation to the next – but it is also symbolic, since it characterizes, by referring to events or experiences shared by a small minority, a larger group that may not have participated in them. (19, emphasis added).

Through analysis of each of the three aspects discussed by Nora—the material, the functional and the symbolic—this chapter aims to show that

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the meaning generated by the museum moves between elements of milieux and of lieux de mémoire. This destabilizes the rather rigid distinction that Nora sometimes seems to make between these two phenomena, as mentioned in Chap. 1. 2.2   A Brief History of the Building The first of the three aspects that, according to Nora, always converge in lieux de mémoire is the material. He explains this aspect by describing which characteristics of lieux de mémoire material foregrounds: Should we stress the lieu de mémoire’s material aspects, they would readily display themselves in a vast gradation. There are portable lieux, of which the people of memory, the Jews, have given a major example in the Tablets of the Law; there are the topographical ones, which owe everything to the specificity of their location and to being rooted in the ground  – so, for example, the conjunction of sites of tourism and centers of historical scholarship … Then there are the monumental memory-sites, not to be confused with architectural sites alone. Statues or monuments to the dead, for instance, owe their meaning to their intrinsic existence; even though their location is far from arbitrary, one could justify relocating them without altering their meaning. (22).

The material aspects of lieux de mémoire fluctuate, in other words, but they always play a crucial role in the constitution of a place of memory. In the case of Amna Suraka, it is what Nora calls a ‘topographical site’: the meaning of this museum, as well as that which it commemorates, are linked to what happened at this specific site and in the specific building in which the museum is located. This introduces the history of the building, which permeates its materiality in different ways: ‘Amna Suraka’ literary translates as ‘Red Security,’ and the word ‘red’ refers to the color of its walls. These walls, which have now turned grey, are filled with bullet holes, giving both their former color, and the site’s name, an additional connotation of blood. The color red also returns in several ways in the museum’s exhibitions. The building is located in a neighborhood of Sulaymaniyah that once had the Arabic name ‘Aqari’ (‘Real Estate’ in Arabic) but has since been renamed ‘Shoresh’ (‘resistance’ in Kurdish). Shoresh is at the center of the old part of Sulaymaniyah, before this city’s rapid expansion after the fall of Saddam

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Hussein. Today, one finds expensive property here; houses that were previously occupied by members of Saddam’s Ba’ath Party, and buildings that were used by the Iraqi national police, the Mûkhâbarât (Intelligence Service), Amn (Secret Security) and Estikhbârât (Military Intelligence). The prison of Amna Suraka was built between 1979 and 1985 by the Ba’athist regime to control the city and its citizens. Cells and torture chambers were later secretly added to the building. From 1986 until 1991, the building housed political prisoners who were perceived as threats to the area’s security. A large part was used as administrative center, another as a prison complex that contained cells for male and female prisoners, including under-aged boys, as well as isolation cells for high-profile political prisoners. Most prisoners were tortured in Amna Suraka, regardless of whether they were politically active. The tactics used were mostly, as Maria Sancho describes, “taken from the soviet school: electroshock, bitten with wires, with the hands tied behind, getting hanged by the shoulders and then soldiers would pull down prisoners clothes and hang themselves to increase the weight” (334). After interrogation and torture, some prisoners would be sent to the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad or to prisons in Mosul or Kirkuk, and were often later executed after show trials at Baghdad’s revolutionary court. The prison was liberated during the Kurdish Uprising, called Raparin, which gained momentum on 5 March 1991 when, strengthened by George W. Bush’s promise to support the Kurdistani struggle, and in the aftermath of the Gulf War that had weakened Saddam Hussein’s position, various ethnic, religious and political groups rebelled against the Ba’ath regime. One of these rebellions took place in Raniya, a town near Sulaymaniyah, where Kurdistani citizens demonstrated against Saddam’s regime, and vandalized propaganda posters and other media relating to the Ba’ath Party. This resulted in a mass demonstration the following day, during which several strategically important government buildings were overtaken by Kurdish fighters. They were, however, reconquered by Ba’ath forces on 8 March. During the battle for Amna Suraka, Faleh Abd al-Jabbar explains, “more than 900 mukhabarat [intelligence services] were killed, including the director, Col. Khalaf al-Hadithi, along with some 150 rebels” (11). Since international support was not delivered, and the US-led allies provided no weapons, the demonstrators were easily outgunned when government troops regrouped outside Sulaymaniyah, “shelling the city from tanks and firing missiles and automatic fire from helicopters” on 31

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March (Human Rights Watch, ‘Whatever Happened’ 660). The Kurdistani resistance therefore only lasted for a few days, and the city was only controlled by Peshmergas for about four weeks. It was only after the installation of the no-fly zone by the end of 1991 that the KRI eventually gained semi-autonomy. Until 1996, Amna Suraka’s buildings had various functions, including a shelter for internally displaced people, discussed in more detail below. Since 1996, the former prison has been under the control of the PUK, who began a renovation process shortly after acquiring it. It was only in 2003, however, that it was opened to the public as a museum. This process was also set in motion by the PUK, more specifically by Hero Ibrahim, the widow of Jalal Talabani, leader of the PUK and former President of Iraq in 2004–2005. The museum’s director, Ako Ghareeb, and its employees, are likewise affiliated with the PUK. Although its employees are public servants, their salaries are paid by Hero Ibrahim herself. The influence of the PUK is discussed in more detail in the last section of this chapter. 2.3   The Building Itself As seen on the map in the museum’s brochure (Fig. 4.1), the building of Amna Suraka consists of different sections: once the visitor has entered, they find themselves in the Hall of Mirrors. After this, they arrive at a courtyard and are directed to the Hall of Culture and, in a different building, the Hall of Exodus. These three exhibitions were created during the museum’s first phase. In this same building, three new halls have recently been opened: Anfal Hall in 2014, Hall of the Martyr Hemn (initially called the Hall of Mines) in the same year and the Hall of Daesh in 2017. In a different part of the site, the Hall of Peshmergas was opened in 2015; here, we also find a cinema named after Kurdistani actor and film director Yilmaz Güney. Furthermore, in 2019, a part called the Resistance Museum was opened.7 The museum also includes a café and a gallery, in which different conferences (in the café) and temporary exhibitions (in the gallery) are held. In light of Nora’s conception of materiality, it is noteworthy that all of Amna Suraka’s buildings belonged to the administrative and logistical part of the former prison complex: the café, for example, is located in the former canteen for Ba’ath employees. Nowadays, it functions as a meeting point for young and old. Due to the high speed of its free internet, it is especially popular among youth. Since these buildings have been

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Fig. 4.1  Map of Amna Suraka in the museum’s brochure

renovated, they have a rather modern atmosphere, disconnected from their former use. This is not true of the actual prison cells, which are found in the back of the complex. The materiality of the prison cells is discussed in detail below, but it is first important to focus on the ways in which the past that is

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commemorated in the building as a lieu de mémoire is manifested in its specific materiality as a ‘topographical site:’ from the outside, Amna Suraka looks wholly unrenovated, like it has been preserved exactly as it was when it functioned as a prison. On its walls, many of which are covered with barbed wire, one cannot help but notice the countless bullet holes, nor the collapsed watchtowers reminiscent of the intense fighting that took place during the 1991 uprising. On the outside, furthermore, the building features no sign telling people that a museum is located here. In this way, Amna Suraka does not give the impression of having been turned into a museum, but instead that it is mainly presented to the visitor as it once was. Although it is not immediately clear to visitors that Amna Suraka is a museum, it is clear that it is an important and official building: in front of its entrance, armed police officers in green uniforms continuously patrol. These are Asaish, the official security organization of the KRG. Although they provide the building with an official character, it is noteworthy that, for those who are part of the area’s milieu de mémoire, these forces undermine its authenticity as a ‘topographical site.’ One of the employees that I interviewed, for example, told me the following: When you enter the building, this is the first thing that visitors see. In my opinion, this could be done more subtly; the soldiers could wear a normal uniform, and their weapons don’t have to be this visible … It is irresponsible towards young visitors to let all these armed men walk around here. Like this is the headquarters of the security forces. If you decide to use security forces, you might as well use them to show what it used to be like when the Amn guarded the prison. Show how they walked around here. There used to be a big picture of Saddam here above the entrance, you could place that back as well.8

This employee, in other words, emphasizes that although the building appears to be authentic, many of its former elements have been removed or changed, presenting the building in a specific way to contemporary visitors.9 The fact that this interviewee himself remembers what the building looked like, and uses this memory to argue against its current presentation, positions the museum between lieu and milieu de mémoire: instead of only ‘preserving’ memories that are disappearing, as Nora might argue, this employee observes that it distorts still-living memories. This distortion of still-living memories also destabilizes distinctions between lieu and milieu for another reason: we have seen above that Nora

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argues that the material aspects of a lieu de mémoire play a crucial role in its status as such a lieu. However, the meaning of these material aspects is not linked by him to milieux de mémoire: the lieu does not gain its status as a memory-site because people remember what took place at the actual material site. In fact, he seems to suggest, a lieu is only a lieu because people do not remember what happened there, making it possible to change its meaning: this meaning is shaped or ‘crystallized’ by this site. Nora writes: [I]f we accept that the most fundamental purpose of the lieu de mémoire is to stop time, to block the work of forgetting, to establish a state of things, to immortalize death, to materialize the immaterial – just as if gold were the only memory of money – all of this in order to capture a maximum of meaning in the fewest of signs, it is also clear that lieux de mémoire only exist because of their capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of their meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of their ramifications. (19).

The fact that Amna Suraka as a material site is embedded in those who have living—and often traumatic—memories of what happened there, its existence as a lieu is entwined with elements from its milieu. This point can be substantiated by an interview that I conducted with one of the museum’s guides, which not only illustrates how deeply the building is embedded in a milieu de mémoire, but also how its materiality and location play an important role in those memories. When I asked him what it was like to work in a building like this, he told me that it was strange for him: “I was here when all the bodies were still lying here,” he stated. After Raparin, when he was 11-years old, he had visited the museum. Our interview commenced as follows: Guide: I came together with my father, we lived across the street from the museum. A rocket was fired from the building, which had hit our house. During this event, we were all hiding in a bomb shelter. Our street was very dangerous, because Peshmergas were firing from the cemetery, one block away from our house. They [the Amn or security forces] fired rockets back at them. One of my brothers had binoculars and had noticed that Amn had recaptured our street, and then we fled into the bomb shelter. Not much later, we heard a rocket hit our house and destroy it completely. Although we were unharmed, we could no longer stay in the bomb shelter and tried to flee. On the street we noticed that, apart from a few Amn, the coast was clear. At the moment the building [Amna Suraka] was taken, and I can still

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picture this very clearly, we entered it. There were bodies everywhere, their mouths had been stuffed with bills and cigarettes, and their heads flattened with concrete blocks. Even at the end, they discovered an Amn who was hiding in a sewer pipe and killed him. I can still remember the smell. Me: Can you describe that smell? Guide: It smelled horrible, like blood and death. Me: Weren’t you afraid, as an 11-year-old? Guide: No, I could not be afraid. Since we lived in the middle of war and heard shootings every day, we did not know anymore what fear was. Me: But it might still have been horrible to see these things with your own eyes? Guide: Of course, but we were without fear. It all seemed unreal or fake to us. Me: Have you thought about these experiences later? Guide: I know now what fear is and cannot handle these things anymore. During that time, I only focused on art and did not even know who Peshmergas were and what they did. Me: But maybe you were simply too young to be aware of it all? Guide: I was young, but from the age of five I only focused on art and was completely uninterested in what happened around me. Together with some friends of mine, who were older, I participated in creative classes. I realized only later that the bodies I had seen were real people, and I could not forget that smell. After this, we experienced the Koraw [Rakrdn, the mass exodus of 1991], and were constantly afraid that we would experience even worse things. That is why we could not really let fear get to us. Me: What is it like for you to work at this place now? Guide: When I think about those times, I am very proud that I can work here. Sometimes I work here all night, and often spend time in the former prison complex, in which I work alone on the texts that prisoners have written on the walls. It is often very dark there.10

Again, this employee of Amna Suraka observes that he has personal memories about the specific, material building, and that these horrible memories infuse the pride he feels in his work, and in his own ability to do so in light of his childhood experience of the site. This permeates the site’s materiality with a specific commemorative meaning, and embeds its function as a place of remembrance in its milieu.

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2.4   The Prison Cells In the prison complex of Amna Suraka, the material is itself still permeated with living memories, overflowing with meaning. This meaning and these memories are omnipresent in the prison cells, are even inscribed on the walls, which feature carvings—both text and drawings—made by prisoners during their detainment in Amna Suraka. Since my first fieldwork visit in 2014, several things have changed in this complex: it now contains a sign instructing visitors what not to do, such as taking photographs, touching the walls, smoking, eating or talking loudly. This could be explained by the fact that the museum’s staff are now more familiar with international museum conventions. It could also be interpreted as a way of turning an informal milieu into a formal or even sacral lieu: the walls are now covered with plastic plates, protecting their carvings from vandalism: preserving the past against those who aim to ‘enrich’ it with their own messages in the present. Behind the plates, we see the authentic texts left by former inmates, circled with a red marker. Signs transcribe the original in Kurdish, Arabic and English.11 Although authenticity is clearly valued, the museum also provides visitors with some guidance: brief informational texts explain where they may find the most important carvings. Since one could easily get lost in the complex, arrows indicate where to go. The first room through which the visitor walks is the cell where male minors were held. The place is fifteen square meters and held ten to forty boys. An English text explains a practice used to make minors older: “The aim of this forgery process was to apply death sentence against them.” That this was common is shown by the text carved in the wall, on which a boy has written: My name is Muhsin. Jailed in one of the corners of this cell. I was detained at home. I was only 15 years old. They changed my age to 18 so that I could be executed. Then I said: mother, father, I am about to be executed by the Ba’athist. We will never meet again. (Fig. 4.2).

Another text reads: “Mohammed Qadr: Death sentence. Rizgar Aziz Karim: Death sentence. This group was sent to the revolutionary court on 13/3/1990.” And somewhere else: “God, I was detained 18/1/1989 until 12/8/1989 I am still here.” Yet another states: “Oh disappointing

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Fig. 4.2  Writings on the walls of the prison complex (photo by Bareez Majid)

time. Why did you separate me from my darlings so early? I was glad in this life but have taken her beauty.” Some of these carvings are hopeful, showing that certain joyful acts were possible in this horrible situation: “At 9 o’clock played Dominoes beating kak [Mr.] Jabbar 1/9/1990, a good win.”12

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The fact that these carvings are part of the materiality of the prison—its walls—and that it was these same walls that held these same prisoners, constitutes an indexical relationship with the suffering that the museum commemorates. This intrinsically ties the memories that Amna Suraka, as a lieu de mémoire, is meant to preserve to the specific material location to which these memories refer. The location itself, as it were, is presented as evidence of the stories that it tells. This is emphasized by the different informational signs in the museum, which contain words like ‘here’ or ‘this cell.’ One of these signs reads: Here was a place to provide the detainees with some food. The portions were so small that satisfied nobody’s hunger. It seemed that they were given food only to keep them alive and to draw confession from them. Nevertheless, starvation as a means for torture. Here is the amount of food given per person per meal. Breakfast: a roll of bread and a cup of lentil soup. Lunch: This meal was a bucket of rice for 10 people and a bucket of vegetable broth for each 15 people. Supper was even worse: it was just a roll of bread and a piece of cucumber. These meals were always the same.

This text, it is important to emphasize, makes the visitor aware of the suffering and pain that was experienced in this specific place. Another sign reads in English: This cell was for those detainees who were waiting for their release. They proved to be innocent, but their sufferings continued, because they were kept waiting for days and weeks. Their room was too small and overcrowded. One person’s share was three bricks space that is why they slept by turns some were sleeping for some hours, they followed by some others.

To bring the visitors closer to the information that is provided, little buckets are placed everywhere in the room, about which the guides explain that they were used for food and drinks, but also (especially in the isolation cells) as toilets. Everywhere the visitor also sees blankets, which have been placed there in an attempt to provide the visitor with a sense of what it must have been for so many people to sleep in such a small room, linking the building’s present to its past (Fig. 4.3). The prison complex also contains three rooms in which prisoners were tortured, both physically and psychologically. In these rooms, signs describe what happened to prisoners and where this happened. One of these rooms is covered with wood. It is empty and the visitor is dependent

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Fig. 4.3  Blankets in the prison complex (photo by Bareez Majid)

on narration by the guides who explain that the room was used to torture prisoners. Sometimes they interrogated and tortured women and children here, and recorded it to later use to emotionally blackmail male relatives and force them to talk. This place was cynically named the ‘Sheraton’ by prisoners,13 after the luxurious and popular hotel in Baghdad used by foreigners. The wooden walls of this room again make the visitor aware of the materiality of the building, and how this materiality would have made the cries of tortured prisoners carry to the different cells. The building’s materiality is further emphasized when the visitor walks through a small corridor leaving the torture rooms. A text explains: “This corridor was leading to the rooms and halls of torture; its walls were often stained with blood because the detainees were pushed against the wall when they were transferred through it.” The corridor does not have a ceiling but is closed by iron bars, and when one looks up the empty sky paradoxically stresses the isolated and claustrophobic character of the prison complex. Following this corridor, the visitor arrives at a room where female prisoners were held. Here, there are plastic trays. A text explains: “The room’s area is (21 m2). The number of detainees here was always

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ranging from 15 to 50 women. Among them were pregnant women who delivered here in this prison and their babies and children were used as means of torturing them admitting committing crimes that they never did.” The door of the room next to this one is closed: a big lock symbolizes the inaccessibility of the suffering that took place here (Fig. 4.4). This lock has not always been there: under direction of Ako Ghareeb, a mattress was placed in the room and visitors could look into it. He made this decision because a mattress had been found in the same room when the prison was liberated, suggesting that this was the room in which women were raped. This caused so much commotion, however, that Ako Ghareeb eventually decided to remove the mattress.14 The topic of rape was considered to be too taboo, although it is known to the public that rape (of both male and female detainees) was part of its machinery. I observed that the guides ignore this part of the prison and, without explanation, walk past the room.15 During my fieldwork, I indeed noticed that many in the museum’s milieu de mémoire find the topic of gendered violence confrontational or

Fig. 4.4  Door with lock (left), sculpture of woman with child (right) (photo by Bareez Majid)

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taboo: it was very difficult to find women who had been imprisoned in Amna Suraka and to talk with them about their experiences as prisoners. Eventually, I met a woman who was willing to be interviewed. She was born in 1970 and imprisoned from 25 May 1990 to 8 January 1991. When she was arrested, she was 19 years old and a student. She told me that people often ask her if she was raped, and that the gravity of this possibility permeates any discussion or conversation she has about Amna Suraka, making it difficult for her to share her story on her own terms. At the moment of our interview, she was married (to a former resistance fighter) and had two children. She told me that she never wanted to share her story with her children.16 When I asked her why she was willing to talk to me about this, she told me that I was a woman and could therefore understand her pain. Her most painful and most frequently recurring memory, she told me, was about the moment she was summoned to the prison and humiliated by Naqib Maajid in the room that is now the Hall of Mirrors. He told her that she had been betrayed by a friend, a fellow comrade, and asked her what she knew about him. When she told him that he was her friend, Maajid spit in her face and humiliated her by saying that she had a boyfriend and that her boyfriend had betrayed her. When her father managed to visit her in Amna Suraka, furthermore, he became so emotional that he was hardly able to speak. In her own words: He cried very hard. There was a man called Jamal, I don’t know exactly what his rank was. He told my father not to cry. To which my father said: How can I not cry? Do you know what they say about me? I cry because I now see my daughter alive, but I also cry for myself and for what they say about me out there. That they say that my daughter is in the Amn. Jamal said: You know what, even though it’s not officially allowed, I’ll leave you alone so you can ask her personally if “something” has been done to her. Only then did my father calm down.17

After her release, my respondent told me, the following happened: When I was released, I was only 20 years old. That was 24 years ago. My brother asked me if “something” had happened. Then I told him that this only concerns me and no one else. I’m under no obligation to tell you about that, I told him. Even though I am proud of my family—they are very open-­ minded people. Even though their daughter has been imprisoned, and although I have been accused of a thousand and one things… they still have

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been very understanding. Believe me when I say that on the night of the intifada people came to our house, people I didn’t even know, to check if I had changed or not. Because of stories about sexual abuse and pregnancy, etc. Someone said to me: Oh, fortunately you are still alive, I heard you were killed because you were pregnant. Just imagine, she really said it in those words. I didn’t even know this woman. My brother never talked about it again. I told him that I will choose a partner who knows who I am, and knows that I have been imprisoned and will accept that.18

Again, this underlines that the people whose memories are represented by the museum are still alive, and that their suffering still forms part of its milieu de mémoire, permeating its materiality: the closed door, the carvings in the walls, the bullet holes all overflow with meaning and confront the visitor with a past that is not only kept alive in, and by this building, but also still lives in the memories of countless victims of the Ba’ath regime. Furthermore, both my respondents’ reflections on the entrance and about the room in which women were sexually abused show that Amna Suraka, presented as an official lieu that teaches people about ‘the’ past, testifies to versions of this past that are simultaneously contested by people who are part of its milieu. This embeds the museum in an ongoing struggle for meaning, or different meanings, and therefore in a phase characterized by communicative memory.19

3  The Functional 3.1   In Order Not to Forget The functional is the second aspect that Nora discusses in his analysis of lieux de mémoire. He does not describe the idea of a ‘function’ extensively in ‘Between History and Memory,’ but we do find the following passage which follows his summary of the material aspect: If, on the other hand, we were to stress the functional element, an array of lieux de mémoire would display themselves, ranging from those dedicated to preserving an incommunicable experience that would disappear along with those who shared it – such as the veterans’ associations – to those whose purpose is pedagogical, as the manuals, dictionaries, testaments, and memoranda drafted by heads of families in the early modern period for the edification of their descendants. (22–23).

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Particularly interesting about this passage is Nora’s reference to veterans’ associations, which suggests that a lieu can include people who actually still remember that which is commemorated. What is crucial, however, is that these memories, according to him, are threatened with extinction, since they (no longer) form part of a shared milieu de mémoire: the moment that those who remember die, these memories disappear and are turned into history. This aspect is also present in Amna Suraka, but that the memory culture of the KRI provides the museum with more functions than ‘just’ the preservation of memories; it is more than a last bastion against forgetfulness. Instead, the functional aspect of the museum can be divided into roughly three elements: ‘in order not to forget;’ mourning the dead and sharing stories of trauma; and recognizing the importance of the fight against Daesh. The first of these functions comes the closest to Nora’s observations and returns in the official ‘subtitle’ of the museum: ‘In order not to forget.’ By including this phrase in its title, the museum is presented as having the official function to commemorate, to strive against forgetfulness by preserving the memories of what happened under Saddam’s regime. This function is explicitly communicated to visitors through a brochure handed to them in the reception room,20 where they arrive after entering the museum through a small door to the left of the museum’s main entrance, described above. This brochure contains a slightly different version of the title: The National Museum of Amna Suraka—Not to be Forgotten. There are two versions of this brochure: one in Kurdish (using the Sorani alphabet as well as the Latin alphabet) and one in Arabic and English.21 The phrase ‘Not to be Forgotten’ also emphasizes the museum’s pedagogical character, an element mentioned by Nora in the passage cited above. Amna Suraka, the visitor realizes when reading the brochure, has the official function to remember and commemorate. As such, it gains characteristics of Nora’s lieu. This function is most clearly present in three of its halls: the Hall of Mirrors, the Hall of Anfal and the Hall of Exodus. The Hall of Mirrors is the first area of Amna Suraka that visitors enter. Located in a cellar-like room underground, this room functioned as a place of interrogation. Today, it is covered with 182,000 fragments of broken mirrors, each representing a person that was killed during the Anfal campaign. On the ceiling, 4500 light bulbs represent the Kurdistani villages that were destroyed during this campaign. These villages, to interpret this metaphor, enlighten the fragments caused by the genocide. Because of this indirect

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representation of Anfal, the visitor depends on the guides’ explanation. The fact that this is the first exhibition that the visitor enters means, furthermore, that Anfal is presented as a framework in which the history of Amna Suraka is situated. This choice is remarkable, since the prison where political activists were jailed was not part of the Anfal campaign itself: as described in Chap. 1, this campaign mostly targeted civilians who were not politically active. By opening with this room, the museum emphasizes its specific function: what should not be forgotten is all of the suffering that Kurdistani people underwent in the recent past, caused by a range of different threats under Saddam’s regime. This function is provided with a more explicitly pedagogical dimension in the Hall of Anfal. In this room, the meaning of the word ‘Anfal’ is explained by a sign: “Anfal is an old Arabic expression meaning booty and looting at the time of war.” The word indeed refers to a verse in the Quran called ‘The Spoils of War’ (Hardi, Gendered Experiences 13). In this verse, the battle against ‘infidels’ is described, telling believers that they are allowed to organize ‘Anfal’ if they do so in the name of God. Even though the Ba’ath Party was secular, this religious name was perhaps chosen to stimulate the executioners of the campaign to do their jobs as efficiently and devotedly as possible. Furthermore, it made it possible to declare all spoils of war halal, which meant that soldiers were religiously sanctioned in claiming them as their property, effectively resulting in a systematic cleansing of the Kurdish population by demolishing and confiscating Kurdish land and property. By describing the word ‘Anfal’ as ‘an old Arabic expression,’ however, the exposition both distances itself from Saddam’s use of it and its legitimization by the Quran verse from which the word was taken—this verse itself is not mentioned by the sign—and produces a distance between Kurdistani and Arab culture. Like the Hall of Mirrors, the ceiling of the Hall of Anfal is covered with stars. These enlighten the names of Anfal victims, painted on the walls in red on a black background. Further in the hall, past the names, are photographs of victims in happier times. Illustrating the museum’s pedagogical function, the room describes the different stages of Anfal and furthermore refers to a frequently cited report, published by Human Rights Watch, to contextualize Anfal, and uses the report’s maps, tables and documents. Importantly, the hall also uses the definition of genocide employed in this report, concerning characteristics like ‘concentration’ and ‘annihilation of the enemy’ (‘Genocide in Iraq’ introduction).

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This embeds the function of the museum in a larger discourse revolving around genocide and the Holocaust. Michael Rothberg argues in this context that “Holocaust’s archetypical narrative of suffering … has become, in its extremity, a source of analogy for other histories” (Traumatic Realism 267). Indeed, Fischer-Tahir notes that Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of European Jews (1985)—which is cited in the introduction of the abovementioned Human Rights Watch report—is often consulted in writings about the Anfal campaign (‘Searching for Sense’ 233). As discussed in Chap. 2, Fischer-Tahir believes that these references have been helpful in framing Anfal, since they have given the victims a framework that recognizes their suffering and affirms the need to remember. As mentioned in the same chapter, furthermore, employing this discourse to some extent also made it possible for Peshmergas plagued by guilt and humiliation to ‘justify’ their inability to protect Kurdish citizens against the genocidal threat. 3.2   Interlude: Historical Context It is noteworthy that the attempt to embed past suffering in a Holocaust discourse is not unproblematic: Silke Arnold-de Simine, for example, argues that using the Holocaust as a trope “could be used to conceal as much as it reveals; although it draws attention to an event, it might also hide its historical specificity as well as its current relevance” (83). Indeed, it is crucial to take into account that the atrocities committed against Kurdistanis were carried out against the backdrop of the Iran-Iraq War and should not be represented as single ‘event.’ This claim can be substantiated by embedding the Anfal campaign within its historical context. Hiltermann’s study provides a thorough discussion of the circumstances leading up to and through the Anfal campaign. Already during this war, Saddam’s Ba’athist regime had used chemical weapons to target Iranian forces. The first attacks were carried out as early as the 1980s, and a more advanced and sophisticated use of potent agents, such as tabun, was implemented in the frontlines by late 1982 (28). This contravened the Geneva Protocol, which was established in 1925 in response to experiences of chemical warfare during the First World War. In the convention, it is stated that “prohibition shall be universally accepted as part of International Law, binding alike the conscience and the practice of nations” (qtd. in Hiltermann 12). The international community, however, did not condemn the use of chemical weapons by

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Iraq, even though its use was known (14–16). Favoring Iraq over Iran, the US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, was even sent to Iraq in December 1983 to meet with Saddam Hussein, and his use of chemical weapons was not discussed (49). Even after the continuous use of chemical weapons in 1984 and 1985, the Security Council did not identify Iraq as a perpetrator (79). Instead, the narrative presented by the US was that both Iraq and Iran were equally guilty, and both were therefore urged not to use chemical weapons. As the UN Security Council declared: “The Security Council condemns vigorously the continued use of chemical weapons in the conflict between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Iraq and expects both sides to refrain from the future use of chemical weapons” (qtd. in Hiltermann 148). The notion of a shared responsibility of both countries, which was continuously perpetuated by the US (172), proved false: in contrast to the use of chemical weapons by the Iraqi regime, there was, and still is, a lack of persuasive evidence concerning the use of chemicals by Iranian forces. In fact, in seized Iraqi secret police and intelligence documents, there is no mention of Iran’s use of chemical weapons during the war, whereas Iraq’s own use of chemical weapons is proudly acknowledged (176). Saddam interpreted the American and international stance as an implicit message that the Iraqi army could use chemical weapons without penalty or embargo (73). Coupled with the proven effectiveness of these weapons in demolishing the morale of soldiers, in 1987, the Ba’athist regime began to use chemical weapons against Peshmergas hidden in mountainous areas. They did this after Kurdish guerrillas (of the PUK), supported by Jash militias (discussed in Chap. 2), had managed to haul over 40 tons of weapons to Kirkuk in October 1986 (91). Herewith the message was sent to Bagdad that the Peshmergas were progressing in reclaiming the city of Kirkuk, with Iran as their allies. The successful raid of Kirkuk had, furthermore, reinforced the ties between Iran and the Peshmergas. The operation was considered a blow to Iraq’s pride and contributed to a feeling of anger and betrayal experienced by the Iraqi regime. Hiltermann observes: “These developments further raised the threat level to the Iraqis, who not only saw their own control of Kurdistan shrinking by the day, but also realized that the Kurds were approaching Kirkuk by infiltrating the surrounding countryside and bringing the population over to their cause” (93). The man appointed by the Command Council to suppress the Kurdish rebellion was Ali Hassan al-Majid, nicknamed Ali-Kimyawi (‘Chemical Ali’). Al-Majid soon realized that the Kurdish guerrillas gained

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ground because of the support of villagers, and his first move was therefore to break the nexus between the guerrillas and the villagers. The use of chemical weapons, used as an instrument of terror, served this purpose. To structure the campaign against the Kurds, prohibited zones were marked in Kurdish areas, including the countryside as a whole. Armed forces were ordered to “kill any human being or animal present within these areas” (99). In these prohibited areas, the Anfal campaign was carried out in eight stages between February and September 1988. It was presented as a way to reduce the Kurdish threat, but also to safeguard and re-impose the Iraqi army’s authority, which was weakened because of the Iraq-Iran War. Furthermore, the idea was that the Kurds must be punished for their ‘treachery’ (134). Hiltermann describes the pattern that was used in the Anfal campaign as follows: [T]he pattern was the same for each stage of Anfal: Fleeing villagers reaching the paved road were gathered by Iraqi troops and pro-regime Kurdish militias. They were herded to temporary holding centres, then driven by truck to the Popular Army base at Topzawa just outside Kirkuk. Here males between the age of fifteen and sixty were separated from their families and hauled off to execution sites in western Iraq, where they were killed and buried in mass graves. Older men and women were dispatched to Nugrat Salman, a notorious prison located in the desert west of Samawa in southern Iraq. Those who survived the prison’s extreme hardships (little food, no medical care, harsh climate) were released in a September 6 amnesty marking the end of Anfal. Then they were sent to live in a resettlement camp. The fate of women and children depended on their place of residence […]. If, however, they were from Germian (Anfals III and IV), in most cases, they were treated like the men and carted off to executions sites for mass killing. Those from the area of Anfal II who fled to Germian and were scooped up during Anfal III also were sent to their death. Perhaps as many as 80,000 Kurds, the vast majority civilians, were thus killed. Only six and a boy returned – miraculously – to tell their story. (132–33).

Since Anfal was considered an ‘internal matter’ or a counterinsurgency campaign, and since the Geneva Convention did not condemn the use of chemical weapons in internal conflicts, again the international community did not intervene. Furthermore, the US was still too preoccupied with the Iraq-Iran War, favoring the former over the latter. It was only when the gassing of Halabja took place on 16 March 1988, three weeks after the

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first Anfal operation, that international awareness was raised about the fate of the Kurdistanis. Chapter 5 returns to this topic. 3.3   Detailing the Anfal Campaign The Hall of Anfal at Amna Suraka provides a specific example of how Kurdistanis were exterminated by telling the visitor how people who lived in Anfal areas were arrested en masse and imprisoned in Nugra Salman (literally: ‘Pit of Salman’), mentioned by Hiltermann in the passage cited above. The exhibition contains a large picture of this prison, which was described as follows by Human Rights Watch in 1993: “It was an old building, dating back to the days of the Iraqi monarchy and perhaps earlier. It had been abandoned for years, used by Arab nomads to shelter their herds. The bare walls were scrawled with the diaries of political prisoners. On the door of one cell, a guard had daubed ‘Khomeini eats shit.’ Over the main gate, someone else had written, ‘Welcome to Hell’” (‘Genocide in Iraq’ 228). Between 5000 and 10,000 Kurds were imprisoned in Nugra Salman from February until September 1988. They lived there under horrible circumstances; about three quarters of those imprisoned died because of hunger, heat or bad sanitation (‘Genocide in Iraq’ 231–38). Information about this camp is provided on signs in the exhibition which provide the visitor with paraphrased testimonies of former internees in Nugra Salmon. These testimonies—which were taken from Chap. 8 of the abovementioned Human Rights Watch report, entitled ‘The Camps,’ (209–38)—are introduced with brief signs. These signs refer to the prisoners as ‘victims,’ and their testimonies clearly relate to the titular function of the museum: ‘in order not to forget.’ One sign holds the following example: “The guards of the prison often shouted at the poor prisoners accusing them as mukaribin (savages) and that they must die like dogs.” The prisoners are only characterized as ‘poor’ in the English version of the text, not in the Kurdish and Arabic ones. This suggests that the pedagogical function of the museum changes in relation to the type of visitor it wants to educate: whereas a foreigner might not know as much about what happened to the Kurdistani as people in the area, this word emphasizes the powerlessness the Kurdistani experienced against Saddam’s regime. In Kurdish or Arabic, however, such a phrase could be experienced as disempowering the Kurdistani. One of the phases of Anfal—that of annihilation—is described in the exhibition in particularly explicit terms, illustrating the idea that nothing

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of what happened should be forgotten: “Against all Islamic rules, it was not allowed to bury the dead: their bodies lay rotting for days and were often eaten by dogs.” The inhumane ways in which prisoners were treated by officers is described in a different fragment, which is also based on the Human Rights Watch report (234–36). This text describes torture techniques, mainly executed by an infamous officer named Hajjaj and his equally cruel assistant, Lieutenant Shakhi. Hajjaj is not the only person mentioned by name: the exposition includes a list of people who were responsible for the Anfal campaign. It includes 37 Ba’ath members who contributed to the annihilation of the Kurdistani, beginning with Saddam Hussein. Anfal is brought closer to the visitor via many photos of mass graves of Anfal victims, several showing skulls with blindfolds still intact. The exhibition also presents personal possessions found in these mass graves. The objects are exhibited in a glass cage in the wall, enlightened by red lights: the color red, echoing in the building’s name and outside walls, as well as in the names of victims mentioned above, is now linked to victims who did not return to tell their stories. Their possessions are accompanied by the following text: “the clothes and other belongings of the Victims of Anfal are clear evidence of the size of the mass killings perpetrated against the Kurdish Civilians.” Paul Williams writes about these kinds of expositions: “The idea that an object ‘witnessed’ an atrocity is a rhetorical strategy that aims to humanize something that existed during the period; the object itself gains a ‘life’” (Memorial Museums 31). These objects, in other words, form a material witness of the cruelty and dehumanization processes of the former regime, illustrating the museum’s function as a pedagogical lieu de mémoire: ‘In order not to forget.’ 3.4   Detailing Rakrdn Presenting the scale and impact of the Rakrdn is especially highlighted in the Hall of Exodus. This hall informs the visitor about the mass exodus, briefly mentioned when describing my personal memories in Chap. 1. This exodus took place after the uprisings against Saddam’s regime in 1991, when Peshmergas managed to liberate several government buildings, including Amna Suraka. When Saddam’s troops reached the city shorty after this uprising, three to four million people in Sulaymaniyah and surrounding areas, fearful of the vengeance that Iraqi troops would wreak, left their homes and properties and fled in panic across the mountainous

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countryside towards the borders of Iran and Turkey. Between 2 and 4 April, whole cities were almost totally evacuated; an event generally known as Koraw, Raparin or Rakrdn by Kurdistanis, which literally translate as ‘the Escape.’ In a 1992 Human Rights Watch report, Rakrdn is described as follows: Their exodus was sudden and chaotic, with thousands fleeing on foot, on donkeys, or crammed onto open-backed trucks and tractors. Many, including children, died or suffered injury along the way, primarily from adverse weather, unhygienic conditions and insufficient food and medical care. Some were killed by army helicopters, which deliberately strafed columns of fleeing civilians in a number of incidents in both the north and south. Others were injured when they stepped on mines that had been planted by Iraqi troops near the eastern border during the war with Iran, and in rural areas from which the government had forcibly relocated Kurds during the 1980s. (‘Endless Torment’ 32)

Although tragic and highly traumatizing in nature, this event is often presented as a turning point in history; in October 1991, the Iraqi army eventually withdrew from parts of the Kurdistan Region and many refugees returned home. The KRI then gained de facto independence, and the constitution of a no-fly-zone introduced a new beginning for the now semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government. In the Hall of Exodus, pictures are displayed in a space that is specifically designed to show what Rakrdn looked like. These pictures are exhibited on the walls behind barbed wire, but also on the room’s ceiling. They display people who are stuck in the mountains, crying and suffering, staring hopelessly into the lens of the camera. Most of these people are women, children and old men. The names of the photographer and of the people shown in the pictures are not provided. The reason for this, the museum’s current director Ako Ghareeb told me in an interview, is political: the photographer is from Sna (the Kurdish part of Iran). Even though they dedicated a whole text to his work, he did not want his name to be mentioned, for fear of retaliation.22 The room is only partly illuminated, which induces a sense of claustrophobia. The only real source of light is found at the end of the room, where a TV shows BBC documentaries about the horrors of Rakrdn. In these documentaries, the visitor sees people who express the feeling of being forgotten by the world, asking the

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interviewing journalists if Kurdistanis are not just like any other people and why other countries do not intervene. At the end of the room, a brief sign explains the context in which the pictures should be understood, clearly providing it with the function of commemoration: March 3, 1991 is considered as a turning point in our nation’s struggle for freedom in that day, we all decided to confront the Ba’athist occupiers, turning the “Mass Exodus” into our struggle’s identity. This tragic day is unforgettable in the history’s pages. On this day, we didn’t escape from death. Our choice was between a dignified death or an undignified life.

In the middle of this text, which is not presented in Kurdish, the narrator shifts from a ‘we’ to an ‘I’ perspective: “The Exodus was my nation’s loud shout against the disgraceful silence of the world. It was the shout that awakened the humanity from its deep sleep.” The sentence following these two suggests that it is the photographer who wrote them down: “Plastic sheets, barbed wires, and other self-made shelters are living in our memories for ever.” This sentence, which is translated into Arabic on the sign, explains the staging of the exhibition: the claustrophobic room represents a provisory shelter, made with barbed wire that, another sentence reads, symbolizes “a human tragedy that remains a main page in our history.” The latter sentence, which concludes the text, is also translated into Arabic on the sign. The fact that only these two sentences are translated into Arabic suggests that it is not deemed important or necessary to explain what exactly happened during Rakrdn to those who speak Arabic. The only aspect imperative to tell is the fact that ‘we’ (the Kurdistanis) have a history, which is different from ‘your’ (‘the Arabs’) history. In this way, as mentioned above, the Arabic visitor is made into an ‘overhearer’ to the museum’s apostrophizing of Kurdistan. However, the main audience addressed by the exhibition consists of those who did not intervene when Rakrdn happened (‘the West’). The English text tells how the West was finally made aware of what happened during the Mass Exodus of Rakrdn, “which pressed the United Nations to pass the resolution 688, which resulted in the no-fly-zone for an undefined nation in the Iraqi Kurdistan, north of latitude 36.” This sentence links the past and present and embeds the tragedy furthermore in the idea that Kurdistan has the right to autonomy; a right that was, to some extent,

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recognized but unfulfilled: a completely autonomous national Kurdistan does not yet exist, and therefore still must be apostrophized. 3.5   Mourning and Sharing Although many aspects that Nora links to the function of lieux de mémoire are visible in Amna Suraka’s emphasis on the importance not to forget, the fact that it is embedded in a milieu de mémoire, again, also provides the museum with another function: one that revolves around forms of mourning and of addressing traumas that comprise this milieu. This second function appears in different elements in the museum, and the following discusses three of these: the Hall of Anfal, the courtyard and sculptures positioned in the former prison cells. The first concerns the Hall of Anfal, in which the visitor continuously hears a female voice that makes traditional mourning sounds. Since it was not allowed to mourn the deaths of prisoners under the Ba’ath regime, the hall functions as a delayed burial ritual for those who form part of a milieu de mémoire that revolves around the traumatic loss of loved ones. In ‘Between History and Memory,’ Nora writes the following about lieux like the Pantheon, the Arc de Triomphe and the Dictionnaire Larouss: These lieux de mémoire are fundamentally remains, the ultimate embodiments of a memorial consciousness that has barely survived in a historical age that calls out for memory because it has abandoned it. They make their appearance by virtue of the deritualization of our world – producing, manifesting, establishing, constructing, decreeing, and maintaining by artifice and by will a society deeply absorbed in its own transformation and renewal, one that inherently values the new over the ancient, the young over the old, the future over the past. (11).

Comparing Amna Suraka with his analysis, the observation that the museum holds a more ambivalent position in-between lieu and milieu is again confirmed. Whereas Nora, after all, argues that lieux are constituted in a time in which rituals, as living embodiments of milieux, are disappearing, Amna Suraka shows that it is precisely its embeddedness in a still-­ active milieux that might provide the museum with a personal ritualistic function. As mentioned above, many of the victims of the Anfal campaign have disappeared and their status remains unknown. In the museum, these victims are represented by the many pictures and names on the walls of the

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Hall of Anfal, re-individualizing them and, in a sense, protecting them against forgetfulness. Their deaths and disappearance, furthermore, might to some extent be made grievable with help of the ritualistic mourning sounds played in the hall. A similar function returns, albeit in a different way, in Amna Suraka’s courtyard, which forms the center of the complex. To enter the courtyard, the visitor walks through a bower covered with roses and green plants. The bower creates a feeling of safety, as if strengthening and preparing the visitor for the cruelty that is represented in the museum; it illustrates the role that materiality can play in a lieu de mémoire. In this courtyard, tanks and artillery that were used by the Ba’ath regime are exposed. The contrast between, on the one hand, the living bower and roses that are planted around the courtyard, and on the other hand the decaying tanks and artillery, emphasizes that the museum represents the past: the weapons appear weak, they are covered with rust, and are shown as instruments belonging to a sealed-off and defeated era. This makes them part of the function characterized above as ‘in order not to forget.’ It seems obvious to most visitors what these tanks and artillery stand for; most do not ask what they are and how they were used. If someone asks, however, I observed that guides tell them that they were used against ‘Us.’ Not only does this increase the distance between ‘now’ and ‘then,’ but also between ‘Them’ (Saddam’s forces) and ‘Us’ (Kurdistanis). Visitors, in other words, are presented here with a narrative revolving around the idea that ‘They’ have lost, having been overpowered by ‘Us,’ who created the museum and planted roses. However, the weapons also have a different, almost ritualistic function: visitors are allowed to touch them. Indeed, the site is used as place where young and old take selfies, posing with tanks and artillery (Fig. 4.5). When I asked about these weapons in an interview with the museum’s director, Ako Ghareeb, he told me that they were moved there so Kurdistanis who lived under Saddam’s regime and often experienced them as intimidating and untouchable, are given a chance to diminish their fear and truly experience them as belonging to a past that is overcome.23 In this way, Ghareeb embeds the museum in its milieux de mémoire, linking the representation of objects to the active memories of visitors, even understanding these objects as ways of working through these memories. Furthermore, this emphasizes the idea that this part of the museum specifically focuses on Kurdistani residents of Sulaymaniyah, who personally experienced not only the Ba’ath regime but who also have vivid memories of the uprising,

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Fig. 4.5  Visitors taking photos with artillery in Amna Suraka’s courtyard (photo by Bareez Majid)

during which the prison was liberated and these weapons were captured as Kurdistani ‘spoils of war.’ Taking selfies at this site, it can therefore be argued, plays a personal ritualistic role: it makes it possible to work through one’s fears and one’s traumatic memories of the suffering that the weapons inflicted. This function also returns, again in a very different way, in a third part of Amna Suraka: several sculptures, made by a sculptor called Kamaran, have been placed in the former prison complex. What stands out is the fact that these sculptures, in contrast to the ones in the other parts of the museum (such as the Peshmerga exhibition and the Hall of Culture, which is described below), contain less realistic elements: the sculptures in the other rooms have skin color, for example, whereas these sculptures as well as their clothing are made of white plaster. This makes the pain that they represent less individualized, providing those who were detained in the prison with an outlet that they can relate to, or cast their memories onto, as a way of connecting with their traumatic past. At the same time, it is also important to stress that these sculptures were based on real stories and

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sometimes modeled on real people. In an interview, one of the museum’s guides explained this to me as follows: Guide: He [the sculptor, Kamaran] based the sculptures on the appearance of the family members [of the prisoners]. An example: Mamosta Ahmadi Sna’a’s sculpture is based on the appearance of his son. The sculpture of the woman is based on a well-known story. The sculptor investigated who that woman was, how tall she was and how old, and did the same with the child. Me: So he didn’t have an idea in advance of what he was going to make, but was guided by what people told him? Guide: That’s right! He collected those stories and then looked for people or made a person stand in that position, took a picture of them, and designed the sculptures based on this information. That person on the stairs, for example, is not based on anyone, but the story of someone who sat in that position really exists. The sculptures of Mamosta Atta above, and of Mamosta Ahmed, who is in solitary confinement, do in a certain sense resemble actual people: they are based on sons or brothers of ex-detainees who are still alive.

With help of Esther Peeren’s framework, discussed in Chaps. 1 and 3, it could be argued that this makes these sculptures, to a certain extent, spectral: after all, the sculptures are specifically created to not only provide the victims they represent with a material dimension, but also to give them a spectral agency on an affective level. Even though their ‘materialization,’ to some extent, might rob them of their specifically spectral and ungraspable qualities, their affective workings, as discussed below, clearly manifested themselves during the interviews I conducted with several ex-detainees. The first of these sculptures can be found in one of the torture rooms through which one is guided when visiting the prison cells (Fig. 4.6). This room is illuminated with red light (again the color red returns, this time creating an eerie and gruesome atmosphere); a text outside of the room tells the visitor that it is 16 m2. The room, the text continues, was meant for hitting prisoners “according to the will of security officers, some were using electrical cables and others were kicking them. Hanging the detainees to the roof and bastinado torture or hitting the feet with a stick, were also applied.” That the officers could be sadistic is depicted by the sculptures of the torturers. They represent men driven by anger and hate, with bloodshot eyes and pulsing veins in their necks. Two men in uniform, with big moustaches and unfriendly faces, hold a long stick to which a man is

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Fig. 4.6  Sculptures representing a scene of torture (photo by Bareez Majid)

tied by his feet. A third man in uniform, looking even more like he has been completely overcome by rage, holds up a whip, frozen mid-swing: he is captured in the act of carrying out the torture technique of bastinado (foot) whipping. The sculpture of the tortured man holds his legs. His face is shot through with pain, his eyes are closed and his mouth is open. His feet are detailed, showing cuts from the whipping. These sculptures are the only three-dimensional depictions of the Other—the enemy—in Amna Suraka (different representations of Others can be found in the Daesh exhibition, described below). The fact that these sculptures of torture are still deeply embedded in a milieu de mémoire is shown by the fact that they have been vandalized by visitors: the whip and the left arm of the torturer sculpture have been broken off. Although the sculptures of the victims can also be touched, they have not been damaged. This damage is probably intentional, having perhaps provided a past visitor (or visitors) with a cathartic outlet. Moreover, it has not been repaired: this damage, which symbolically strips the torturer of his power to inflict harm, is permanent.

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A different function can be attributed to other sculptures of Ba’ath regime victims: in one of the torture rooms, the visitor encounters a sculpture of a man hanging by his arms, tied behind him and attached to a pipe in the ceiling, a position known as strappado that quickly dislocates the shoulders to cause immeasurable pain and permanent damage. A text explains: “exposing them to electrical shocks, pressing heated iron on their bodies, hitting them with cables and letting electrical currents pass through their sensitive organs. Many heroes of the Kurdish resistance had died due to this type of torture.” With ‘sensitive organs,’ ears and fingers are meant, but also genitals. Perhaps because of the taboo surrounding this issue, the electric wire is hung around the sculpture’s neck. His eyes are closed, and his brows creased in pain. His Kurdistani clothes are ripped, and he is barefoot. The room is illuminated with white fluorescent lighting; a sharp contrast to the red light that illuminates the torturers in the other room. Unlike the sculptures of the torturers, furthermore, this sculpture is protected by a glass plate. Behind the plate, we not only see the sculpture hanging from the ceiling, but also a table, chair, and an electric device. These are authentic objects, a text tells us: “this chair and this table were used by the security investigators when they were questioning the detainees. These pieces of furniture were kept by (Baxtiar Fuad Rasheed and Hemn Fuad Fahseed) during the fall of this fort. And they kindly presented them to this museum after its opening.” The visitor also encounters several other white sculptures: at the bottom of the staircase that leads to the second floor of the prison complex, for example, a sculpture has been placed of a blindfolded man chained to the railing. No text explains what we see, but as I observed in my fieldwork, a staff member often tells visitors that the sculpture represents a specific type of torture: prisoners were forced to stand for hours in this uncomfortable position. During winter, prisoners who were chained to the railing like this were often underdressed for the climate and grew very sick from exposure. These prisoners were also humiliated by passing guards. Like the other sculptures, this one does not look at the visitor: although we are made aware of his suffering, we cannot look this sculpture in the eyes; he is unaware of his witnesses. To some extent, this encourages the visitor to identify with his body, and not with him as a specific individual person. Another sculpture shows a standing woman, a child anxiously holding her legs: it refers to the many women who, together with their children, were held as ‘bait’ in the prison, forcing their husbands or male family members to turn themselves in. Furthermore, it emphasizes

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the suffering of these women, who not only had to take care of themselves in the unforgiving environment, but also their children. None of these sculptures have names, nor are they based on historical figures. They are rather presented as anonymous, suffering symbols. Their pain forms the central focus, their postures shrunk, their eyes blindfolded; their bodies are reduced to suffering (Fig. 4.7). When seeing the sculpture on the stairs, one of the respondents I interviewed said the following: Respondent: I’ve had two operations on my back, because of those hours I spent on the stairs. This sculpture [sculpture of the man on the stairs]: that’s us. That’s what we all looked like. That’s how we spent the first hours. That image is me, that image is my friends. I couldn’t go on anymore, then at a Fig. 4.7  Sculpture representing prisoner (photo by Bareez Majid)

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certain moment, I took off my shoes with my free hand. I put it under me, that piece of skin is now black. Me: Can you remember what you were thinking at the time? Is one actually able to think at such a moment? Respondent: What was I not thinking about? I thought about my father, and how he always advised me to stop working in the resistance. That I or my children would be arrested, and that they would be Anfalized. I thought of his words. I thought about my children. I have three daughters. I had another son, but he died at a very young age. His name was Safir. But my youngest son, Sangar is his name, I thought about him a lot. Also, because he was the youngest of them all. He was young and taqane [a word used for the only son or daughter in a family]. I also thought a lot about my wife. That she would now have to take care of our children on her own. When she found out that I had been arrested, she immediately burned everything that had to do with the resistance, became homeless, and went into hiding with our children. Despite everything, she still managed to rent a room from an acquaintance of ours, so that our children could still go to school.24

Together with the testimonies carved in the prison walls, these sculptures create the possibility of representing the suffering that was experienced for years in the exact same place where the visitor is standing. As such, they transmit a sense of the traumatic experiences that people underwent in the prison complex. This is especially true because the museum, again, is embedded in the traumatic milieu de mémoire that it represents: the scenes of pain and torture represented by the white sculptures might provide victims of this regime with an ‘opening’ to their experiences, affecting them in such a way that they are perhaps encouraged to put them into words, and even share these experiences. For example, when I asked a former prisoner what he thought of the sculptures, he said: “Someone like you doesn’t get this. You can’t understand those sculptures until you’ve experienced this. You can feel it only when you have suffered this much pain. They bring me closer to my friends, like Mamosta Ahmed.”25 Observations like these indicate that the status of the particular memories triggered by the sculptures comes closer to the phantomic than to the spectral. Whereas the sculptures have a certain material and spectral agency, these memories themselves are so particular, fleeting and vulnerable, often repressed or appropriated by different hegemonic discourses— such as the apostrophizing of Kurdistan—as well as feelings of regret and guilt, that there is hardly any place for them. As Cheryl Lawther observes about the appropriation of traumatic memories in the context of Northern

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Ireland: “within the politics of the dead, certain victims’ voices and their calls for truth may be prioritised because of the heavily politicised message that they carry, while leaving others at the margins” (161). Once a space suddenly opens up in which these politicizes messages are less present, however, the phantomic layer present hiding within the mnemonic reality of the ex-detained whom I interviewed, might briefly reveal itself. This observation is corroborated by another interview I conducted with a former detainee. In the beginning of the interview, he had not told me much about himself and his experiences. He had only described the circumstances of his arrest and imprisonment. When he was 41, he told me, he was a member of the Komala Party and was arrested at the school where he taught on 23 December 1990. The three Amn who arrested him told him that they only needed him for four or five minutes, which turned into years. Just before he was taken away, he signaled the janitor, who ran to his house and warned his family so they could hide. He still seemed to feel relief that he was able to do this, because he said he would have found it horrible if his children had been captured by the Amn, especially his then four-year-old son. He was led into Amna Suraka blindfolded and was questioned for days. He did not tell me much about the ways in which he was tortured, only that he was then transported to Abu Ghraib together with a group to which he and 30 others belonged, and was sentenced to death. After two court sittings, however, his sentence was changed to life imprisonment, and he was released in 1992 in an exchange of prisoners of war.26 He had written his experiences down on 10 May 2007, and allowed me to make photocopies of his story. He had also collected evidence related to his imprisonment, like the official court order of the Ba’ath Party against him, a list of the names of his friends who were arrested with him, and a picture of five of them who had died. He also let me take a picture of a testament he had written in prison. He did not want me to handle the original documents, since in the past people had lost them and he did not want this to happen again. Because of the documents he showed me, and the chronological and schematic way in which he told his story, his narrative came across as rather abstract and impersonal. However, when he saw the sculpture of the man tied to a hook in the wall, he changed completely. In some way, the sculpture affected him and enabled him to present a less structured and ‘official’ narrative about his experiences: he now told me that when he was led into the building blindfolded, he was tied to a hook, just like the sculpture, on the building’s roof, wearing very little clothes.

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Then the guards guided him into the building and tied him up again, bent over a guardrail, and he was kicked and hit repeatedly by all the officers who passed by. His pain forced him to sit on one of his shoes, even though this meant that his other foot would freeze. They did these things to humiliate him, he told me, but they had not been able to destroy his spirit. He then began to share his feelings of powerlessness towards his family. What hurt him more than the many humiliations he had undergone when he was imprisoned was that he believed that he would not be able to see his son grow old, and the realization that his situation hurt his own father, who had warned him many times that he should not work for the resistance. He furthermore told me that he felt like he had made his family pay for his own actions. They blamed him for their hard life, their years of living in hiding, and the insecurity they had experienced. Unlike himself, his family had never received the recognition that other ‘real’ political activists had been given. This had made them skeptical about his experiences, making it difficult for him to share his story.27 I also interviewed a 21-year-old guide who had been working in the museum of Amna Suraka for only a month. This guide emphasized that everything that the museum stands for is ‘history’ to him, although his parents do talk about their own experiences at home. The prison complex, he told me, brings this history closer. This was the case, he said, because in contrast with the other parts of the museum, this complex is unrenovated, and also because of the sculptures. Seeing these sculptures, he told me, made history come alive. In his own words: I think the sculptures there are very successful. As I told you: you immediately feel what it is like to be tortured there. You see it directly in front of your eyes. There’s a sculpture on the stairs. They say that this was one of the first torture techniques used against the prisoners who were brought in here; that they were tied to the railing. In this way, they could not sit, but were also not able to stand. They were often kicked and humiliated in that position by the executioners and officers who passed by. They put out their cigarettes out on them. You can see that when you’re here. You can feel that.28

In light of these observations, the lamentation sounds in the Hall of Anfal, the tanks on which visitors climb and with which they take selfies, and the sculptures of anonymous persons in pain, provide Amna Suraka with more diverse functions than Nora attributes to lieux de mémoire: they

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enable Kurdistani visitors, still deeply embedded in a milieu de mémoire, to partly reflect on and confront traumatic experiences, memories of fear, or feelings of grief for lost loved ones that often cannot be shared precisely because this milieu is still so ‘fresh.’ 3.6   Recognizing the Present The third and last function of Amna Suraka on which this chapter focuses is that of recognizing and presenting the fight of the Kurdistani against Daesh in recent history. This happens in the Daesh Exhibition, which opened in 2017. Again, this shows that the museum not only aims to preserve memories so that they are not lost to forgetfulness, but instead aims to recognize and show what recently happened and is still happening, linking the suffering caused by Saddam’s regime to the suffering caused by Daesh. Indeed, the hall contains endless photographs of Peshmergas who have died fighting against the terrorist organization. The function that the Daesh Exhibition has within Amna Suraka can be illustrated with help of the following sign, which illustrates its ‘living’ dimension: The National Museum Amna Suraka– Not to be Forgotten, is an important living historical site of commemorating the resistance as well as the graveyards of the Kurdish people against their oppressor. We consider ourselves as responsible for the retelling and preserving the truth of this past because upholding this history, which is full of immense sacrifices and tragedies, is beyond important. The project to establish ‘Museum of the Martyrs in the War against ISIS’ is a continuation of our work of preserving history in this museum. And we are deeply proud that we managed to successfully establish, for the first time in the world, an exhibit dedicated to the war against ISIS. Despite the fact that this work is nowhere near done, nor has the rain of the blood of martyrs stopped falling yet. This museum is part of our identity in the four parts of Kurdistan and has aimed to transcend the artificial borders imposed on us, and so our generation are a source of deep pride and immense honor no matter which part of Kurdistan they have their blood. In this museum we aimed to demonstrate the truth to the world, which is a source of great pride in a war imposed on us, because we represented humanity while still retaining our peace speaking spirit. In the process we managed to not only unite the world, but to also win against the dark forces of terrorism. We honor the contribution and support of other nations and peoples and we are proud that we remained as Kurds as we have sacrifices for retaining the balance for peaceful, mutual coexistence. We hope in return

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that the world after the end of the worshipers of darkness is a just world that honour and remembers the bravery and sacrifices made present here.

Some key aspects of this text are important to emphasize: first, it foregrounds the role of the museum as a place where ‘truth’ is guarded and shown. It is the first place, the text tells us with pride, where the horrors of the fight against Daesh are archived and exposed. Second, the text tells us that the Kurdistanis have proved to be a peaceful people, whose existence continues to be threatened to the present day. Daesh is presented, in this way, as one threat in a long list of threats to Kurdish existence, including the other horrors commemorated in the museum. A way of finally overcoming this state of continual threat, the text suggests, lies in the aspiration to become independent: explicitly mentioning the ‘four parts of Kurdistan,’ the goal of independence is explicitly presented in this text. Furthermore, the idea that Kurdistanis are united against one similar enemy presents their strengths and perseverance as binding and communally shared factors. As mentioned above, representations like these apostrophize Kurdistan, referring to a ‘non-state nation’ that should exist (the apostrophe returns below in the discussion of the museum’s symbolic aspects). Third, victory over Daesh is presented as organized by Kurdish Peshmergas, but the text and other signs at the exhibition link this accomplishment to the international community: photos display Western soldiers fighting with the Peshmergas against Daesh. That a coalition is what made it possible to defeat Daesh, and that Kurdistanis played a necessary and important role in this coalition, is expressed by a list of both Western and Arab countries that provided military and humanitarian support: “partners pledging support, and coalition support.” One of the functions of this part of the museum, in other words, is to make the visitor aware of the role that the Kurdistanis played as coalition partners, linked explicitly to notions of Kurdish independence and autonomy. This exhibition is located in a large hall and consists of two floors: a ground floor and a second floor, to which the visitor can walk using ramps. The room is illuminated by artificial arms of Peshmergas holding oil lamps. Furthermore, photos of the fights against Daesh are displayed, together with signs that explain what they represent. These are alternated with news items, giving the impression that the museum tells a truthful and objective story, embedded within an international journalistic context. The function of Amna Suraka, this suggests, is not just to preserve

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memories that would otherwise be forgotten, but also to present the recent past to visitors, emphasizing the resilience of the Kurds and their ability to work together with international forces in the fight against Daesh. As such, this function partly overlaps with the symbolic.

4  The Symbolic 4.1   Kurdistani Culture and Folklore As the third and last aspect of lieux de mémoire, Nora describes the symbolic. He refers in this context to various phenomena, for example, to a commemorative minute of silence as a “strictly symbolic action” (18), as well as to sites where “the commemorative element is only one amid many symbolic meanings, such as the national flag” (23) or “tricolor” (12). Again, he stresses the flexibility of this aspect: If, finally, we were most concerned with the symbolic element, we might oppose, for example, dominant and dominated lieux de mémoire. The first, spectacular and triumphant, imposing and, generally, imposed – either by a national authority or by an established interest, but always from above  – characteristically have the coldness and solemnity of official ceremonies. One attends them rather than visits them. The second are places of refuge, sanctuaries of spontaneous devotion and silent pilgrimage, where one finds the living heart of memory. (23).

It is this reference to ‘dominant and dominated’ lieux de mémoire that is highlighted in the following to characterize the symbolic aspects of Amna Suraka. These aspects revolve around the ways in which its different expositions are presented as symbols of Kurdish suffering and resilience. These symbols appear in the museum in roughly two forms: Kurdistani culture and folklore, and Kurdistani heroes. Both symbols apostrophize an independent Kurdistan as the only true home of this culture and these heroes. This act of apostrophizing is embedded in a historical context with help of an object displayed in the museum’s courtyard: a carriage that, a text tells the visitor, was used by British Forces and is “a part of the British army occupying of this country” in 1917. By displaying this carriage in a museum about the crimes committed by Saddam’s Ba’ath regime and by Daesh, the act of apostrophizing is embedded in a narrative that portrays Kurdistan as continuously threatened by various aggressive Others.

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What is specifically threatened is shown by the first symbol mentioned above: Kurdistani culture, which is presented to the visitor of Amna Suraka right after the Hall of Mirrors discussed above. After this hall, which presents an abstract reference to a discourse of genocide and the notion that ‘one should not forget,’ the visitor finds themselves in a space that represents a normal living room in a rural Kurdistani house; a room in which tea was drunk and that contains blankets and beds. The colors in the room are bright; we see a room in which people lived and laughed. What the guides generally do not mention, but what I learned during my conversation with them, is that these objects were actually taken from an Anfalized village. The museum bought them from families in this village, a guide with whom I spoke told me.29 In contrast with the exhibitions through which the visitor is guided later, there are no mannequins or sculptures. The only ‘evidence’ of those who lived in rooms like this is presented to the visitor within a glass case on the wall: a dress. It is accompanied by a sign, only in Kurdish, which reads: Poshak [a typical Kurdish word for a wedding dress that women wear in rural Kurdistan] that belonged to Meryam, a young woman from the village of Garmyan, who lost her future husband to Anfal after being engaged for two months. When he was killed, Maryam decided to live only with her memories of her fiancé.

On a picture taped to the glass case, we see Maryam sitting in a corner of a room, wearing a purple dress and a typical Kurdish headscarf, bent over her Poshak and putting it in a Bwxcha (Kurdish bag). Following the abstract Hall of Mirrors, this room symbolizes that which was targeted in the Anfal campaign: Kurdistani culture. Indeed, the same picture returns in the Hall of Anfal, suggesting that she was also a victim of the Anfal campaign. However, one of the guides also told me that Maryam died recently, in 2009. While Maryam did not lose her life in the attacks, she lost the future and way of life she had envisioned for herself, symbolized by the wedding dress she never wore. This culture has a symbolic aura that simultaneously apostrophizes Kurdistan, because the text about Maryam is only in Kurdish. This suggests that the sole targeted audience of this text are Kurdistani visitors. This room, in other words, wants to teach these visitors something about their own culture: the use of a typically Kurdish word like ‘poshak’ exemplifies this by referring to ancient traditions that bind Kurdistani visitors to

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their collective history and culture. At the same time, only someone familiar with Kurdistani culture understands that the text implicitly has a deeper symbolic meaning: after having lived in mourning, and after not having been able to marry again, Maryam has given her dress to the museum. By doing this, she has decided to let go of her past and is ready to move on. That she does not wear a black dress in the photo, as many widows do until their death in rural areas of Kurdistan, strengthens this interpretation. In this way, the text invites the Kurdistani visitor to apostrophize Kurdistan as the only true home of Kurdistani culture, making those who cannot read the sign into ‘overhearers’ of the act of apostrophizing, as if they are witnessing a community of people all pointing at one direction: the Kurdistan of the future, addressed in the present. A similar act of apostrophizing returns in the symbolic dimensions of the Hall of Culture. This hall is in a three-story building that the visitor enters after they have visited the Hall of Mirrors and crossed the courtyard. It mainly shows portraits of women dressed in traditional Kurdistani clothing, placed in typical Kurdistani settings such as natural environments, next to or with typical Kurdistani objects. Contrasting with the picture of Maryam, the body language of these women expresses pride: they smile and/or look directly into the camera. One portrait shows a smiling young woman, dressed in a colorful Kurdistani dress, leaning on what appears to be a balcony. In the background, we see a Kurdistani house decorated with purple flowers. On her right shoulder rests a white dove. This portrait contains all the ingredients that make it into a symbol of resilience: the victims of yesterday, who are portrayed in the Hall of Mirrors and who were attacked with the weapons displayed in the courtyard, are the optimistic individuals of today: ‘we, the Kurdistani, are still here,’ it seems to say. Peace and acceptance, symbolized by the white dove, have been achieved now that the Ba’ath regime has been defeated. The portrait symbolizes optimism and hope for the future, characterized by an emphasis on reconciliation and peaceful co-existence that echoes the second narrative discussed in the analyses of education textbooks in Chap. 2; moreover, white doves, an international symbol of peace, also appear in one of these textbooks and on the museum’s brochure. The Hall of Culture also displays male and female mannequins dressed in typical Kurdistani clothes. These clothes are not only from the KRI, but from all areas in which Kurdistanis live, including Iran, Syria, Turkey and Armenia. This means that the exposition not only expresses a feeling of unity, but also suggests that all Kurdistanis are equal and are a unified

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cultural group, again apostrophizing Kurdistan. The shared characteristics of this group of people, the museum suggests, can be found in its artistic and cultural products, such as typical Kurdistani jewelry and carpets, which are displayed in a different room. All of these objects are accompanied by signs explaining what they are. A room at the end of the hall is dedicated to the process of weaving and coloring fabrics, displaying the instruments used to do this. These cultural elements can be characterized as belonging to the symbolic aspect of Amna Suraka as a lieu de mémoire, representing that which was targeted by the Anfal campaign but also symbolizing Kurdish resilience, unity and peacefulness. However, this aspect also makes the museum, again, distinct from Nora’s definition. After all, these elements not only point to the past, but also to the present and future: they are embedded in a milieu de mémoire of Kurdistani who, for example, recognize the strong symbolism of Maryem, connect her story to their own memories and partake in the act of apostrophizing Kurdistan. As such, the museum symbolizes much more than just the past, and does much more than just materializing memories before they are swept away by history. Instead, they play a symbolic and apostrophic role in presenting Kurdistani culture and folklore as phenomena that will still exist, and persist, in the future. Nora’s reference to ‘dominant and dominated’ lieux de mémoire (23) also turns our attention to another symbolic (and apostrophic) role played by this exposition of folklore: Eric Davis argues that under the reign of Saddam, representations of folklore were used in museums to counter colonialist perceptions of (former) colonies (like Iraq) as devoid of a vibrant culture. These perceptions were used to justify colonialism and its exploitative practices, and explains colonialist obsession with older, more ‘naïve’ civilizations. The Ba’ath Party, Davis observes, emphasized the living culture of its people—its folklore—presenting ‘the’ Iraqis as a unified and vibrant people. He notes, for example, that under Saddam’s regime, the Costume and Folklore Museum was expanded, and in 1972, an institution named Dar al-Turath al Sah’bi (the House of Popular Culture) was established (98). Furthermore, what Davis describes as ‘low culture’ or popular culture, including folklore and handicrafts, was praised under Saddam’s regime. As a result, a new type of museum was born, which Davis describes as follows:

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The new type of museum, in the form of combined craft center and exhibit space, was also used further to deny social differences. Folklore could become the common denominator of all Iraqis  – sunni Muslims, shi’i Muslims, and Kurds alike – who shared more or less the same type of food, clothing, rituals games, music, and family structure. In other words, as constructed by the state, folklore not only proved that Iraqis represented a unified national culture and political community but also provided a link to Iraq’s Mesopotamian heritage, since many cultural patterns and practices by the ancient inhabitants of the region were said to parallel those of modern Iraqis. (100).

In Amna Suraka, Kurdistani folklore is used to counter the idea that Kurdistani people did not, and do not, have a living culture distinct from that of Arab Iraq. In other words, representations of folklore were used under Saddam’s regime to counter colonialist perspectives or as a common denominator to enhance their control over Kurdistanis. In turn, in the KRI folklore is represented to counter the reductive narratives created by Saddam’s Ba’athist Party. In doing so, it resists the Ba’athist hegemonic perspective and confronts it with that which it excludes as a symbol of the resilience of Kurdistani culture: the apostrophized Kurdistan. 4.2   Kurdistani Heroes A second dimension of Nora’s symbolic returns in several references to Kurdistani heroism in Amna Suraka. In the Hall of Culture, we find a mannequin of the iconic Kurdistani woman and historical figure, Hapsa Xani Naqib (1881–1953). The mannequin is dressed in traditional Kurdish clothes typical for the city in which she lived, Sulaymaniyah. She was the niece and sister-in-law of Sheikh Mahmud Barzinji, monarch of the Kingdom of Kurdistan. As a politically engaged activist, she not only fought for the rights of Kurds, but also for women’s rights in general.30 Surrounded by Kurdistani artifacts, the mannequin is encased by a glass fence, which protects the bottom half of her ‘body.’ In the opposite room, the visitor finds a mannequin representing Sheikh Mahmuud Barzinji himself. Dressed in Kurdistani clothes, the monarch expresses braveness and wisdom. He is positioned in the middle of a room, which represents his living room. This room is more modern than the rural home represented in the Hall of Mirrors and contains a sofa and a desk. On the wall hangs a clock with two rifles next to it, representing the long battles that Sheikh

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Mahmuud Barzinji fought for Kurdistani rights and sovereignty. These mannequins symbolize the Kurdish fight for independence and freedom, apostrophizing an autonomous Kurdistan that existed for a short period of time in the relatively recent past. This symbolism returns in the last room of the Hall of Culture. It contains glass cases, completely closed, filled with different kinds of weapons. The weapons are ordered by size. Like the artillery and tanks displayed in the museum’s courtyard, these weapons have been rendered harmless, objects of the past: conquered, ‘lifeless’ objects displayed in closed glass cases. This is emphasized by the sign in the room, which says the following in Kurdish, Arabic and English: We neither manufactured these weapons, nor feel proud exhibiting them. In fact, these were used by those who threatened our existence. We also admit that these very weapons helped us achieve our freedom.

Combined with the previous rooms, this fourth room provides the word ‘freedom’ with a specific meaning: everything shown so far was almost destroyed by oppressive powers, this room tells us. But ‘we’ fought back and now have the freedom to display, and also to live ‘our’ rich culture. A similar symbol of Kurdistani heroism is found in the prison cells described above: on the second floor of the prison complex, we find a sculpture that represents Atta Hajj Ahmad Zahir, also known as Atta Zeringar. A sign tells the visitor: “Atta was a great freedom fighter who never gave up striving against the oppressor. He was used to wake up early in the morning and starting the day with a National Hymn to awaken the other detainees and to challenge the prisoners.” In contrast with the other sculptures in positions of agony discussed above, this one stands up, holds his head high and looks, his arms crossed, at a little window covered with bars. On the wall in front of the sculpture, we see a drawing carved in the wall by a prisoner. It features a vase with a particularly large flower, and in the vase, a small flying bird. The vase is surrounded by Kurdish words identifying it as a “freedom flower.” This image, together with the sculpture’s proud posture, offer powerful symbols of freedom and hope that shape Atta Zeringar’s status as a martyr. The sculpture is a materialization of the act of apostrophizing: instead of looking at the visitor, his back is turned, making this visitor into an ‘overhearer’ of his positioning before the ‘freedom flower’ and the freedom represented by the window he looks

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towards. Since the visitor can also look up at that same window from within the prison complex, the overhearer might feel compelled to participate in Zeringar’s act themselves. A third reference to Kurdistani heroism can be found in the Hall of Peshmergas. This hall consists of two floors: at the ground floor, the walls are covered with a collage of more than 6000 photographs, and the room is occupied by several mannequins of Peshmergas fighting in the mountains. In many of the photos, we see Jalal Talabani of the PUK. When the visitor enters this hall, a display explains in Kurdish who the Peshmergas are, stressing their symbolic nature as holy protectors of the Kurdistani and of the apostrophized Kurdistan: The day a person decides to become a Peshmerga, the only thing he sees is his fatherland’s happiness. That is why a Peshmerga is someone who sacrifices his own life for the freedom of his country. Peshmerga is one of the holy names, and refers to grandness and loyalty, gratitude and love.

The following line, which we find below several paintings and charcoal drawings of mountains, illustrates this idea: “Those days when we had no friends but the mountains.” The fact that the line is set in the past tense suggests that nowadays the Kurdistanis do have friends, thus implying that the battles fought by the Peshmergas have had a positive result. This narrative is also represented on the ground floor by means of a mannequin of a disabled Peshmerga, seated in a wheelchair, placed on a pedestal (Fig. 4.8). The English version of the text explaining this mannequin reads as follows: When I decided to join the resistance force inside the city, and become a Peshmerga member, I never expected to see this day. To be thanked by my people. Since then I always considered it my duty to serve my nation. Martyrdom was our greatest aspiration. My friends are much more fortunate because they gave their lives for the cause while we only gave an organ. To all the Kurdish martyrs who became the symbol of Kurdistan’s glory and freedom.

The text emphasizes the idea that Kurdistan has become a safe haven because of the contributions—including the loss of life and limb—of the Peshmergas. Furthermore, it emphasizes the need to move forward; to

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Fig. 4.8  Mannequin representing a Peshmerga in a wheelchair (photo by Bareez Majid)

serve the nation, work towards glory and freedom, and perhaps constitute a truly independent nation in the future. The Hall of Peshmergas also displays objects that are used to concretize the past and speak to visitors. For example, it contains weapons, accompanied by the following text that expresses an idea from the perspective of the

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weapons. It not only displays these weapons to inform visitors, but to present them as symbols: We intended to genocide them all. But they captured us. They asked why would you kill us, when you don’t know us. They told us: turn around and see for yourself. Among all who been killed which one once waylaid you? Turn around and see for yourself, a blood river flowed by your cruel bullets, light trigger and blind nozzles. Since then, these rifles revolted and decided to stop turning around until this nation eventually would be free.

This text is consistent with the analysis above about the weapons displayed in the Hall of Culture as well as the artillery in the courtyard. The Kurdistanis are characterized as peaceful and the use of weapons is presented as an action instigated by external forces and that the Kurdistanis were forced to undertake. In this hall, however, a further step is taken: the objects themselves are addressed, apostrophized, and this act is described by these same weapons. This makes the visitor into an overhearer of ‘the’ Kurdistani people addressing the weapons, encouraging them as overhearers to reflect on the bloodshed that characterizes their history. The heavy symbolism that the visitor is confronted with when walking through the room builds up gradually: next to a bullet hole in a second floor wall, for example, a sign apostrophizes Kurdistan through a material opening: “the very aperture through which the Baath regime thugs were sniping on March 3, 1991. Through it we look at our nation’s future and freedom which we irrigated with our martyr’s blood.” The symbolism— blood, martyrs, freedom—reaches a climax at the end of the Hall of Peshmergas, where the visitor encounters a mannequin of a man half-­ dressed in a white robe. Although he is kneeling, his posture, in contrast with the sculptures limp with pain elsewhere in the museum, is strong, and his expression peaceful. He holds a large Kurdish flag and the pedestal on which he has been placed is dripping with blood, the walls around him illuminated in red light. His white clothes recall the clothes worn by those who go on Hadj, providing the mannequin with an almost holy aura. There is no text explaining what the mannequin represents. However, on both sides a poem by Kurdistani poet, Sherko Bekas, is displayed. It tells the reader what a martyr is and compares a martyr to elements of nature (mountains, snow, trees) and also body parts (fingers, hands), expressing that a martyr is someone who has given up his body for the fatherland, and

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is part of a larger whole—either the ‘body’ of the Kurdistani or the natural motherland of the apostrophized Kurdistan itself. A similar idea returns in a hall that used to be called the Hall of Mines but is now the Hall of the Martyr Hemn; it is named after a man named Hemn who was killed during a minesweeping campaign in the KRI and whose picture we see near the hall’s entrance. The scope of this chapter does not make it possible to focus on this hall in detail, but what is important to note is that this room, which draws the visitor’s attention to the use of landmines against the Kurdistani, extends the notion of martyrdom to those who, in the present, have lost and continue to lose their lives in campaigns to rid the region of its remaining landmines. This again links the past that the museum commemorates to the present, extending its symbolism of heroism to recent events, and providing it, as a symbol of Kurdistani heroism, with a certain timeless aura. The colors of the Kurdish flag return in the hall’s lighting, again presenting the same aura as that of the kneeling personification of Kurdistan in the Hall of Peshmergas. This aura extends to the Peshmergas who are praised in the Room of Daesh. Here, we find several strongly symbolic elements as well: as discussed above, for example, the journalistic items shown to the visitor are surrounded everywhere by arms draped in Peshmerga clothing who enlighten the exhibition with their oil lamps. The symbolism of these mannequins is clear: the Peshmergas are the heroes who bring light to the darkness. The exhibition contains other overtly symbolic elements as well, such as a coffin over which Kurdish flags are draped. At the end of the ground floor, furthermore, we see two mannequins of male Peshmergas looking up with pride. The visitor sees a light-box showing a photo of a hand holding a weapon, sticking out of debris: it symbolizes the indestructability of the Peshmergas and that which they fight for. Countless other photos show how Peshmergas are received everywhere with open arms amongst many waving Kurdish flags.

5  An Entwinement of History and Memory 5.1   ‘Our true history’ The discussion above shows that the three aspects that Nora links to lieux de mémoire can be found throughout Amna Suraka. Simultaneously, it indicates that whereas Nora distinguishes lieux from milieux de mémoire, the specific material, functional and symbolic aspects of Amna Suraka

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cannot be understood without showing how they are permeated with elements of its milieux. This makes the museum into a site that should be positioned somewhere between lieux and milieux, one embedded in a struggle for meaning that is characteristic of what Assmann describes as ‘communicative memory.’ However, characterizing the KRI’s memory culture as revolving around this kind of memory is not entirely accurate either. Assmann writes: Communicative memory is non-institutional; it is not supported by any institutions of learning, transmission and interpretation, it is not cultivated by specialists and is not summoned or celebrated on special occasions; it is not formalized and stabilized by any form of material symbolization but lives in everyday interaction and communication and, for this very reason, has only a limited time depth which normally reaches not farther back than 80 years, the time span of three interacting generations. (‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’ 2013, 37)

These characteristics can only be applied to Amna Suraka to a certain extent: this site was constructed by a ruling political party and is stabilized by ‘material symbolization.’ Furthermore, the narrative that it tells, revolving around a history of suffering that is frequently linked to values like independence and victory, is similar to the first narrative discussed in Chap. 2; a narrative shaped in educational textbooks and therefore explicitly supported by ‘institutions of learning.’ This means that Amna Suraka also has characteristics of cultural memory, which rests on what Assmann calls ‘specialized carriers of memory,’ and is ‘hierarchically structured,’ has a ‘high degree of formation’ and is expressed through ‘ceremonial communication’ (‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’ 2008, 117). He continues: “in the cultural memory, the past is not preserved as such but is cast in symbols as they are represented in oral myths or in writings, performed in feasts, and as they are continually illuminating a changing present. In the context of cultural memory, the distinction between myth and history vanishes” (109–13). In this last section, this last claim by Assmann is used as a stepping stone to argue that the destabilization of the dichotomy between lieu and milieu, and between communicative and cultural memory, also destabilizes the dichotomy between what Nora characterizes as ‘history’ and ‘memory.’ With respect to Amna Suraka, this became apparent in an interview I

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conducted with Dlashad Majeed, the museum’s artistic director. When I asked him about how he came to work in Amna Suraka, he told me: Since my younger years, since being a teenager, I have worked here, and I have become used to this place and to working here. I see working here not just as a way of making money, because then I would have already started working somewhere else. It is my love for giving and for the work itself that keeps me here. I find that ‘we’ have a great lack of knowledge in this field. I try my best to develop myself through my work. I am passionate about contributing to the archive, so the horrors that our people experienced are not forgotten. Because when these stories only stay with individuals, then we lose them and they will be forgotten. We want to collect and to archive, to show these stories to local and to foreign visitors as evidence of our true history. Of whom we have been, and who we will be.31

At first glance, this statement resonates with Nora’s claims. After all, the French historian writes: “Lieux de mémoire originate with the sense that there is no spontaneous memory, that we must deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations, pronounce eulogies, and notarize bills because such activities no longer occur naturally” (12). In line with Nora, Majeed therefore seems to suggest that Amna Suraka forms a lieu de mémoire that is shaped on the border between memory and history, trying to preserve memories against forgetfulness by actively and consciously archiving them and presenting them to the public. The process that he describes, in Assmann’s terminology, is the process during which a disappearing communicative memory is transformed into cultural memory. What should be noted about Majeed’s statement, however, is that he refers to the act of preserving memories as driven by the aim to present ‘evidence of our true history.’ And this, again, problematizes both Nora and Assmann’s dichotomy: whereas the French historian distinguishes memory from history, and claims that history begins where memory has disappeared—“History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it” (9)—Majeed suggests that both come together in Amna Suraka. And this shows that Nora’s almost romantic distinction between a spontaneous ‘memory’ and a rigid ‘history’ is difficult to defend in the context of the KRI. Since in this context the memories of the events that are commemorated are still alive in the form of a vibrant milieu de mémoire, the political aspects of the ways in which the museum apostrophizes an autonomous Kurdistan results in an

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exclusion of aspects of the past that would undermine the act of apostrophizing. This act, in other words, squeezes the area’s milieu de mémoire into a lieu de mémoire, presenting one version of the past as the ‘official’ version that it commemorates as a lieu. Put within Assmann’s vocabulary: this act deliberately aims to turn history into myth and myth into history, accelerating the transformation of communicative into cultural memory. One of the consequences of this destabilization of distinctions between milieu and lieu and between memory and history, is that this results in a representation of the past that is vulnerable to problematic forms of appropriation and framing precisely because this version is supported by a lieu de mémoire that makes it appear to be official and objective; that makes it appear to be cultural memory. Nora writes in ‘Between Memory and History:’ Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. … Memory, insofar as it is affective and magical, only accommodates those facts that suit it; it nourishes recollections that may be out of focus or telescopic, global or detached, particular or symbolic  – responsive to each avenue of conveyance or phenomenal screen, to every censorship or projection. … Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects; history binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things. (8–9).

For Nora, it seems, the ‘dialectic of remembering and forgetting’ is not problematic if it concerns memory, because memory itself continuously changes: the problem, for him, is that memory is disappearing and is being replaced with history: “At the heart of history is a critical discourse that is antithetical to spontaneous memory” (9). Nora observes that memory is “vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation”; in other words, he suggests that only history is ‘problematic.’ My analysis above, however, shows that the moment the distinction between ‘memory’ and ‘history’ disappears, the former’s vulnerability to appropriation can actually be problematic, precisely because it is shaped in a still vibrant milieu de mémoire in which different political, ideological and cultural interests aim to present one specific version of the past as history; as that which Majeed in the interview cited above characterizes as

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‘our true history.’ This claim can be substantiated by turning to two aspects of Amna Suraka’s past that are subject to appropriation: that of the internally displaced people from Kirkuk, Khanqin and Garmyan who were interned in the building in the 1990s, and that of Jash, Kurdistani collaborators with the Ba’ath regime. 5.2   Manipulation and Appropriation When I visited Amna Suraka for the first time in 2014, I was struck by the fact there was no reference to the internally displaced Kurdistanis who used to live in the building. This contrasted with my own memories: I remembered that when I used to pass Amna Suraka as a child, I would see internally displaced Kurdistanis in front of the building, selling bread and other self-made products. When I asked about this, one of the guides shared this same memory with me.32 However, when guiding visitors around, I noticed that guides ignored this aspect completely: they emphasize that the building functioned as a prison, and after the Kurdistani liberation was turned into a museum to commemorate the area’s horrific past. The most important aspect, the guides emphasized as well, was the fact that Hero Ibrahim undertook the challenge herself to construct a national museum. That an important part of the building’s history was ignored by this narrative might be explained by the aims of the museum’s initiator: the PUK. To understand this, we must go back to the history of the so-called Shuras, Marxist-Leninist worker councils that, before the fall of Saddam, resisted the Ba’ath regime together with the PUK and KDP. Eventually, the Shuras collapsed and, in 1995, many of their members became part of the Worker Communist Party of Iraq (WCPI), which eventually became the Communist Union of Iraq (CUI). The Shura movement tried to spread Marxism in an attempt to counter the, in their view, limited nationalistic and radical populist leftist ideas celebrated by the PUK and KDP. Shortly after Raparin, the Shuras contributed to the rebuilding of hospitals and aided internally displaced people by housing them in government buildings like schools, but also in then-vacated institutions like Amna Suraka. After the fall of Saddam, the Shuras continued to argue that the suffering of civilians and class inequity were not taken seriously by the PUK and KDP. They organized protests and claimed that radical political and economic change was necessary. During the civil war between the PUK and KDP, the PUK then attempted to eradicate the power of the

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Shuras: the party feared that the communists would become stronger and would eventually instigate a revolution. One way of doing this was by forcing the internally displaced people that were housed in the former prison of Amna Suraka to move away, erasing the influence of the Shuras. This might explain why this aspect of the building’s history was not mentioned in the museum in 2014: after all, such a reference to the past would only emphasize internal disputes between the Kurdistani and discredit the PUK. Instead, the director of the museum told me in an interview that they only stayed there for a short amount of time: “all we’re telling, and what is worth being told, is that they were here because they fled the regime. We also briefly highlight that fact. Actually, their existence here is not necessarily something positive for us. In the prison cells, for example, many texts were written on the walls. Some of those texts have been destroyed by them.”33 When I revisited the museum in 2018 during the second stage of my research, I noticed a change: this time the guides openly spoke about the internally displaced people and this history was included in the museum’s new brochure. The brochure mentions that Kurdistanis from Kirkuk lived in the building between 1991 and 1996. Their departure, however, is explained in the following way: By request of Hero Ibrahim Ahmed, also known as Hero Khan, the wife of Jalal Talabani, former president of Iraq and member of the political party PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan), these people were housed in other places … and the Newroz Company started to renovate on her expenses.

Although this story is now included in the museum, it is framed in such a way that it still emphasizes the strength of the PUK, implicitly also justifying the dominant role played by the PUK and Hero Ibrahim in the museum. Indeed, the brochure also contains a list of the people who have contributed to the museum: Jalal Talabani, Hero Ibrahim Ahmed, Omar Fatah (a senior leader of the PUK), YNK Bank and the Qaiwan Group (a PUK-owned company). This story of internally displaced people from Kirkuk, Khanqin and Garmyan living on the former prison’s grounds, however trivial it may look at first sight, shows how the narrative presented by Amna Suraka as a lieu de mémoire is permeated with the values of, in this case, the PUK. The way their influence manipulates and appropriates memories represented by the building makes visitors witness this party’s act of apostrophizing

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Kurdistan in a ‘pure’ and ‘heroic’ manner. The party’s presence can indeed be found throughout the museum: when the visitor enters the Hall of Peshmergas, for example, a photo of Jalal Talabani sits on the desk of the staff member who oversees the exhibition. Behind his desk, we also see a photo of Ibrahim Ahmed, the founder of the PUK and father of Hero Ibrahim. The presence of these two photos emphasizes the museum’s political framework as inextricably linked to the PUK. The photos that cover the walls of the ground floor and second floor, furthermore, only display male Peshmergas from the PUK. Women or members of the KDP are excluded. One of the ex-detainees whom I interviewed explicitly criticized this. He stated that turning the building into a museum had, from the start, been driven by the aims of the PUK. He told me: “They are not interested in my history, they use the place to write their own history. As they see fit.”34 Lastly, Fisher Tahir’s observation that “despite their will, their self-image, and their brave and desperate acts — [the Peshmergas] were incapable of protecting the Kurdish people in 1988” (‘Searching for Sense’ 240), is ignored in the Hall of Peshmergas. The bloody Kurdish civil war in the 1990s between the PUK and KDP is not mentioned either. This point is substantiated through references to the ways in which the museum excludes another problematic aspect of the past, namely Kurdistani collaboration with the Ba’ath regime, briefly discussed in Chap. 2. This is illustrated in an observation made by the museum’s artistic director Dlashad Majeed, taken from a 2021 documentary called ‘Memory—The Red Security Building: Emne Soreke,’ in which he speaks about the recently opened exhibition called Resistance Museum. He states: This room and the one next to this are assigned for the executed martyrs in Abu Ghraib, Kirkuk, Mosul and other prisons in southern Iraq. Before one’s execution, they made them wear a bracelet like a watch with their names and the execution date written on it. When their corpse was taken to the cemetery like Al-Karkh and some other places, they checked their bracelets with the death certificate … relying on some reliable sources and working on it for some years, we have collected more than 5000 martyrs’ names from the whole of Southern Kurdistan.

These bracelets, including handwritten names, have been recreated for the museum, resulting in rooms filled with names. What is peculiar, however, is that even though Majeed claims that research has been conducted about these victims, he does not refer to the

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actual documents about them, which are available in the Archival Centre Bnaky Zhin. To explain why these documents are excluded, which again illustrates the way in which the entwinement of history and memory makes a museum like Amna Suraka vulnerable to manipulation, I turn to an interview that I conducted with Ako Wahbi, one of the international board members of this archival center. During the interview, Wahbi told me about the archive’s work and how collecting data under the Ba’ath regime became an act of resistance. In these times, Wahbi was affiliated with the Komala Party, which understood itself as a representative of the urban intelligentsia, and whose members were involved in collecting data and information. They had, for example, a blueprint of Amna Suraka, which they were able to obtain with the help of an engineer. These kinds of documents proved to be helpful during the battle of Amna Suraka.35 Wahbi was present at this battle and told me that he and his colleagues were aware of the fact that, after the war, people would want to know what happened, and for this reason, they began collecting documents immediately after the prison’s liberation. This proved to be a difficult task, since many documents were destroyed, mainly by Jash who did not want to be exposed as traitors. Not long after the uprising, as described above, the Ba’ath Party regained strength in the Kurdistani cities and Sulaymaniyah fell back into the hands of the regime. Out of fear that the documents that they had been able to preserve would likewise be returned to the regime, they destroyed some and smuggled the others to Iran, Wahbi told me.36 There they were handed over to American officials. For a long time, the documents were archived at the University of Colorado by Human Rights Watch. On 30 September 2014, a delegation under the supervision of the university’s chancellor, Philip DiStefano, went to Sulaymaniyah to officially return the documents to be housed permanently at Bnkay Zhin. Present during this ceremony was historian, Ferdinand Hennerbichler, currently affiliated with the University of Sulaymaniyah, who argued that these documents were much needed since they will allow people to “come to terms with their own history and reconcile their past” (University of Colorado Boulder). Yet, coming to terms with the past through the medium of the archive proved to be almost impossible in today’s KRI; Bnakay Zhin was only allowed to gain the archival material on the condition of confidentiality: the documents may not be accessible to the public. According to Wahbi, this decision is understandable, due to the documents’ sensitive content. Releasing information about the past, after all,

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would shed light on those Kurdistani who collaborated with the regime, and may ultimately result in a civil war, Wahbi pointed out.37 For my research, however, I was allowed to see some of the documents written by the Amn: one includes a list of Ba’athists who were killed during the uprising, another of hostages and missing persons belonging to the Amn forces. Interestingly, these lists are accompanied by a handwritten letter from 10 May 1991 from an Amn who had witnessed the uprising himself. In this letter, he states that the official tally of the Ba’athist security forces who were taken hostage or killed during the uprising is incomplete due to ‘the traitors’ who destroyed the official documents. ‘Traitor,’ in this context, refers to Kurdistani who rose against the Ba’athist regime. This document supports Wahbi’s observation about the destruction of the documents by Kurdistani collaborators. However, in one of the interviews mentioned above, during which a former detainee showed me pictures and official documents about his imprisonment, it became clear that these documents actually circulated directly among those who were affiliated with this resistance group: when I asked him explicitly about these documents, he stated that his official documents were saved by the Peshmergas during the battle at Amna Suraka, and that they were returned to him directly after Raparin. In fact, it was because of these documents that they knew who had snitched, which led to this person being killed.38 This implies that the information found in these documents is controlled by, and even constitutes, political power. Most people who are now active in politics, yet another ex-detainee pointed out to me in an interview, collaborated at some point with the former regime. These people are characterized as persons ‘with files,’ he stated.39 This means that we can add another function to the museum of Amna Suraka as a lieu de mémoire: whereas it seems to be driven by the function epitomized by the phrase ‘in order not to forget,’ it also has an ideological function, closely tied to the act of apostrophizing. This makes the memories that the museum presents vulnerable to appropriation and manipulation by political discourses: only certain aspects should not be forgotten, and the way in which they should not be forgotten is driven by political aims. After all, if they would not be forgotten, the act of apostrophizing would be tainted, and the overhearer would notice that it is mainly driven by ideological tactics. Whereas Nora argues that a lieu de mémoire shapes ways to protect memory against history, many of the memories represented by Amna Suraka are presented as history under influence of the

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milieu de mémoire in which the museum is embedded. This makes it more difficult to distinguish between history and memory as described by Nora, and might even suggest that in the case of this museum it is impossible to differentiate the two.

6   Material, Functional and Symbolic In ‘Between History and Memory,’ Nora writes the following about the three—now familiar—aspects of lieux de mémoire: Even an apparently purely material site, like an archive, becomes a lieu de memoire only if the imagination invests it with a symbolic aura. A purely functional site, like a classroom manual, a testament, or a veterans’ reunion belongs to the category only inasmuch as it is also the object of a ritual. And the observance of a commemorative minute of silence, an extreme example of a strictly symbolic action, serves as a concentrated appeal to memory by literally breaking a temporal continuity. (19).

This chapter has shown that this also applies to Amna Suraka: the function that the spectral sculptures play in affecting visitors, for example, comes about because of the materiality of the prison walls surrounding these sculptures; walls inscribed with messages from detainees emphasize the building’s authentic nature. And the symbolism that the museum gains as a representation of Kurdistani freedom and victory that apostrophizes an independent national Kurdistan, comes about because of its function as a place where forgetfulness is overcome and recent resistance against Daesh is recognized. These three aspects, furthermore, cannot be understood if we distinguish lieu from milieu de mémoire or communicative from cultural memory. In turn, we also cannot distinguish between what Nora characterizes as ‘memory’ and ‘history.’ Both are entwined in the society of the KRI, to both positive and negative results: their interconnectedness makes the stories that the museum tells vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, but also creates unexpected opportunities to process and share traumatic memories.

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Notes 1. The phrase recently found its way to the title of Behrouz Boochani’s autobiographical No Friends But the Mountains (2018). 2. Several observations discussed in this chapter are included in my co-authored study on Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance (see Majid, Peters 2022). 3. For an overview of these regions and their history, see Bochénska et al10–26. 4. Duman describes Hashd al Shaabi as a Shia-armed umbrella group also known as the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). Initially founded to support Iraqi security forces, al-Hashd al-Shaabi is now the lead actor in the fight against Daesh: “approximately 90,000 Shiites volunteered for the ‘jihad’ that Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called for in its fatwa, which he announced due to the inefficiency and weakness of the Iraqi Army against the ISIS” (Duman 10). Furthermore, he argues that al-Hashd al-Shaabi have a negative reception among Sunni Arabs because of the forces’ link to Iran, despite some Sunni membership in the group. He notes that “most factions other than the Shiites consider Iran’s influence in Iraq as an ‘invasion’” (Duman 8). 5. This refers to the Arabization campaigns carried out by the Ba’ath regime (see Chap. 2). 6. See, for example, Winter; Schwarcz; Kardux; and Rothberg ‘Noeuds de mémoire.’ Rothberg develops the concept of memory as ‘Noeuds’ or ‘knots’ as a critical response to Nora’s lieux de mémoire. These ‘knots’ make it possible, according to Rothberg, to understand the formation of collective national identities in relation to other forms of memory (‘Noeuds de mémoire’ 118–19). 7. Given the scope of this chapter and that I was unable to visit the museum after 2016, I do not include an analysis of the latter exposition. 8. Personal communication with the author, November 29, 2014. 9. There is a reason for the presence of these security forces: during politically unstable moments, there is a chance that people may try to invade the building, especially given the social resentment towards what are perceived as corrupt political parties. Shortly after the 2017 Kurdish referendum for independence, for example, security was heightened because the museum’s staff were afraid that people would break in and loot the museum. After the referendum, this happened to other culturally significant places, such as the archive, Bnkay Zhin. 10. Personal communication with the author, November 29, 2014. 11. It is worth mentioning that the informational signs differ throughout the exhibitions. The halls that were made first contain hardly any signs, and if they do, there is a distinction between the information provided in English,

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Kurdish and Arabic. The signs in the Anfal Hall, for example, are only in Kurdish, but in the Hall of Exodus, more signs are in English than in Kurdish. In the halls that were added later, such as the Daesh Hall, signs are in Kurdish, Arabic and English. An explanation could be that the museum now wants to reach more international visitors, whereas in the beginning it was primarily aimed at a Kurdistani audience familiar with most of its content. 12. I have used the English translations provided on the museum’s signs. 13. Personal communication with the author, November 26, 2014. 14. Personal communication with the author, October 26, 2014. 15. For a detailed exploration of this topic and its taboo status in the memory culture of the KRI, see Hardi, Gendered Experiences. Karin Mlodoch observes the following in an article dedicated to the female victims of the Anfal campaign: “In contrast with the great significance surrounding the memory of violence and victimhood in the political arena, there is a striking [sic] lack of response to the immediate needs of victims and survivors of past crimes, and their voices and perspectives have largely been excluded from the current political debate on both regional and national levels” (‘Fragmented Memory’ 206). What is crucial for female Anfal survivors, Mlodoch therefore concludes, is the constitution of “multiple public and social spaces and forms of symbolic closure to express their own specific memories and narratives, achieve social and political acknowledgement, and develop new life perspectives” (‘We Want to be Remembered’ 86). This idea will return in this chapter and Chap 5. 16. Personal communication with the author, December 17, 2014. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. The latter aspect returns in the ways in which gendered violence formed part of Daesh’s more recent genocidal campaign against Kurdistani Yezidi women. The suicide rate among these women is high. However, even for the community, this remains a problematic topic, and is thus often neglected (‘Iraq: Yezidi Survivors of Horrific Abuse’). 20. Like most recreational places in the city, one can find a television turned on in this room. There is no entrance fee, and the museum is open between 9 AM and noon, and between 2 and 4 PM, except on Fridays. The opening hours are flexible, especially for foreign delegations and visitors from abroad. 21. The brochure does not yet contain information about the part of Amna Suraka focused on Daesh. 22. Personal communication with the author, October 30, 2014 23. Ibid. 24. Personal communication with the author, November 30, 2014. 25. Personal communication with the author, November 26, 2014.

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26. Personal communication with the author, November 30, 2014. 27. Ibid. Many discussions that I had with other ex-detainees affirm this feeling of emotional estrangement from family with respect to their experiences. During an interview I undertook with another male ex-prisoner, for example, he told me that he wanted to stay a night at the site to be reunited with his fellow inmates who were killed. Furthermore, he began questioning his own role in the revolution, claiming that he did not know if it had all been worth it. He was only able to tell me these things, however, after he had looked at the sculpture of a person in pain. (Personal communication with the author, November 26, 2014) In almost all the interviews that I conducted with ex-detainees, the recurring theme was formed by their inability to share their traumatic experiences with their children. A male respondent who was sentenced to death, for instance, told me that he had never talked about his experiences with his family; that he could not say anything about this to his family. When I interviewed him, his wife came into the room and stated, when she heard us talking, that she never asks him about his past because, in her own words: “those memories are too painful to be recalled. Maybe I should have asked him about it, but it’s also hard for me to hear about it.” However, the fact that he does not eat oranges, she knows and told me during the interview, is because of his time in prison, when the Amn pushed unpeeled oranges into his mouth. (Personal communication with the author, November 4, 2014). 28. Personal communication with the author, March 27, 2018. 29. Personal communication with the author, October 29, 2014. 30. For more on women activists in the region, see the work of Mojab. 31. Personal communication with the author, October 26, 2014. 32. Personal communication with the author, October 29, 2014. 33. Personal communication with the author, October 30, 2014. 34. Personal communication with the author, November 4, 2014. 35. Personal communication with the author, November 25, 2014. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Personal communication with the author, November 30, 2014. 39. Personal communication with the author, November 4, 2014.

CHAPTER 5

The Phantomic: The Halabja Monument and Peace Museum

1   The Phantomic The Halabja Monument and Peace Museum is dedicated to the victims of the chemical attacks on the town of Halabja in March 1988, and opened its door to the public in 2003. One of the main differences between this memory site and Amna Suraka, discussed in the previous chapter, is not only that it was newly constructed to commemorate what happened in the area, but also that it holds a rather different position within the community in which it is embedded and which constitutes its milieu de mémoire. For lack of a better word, this position can be characterized as more ‘intense’: the monument is contested by people living in the area, but at the same time, the involvement of many of these people also plays a bigger role in the meaning constituted by the site itself. The site, in other words, is still involved in the battle for meaning-making that Assmann links to the stage of ‘communicative memory,’ although it, again, also has elements of the ceremonial and institutionalized character that he associates with ‘cultural memory’ (‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’ 2008 and 2013, and Cultural Memory). To grasp the specific meaning constituted by the involvement of Halabja’s community—mainly by guides who work in the museum—this chapter adopts a different theoretical framework than the previous one, namely, a framework that revolves around the notion of the phantomic. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Majid, Towards an Understanding of Kurdistani Memory Culture, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37514-9_5

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During my fieldwork, I observed the ‘intensity’ of the relationship between the HMPM and the milieu de mémoire in different ways: I was told by many that the people of Halabja initially regarded the idea to construct a museum to commemorate the attacks as a positive signal, since this was the first time that the suffering that took place in this area was acknowledged on a national level. For example, my host Shahla (mentioned in Chap. 1) told me how she and her friends were optimistic. When the construction of the museum began, however, public opinion changed. This is connected to the broader history of the city: during the first years that the KRG was in power, little energy and money had been put into rebuilding the city after its destruction by Saddam’s troops. After 2003, as Mlodoch writes: [T]he Kurdish region saw a rapid process of economic development and modernization, which brought improvement to the life conditions of the Anfal and Halabja survivors as well. The Kurdistan Regional Government finally started to invest in the destroyed areas’ infrastructure. Survivors’ pensions were raised; they received grants for building houses and their children stipends for university or college education. … However, there is still an intense feeling of rage and bitterness among Halabja survivors. They feel exploited by the Kurdish national discourse and political elite, who define the chemical attack against Halabja as a national trauma but fall short of addressing the survivors’ claims and needs. (‘Indelible Smell of Apples’ 358–59)

Indeed, I was told by many that when the people of Halabja noticed, simultaneously with the construction of the museum, that only those parts of the city were renovated that national and international delegations would see on a visit to the site—mainly the areas around the road leading to the museum—they began to perceive its construction as a prestige project that was not based on an actual concern with the suffering that took place in the past. This resulted in the impression, briefly mentioned in Chap. 1 and shared by many today, that the story of Halabja was, and is still, exploited by political actors for their own gain. Many told me, for example, that the KRG organizes guided tours for international delegations to visit the monument and mass graves. Some people I spoke to even explicitly stated that these delegations must bring in lots of money, but that the money does not reach the people who are in dire need of it.1 In 2006, feelings like

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these resulted in a demonstration, mainly organized by young men from Halabja.2 This protest took place on the 16th of March, which is the national Halabja Remembrance Day.3 Although the demonstration was violently suppressed by security forces, causing the death of 17-year-old Kurda Ahmed, the demonstrators still managed to burn the HMPM down to the ground (Rubin). The significance attributed on a national level to commemorating the events that took place in Halabja was illustrated by the fact that reconstruction commenced directly after the building was destroyed: the museum reopened its doors as quickly as possible just one year later. After its second completion, strict security measures were undertaken. Today, the presence of these forces strengthens the impression that the building and its expositions are—on a national level—valuable and worthy of protection and preservation. Put more strongly, this presence provides the museum with a feeling of national urgency, institutionalizing it as an official monument. The abovementioned intensity of the HMPM also returns in a more positive way: despite these demonstrations, the site is strongly valued by many in the local community as well. It was rebuilt with help of inhabitants of the area, and the people of Halabja offered new objects to be displayed in its exhibitions. Furthermore, the museum is run only by citizens of Halabja. Its staff belongs to the communicative part of the memory culture manifested by the site. Their personal histories play a crucial role in the museum’s meaning. To capture the specific way in which this makes the HMPM into a site haunted by ghosts of the past, this chapter introduces the notion briefly alluded to in some of the previous chapters and above: that of the ‘phantomic.’ This framework is used because the existing terminology employed within Memory Studies and Museum Studies, is not entirely sufficient to understand the specific character of the HMPM. The word ‘phantomic’ has been chosen for four reasons. The first reason has been discussed in Chap. 1 and is rooted in Esther Peeren’s discussion of the spectral metaphor. As mentioned in previous chapters, this notion captures the fleeting, vulnerable and rather ineffective status occupied by those who disappeared in the past and whose remains have not been found. As such, it should be distinguished from the more robust and effective ‘specter,’ especially since the phantasmatic aspects of the phantomic makes this dimension vulnerable to appropriation or expulsion. In this chapter, these aspects of the phantomic are fleshed out more extensively and clearly than in previous chapters.

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The second reason concerns a response to Alison Landsberg’s notion of ‘prosthetic memory,’ which she uses in reference to artificial limbs (20). Within Landsberg’s framework, as is shown in more detail below, ‘prosthetic memories’ are understood as replacements of actual memories of past events, and form rather concrete representations (e.g., films, dioramas, photographs) of these events. She argues that the constitution of these kinds of memories is necessary as it enables museum visitors, in a specific way, to not only work through the past, but also build a better future. Since that which is commemorated in and by the HMPM is still alive in the memories of those who belong to KRI society, and since these same memories materialize in different ways in this site (often because they are contested by political and ideological frameworks), the term ‘phantomic’ is more helpful. Again, this term emphasizes the ungraspability and vulnerability of these memories, replacing the concrete materialization of a ‘prosthetic limb’ with the more ambivalent presence/absence of ‘phantom limbs.’ Furthermore, it avoids the ways in which Landsberg too uncritically instrumentalizes representations of the past by linking them to an idea of what the future should be like, prioritizing their political and cultural function over a concern with representation itself. The third reason is that the rather ungraspable nature of the ‘phantom’ makes it possible to show that the moment ‘prosthetic memories’ are created in the HMPM, they are haunted by the actual memories of those who experienced the events that these prosthetic memories concern. This provides the ‘prosthetic limb’ with a phantomic aura that encourages the visitor to question the reality of the prosthetic, to realize that there is always something more, something hidden about the traumatic past represented in and by the museum. This means that the phantomic is not presented as replacing the prosthetic, but rather that the phantomic is something that haunts and surrounds the prosthetic, sometimes turning into a critical reflection on the prosthetic. The fourth reason for using the term ‘phantomic’ is that it emphasizes, through references to phantom limbs and especially phantom pain, how one can suffer from an absence that is still experienced as a phantomic presence. Here, the more general aspects return that Derrida links to the ungraspable alterity provided by spectrality, discussed in Chap. 1. Similar aspects of the KRI’s memory culture were described in Chap. 3, in the analysis of Ali’s The City of White Musicians, which revolves in different ways around ungraspable and contested memories and representations of suffering and genocide. In the context of the HMPM, this aspect mainly

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concerns the countless people who disappeared under Saddam’s regime and who are also commemorated in and by the site. As mentioned in Chap. 1, official numbers of Anfal victims are uncertain. Since many bodies were quickly buried in mass graves, or along the road where they were found, and since others died in hospitals and camps in Iran, it was impossible to count and identify them all. By commemorating these disappeared people and the events that made them disappear, as described below, the HMPM refers in different ways to a traumatic absence that is present because it remains unprocessed, circling around a phantom pain that is invisible but that, again, haunts many Kurdistani selves as well as the KRI more generally. The ghosts of the past, this means, have not yet been expelled or put to rest. These phantomic aspects make the HMPM different from Amna Suraka, which can primarily be characterized as an apostrophic museum. Although the notion of the phantomic could perhaps be used to describe aspects of Amna Suraka, especially the sculptures discussed in Chap. 4, the specific way that photos are used and materialized with sculptures and dioramas in the HMPM, as well as the specific role played by guards who infuse these representations with their own memories, makes only the latter site into a phantomic museum. Since both museums are embedded in the same memory culture, however, they are not completely different: just as the phantomic might appear in some places in Amna Suraka, the apostrophic characterizes aspects of the HMPM as well: again, as expressed below, this term can be used to understand how the site addresses an independent Kurdistan. To develop the analysis of the HMPM as a phantomic museum, this chapter first presents an overview of several relevant concepts from the field of Museum Studies, which are used to examine what the notion of the phantomic contributes to this field. Since the authors who develop these concepts do so using a comparative angle, and thus do not provide a systematic framework to analyze one specific site, the close reading of the HMPM is again structured through Pierre Nora’s three aspects of lieux de mémoire: the material, the functional and the symbolic. However, Nora’s concepts will play a less prominent role than in Chap. 4.

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2  Museums and Prosthetic Memories 2.1   Holocaustal Events In her 2013 book, Mediating Memory in the Museum, Arnold-de Simine provides a historical overview of the concept of a museum, describing the different roles and functions ascribed to museums in changing social, cultural and historical contexts. She first focuses on what she characterizes as the ‘historical museum’ and, rooting its origins in Enlightenment ideals, argues that its role mainly revolved around the idea of transmitting knowledge about the past. Often, she observes, these museums also produced standards for manners and taste, actively encouraging visiting citizens to proudly identify with their nation and its heritage as presented to them in the knowledge shaped by the museum (7).4 Shifting to the present, Arnold-de Simine observes that a change has taken place and continues to do so: in addition to the original mission of museums as transmitting knowledge about the past, she argues, a new kind of museum is being born that has the purpose of both entertaining and ethically engaging visitors. She calls these kinds of museums ‘memory museums,’ a concept famously described in the context of the Holocaust by Susan Sontag as a “product of a way of thinking about, and mourning, the destruction of European Jewry in the 1930s and the 1940s” (77). Arnold-de Simine, however, aims to develop a broader definition of this term, writing that the “genre of the memory museum is by no means restricted to Holocaust museums anymore but addresses very different historical events and periods” (Mediating Memory 11). She substantiates this claim by comparing the notion of the ‘memory museum’ with that of the ‘memorial museum’ as developed by Paul Williams. In his 2007 book, Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities, he defines the memorial museum as “a specific kind of museum dedicated to a historic event commemorating mass suffering of some kind” (8). What characterizes the events commemorated by memorial museums, Arnold-de Simine likewise observes, is that they revolve around trauma. Referring to the work of American historian, Hayden White, she explains: Memorial museums are concerned with different forms of trauma: trauma suffered by individuals belonging to a specific group, which is then supposed to be vicariously experienced by museum visitors, and collective trauma, caused by what Hayden White controversially calls ‘holocaustal

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events’. Hayden White, among others, claims that the Holocaust, together with other ‘modernist events’, resists historicization. Instead, these ‘holocaustal’ events have left modern societies with collective traumas. (Mediating Memory 37)

It is this emphasis on ‘holocaustal events’ and their resistance to ‘historicization’ that, according to Arnold-de Simine, explains the rise of museums that relinquish the aim to ‘only’ transmit knowledge to visitors. To understand this shift, it is important to reflect on White’s characterization of ‘holocaustal events’: Some of these “holocaustal” events – such as the two World Wars, the Great Depression, a growth in world population hitherto unimaginable, poverty and hunger on a scale never before experienced, pollution of the ecosphere by nuclear explosions and the indiscriminate disposal of contaminants, programs of genocide undertaken by societies utilizing scientific technology and rationalized procedures of governance and warfare (of which the German genocide of 6,000,000 European Jews is paradigmatic) – function in the consciousness of certain social groups exactly as infantile traumas are conceived to function in the psyche of neurotic individuals. This means that they cannot be simply forgotten and put out of mind, but neither can they be adequately remembered; which is to say, clearly and unambiguously identified as to their meaning and contextualized in the group memory in such a way as to reduce the shadow they cast over the group’s capacities to go into its present and envision a future free of their debilitating effects. (‘The Modernist Event’ 20)

According to White, these kinds of events emphasize the constructivist character of historiography: fiction and historiography, he argues, both employ strategies to organize events into an overarching narrative structure that is then presented as ‘history’ (Sobchack 4). However, because ‘holocaustal events’ cannot be ‘adequately remembered,’ in his view, they cannot be made into stories or historical narratives; they cannot really be represented as a completed and processed past. Again, in White’s own words: In short, the threat posed by the representation of such events as the Holocaust, the Nazi Final Solution, by the assassination of a charismatic leader such as Kennedy or Martin Luther King or Gandhi, or by an event such as the destruction of the Challenger, which had been symbolically

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orchestrated to represent the aspirations of a whole community, is nothing other than the threat of turning these events into the subject-matter of a narrative. Telling a story, however truthful, about such traumatic events might very well provide a kind of “intellectual mastery” of the anxiety which memory of their occurrence may incite in an individual or a community. But precisely insofar as the story is identifiable as a story, it can provide no lasting “psychic mastery” of such events. (31–32).

White argues that, when thinking about different ways of representing these ‘holocaustal events,’ we should therefore turn to the experimentations with style that characterize the writings of modernist authors. He states: “This is why the kinds of anti-narrative non-stories produced by literary modernism offer the only prospect for adequate representations of the kind of ‘unnatural’ events—including the Holocaust—that mark our era and distinguish it absolutely from all of the ‘history’ that has come before it” (32).5 A similar motivation drives the memory museums that Arnold-de Simine discusses, which employ different techniques to represent events that, according to White, cannot be ‘adequately remembered.’ 2.2   History, Memorial and Memory Museums Arnold-de Simine observes that the memory museums that she discusses adopt different approaches not only because of the representation crisis of ‘unnatural events,’ as foregrounded by White. She argues that they are also driven by the fact that most members of the generations who personally experienced the two World Wars and the Holocaust have died, but that societies are reluctant to let go of the living memories that die with them. To do so would involve a dying of their shared cultural identity: “[the] fear of disappearing memories is closely tied to a feeling of loss of identity. Therefore, solutions have to be found to ensure that personal recollections are passed on to the next generations that follow, not just within families and over three generations but in the long term and in mediated form” (Mediating Memory 11–12). It is this reflection that distinguishes Arnold-de Simine’s approach from Williams’s analysis, and that results in her distinction between memory museums and memorial museums. Whereas Arnold-de Simine is concerned with the different ways in which museums try to preserve identities related to past events and employ a wide range of techniques to represent and even constitute memories of these events (described below), Williams

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adopts a narrower perspective. Although he analyzes various museums and sites, such as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, World Trade Centre Memorial and the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes, he argues that all are driven by one specific aim: that by sharing “a common mission to prevent future horrific suffering—the ‘never again’ imperative instigated by Holocaust remembrance—memorial museums attempt to mobilize visitors as both historical witnesses and agents of present and future political vigilance” (220). It is this aim that, in his view, makes it possible to combine the claim to knowledge that drove the historical museum with the aim to commemorate traumatic events. Memorial museums, Williams writes, function as sites of mourning and of commemoration, whereas ‘regular’ museums focus on contextualization and education. Regarding the former, he asserts: “We come in respect, bringing with us a sense of history, often loaded with familial significance … World War memorials act more as staging points of mourning and reflection than as destinations that explain the significance of an event” (220). He continues: “On initial consideration, the memorial museum spells an inherent contradiction. A memorial is seen to be, if not apolitical, at least safe in the refuge of history. … A history museum, by contrast, is presumed to be concerned with interpretation, contextualization, and critique” (8, emphasis in the original). By focusing on the mission of ‘never again’ sparked by the event that is commemorated, these museums manage to combine the two aspects. However, Arnold-de Simine rightly identifies this cross-cultural approach as focusing too narrowly on the representation of specific events, that is, ‘holocaustal events’ that according to Williams, are represented by the museums that he discusses in such a way that the visitor is convinced by the imperative of ‘never again.’ But, as several other commentators have also noted (see, for example, the critiques by Peter McIsaac and Karin Till), this leads Williams to overlook the many differences between the specific social and political contexts in which these museums are embedded, which implicitly project a framework that has its roots in European memory culture and, especially in Holocaust commemoration, on these vastly different contexts. It is for this reason that Arnold-de Simine introduces the notion of ‘memory museums,’ which enables her to develop a more flexible and exploratory analysis of the narration and curatorial techniques employed by these sites, thus embedding them more specifically in their respective memory cultures.

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Furthermore, Arnold-de Simine argues, approaching these sites as ‘memory museums’ also makes it possible to replace Williams’s primary focus on site that commemorate specific events—presented with the emphasis that they should ‘never happen again’—to a focus on the ways in which museums engage with memory and the constitution of identities. She writes: “For my case studies I prefer to use the term ‘memory museums’ rather than ‘memorial museums’ because they have not been chosen on the basis of the historical events they present or been grouped in sub-­ genres such as migration or war museums” (10). By choosing different subjects of study, Arnold-de Simine extends the fields of memory studies and museum studies beyond their often hegemonic concern with the memory of the Holocaust and ‘holocaustal events.’ Furthermore, by doing this she also departs from an ‘event-based’ focus on trauma, criticized in Chap. 1 for only highlighting traumas that caused by a disruption in the past that must be processed in the present. Using the methodology of Craps’s Postcolonial Witnessing, it should be argued that this excludes forms of trauma that continue to ripple through societies and are continuously reintroduced by new threats and acts of violence. This is what makes Arnold-de Simine’s approach fruitful for this chapter: it allows me to be as sensitive as possible to the specifics of the memory culture in which the HMPM is embedded, in which traumas of the past are triggered and renewed by threats in the present. Unlike Williams’s framework, her theory enables me to analyze the details of the HMPM’s representation techniques without being primarily concerned with that which the attacks on Halabja—as a finite event—would share with other traumatic events commemorated in museums around the world. As is shown in the last section of this chapter, understanding the attacks on Halabja as only an ‘event’ also excludes crucial aspects of the area’s complex history that political narratives about this history try to ‘forget.’ 2.3   Prosthetic Memory Arnold-de Simine illustrates her observations with analyses of three memory museums: the Militärhistorisches de Bundeswehr Museum in Dresden, Germany; In Flanders Field Museum in Ypres, Belgium; and the Imperial War Museum (North) in Manchester, England. She concludes about these sites:

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All three museums … use personal stories to showcase the hardship, suffering and trauma of war, although to a different extent and to very different purposes; their exhibitions are ‘experience-orientated’, multimedia and interactive; they try to encourage visitors to get emotionally involved and empathize with the suffering of individual soldiers and civilians and they set their own approach in the context of a wider remembrance culture. … Last but not least, they all feature artworks by both contemporary and early twentieth-century poets, painters, photographers, sculptors and video artists. (Mediating Memory 72)

This passage illustrates the main aspects that, according to Arnold-de Simine, characterize the memory museum: they are provided with a specific pedagogical role. Their main aim is to encourage “visitors to empathize and identify with individual sufferers and victims, as if ‘reliving’ their experience, in order to thus develop more personal and immediate forms of engagement” (‘Memory Museum’ 18). Since these museums are meant to engage the visitor and create a space for emotional investment, stimulating embodied experiences through interactive designs and multimediality, they overlap with ‘experiential museums’ as defined by Alison Landsberg (Prosthetic Memory). In these museums, “visitors are supposed to gain access to the past through the eyes of individuals and their personal memories, by ‘stepping into their shoes’, empathizing and emotionally investing in their experiences, (re-) living a past they have not experienced first-hand and thereby acquiring ‘vicarious memories’” (10–11). One of the pillars on which Arnold-de Simine’s analyses therefore rest is the abovementioned notion of ‘prosthetic memory’ developed by Landsberg. Prosthetic memories, Landsberg claims, are “not natural, not the product of lived experience … but are derived from engagement with a mediated representation … like an artificial limb, [they] are actually worn on the body”; and as commodified forms, “they [are] widely available to people who live in different places and come from different backgrounds, races, and classes” (20–21). Prosthetic memory is thus perceived as an effective and “[p]owerful corrective to identity politics” (21). The effectiveness of prosthetic memory lies at the heart of Landsberg’s concern with the ethics of representation, which is criticized below. Landsberg writes: “because [prosthetic memories] feel real, they help condition how a person thinks about the world and might be instrumental in articulating an ethical relation to the [O]ther” (21). In her view, we should therefore

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not be concerned with the authenticity of memories or of their representation, but with their capabilities. One of these capabilities is the expansion of community memory. She argues that “Prosthetic memories are indeed ‘personal’ memories because they derive from engaged and experientially oriented encounters with technologies of memory. But because prosthetic memories are not natural, not the possession of a particular family or ethnic group, they evoke a more public past, a past that is not at all privatized” (143). Focusing on empathy and embodied experience in the context of museum visits, this means that both Landsberg and Arnold-de Simine emphasize the role that representations of suffering play in the constitution of prosthetic memory, in enabling visitors to constitute empathic and affective connections with that which they encounter in the museum. As Landsberg writes, “prosthetic memories [can] produce empathy and social responsibility as well as political alliances that transcend race, class, and gender” (21). Through mediated memories that engage the visitor, she even claims that new political subjects can be produced. Arnold-de Simine embeds this idea in her analysis of different contemporary memory museums: Some museums, such as the MHM Dresden, go beyond their visitors’ comfort zones and not only present them with surprising and even shocking facts and stories, but also make them question the very frames of certainty that ground their identities, helping them to rethink their attentiveness to another space and time, the way they relate to others and otherness. (Mediating Memory 203)

Important to note is that this approach enables both Landsberg and Arnold-de Simine to depart from an exclusivist focus on complex, modernist forms of representation. This can be linked to the analysis of the sculptures in Amna Suraka, in Chap. 4. Although these sculptures would perhaps be considered artificial, kitschy or sentimental when analyzed from the perspective of, for example, White’s celebration of modernist experimentations with form, in the context of the KRI they are effective and affective. The sculptures cannot be regarded as providing ‘the’ definite answer on what it means to be tortured, but these depictions of suffering, as both Landsberg and Arnold-de Simine emphasize, do at least have the potential of constituting a phantomic space in which victims of trauma might share otherwise repressed experiences.

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Although both scholars emphasize the capabilities of prosthetic memory, however, it is noteworthy that they do not embrace this concept with similar enthusiasm. Whereas Landsberg is mainly positive about the empowering and constructive dimensions of prosthetic memory, Arnold-de Simine is more critical and, in that way, approaches the emphasis on reflection, critique and the ethics of representation defended by White. While the aim to constitute prosthetic memory results in highly original, creative and often self-critical museums, she argues, it is still important to consider its vulnerability to political distortion and appropriation, with the manner in which its focus on experience and empathy might obscure the gravity of the suffering that is represented by memory museums. As Vered Vinitzky-­ Seroussi writes in her review of Arnold-de Simine’s book: Arnold-de-Simine rightly wonders whether experiencing other people’s suffering in the context of a museum (or any context, for that matter) might not actually obscure the boundaries between the experience of real suffering and its representation. In particular, she posits two dangers inherent in such museum exhibitions: blurring the borders between a museum as a site for learning and a memorial as a site for mourning, and secondly – and more importantly – the possible loss of sensitivity towards actual, palpable suffering since ‘I already endured’ the Holocaust/slavery/the GDR at the museum and survived it. (37, emphasis in the original).

These two worries play an important role in the analysis of the HMPM developed below. This site illustrates that a prosthetic memory is indeed vulnerable to political distortion and the appropriation of suffering by those in power, a claim also defended in Chap. 4 about Amna Suraka. Furthermore, an analysis of the HMPM rejects Landsberg’s assertion that we can and/or should try to put ourselves in the shoes of traumatized victims in a museum setting. 2.4   Milieux and Lieux de Mémoire As mentioned above, this chapter presents the ‘phantomic museum’ as a concept that makes it possible to grasp the HMPM’s character in a more nuanced and specific manner than the terminology discussed so far. Again, this notion does not replace Arnold-de Simine’s analysis of memory museums or her and Landsberg’s observations about the role that prosthetic memories play in these kinds of museums. After all, these concepts provide

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Arnold-de Simine’s approach with an open and inclusive character that departs from the event-based model discussed above and in Chap. 1. It is important to note, however, that because Arnold-de Simine’s Mediating Memory in the Museum only analyzes European museums, the theory that she develops using this framework is applied to contexts in which the living memories of the traumas which are commemorated have (almost) died out. This means, in other words, that she chiefly analyzes how individuals who do not have first-hand memories of these specific historical traumas can (or cannot) be affected in such a way that they adopt these memories. To show why and how this chapter aims to enrich the approaches of Arnold-de Simine and the other scholars discussed above with the notion of the ‘phantomic museum,’ it is helpful to briefly return to Nora’s work. Although Arnold-de Simine, Williams and Landsberg do not do this explicitly themselves, their observations can, to some extent, still be linked to the framework constructed by the French historian. Arnold-de Simine’s notion of the memory museum, Williams’s concept of the memorial museum, and Landsberg’s analysis of experiential museums and prosthetic memories all converge around the idea that what Nora calls a milieu de mémoire is disappearing. And it is because of this milieu’s fading, they argue in different ways, that the focus of these museums has started to shift. Of course, the conclusions of these authors are different, if only because they use the same concepts in different ways. Nora, as discussed in Chaps. 1 and 4, argues that when memory disappears it is replaced by a rigid and fossilized form of history, with lieux de mémoire carving out a place between the two. Williams observes instead that the disappearance of what he calls memory results in the aim to construct memorial museums that represent and commemorate past events in such a way that they instill the ‘never again’ imperative in their visitors. Inspired by White’s observations about the difficulty of representing traumatic events, Arnold-de Simine argues in turn that contemporary museums focus on ways to transmit specific memories by using techniques involving embodied experience that are meant to have ethical and affective outcomes. This replaces an emphasis on knowledge and what she calls history with an emphasis on what she characterizes as memory. As Vinitzky-Seroussi observes: [I]f in the past people were taught, because it was believed that knowledge brings responsibility and thus makes people ‘better’ over time, history and knowledge as loci for mankind seem to be losing their power in favour of a

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new belief: that it is memory (defined more in terms of experiencing the past) that will make people better. Hence the new museums invest in memory (rather than history) and in experience (rather than knowledge). In other words, exhibitions can no longer be ‘boring’ and must display ‘high-­ end’ technology. (376).

Indeed, Arnold-de Simine writes: “What characterizes the global phenomenon of the ‘memory museum’ most strikingly is the postmodern shift from ‘history’ as the authoritative master discourse on the past to the paradigm of memory” (Mediating Memory 11). Despite these differences and their confusing use of diverse terminological frameworks, what these authors share with Nora is the claim that the memories represented by the museums they analyze are disappearing. This makes the contexts of their analyzed sites different from that in which the HMPM is embedded: as argued throughout this book, many who lived through the horrors commemorated by the HMPM are still alive and, as described below, even work in the museum itself. At the same time, the HMPM not only has an official and ceremonial character that mainly comes about because of its political and symbolic function, it also aims to create prosthetic memories. This means that it tries to institutionalize and preserve memories in a context in which these same memories still exist. This problematizes the frameworks employed by Arnold-de Simine and Landsberg, just like it (again) destabilizes the dichotomy between lieux and milieux de mémoire, and thus makes the HMPM into a hybrid site in which different aims and techniques are simultaneously entwined and contradictory. It is this specific character that the following section aims to grasp by describing the elusive nature of memories alluded to with the term ‘phantomic museum.’

3   The Material As mentioned above, the analysis of the HMPM is, again, structured using the three aspects of lieux de mémoire identified by Pierre Nora, the first of which is the material. The following discussion of the material aspects of the HMPM is rather brief, since a large part of this aspect is also categorized within the symbolic. As I will show below, the site’s materiality is inextricably permeated with symbolic meaning. Consequently, this first section describes its design and location.

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Fig. 5.1  The Halabja Monument and Peace Museum, seen from a distance. Surrounded by Kurdish flags and one white flag (photo by Bareez Majid)

Halabja is situated about 80 kilometers to the southeast of Sulaymaniyah and about 16 kilometers from the border with Iran. One enters the city on a wide and well-maintained road. On the sides of this road, large portraits of Peshmergas who died during the war with Daesh have been placed. The HMPM is located on the outskirts, just before the entrance to the city. Like the museum of Amna Suraka, there are no signs telling visitors where to go, but the building itself is so colossal and uniquely shaped that it cannot be missed (Fig. 5.1). In light of the 2006 demonstrations discussed above, a strict entrance policy is carried out which also accentuates the site’s importance; visitors are required to pass through a checkpoint before entering. Behind this checkpoint, the building is located on a vast estate, surrounded by a green garden. Regarding the material aspect, the main—and obvious—difference between Amna Suraka and the HMPM is that the latter is a building specifically constructed as a monument and a museum. This is markedly different from the former: the repurposed buildings of Amna Suraka, as discussed in Chap. 4, are presented to visitors as ‘authentic,’ preserved as

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they appeared when the grounds functioned as a prison. Amna Suraka can therefore be characterized as a ‘topographical’ lieu de mémoire (Nora 21). The differences between Amna Suraka and the HMPM does not mean that the latter contains no topographical elements: after all, it is located in Halabja, where the attacks that it commemorates took place. Furthermore, during my visit the director of the Halabja Monument, Sarkhel Khafar, hosted a tour for a television program which I was allowed to record. During this tour, he elaborated not only on the history of the building but also explained the objects situated within the museum. This chapter often refers to this guided tour.6 In an interview, the former director of the museum, Ibrahim Hawramani, told me proudly that the material used for the monument and the museum is all sourced from the Kurdistan Region, and that some 3000 people from Halabja worked on the monument during the years of its initial construction.7 The role of the milieu is underscored by both Kurdistani material and manpower, providing the HMPM’s materiality with an aura of locality. During his guided tour, Sarkhel Khafar also highlighted that the building was designed by architect Jalal Bakr Qasab from Sulaymaniyah, whose proposal was the winning entry in a competition. Its exterior makes it clear to the visitor that this is a newly constructed and official monument. The main building has a circular shape, with 16 columns rising into the sky. These columns curve upwards and come together to embrace a globe, high above the center of the building. The columns are made of white granite. Since this material reflects sunlight, the appearance of the building changes depending on the time of day and the weather. The columns rest on a rooftop that is covered with artificial stones. Together with the shape of the columns, this gives the impression that these columns form two hands, thrusting upwards through the rocky ground, or perhaps through rubble, to hold the globe aloft. The symbolic meaning of this design is discussed below. Because of the building’s circular shape, the visitor is obliged to follow a pre-determined path, consisting of the following parts: 1. an exhibition room with photos of the rich cultural life of Halabja’s citizens; 2. an exhibit containing dioramas based on photos taken by Iranian photographers directly after the chemical attack; 3. an exhibition room showing photos of the atrocities; 4. a rotunda that includes lists of victims’ names written on the wall;

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5. an exhibit where information about photographers is shown, as well as archival documentation of the testimonies of members of the Kurdistani community who testified against Saddam Hussein; 6. a garden where several sculptures are situated; and 7. a space that includes temporary exhibits and also displays objects that belonged to the victims of Halabja. The scope of this chapter does not make it possible to discuss all of these rooms, but the following discussion focuses on those that are important for an analysis of the functional and symbolic aspects of the HMPM, its use of prosthetic memory and, eventually, its status as a phantomic museum.

4   The Functional 4.1   In Order Not to Repeat The second aspect of lieux de mémoire that Nora discusses is that of the functional. The HMPM has five interrelated functions, the first three of which can be characterized with the following phrases, based on Amna Suraka’s subtitle ‘In order not to forget.’ These phrases are: ‘In order not to repeat,’ ‘In order to mourn,’ and ‘In order to document.’ Each of these phrases—and therefore each of these functions—is aimed at a specific audience. The first function, which comes the closest to the single aim that Williams attributes to memorial museums, reflects the sign shown at the entrance of the site, entitled ‘The Idea of Halabja Monument.’ This title is listed first in Kurdish, and then translated into English as well as Arabic. The text itself, however, is only in Kurdish and reads as follows: On 16/03/1988 the city of Halabja was gassed by the hands of the Ba’ath regime. During this gassing, 5000 citizens lost their lives, and 10,000 others were injured. The city was fiercely damaged. Those who survived the attacks were forced to leave the city and flee towards the borders. Once there, they settled in villages in Iran. Most of them ended up in refugee camps and life there was harsh. Most of the injured victims that reached Iran passed away in the camps, and a great number of people were buried there.

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After the holy Raparin in 1991 and after the fall of the Ba’ath regime, little by little the citizens of Halabja returned to their town, where they tried to pick up their lives. During these years, the city of Halabja was uninhabitable. It was only because of the support and effort of the attentive citizens and the work of the KRG and the NGOs working in the region, that we could begin to rebuild the city. Soon, changes were implemented, to the satisfaction of its inhabitants and those who visited the city. It was during this time that the honorable Mam Jalal, the former president of Federal Iraq, commissioned this monument to be made, to commemorate the victims. This happened under supervision of the honorable doctor Barham Ahmed Salih, the prime minister of the KRG. The project was designed by Kurdish architect Jalal Bakrd Qasab. The project commenced in January 2001. On 15/09/2003 the monument for the victims of Halabja was opened to the public, in the presence of the families of victims who had passed away, representatives of the KRG, in particular the honorable Mam Jalal and the honorable Masoud Barzani. But also, the American Minister of Foreign Affairs, Paul Bremer,8 and several other important people. [My translation].

Although most of the signs in the building itself have been translated into other languages, the fact that this text is only in Kurdish indicates that it specifically addresses a Kurdistani audience. In light of Williams’s analysis of the dual character of memorial museums, this sign presents the first function of the HMPM—‘in order not to repeat’—as having two dimensions: firstly, it explicitly mentions that the site has the function of commemoration (its function as a monument), and secondly, the information that the sign contains suggests that its other function is education (its function as a museum). The fact that it is called the Halabja Monument and Peace Museum, furthermore, emphasizes that these two functions carry a social urgency: we should commemorate and remember to preserve peace in order ‘not to repeat.’ This is a version of the ‘never again’ imperative discussed by Williams. Since I observed that young visitors often seem to be distracted and uninterested while touring the museum, I asked one of the guides, named Akram Mhamad, himself a survivor of the Halabja gassing, how he responds to these types of visitors. In his answer, he stressed the urgency and necessity of educating children about what happened in the past, but also told me about the difficulty of doing this:

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It is impossible to force them to listen to you. Once, a group of three or four boys who were taking photos, they started to laugh. I was not very angry, but I told them that it was not the place to laugh, and if they wanted to do this, they should leave the building. I didn’t tell them in an angry way. They excused themselves and told me that it wasn’t their intention to be disrespectful. This was the only time I have said something, and I am planning to repeat it. There are other youngsters who do not totally take you seriously, but you cannot guard the place with a stick in your hand and keep order. This is all created to raise awareness among young people that the freedom we have today was not achieved in one day.9

According to Akram, it is important that these memories are collected and presented at one concrete site, teaching younger generations about what took place in Halabja. This archival function was also pointed out to me by the former director, who told me: The monument is there to archive and to display these photos. Because of our government, however, the younger generation does not know much, is not loyal and does not have historical awareness. Sometimes the youngest generation does not even know what the reason behind the chemical bombardment of Halabja was. Their historical knowledge is very superficial … Real change begins at schools. But this is difficult because the attacks on Halabja are not really discussed in schools. It does not even appear in schoolbooks. Only in the fifth grade is it briefly mentioned. And then it is filled with factual errors. The book says, for example, that the attacks took place on [March] 15th. The first attack took place at 12 AM in the night between March 12th and March 13th. They continued until 2 o’clock on the 15th. From that day on, the city was captured by the army. Only at the Zalm Bridge, they stopped. On the 16th of March, at 11:30, the city was bombed. Then, between 2 and 2:30, the city was gassed. Then people started to flee, and they started to attack other places. This should be taught in school.10

What is important about this statement is that the former director, again, clearly understands one of the functions of the HMPM as educating Kurdistani visitors, especially youth, about ‘their’ past, and to do so with great attention for what really happened. In a sense, therefore, he supports the idea that the museum should be about the transmission of knowledge and perform the role of the memorial museum described by Williams.

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4.2   In Order to Mourn Whereas Williams argues that all memorial museums are driven by one single function—‘never forget’—that focuses them on one specific event, the HMPM has more functions. A second function performed by the HMPM is to provide a place of mourning; a function attributed in the previous chapter to Amna Suraka as well. Again, this function is mainly aimed at a Kurdistani audience, and more specifically those who lost loved ones in the gas attacks. As mentioned above and in the previous chapter, most victims of these attacks were not properly buried: bodies that were found in the city were buried in mass graves. Others who were killed during their escape were buried in anonymous graves wherever they were found. Many bodies are still interred on the surrounding hills and mountains. About ten minutes away from the museum is a graveyard dedicated to those people whose bodies have never been found (Fig. 5.2). In this graveyard are white (family) tombstones with names of the 5000 victims and a monument of a woman called ‘The Mother of all Martyrs’ who holds out

Fig. 5.2  Two men sitting on the graveyard with empty graves, near the HMPM (photo by Bareez Majid)

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her hands, a gesture with a religious and symbolic connotation that is discussed in more detail below. Furthermore, there are three mass graves in which the bodies that were found directly after the attack are buried. The three mass graves contain 24, 1500 and 440 bodies. The presence of these graveyards—some with empty graves and some with actual human remains—shapes the museum’s function as a place where people can mourn the dead and emphasizes its specific topographical locality. This graveyard with the empty graves also plays an important role in constituting the phantomic aura of the HMPM: the empty graves suggest the presence of an absence and are haunted by the phantoms of those who have died, those whose names can be read on the tombstones but whose bodies have never been either found or identified. That this provides an opportunity for people who have lost loved ones to mourn, knowing that the graves are empty, emphasizes that those who mourn are haunted by a phantomic presence as well; they experience a form of phantom pain. This phantom pain is perhaps especially felt on behalf of the many children who died during the attack. Since their bodies were never identified, many parents still hope for their return. Chapter 3 provided two examples of parents who continue to grapple with this experience. Another example is the story of Zimnako Mohammed Salih. Zimnako, who was raised as Ali in an Iranian family, discovered at age 21 that he was a survivor of the chemical attacks. With the help of a DNA test, he was eventually reunited with his family. A famous photo which shows him next to the grave created for him is displayed in the HMPM (Fig. 5.3). Again, stories like his provide those who disappeared but whose bodies have never been found with a phantomic presence that makes it difficult to mourn them, situating them between absence and presence, and sometimes even ‘returning them from the dead.’ In the museum itself, its function as a place of mourning is most clearly embodied by the rotunda at the building’s center. The walls of this rotunda are made of black granite, which makes it quite dark, almost giving the impression of entering a tomb. On its walls, lists of attack victims’ names are displayed in white. One finds the names of individuals, but also groups of names belonging to the same family. Lines separate these names and delineate families. A few names are colored red or pink.11 During my fieldwork, I often noticed people looking for the names of their loved ones, seeking to identify those whom they have lost and who now live on in their conscience, like phantom limbs. The rotunda is discussed below in an analysis of the museum’s symbolic aspects, but it is important to note here

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Fig. 5.3  Photograph in the HMPM showing Zimnako Mohammed Salih with his own grave (photo by Bareez Majid)

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that because the visitor circles around this black rotunda in the middle of the museum, it is this empty center that imbibes the museum’s overall structure with a phantomic presence/absence. 4.3   In Order to Document and Convince The third function of the HMPM is aimed at a different audience: those who might not know about or question what happened. This function is driven by the aim to provide evidence; to show that it happened, what happened, and how it happened. In combination with the presence/absence of the black rotunda at the building’s center, as well as the empty graves outside on the hills, this evidence is meant to show that although the pain of the ‘phantom limb’ cannot be witnessed by those not suffering from it, and although the bodies of countless victims have not been found, this pain is real and the event that caused it did happen. This is done by displaying a number of documents that are meant to prove the conditions that caused the loss of loved ones, objectively presenting the contours of the ‘phantom limb’ without being able to materialize this limb itself. Furthermore, they aim to provide these contours with a moral and legal dimension, demarcating that what happened was wrong and that those responsible have consequently been judged. To understand the urgency of the function ‘in order to document,’ the attacks that the museum commemorates must be embedded within their historical context. When I asked one of the guides about who makes the decision about what to display, and how, he told me that the decision was made in collaboration with artists, the staff and representatives of the victims. After the building was set on fire, for example, many belongings that were found in mass graves were lost. In their place, it was decided to display copies of official documents. The guide explained this decision as follows: “Our main aim is to move people emotionally. In doing so, we hope to meet some criticism voiced by some of our visitors. For example, there are some visitors with an Arabic background who deny the catastrophe. They say, for example, that the photos we have exposed in the museum are shot in only two streets. Where are the photos of the other streets, if this was really true?”12 One of the reasons often provided for this criticism is that the photos were made by Iranian journalists, which means, according to doubters, that they could be staged because these journalists had a political goal.

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This goal had everything to do with developments on the geopolitical stage. As Bengio observes about the time at which the attacks took place: “At that stage (March–April 1988), the international community was still united in its fear of a possible Iranian breakthrough towards the Gulf states and, viewing Iraq as the primary barrier to Iranian aggression, did nothing to weaken or antagonize Bagdad” (Kurds of Iraq 182). In fact, as Hiltermann describes: “Evidence shows that the US, fully aware it was Iraq that had gassed Halabja, accused Iran of being at least partly responsible, and then instructed its diplomats to propagate Iran’s partial culpability” (239). The Islamic Republic of Iran therefore seized the attack on Halabja as undisputed proof that the Iraqi army was using chemicals weapons against civilians. It was therefore in their benefit to send journalists as quickly as possible to cover the atrocities committed by the Iraqi regime. Their photos of the destruction of Halabja and the massacre were soon spread by the media, giving the attack worldwide publicity. Furthermore, the Anfal campaign itself was either ignored or framed in specific ways within the Arab world. It was praised, for example, by Iraqi Arab media, which cynically described the campaign as “the best gift to our [Kurdish] masses who are celebrating Nowruz” (Bengio, Kurds of Iraq 181). Also, mass demonstrations were held in Bagdad to support the campaign (282). Bengio observes that a similar perspective was implicitly or explicitly defended by intelligentsia in the region: “It was a well-known fact, but for a few exceptions, that Arab intellectuals shied away from tackling Halabja and Anfal” (283). In this context, Bengio cites the following observation from Kurdish poet and playwright, Khalid Sulayman: “The Arabs were conditioned to accept the idea of the anfalization of the Kurds by the Ba’ath. Arab officials, intellectuals and even the general public were of the opinion that the campaign was nothing but an action to hold in check human groupings that did not fit in the expectation of the Arab State” (282).13 These responses can partly be explained by the political pressure expressed by Saddam’s regime. As Hiltermann writes: “People were expressly prohibited from discussing chemical attacks on pain of severe punishment. Victims of such attacks not only had to remain silent about what had caused their injuries … they also were denied the medical care they so desperately needed” (189). It could also be argued that Arab intellectuals found it difficult to escape the pan-Arabic discourse in which Saddam played and still plays an important role. This ideology made it possible to accept a unified standpoint in opposition to the hegemony of

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Western powers, which must also be taken into account in order to understand the HMPM’s function to document and provide evidence. Exemplary for this discourse are responses to the book, Cruelty and Silence by Iraqi-Arab scholar, Kanan Makiya. His was the first voice from the Arab intellectual world that raised serious questions about the role played by Arab intellectuals in regard to Anfal and Halabja. Makiya observes in a characteristic passage: “Millions upon millions of words have been written about the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages, in order to bring about the creation of the Israeli state. And rightly so. Yet many of the very intellectuals who wrote those words chose silence when it came to the elimination of thousands of Kurdish villages by an Arab state” (201). This book, as well as his The Republic of Fear: Inside Saddam’s Iraq (1989, written under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil), was received with outrage by Arab intellectuals, and Makiya was accused of falsifying the truth. One of the intellectuals who voiced this critique was Edward Said, who wrote an emotional review of Makiya’s book in which he states that it is “revolting, based … on cowardly innuendo and false interpretation” (Johnson 85). In a letter exchange between Irani-American historian and gender theorist, Afsaneh Najmabadi and Said in 1991, Namjabadi criticized Said’s attacks on several journalists, writers and scholars for defending a simplified idea of ‘one’ Arab identity that would be threatened by the US and Israel: “To accuse these books and their authors of anti-Arab racism may be useful for Said’s dislodgement project, but it does little to clarify the debates now engulfing Arab intellectuals and is itself a form of racism, for it assumes a unified and undifferentiated Arab” (2). This same one-sided approach to the area, Najmabadi argues, drove Said to write the following about the Halabja massacre, published in the London Review of Books on 7 March 1991: “the claim that Iraq gassed its own citizens has often been repeated. At best, this is uncertain. There is at least one War College report, done while Iraq was a US ally, which claims that the gassings of the Kurds in Halabja was done by Iran” (qtd. in Najmabadi 2). Indeed, as mentioned above, the US did circulate contradictory theories about the war, making it difficult for the greater public to know who was responsible. Furthermore, as Hiltermann observes, real evidence of genocide “became available only after 1991, when independent investigators could visit Kurdistan freely. And only in 1995 did the State Department’s legal advisor determine that what had happened during Anfal constituted genocide” (213). However, the doubts raised by intellectuals like Said continued a process of silencing victims, as occurred

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in Iraq in the 1980s and 1990s. After all, Said seems to be mainly concerned with who is to blame for what happened, not with the suffering that took place. It is in this context that the HMPM’s function to foreground this suffering and to document what happened should be understood. This function returns most explicitly in the last exhibition room of the HMPM, which displays copies of official documents. In this room, for example, the visitor finds official documents from the case of Kani Ashqan, a neighborhood in Halabja that was destroyed in retaliation for demonstrations that took place in the city. In May 1987, many people were arrested and buried alive, I heard guides telling visitors.14 Driven by the aim to provide as much proof and evidence as possible, in this room we also find the document in which the Ba’ath regime issued the order for the Anfalization of Kurdistani villages. Other official documents contain information about how, and by whom, the gassing of Halabja was ordered. That these events are supported with copies of official documents creates an aura of authenticity and truth. Among them are testimonies of the five survivors of the Halabja massacre who were brought to court. Their testimonies, identified as such in English, Arabic and Kurdish, are exhibited together with their photos.15 The testimonies themselves are in Arabic, the language used during the trial, and they are not translated into Kurdish. This suggests that those addressed by this part of the museum are Arabic-speaking visitors who, this also implies, are probably the most likely to deny the evidence shown and to dismiss the phantoms of the past. One of these testimonies is that of the abovementioned Aras Abid Akram, who now works as a guide in the museum. Also exhibited are copies of news reports that were published in the international media about the Halabja massacre. During the guided tour, employees state that the museum does not show news articles written in Arabic because nothing was published about Halabja in Arabic newspapers. This is not true, as discussed above. However, we should understand this statement as an example of Laub’s emphasis on the survivor’s perspective, discussed in Chap. 1: it expresses the experience of an all-encompassing, hegemonic political whole that aimed to eradicate Kurdistani existence. In the right corner of the hall, we find death certificates of the three people presented as mainly responsible for the attacks: Saddam Hussein and his two sons, Uday Saddam Hussein and Qusay Saddam Hussein. Below the death certificates of the two sons, we see two photos of each.

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The ones on the left are portraits taken when they were alive, and those on the right show their dead faces, taken after they were killed during a three-­ hour firefight with US forces in the Iraqi city of Mosul on 22 July 2003. The photos of their dead faces are gruesome; they are battered and bruised. Like the photos of the victims of Halabja, the museum strives to provide direct documentation of the harsh reality of the attack on Halabja and its aftermath. The reason for this explicit message, a guide explained to me when I asked him about how they obtained the documents, is that “there is a group of people who continues to defend the claim that Ba’athists are still alive and in charge. For this reason, we had ordered these documents from Mosul, so that they could be presented here.”16 Again, this emphasizes the site’s function as documentary, its intent to grasp or pin down the character of the traumatic event that took place in the past, all too easily denied by those with a different political and ideological agenda. The same goes for Saddam Hussein himself, whose death certificate is displayed as well. We do not see a photo of his hanging, but three photos of him in court. In the first photo, he is standing behind a microphone; in the second, he stands in court, looking angry; and in the last, we see him with a hand covering his eyes. This gives the impression that he feels remorse. The last photo is particularly interesting, because Saddam claimed in court that he had the constitutional right of “the President of Iraq,” which meant that he did not and could not recognize the court’s authority (J. Steele). He never showed a sign of remorse and denied all accusations raised against him. Below the documents of Saddam, we find a document of the death sentence of Ali Hussein Majid, who ordered the gassing of Kurdistanis in Halabja. This outcome is especially important to the people of Halabja, since he is the only one who was specifically condemned and judged for the Halabja massacre. This document has been copied in color, and we see that it was signed in green. The site has tried to make these documents as ‘real’ and palpable as possible to pin down the contested character of that which is remembered: in one display case, the visitor sees several objects, one of which is the pen with which the abovementioned death sentence was signed (Fig.  5.4). According to law, I heard guides explaining to visitors, this pen can be used only once, after which it must be either demolished or saved in an archive. After the trial, people from Halabja asked the judge for this pen, and it was given to them as a sign of respect.17 The fact that the pen has been archived and can be seen by the visitor underscores that the trial itself was legitimate and constitutional, and again functions to convince the

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Fig. 5.4  Pen that signed the death sentence of Ali Hussein Majid (left), placed next to a Gobarok that belonged to a victim of the gas attacks on Halabja (center), and the rope used to hang Ali Hussein Majid (right). The sign tells the date of his execution (photo by Bareez Majid)

visitor of the truth of what happened.18 The pen is displayed (Fig. 5.4) next to a necklace called a Gobarok, which is mostly worn by newly married brides. It belonged to a bride who died during the attacks. Until the righteous owner claims it, the necklace will be exhibited here, the guide tells visitors. It could be argued that by putting these two objects together on a shelf, the following claim is made: the pen used for ending the life of the perpetrator is now able to rewrite the existence of those who are not with us anymore, such as the newlywed bride whose life was prematurely ended and whose absence is emphasized by the presence of the necklace. Furthermore, the presence of the actual pen that signed the death sentence, as well as the materiality of the actual necklace worn by a victim of the attacks, again proves the reality and authenticity of what is shown in and by the museum, solidifying its existence and materializing the contours of the ‘phantom limb.’

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During my presence as a participant observer in the community of Halabja, I noticed that many in this city look back on the trial of Ali Hussein Majid with pride, as during his trial witnesses and victims from Halabja testified in court against a representative of Saddam’s regime. It is for this reason, I heard a guide telling several visitors, that they also proudly display the rope with which ‘Ali Chimyawi’ (‘Chemical Ali’) was hanged in a showcase (Fig. 5.4). The text placed on this rope reads: “25-01-2010,” the day of his execution. The guide tells us that, according to law, the rope has to be 68 meters long. One half of the rope was given to the museum of Halabja, together with the pen, and the other half to the Shi’ite Arabs from the South, since they were also victims of the regime.19 This emphasis on reality, authenticity and documentation is also shown by the cameras and typewriters that are displayed in this room: instruments that literally documented the horrors of that day. We see two photos next to the cameras, one of which is of photographer Stephen Hirten. A text in Kurdish and English explains: “This is the camera of (Stephan Hirten) a Swedish photographer who was in Halabja on 21st of March 1988.” In Kurdish, the text also mentions that the photographer, whose photos were published in Swedish newspapers, donated his camera to the museum in November 2009. The other text referring to the other photographer reads: “This is the camera of Ramazan Ozturk, a Kurdish photographer from the Kurdish region of Turkey. He was in Halabja on the 18th of March 1988, two days after the chemical attack. He took the famous image of (Omari Khawar) and his only son. Both dead in the street.” This image is discussed in more detail below. Next to another camera, a text in Kurdish reads: “A present from the photographer Kees Schaapman. During the catastrophe of Halabja photos were made with this camera.” Masks are displayed as well, with texts explaining: “An example of a gas mask, used during chemical attacks.” All the objects presented in this room seem to have one main purpose: to educate the visitor and to provide proof of what happened, and moreover, to provide proof that the gathering of this proof took place. Everything we have seen so far, the museum emphasizes furthermore, has been recognized by a court, making it legitimate, including the severe forms of punishment meted out to those who were responsible. One specific object also seems to be displayed to show that all groups—including Arabs—were victimized by Saddam Hussein’s regime. This is done by a showcase that, below a display of several medals and awards won by Kurdish athletes to demonstrate what Kurdistanis have achieved after the

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fall of Saddam, shows the slipper of an Iraqi Arab named Abu Tahsin. The guide tells the story behind this slipper in the following way: Abu Tahsin slapped the poster of Saddam Hussein with his slipper. You must know that this happened before the fall of the regime; there was still war going on in Baghdad. He takes Saddam’s poster off and starts slapping it … He brought us his slipper, although other countries like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iran wanted to have his slipper badly. They wanted to pay him 10 million dollars for it, but he didn’t accept it. Instead, he donated it to our museum. Currently he lives in Sulaymaniyah. He was given a house and a parcel by the honorable Mam Jalal, and he currently lives in Malkani [a neighborhood in Sulaymaniyah]. He comes to visit us on a weekly basis, just to look at his slipper. We have asked him what the reason for this slapping of the poster was; he told us that it was because of one of his sons, who was newly married, was executed by the Ba’ath regime. He waited for a day to take revenge.20

This story is confirmed by a photo, where we see him slapping the head of the former leader with his slipper, together with a signed statement from Abu Tahsin, in which he states that these objects are authentic. Lastly, to embed the gravity of that which is documented by the museum in its international context, and to provide its historical facticity with a moral dimension revolving around universally recognized instances of injustice, the room also contains a list of the global use of chemical weapons. This list is ordered in the following way: World War I, post-­ World War I, World War II and post-World War II. The headlines on this list are in English as well as Kurdish, but the text itself is in Kurdish. The list starts in 1915 with the use of chemical weapons during World War I in Ypres and ends with the chemical attacks on Halabja. The list is not comprehensive. For example, the use of gas in Nazi concentration camps is not mentioned. Instead, two other events are listed: firstly, the bombing of China that was carried out between 1937 and 1943 by Japan; secondly, the raid on Bari: an air attack by the Germans on the allied forces in Italy, on 2 December 1943. The list also contains references to the various chemical attacks by Saddam’s regime, including the attack on Iran in 1987 when 281 villages were bombed and gassed. In a textbox next to this list, we find two flowcharts, highlighting the impact of both world wars on civilians. We read, for example, that the impact on civilians was much higher during World War II (civilians made up 54% of casualties) than during World War I (14%). In the chart on the

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left side, we see the number of military personnel, as well as the number of civilians who died in various countries during the Second World War. There is no mention of the Holocaust and of the specific groups that were targeted. Instead, focus is placed on the death toll among civilians in general. Another text specifically describes the history of chemical weapon use in the Kurdistan Region between 15 April 1987 and 17 May 1988, including the names of the villages that were attacked. 4.4   Photographs and Dioramas as Prosthetic Memory Now that the HMPM’s three functions of commemorating and remembering—in order to prevent further violence, to provide a place of mourning and to document what happened—have been discussed, a fourth function can be highlighted: to shape a prosthetic memory by bringing the past alive as vividly as possible, and placing visitors ‘in’ this past. This brings me again to Arnold-de Simine’s observations about the shifting function of museums. In ‘Introduction: Memory, Community and the New Museum,’ Arnold-de Simine and Jens Andermann reflect on the employment of various forms of media in contemporary memory museums, contrasting this employment with the presentation of ‘knowledge’ in historical museums: [I]nvestment in memory media is motivated by the conviction that mere knowledge about the past might not suffice to prevent violent histories from happening again. Furthermore, historiography’s ideals of disinterested objectivity, detachedness and clear distinction between past and present appear heartless, like a betrayal of the dead and especially of the victims of traumatic events. To relegate something completely to the realm of historical knowledge seems nothing short of shying away from our moral responsibility. So the obligation to remember is taken to its literal extreme: visitors are asked to adopt memories in order to be able to respond emotionally to the past and museums take on the role of facilitators in that process by providing experientially oriented encounters with memory media and technologies. (8).

This emphasis on ‘adopting memories’ is criticized below, but for now it is noteworthy that, as discussed above, the ‘obligation to remember’ appears in the ways in which the museum both aims to educate Kurdistanis, especially younger generations, about what happened in the past, and aims to document this as objectively as possible, convincing anyone who doubts

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the events by confronting them with evidence. However, as Arnold-de Simine emphasizes in this passage, presenting only ‘dry’ historical evidence might not be enough. This might explain the inclusion of objects like the slipper and rope described above, to make the past more palpable, but in the HMPM, this also culminates in the employment of different media to constitute prosthetic memories. These media are used to commemorate what happened, ‘prevent violent histories from happening again,’ and to do this in a very specific way: by making the past as ‘real’ and ‘alive’ as possible with the aim to provide visitors with the possibility of ‘adopting’ a memory about this recreated past. This is done in the museum primarily by combining photographs, dioramas and real historical objects that together shape that which Landsberg characterizes as the ‘artificial limb’ of memory (20). The scope of this chapter does not make it possible to discuss all photographs and dioramas exhibited in the HMPM in detail. Instead, a selection will be highlighted, first addressing the exhibition room that the visitor initially enters when they visit the museum. In this room, the importance of the medium of photography is immediately emphasized: it is decorated with black-and-white photographs in black frames. These frames give the impression that we are looking at a film reel and foreground the materiality of photographs as a medium. The photos themselves mainly consist of intimate snapshots that present the innocent and joyful lives that people lived before the gassing. The guides clarify in detail what we see in the photos to those who ask about them.21 These photos shape a phantomic image of a life lost because of the attacks, now only existing in the black-and-white photographs, a mode that itself signifies a bygone time. The symbolic aspects of these photographs are discussed below. The second exhibition room offers the first example of the way in which photographs and dioramas are used to create a prosthetic memory in the HMPM. On the right side of this room, roped off from visitors by a red ribbon, we find a diorama that represents a street with collapsed houses. On the road, several mannequins are scattered, representing dead bodies. One of these mannequins represents the most well-known victim of the gas attacks, Omari Khawar (Fig. 5.5). This diorama represents, in three dimensions, a famous photo which can be characterized as ‘metonymic’ in nature. In his book, Committed to Memory, Oren Baruch Stier, here in the context of the Holocaust, characterizes these kinds of representations as follows: “As part of a whole, these

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Fig. 5.5  Diaroma representing the picture known as ‘The Silent Witness,’ showing Omari Khawar cradling his son (photo by Bareez Majid)

pointers act as mediators for Holocaust awareness and memory, in that they refer metonymically to the events of which they somehow once took and still take part, and present in condensed form images of what is deemed most essential to the process of remembrance” (25). The photo of Omari Khawar, cradling his infant son even in death, is generally known

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Fig. 5.6  The photo ‘The Silent Witness,’ in the HMPM (photo by Bareez Majid)

as ‘The Silent Witness’ and is the most famous photograph of the Halabja attacks, presenting a metonym of the attacks as a whole (Fig. 5.6). Its importance is illustrated by the fact that representations of this photo return in several forms throughout the HMPM, as discussed below (Fig. 5.7).22 When confronted with this diorama, a guide tells visitors the full name of the victim, as well as his life story. He explains that we are witnessing the death of Omar Hama Saleh Ahmed Suleiman, better known as Omari Khawar. He who was born in 1938 and died on 16 March, the body of his dead son beneath him: when the attacks took place, he tried to flee his house together with his son, but collapsed a few minutes later at front of the door of a neighbor two houses away. What makes this diorama interesting in the context of prosthetic memory is that it can be understood, together with the stories told by the guide, as a way of bringing the scene depicted on the iconic photograph ‘back to life,’ or rather, to the exact moment of Omari’s death. Indeed, the situation in which the visitor is

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Fig. 5.7  Statue of ‘The Silent Witness’ in the museum’s garden (photo by Bareez Majid)

positioned can be considered within the context of Arnold-de Simine’s description of the ‘new’ memory museum: These new museums do not simply change their narratives by including a variety of individual stories; they renegotiate the processes of representation and narration and rethink the museal codes of communication with the public. The aim is not only to pass on mediated memories of eyewitnesses to future generations, but to encourage visitors to experience the past vicariously and supply them with ‘prosthetic memories.’ (Mediating Memory 12)

The story and destiny of Khawar, as represented by the diorama, is an invitation to local and international visitors to ‘experience the past vicariously.’ When entering the room, it almost looks like a real person is lying there on the ground, giving the impression that one is witnessing the death of Khawar oneself. During my fieldwork, I also noticed a child crying next to the mannequin, scared by the scene. By translating that which is depicted on the photograph into a three-dimensional scene through

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which the visitor can walk, we can argue with help of Arnold-de Simine and Landsberg’s theories on museal techniques, that the museum attempts to give visitors the feeling that they are there, ‘in’ the past represented by both the photograph and the diorama, thus providing visitors with a prosthetic memory of this past. The same can be said about a second diorama in this room: we see a mural of a street, in front of which a replica of a pickup truck carrying dead bodies, mostly those of women and children, has been placed. Furthermore, dead bodies lie in front of and on both sides of the truck (Fig. 5.8). Again, this scene is a representation of an actual photograph (Fig. 5.9), and again it is meant to make the visitor feel like they are present in this part of history; like they are standing in the middle of the gas attacks, witnessing what is happening around them. As with the iconic photo of Omari Khawar, the pickup truck also returns in various ways in the museum. The HMPM’s garden even displays an actual pickup truck resembling the one in the photo.

Fig. 5.8  Diorama representing a truck with bodies (photo by Bareez Majid)

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Fig. 5.9  The photograph itself, in the HMPM (photo by Bareez Majid)

Similar experiences of affective involvement might be triggered by other dioramas, one of which indicates that the attack not only destroyed civilians but also nature: on the left side of the room, the visitor sees a mural depicting a green Halabja. In front of this idyllic photo, replicas of dead animals have been placed. The guide tells visitors that the chemical attacks poisoned the area’s water for a long time, killing both animals and humans. At the end of the room, the visitor also sees a replica of a lake. Here, guide indicates that this scene depicts Kani Ashqan, a nearby lake where many people were found dead. The reason for this was that many fled to this place to wash their faces. Since it was located in a valley that trapped in gases, however, it had become very poisonous, causing the deaths of all those who came to this site. The visitors are also encouraged to form prosthetic memories in a third exhibition room exhibiting photographs. The photographs near the entrance of this room show the aftermath of the attacks: the visitor sees the city of Halabja in ruins. These are followed by photos of the attack’s victims. For the construction of prosthetic memory, it is crucial that several photos, already shown in the previous hall, return in this third room.

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The repetition provides visitors with the sense that they have already seen this before; these images become a déjà vu. Indeed, the room also contains the same photo of the pick-up truck carrying dead bodies that we saw represented in the diorama in the previous room (Figs. 5.8 and 5.9). Although the photos of the victims are presented here without background information, the guides take their time to elaborate on the stories of the people they depict. That this background information is not provided on informational signs might again be explained within the context of prosthetic memory: what seems to be most important here is that the visitor ‘feels’ like they are part of this past and come as close as possible to the traumatic events as they happened. The information the guides provide might indeed be first-hand knowledge; it is transmitted to the visitor without the concretizing medium of text, the presence and reading of which would transport visitors out of this current past and into the present. This latter claim is substantiated by a clock that visitors encounter before they enter the exhibition room where the dioramas are displayed. The guide tells visitors that they will be provided with insight into what happened on 16 March 1988. The clock, which hangs above the room’s door, gives the impression that we ‘enter’ that day. It is colored red and looks partially burned. It has stopped at 11:35, the moment when the first gas bombs fell. The clock was provided to the museum by an artist from Sulaymaniyah and is reminiscent of the famous melted clock found in Hiroshima, stopped at the time of the bomb’s detonation, 8:15 AM. It also echoes the role that clocks play in several commemoration sites in former concentration camps, such as Buchenwald. The clock in Buchenwald, however, is stopped at 3:15, when Americans arrived to liberate the camp. The clock in Halabja stands still at the moment that the catastrophe began, like the Hiroshima clock. By passing this clock, the visitor is encouraged to have an ‘authentic’ experience, to re-enact the events that began at this time in this area, shaping their ‘own’ prosthetic memories of this event. 4.5   Prosthetic Memories in a Phantomic Museum The specific memory culture of the KRI, in which a milieux de mémoire is still alive, destabilizes the idea of prosthetic memory as discussed by Landsberg and Arnold-de Simine, partly transforming it into and infusing it with ‘phantomic memory.’ According to Arnold-de Simine and Landsberg, as discussed in depth above, the former is shaped within a

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context wherein actual memories are disappearing or have already disappeared as experiential generations pass away, which is not the case in the KRI where traumatic events occurred relatively recently. In fact, the prosthetic memory shaped by the HMPM not only pulls the visitor into the past by trying to make them feel like they are experiencing this past themselves, but also pulls the past into the present, highlighting the manner in which the KRI is still haunted by actual memories of traumatic events, and by the phantom pain experienced by survivors who are still alive in the present. This provides the prosthetic memories shaped by the museum with a phantomic dimension, making the visitor question the reality of the memories that they adopt. This happens once the visitor realizes that many of the people in the museum’s photographs are still alive. The exhibition, for example, contains a photo of a dead man who is surrounded by two boys hugging him. On the right side of the photo, we see an older man talking to the boys. On the left side, we see a girl who is holding a small child. The guide tells us that the dead person in the middle is the older brother of these children, and that he was killed in the attack. His siblings did not want to leave his body behind and continued hugging him. Their father, the older man standing on the right, urges them to leave. Next to this photo, we find a photograph of Mr. Hawraman Gechenaee seated before a microphone. Above the photo, we read that it was taken on 16 March 2015, with another text indicating that he is a member of the Kurdish parliament. A smaller version of the photograph described above is placed next to Gechenaee’s photo, an arrow pointing to the boy who is holding the dead body of his older brother. The guides proudly commented on the fact that this is the same person, exactly 27 years later. This problematizes the idea that the memories of the dead shown in the photographs would need to be made into prosthetic memories that visitors can ‘wear’ like a prosthetic limb, because these memories are still held by living people in today’s KRI. Instead, it provides these photos with a vulnerable phantomic aura, making their subjects both present and absent. Instead of these memories being ready for what Landsberg defines as commodification, making them claimable by visitors, they are now, to some extent, reclaimed by those who actually have them. Put differently: that the scenes shown in the photographs are living memories emphasizes that the prosthetic memories shaped by the photos and dioramas are merely prosthetic, and that there will always be something about them that is missing, something that withdraws the moment a visitor aims to adopt the

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memory like a prosthetic limb. The limb, after all, is a phantom limb, still experienced in a painful manner by those to whose bodies this limb belonged/belongs. But the links between past and present, and therefore between living bodies and phantom limbs, are even more explicitly present in the HMPM: as mentioned, most of the guides who work at the site were themselves victims of the gas attacks, and two of them are actually present in photographs displayed in the museum. This introduces a highly personal, emotional and, again, phantomic dimension to the museum, embedding it firmly in its milieu de mémoire and replacing the ‘artificial limb’ of memory with the phantom limb experienced by those who are haunted by these actual memories. This can be illustrated with help of a focus on two of the museum’s guides: Akram Mhamad and Saman Ahmad. The former is the only survivor of his family. The scene of the pick-up truck discussed above—not only represented in a diorama but also shown in a photograph (see Figs. 5.8 and 5.9)—concerns him: he is one of the boys sitting next to the vehicle. I interviewed Akram about this photograph. He told me that their photo was taken one day and one night after the attacks. He points to himself lying next to his dead mother, whose scarf he holds against the smell. When I asked him if I had correctly understood that he had been lying there for that long, he replied: You know what, because of the bombing that happened shortly before, our driver had to stop on the corner of the street [pointing to the corner on the photo]. We left at 11:30, we were eating at that moment. When we drove through the street, one by one my relatives fell from the truck. One time our driver stopped to put them back on the truck. At a certain moment he could not continue. He opened the door to put some bodies back in the car when he himself collapsed on the ground. It was around 12:30 and we stayed there until the morning of the seventeenth. The thing was that on the sixteenth it was too dangerous for people to enter that street. Only people who were looking for the bodies of their loved ones took that risk. On the seventeenth a team of Iranian first-aid helpers arrived to assist those who were showing signs of life. We were all taken out of the truck. Although I know they asked me to get out of the car, I was not able to do this without assistance. Then they carried me out of the car, and that is when they took a photo of us, and we were deported to Iran. This is me, these are the children of my aunt and this my grandmother [pointing at different people in the photo]. During the attack we were together, but once in Iran, the women

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and men were separated. My grandmother was separated from us, and we were reunited only much later. It was pure destiny that my grandmother died on the sixteenth of March, 2015, on exactly the same day, only in 2015. These are cousins of my father, this was my mother, and this was my brother. This was my aunt, my mother’s sister. In total, 40 out of 46 people were killed in my family. This was not the only car; next to this truck there was a Datsun from ‘79 that reached Annab, and another car. In my family, my parents and my three brothers were killed. This one has four martyrs: his parents and a brother and a sister. My grandma did not only lose my mother, but also another daughter and son. These four people you see in this photo, in total we have 12 shahid.23

When I asked him if I could take a photo of him, Akram stood next to the photo and pointed at his young self, reclaiming the scene, and pulling it back into his own personal memories, making its phantomic essence unavailable to the visitor (Fig. 5.10).

Fig. 5.10  Akram pointing at his young self on the photograph of Fig.  5.9 (photo by Bareez Majid)

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Akram has worked as guide in the museum since 2009. When I asked him what it means for him to work in the museum, where he is confronted daily with this photo and the diorama representing his dead family members, he responded in the following way: Most foreign journalists who come here and see the photo have asked if it is not difficult for me to work here. Because I see this every day and I get confronted by it. Of course, it is not easy to be confronted with how my family was killed each day. However, it makes a huge difference, especially towards foreigners, that I can tell my own story instead of letting others do this for me. This asks a lot of me because it is not easy to remember that day.24

It is important to note the deeply personal and intimate way in which Akram reflects on his experiences, indicating that he is still haunted by what happened, suffering from a phantom pain to which I, as a researcher, did not have access: It is not that easy. I always say that we will one way or the other die one day. It is even natural to lose your parents. Nonetheless, one of the two should survive to help you to stand on your own two feet. But when you lose everyone at once, this is extremely difficult. I say this from my own experiences. I know how hard this can be. I was ten when this happened to me. I could go on and on about this, but this still does not come close to the experiences themselves. I was so young that I could not understand what happened to me. I only knew that I began to lose my vision, and everything afterwards is blurry.25

His story does not end with what happened on that day. Akram also took me to the aftermath of the attacks, telling me what it meant to live on with survivor’s guilt: Even when I was eventually in Iran, the doctors didn’t have the heart to tell me that my parents were killed during the attacks. They convinced me that they were in a different hospital for treatment, and that they would return afterwards. Iran was not as developed as it is now. They were not able to help all these sick people. Although the hospital was quite okay, we couldn’t stay there for long and were deported to a mosque where we were treated. A cousin of mine was injured in his leg, and we had to carry him to the mosque ourselves. There are still traces on his body. What I’m trying to say is, the poison had various impacts on our bodies.26

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This story indicates that, for people like Akram, the aftermath of the attacks, like their treatment in Iran as well as their return to Halabja, was very traumatizing. He told me: “After our treatments, we stayed in camps in Iran. It was only after the amnesty given by the regime that we were able to return. Our family did not stay in camps, instead our relatives in Sulaymaniyah took us in. We went to school there, but we seriously were afraid to say that we were from Halabja. We had to hide it.”27 Similar feelings are expressed by another guide with whom I spoke, Saman, who fled from Halabja to Iran just before the attacks in 1988. In a conversation in which I asked him about his work in the museum and his experiences in the past, he told me how emotional he becomes during the annual commemoration of the attacks. It is not easy for him to work in a place that continually reminds him of the horrors that took place in Halabja, he said. His work affects him so much that, when he comes home in the evening to his wife and young child, it is difficult for him to be around them and live a ‘normal’ life.28 Saman also told me how he began crying last year when music was played during the annual ceremonial commemoration of the attacks. His colleagues, who seemed to question the authenticity of his links with the past commemorated by the museum, asked him why he was crying, to which he replied: “It might be true that I have not lost many people in the attacks themselves, but it is all so sad that I feel like I have lost my entire family.”29 He also told me about his grandfather and grandmother, who were both in Halabja during the gas attacks and died of lung cancer after having been sick for years, and also about how his father was imprisoned in Abu Ghraib for three months because he deserted from the army. He said the following about this father and the marks left on his body after months of torture: My mother told me that he came home in a Lada, and that she expected that he could get out of the car on his own feet, but that turned out not to be possible. He really couldn’t walk. He crawled to the front door on all fours, and when she saw him like that she started to cry and scream. But he calmed her and told her not to cry so that no one would know. He told her not to worry, he had just been tortured. They had beaten the soles of his feet with a cable. My feet hurt me, he’d say. They are lifeless. My mother tells me that my father couldn’t do anything for three months and they had to treat him every day. They had to wrap his feet in a towel moistened with warm water, or give him a foot bath in normal water or salt water. He recovered little by

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little. My mother swears that at the place of the blows he had swellings for more than four years, which had to be surgically removed. He eventually died of liver cancer.30

By telling these stories, Saman seems to want recognition as an active part in the museum’s memory culture. In contrast with Akram’s story, Saman’s narrative is shot through with the experiences he had as a refugee in Iran, where he lived until 1998. He looks back on this time with nostalgia since, he tells me, when they returned to Halabja their lives became very difficult. Living with his whole family in one room, their lives were strongly defined by the war and the resulting economic, social and cultural poverty. He and his friends were unable to study and, in contrast with his peers in Erbil and Sulaymaniyah, his life was overshadowed by depression, he tells me. The 300,000 Dinar (about 225 euro) per month that he receives for his work in the museum is not enough to pay family’s expenses.31 Again, it is this deeply personal, often difficult and painful dimension that might destabilize the prosthetic memory shaped by the HMPM’s photographs and dioramas by infusing them with a phantomic aura, simultaneously making this memory ‘come to life’ and making the visitor aware that this memory is only a shadow of what really happened; that it is prosthetic and actually only ‘really’ alive in the minds of the guides who experienced what we see in the dioramas and photographs who still suffer from phantom pain day in and day out. As such, the phantomic dimension of this site indicates that there is always something hidden, something ungraspable and something that refuses to be pinned down about the traumatic events that happened, despite how hard we try to do so by presenting documented facts or prosthetic memories. Below, this aspect is explored further by developing a critical analysis of prosthetic memories. To do this, it is crucial to first focus on another function of the HMPM: the political. 4.6   A Political Function Thus far, four functions of the HMPM have been discussed, which entwine the need to remember with the aim not to repeat violence, and not only pull the visitor into the past but also pull the past into the present. The HMPM’s fifth function is political in nature. This function, as in the case of Amna Suraka, has its roots in the ideologies of one of its main

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stakeholders, the PUK, and is aimed at emphasizing the beneficiary influence of this party.32 That the PUK is the museum’s main stakeholder is directly identified to the Kurdish visitor at the site’s entrance: this party, led and embodied by Jalal Talabani, is mentioned in the introductory sign. Next to this text, the visitor also sees photos of two people, one of Jalal Talabani (taken when he was still the President of Iraq—with the flag of Iraq behind him), the other of Barham Ahmed Salih,33 another important member of the PUK. This is striking, because the text does state that other people were present when the museum was opened, including foreign delegates and KDP representative, Masoud Barzani. Presenting this photo and providing this information at the beginning of a visitor’s experience at the HMPM suggests that the PUK, as a friend of the people of Halabja, is the party that has made it possible to create a site where victims can respectfully be commemorated. Furthermore, although the text is in Kurdish (despite the large headline of the sign being in English), these photos can be understood by all visitors, especially the symbolic meaning of the Iraqi flag behind Jalal Talabani. The presence of the PUK weaves throughout the museum: the first photo that the visitor sees in the first exhibition room, for example, was taken during a visit Jalal Talabani paid to the city of Halabja in 1963. This photo is followed by one from a visit that the King of Iraq, Faisal I, paid to the city in 1924; their sequence suggests that Talabani reclaimed the area from Iraq. A similar emphasis on the PUK returns in a photo displayed at the beginning of the second exhibition room: it shows the day of the HMPM’s opening, with Jalal Talabani in the middle greeting the public. On his right stands Barham Salah, clapping for him. Behind Barham Salih stand Masoud Barzani and Nechirwan Barzani. On the left side stands then US Secretary of State, Colin Powell. The positions of the different persons is important: it highlights political power relations, not only by linking the PUK to the United States, but also by positioning the Barzanis (of the KDP) behind the representatives of the PUK. What provides the scene depicted on this photo with importance, furthermore, is that it takes place at a cemetery: behind the figures mentioned above, we see a white sculpture situated atop a small hill made of stones. Immediately behind the sculpture are the tombstones erected for the victims whose bodies have not been found. Each year, these victims are commemorated at this site on 16 March during an official ceremony attended by national and international politicians. More importantly, the

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public that we see from behind, attending this ceremony, attracts attention: they are all wearing black and hold photos and/or flowers in their hands. This underscores the site’s political function: the monument and the sculpture were created for the locals, and their suffering is held at the forefront by the PUK, as the above-cited text at the entrance of the museum says, “to the satisfaction of [Halabja’s] inhabitants.” 4.7   Politicizing Prosthetic Memories It is this fifth political function that introduces the problematic aspects of prosthetic memories. Although, as demonstrated above, these memories might be provided with a critical phantomic dimension in the HMPM, it is the ungraspability and delicacy of these same phantoms that makes them highly vulnerable to political appropriation and distortion. This issue is also identified by Arnold-de Simine, who argues that attempts to bring the past to life might have the opposite effect than intended. She writes: The problems with audio-visual devices that are supposed to create empathy in the museum visitors are therefore manifold: empathy is a complex response and curators need to clarify what exactly visitors should be encouraged to feel, why they should respond in such a way and to what end. Curators should also ask themselves why audio-visual media are chosen to induce empathy. Photography and film are seen as privileged devices for a variety of reasons: they allow viewers to mimic the distress seen on another’s face. … [P]hoto and film are still perceived as media with an indexical link to past events, media on which reality has left its very material trace. This material mark left by reality can then be passed on to the beholder on whom it has a long-term effect, an argument made, for example, by Landsberg. (Mediating Memory 122)

Arnold-de Simine argues, in other words, that the attempt to make visitors empathize with victims of trauma through photographs, film or, in the case of the HMPM, dioramas, might actually desensitize them to what really happened: it might make them think that they have actually experienced the horrific events commemorated by a memory museum, which provides shortcuts to emotional involvement that not only ignore that it is impossible to experience in a museum what the victims endured, but that also neglect the complex political and cultural dimensions in which this suffering took place.

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The latter problematic aspect is illustrated by the original plan to build a commemorative site for the traumatic events that took place in Halabja. Not only would this site commemorate the gas attacks, but it would also include what happened in 1974 and 1987. In 1974, conflicts arose in response to a failed peace agreement signed by Barzani, four years earlier. In this agreement, it was decided that Baghdad would acknowledge the Kurdistan Region’s autonomy. Since the agreement was not kept, an outburst of conflicts between Kurdish Peshmergas and the Iraqi army took place. Because of its strategic location, the city of Halabja was used as the Peshmergas’s headquarters. To crush the resistance, Halabja was bombed on 26 April 1974, resulting in causalities and in the destruction of homes (Aziz). The events of 1987 that the museum glosses over concern the destruction of Kani Ashqan, a neighborhood of Halabja, although a document related to this event is exhibited in the museum. This destruction was a Ba’athist response to the anti-regime demonstration organized by the people of Halabja on 13 May 1987. The Peshmergas encouraged this demonstration, which was crushed violently by the Iraqi forces. A few days after the demonstration, an unknown number of people were rounded up and publicly punished for their acts:34 “As a reprisal against local support for the peshmerga, Iraqi troops had already bulldozed two entire quarters of the town, Kani Ashqan and Mordana, in May 1987” (Human Rights Watch, ‘Genocide in Iraq’ 103). The document displayed in the museum that refers to this event is not explicitly embedded in a narrative that tells visitors the whole story: that, although the Peshmerga forces used Halabja as a home base and were helped by the locals, and although the Peshmergas encouraged protests against Saddam, they did not succeed in protecting their supporters. In line with the analyses of ‘forgetfulness’ developed in Chaps. 2 and 4, the events of 1974 and 1987 are meant to be forgotten in the HMPM, because drawing attention to them would create grounds for critical reflections on the Peshmergas. And this, in turn, would undermine the museum’s political aim. Also, including these events would make it impossible to uphold the narrative that the 1988 attacks on Halabja were a stand-­ alone event targeting only civilians. Instead, the attacks would then have to be embedded within a narrative that describes years of struggle between the former regime and the Peshmergas. This is yet another reason to depart from the event-based approach to trauma discussed in Chap. 1, and from a focus on ‘holocaustal events’ that dominates Williams’s analysis as

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described at the opening of this chapter. The trauma of Halabja cannot be understood without embedding it in its much more complicated and extensive historical context, a claim also developed, in previous chapters, in the analyses of aspects of the past ‘forgotten’ by the KRI school curriculum and Amna Suraka. This ‘forgetting’ is problematically catalyzed by constituting a prosthetic memory, since this constitution is mainly concerned with creating a shortcut to direct emotional participation, replacing knowledge and reflection—including the representation of a problematic past—with affect and involvement. Since emphatic identification might be undermined by including elements that problematize the telling of a story into which the visitor is drawn, including a clear victimization narrative, a museum concerned with prosthetic memories might therefore be inclined to exclude these complicating elements. This point is substantiated by an analysis of the HMPM’s sculptural clock: the time it displays and the date that is mentioned by the guides for the Halabja attacks are themselves the result of a political decision, which means that the prosthetic memory created for visitors is also political. Visitors do not realize this, however, precisely because of the museum’s direct focus on involvement and experience. What the inclusion of the clock ignores (‘forgets’), after all, is that bombardments had already begun on 13 March 1988. Prior to these bombings, the Peshmergas, backed by Iranian forces, retook Halabja and Dukan Dam, events that played a role in the Iraq-Iran War. During these clashes, the city was bombed for days (Hiltermann 120). During an interview, Ibrahim Hawramani, who was also an eyewitness, told me that “the first attack on Halabja took place at 12 o’clock on the night of March 12th. These attacks continued until March 15th, 14:00. The city was from then on in the hands of the regime, and they only stopped at Zalm Bridge. On the 16th of March, the regime started bombing the city at 11:30. A few hours later, between 14:00 and 14:30, the gas attacks began. From that moment on, people started to flee.”35 Although they were afraid that the regime would use chemical weapons, many did not think that these weapons would be used against civilians. For this reason, the Peshmerga forces stopped people from leaving the city. Citing a former Peshmerga, Hiltermann describes the situation as follow: “Shawqat [a former head of the Peshmerga forces], did not urge Halabjans to evacuate. To the contrary, ‘on his orders we advised the people of Halabja not to leave when the shelling started on the evening of the 15th because, we told them, we would protect them. I disagreed with Kak

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Shawqat, but he was in charge’” (120). By letting a clock represent a single, defined moment for the bombardments and providing the visitor in this way with an experience to adopt as a prosthetic memory, however, these events, as well as the involvement of Peshmergas and Iran, are ignored. 4.8   The Prosthetic Replacing the Phantomic Politicized instances of ‘forgetfulness’ indicate that it is precisely the delicate and ungraspable nature of memories that might make them powerless in the face of attempts to shape them through the lens of ideological and political ideals, expelling the phantomic and squeezing the past into prosthetic molds that are uncritically presented as ‘what really happened.’ A more personal version of this vulnerability is illustrated by the story of Akram, part of which is told above. In an interview, I asked him to tell me about why all of his relatives were gathered by his cousin, who drove the car. He explained: You know what, the whole family gathered around in my uncle’s [father’s brother] house. They had an air-raid shelter. We were together. There were rumors that there would be gas attacks. One part of the group wanted to stay, the other wanted to leave. On that day, we eventually decided that we would leave with three cars. … My mom was pregnant at that time. We tried twice to leave the city, but were held back on the Zalm Bridge, because the regime was bombarding that side. We were not allowed to go in the direction of Sulaymaniyah. Our driver, my cousin, had two younger brothers. A cousin of ours offered to take these boys to Sulaymaniyah. That happened a few days before the actual attacks. These two cousins survived. … Our driver didn’t want to go because his dad didn’t want to leave. The same went for the daughter, who didn’t want to leave because their mum did not want to go. However, the other two were too young to make that decision. They are the two only survivors of that family.36

The story that Akram tells about this day comes close to many stories I heard in Halabja. Although there were rumors, it was unthinkable that such an attack would be carried out on such a large scale, targeting civilians. People were already familiar with air attacks, and hiding in shelters was a common practice in the area. During the gas attacks, however, hiding in shelters led to the deaths of many people.

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It is important to note, however, that Akram’s family did not die in a shelter, but outside when they were on their way to safety. The delay is explained by Akram as a disagreement within the family. He briefly mentions that this was not the first time they tried to escape and that they were stopped from leaving near the Zalm Bridge. He does not mention by whom, but provides a reason: the Zalm Bridge was not safe to cross. However, from various sources we know that the Zalm Bridge was in the hands of the Peshmerga at that time.37 Since the Peshmerga forces were convinced that the attacks would not be carried out if there were so many civilians on location, they tried to restrict people from leaving. As Andrea Fischer Tahir observes, “the mistakes made by Peshmerga with regard to Halabja [were] widespread among critics of the ruling parties and could be heard in informal conversations of low-ranking Peshmerga” (‘Gendered Memories’ 104–105). However, Akram’s recollection shows that it is still difficult for people to mention or even acknowledge this mistake. The presence of Akram and other guides makes it clear that traumatic experiences like these are never ‘finished.’ Instead, traumatized victims keep reliving their traumas, and often experience the aftermath of what happened as equally traumatic. By being present in the museum and sharing their stories with visitors, guides like Akram confront the artificiality of prosthetic memories with personal, phantomic ones. Still, that he does not mention certain aspects or even misrepresents certain events shows how vulnerable representations of these kinds of memories are to political manipulation and appropriation, to forms of ‘forgetfulness’ instigated by ideological discourses. The artificial prosthetic limb of memory, in those cases, comes to replace the phantom limb. This illustrates the importance of Arnold-de Simine’s claim that we should not too quickly sacrifice knowledge, reflection and critique for involvement and affective experience, and underscores Laub’s emphasis on combining personal testimonies with historiography. Instead of “suggesting a straightforward access to the past,” Arnold-de Simine therefore advocates for representations that “insist on the painful dissociation between past and present, experience and memory, seeing and knowing, self and other: the experience cannot be posthumously appropriated through empathic identification or voyeurism” (‘Memory Museum’ 30).

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5   The Symbolic 5.1   Symbols of Peace and Unity The third and last aspect that Nora discusses in the context of lieux de mémoire, as explored in Chap. 4, is the symbolic. This aspect appears in different forms in the HMPM and overlaps with the material and the political, discussed above. It is also this aspect that provides the site with an official and institutionalized aura, embedding it within a political and international discourse in which it carves out its meaning as a lieu de mémoire. A first symbolic aspect concerns the building’s architecture (Fig. 5.1). To interpret its symbolism, it should be compared to the museum’s logo, in which the building’s design also features. More than in the monument itself, the building’s columns are presented in this logo as upraised arms and hands. Instead of a globe, the logo depicts a dove with an olive branch in its beak, an internationally recognized symbol of peace. The arms and hands firstly exemplify that the design has an Islamic symbolic connotation, since it resembles two arms raised in Islamic prayer. As mentioned in previous chapters, Islam was frequently used by Saddam’s regime to justify the Kurdish genocide, most explicitly by using the religious notion of ‘Al-Anfal.’ The religious connotations of the logo rewrite this narrative by providing the building’s design with the symbolism of hands raised in prayer. Another monument, erected in the city of Halabja itself, strengthens this interpretation. This monument mirrors the design of the HMPH: it consists of a small hill of stones in which bombs are planted, from which two hands rise to the sky. A second symbolic aspect of the museum’s logo is the dove as a symbol of peace. Together with the prayerful element of the raised hands, their cupping of the dove sends a deeper message: while Islam was appropriated by the regime to enact violence against the Kurdistani, here, it supports peace. The logo presents the phrases “Halabja Monument and Peace Museum” in English as well as in Kurdish. On one side, it contains the word “peace” in Kurdish (Ashti), on the other side in English. This concern with peace is also found on a poster on the wall surrounding the building’s grounds. In Arabic, it reads: “Al Halabja is a symbol of peace and co-existence among all the different parties in Iraq.” Another poster shows the following text: “Halabja says: if you were not with me yesterday, cooperate [in my] reconstruction today.”

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This latter poster’s slogan might be interpreted as an indictment of the international community, which failed to help Kurdistanis when they needed it most. This community is apostrophized in this formulation by Halabja itself, making the visitor into an ‘overhearer’ of the act of apostrophizing. By representing this indictment alongside symbolic references to peace, furthermore, it is presented not only as a betrayal of Kurdistanis, but also of the symbols of hope and peace. According to one of the employees who gave me a guided tour, the design of the museum’s building itself should even be understood as a critique of the silence of the international community. In his view, the globe on top of the monument symbolizes humanity, and the biggest four of the 16 columns represent the four parts of Kurdistan. The monument is 3 meters wide and 19.88 meters long, which, according to one of the guides, refers to 16-03-1988.38 The monument shows, according to director Serkhel Khafar, that Kurdistan forms part of the world and humanity, and cherishes it, even though the international community did not intervene substantially when the Kurds were gassed.39 In front of the building, several fountains might emphasize this symbolic reading: water represents rebirth and continuation, symbolizing that ‘the’ Kurdistanis embrace peace, rebirth and hope. A symbolic element that was discussed in the previous chapter in the context of Amna Suraka, is the flag as a symbol of national unity. Flags return in the HMPM: on opposite sides of the building, seven flagpoles with Kurdish flags and one with a white flag have been installed (Fig. 5.1). Combining Kurdish flags with a white flag again symbolizes peace and hope, creating a sense of brotherhood and reconciliation. Being a Kurdistani, the flags seem to tell visitors, is something that can go hand-­ in-­hand with peaceful and friendly approaches towards others. Already from the outside, this implies, the building symbolizes values revolving around hope, togetherness and peace. While this is a monument, furthermore, it does not only look back at the past, but also offers a hopeful glance towards the future: the circular shape of the building confirms the idea of the past as a completed narrative, already worked through and finished. Flags are also found in the building’s rotunda, briefly discussed above as a place of mourning. Above the center of this rotunda, a large cloth has been draped with the colors red, white and green: the colors of the Kurdish flag. On the ground, the visitor sees a small round pillar, surrounded by vertical broken columns. These columns, the guides tell visitors, symbolize the interrupted lives of the dead. The tops of the pillar is covered with

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a mirror, with a large lamp at the center surrounded by small Kurdish table flags. On this surface, furthermore, we find tea lights and flower garlands. The latter are usually used during funerals, making the room feel like a tomb, meant for mourning. The light in the middle could be interpreted as symbolizing an internal light, a way to remember and commemorate those who are no longer with us, and providing hope in the darkness. Again, a round shape returns here: this might symbolically refer to the shape of many war monuments, but could also symbolize the void that is created by war that can only be filled through the process of commemoration. The rotunda is the only place in the building in which no photos or figurative images can be found, stressing its phantomic dimension as a place haunted by the presence/absence of those who disappeared and whose bodies have never been found. 5.2   Kurdistani Culture as a Symbol of Strength and Vulnerability Another element that belongs to the symbolic aspect of the HMPM is the specific representation of Kurdistani culture and of the victims of the attacks. A similar element was discussed in the previous chapter, which argued that Amna Suraka provides Kurdistani culture with a symbolic aura as a flourishing and unified culture that was attacked by an evil Other. As in Amna Suraka, in the HMPM this symbolic aura also revolves around the act of apostrophizing: in different ways, the museum refers to Kurdistani culture as something that flourished in the past, that was destroyed by a horrible event, but that keeps returning and is looking for its rightful home in a truly independent Kurdistan. In this way, like in Amna Suraka, the museum addresses Kurdistan as a place that does not (yet) exist (anymore). That the visitor is invited to regard Halabja as a symbol of culture and civilization is strengthened in the first exhibition room, briefly discussed above: this room contains photos that highlight the cultural richness of Halabja before the attacks: we see photos of theatre plays and other cultural gatherings. It returns in another series of photos in this room: one series shows schoolchildren, both boys and girls. These photos, according to a guide who showed me around the museum, prove how emancipated the women of Halabja are and were, “even more than the women from Sulaymaniyah.” The same guide told me the following when I asked him to tell me bit more about the photographs:

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These were our women from the past. Look how modern they look. This is proof that our women have always been strong, although the opposite is claimed nowadays. People from outside Halabja, who just like you have done research on our history, have portrayed them as weak. But this is how they lived, and this shows their strength.40

Education and female empowerment are, in other words, presented as proof that Halabja has always been modern and, again, should be understood as a symbol of all that is good and hopeful about Kurdistani culture. The room closes with a photo of a performance of Newroz festivities in 1974. Newroz, celebrating Spring Equinox, is not only regarded as a significant aspect of Kurdish identity as explained in Chap. 2, but it also takes place in March, the same month in which the gas attacks were carried out in 1988. As discussed in the analysis of school textbooks, in Chap. 2, the central ingredient of Newroz is Kaway Asinger, which functions as an origin myth, enabling the imagination of Kurdistani national unity. This makes Newroz a symbolic representation of ethno-genesis and a resistance myth for Kurdistanis. Concluding this room with a mythical story of resistance is meant to again convince the visitor that Kurdistani culture symbolizes strength and resilience. Purity is also an important symbol of Kurdistan in the HMPM. In the second room of the HMPM, purity is linked to a gendered notion of victimhood. We see a diorama of dead women and children, who were baking bread when the attacks took place. Not unlike the rural room in the Hall of Mirrors in Amna Suraka, femininity is here presented as a symbol of Kurdistani culture, domesticity and purity; a symbol that partly conflicts with the idea of women as strong and emancipated, presented in the previous room. In the abovementioned tour provided to the television program, Khafar explained the exhibition as follows to the journalist: When you take a closer look, you will see that among the victims, there were more women and kids. The reason for this is twofold: firstly, Halabja is mountainous. Secondly, 69% of the people were kids and women. They are biologically weaker than us men. It was for them more difficult to escape through the mountains. That is why such as high percentage of women had died.41

Presenting women—and children—as symbols of Kurdistani culture and of that which was destroyed emphasizes the symbolic evil of the Other,

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who destroyed this purity and took advantage of its vulnerability. In the last part of this exhibition room, we find photos showing the remains of Anfal victims. As explained in Chap. 2, however, the Halabja massacres were not part of the Anfal campaign. Considering the symbolic meaning of this combination of photos and events, this seems to be unimportant: framing the attacks in this way makes it possible to present a cruel and unambiguous enemy as ‘the’ enemy of ‘the’ Kurdistanis, in turn apostrophizing an independent Kurdistan. That the symbolic dimension overshadows the differences between eras, periods and areas is also shown by the way in which what happened in the past is linked to the present: the photos of Anfal victims are followed by a text explaining the chemical attacks on the Kurdish city of Sardasht in Iran on 28 June 1987. The text is accompanied by photos displaying children mutilated by the attacks. Three other photos link their injuries and deaths to the plight for an autonomous Kurdistan. In the first photo, we see the body of a Kurdish child killed in the Halabja attacks. Then we see a photo of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, which made global headlines after he drowned in 2015 in the Mediterranean Sea as his family fled Syria, and his body washed ashore on a Turkish beach. The last photo is of a Kurdish boy named Aziz, whose family fled from Daesh; he died of dehydration in the Shinghal mountains. These photos, again, show how the history of suffering, a targeting of  ‘our nation,’ continues repeating itself. Director Serkhel explained in the abovementioned TV interview when he was asked about these photos: “And again the victims are innocent civilians like children and women.”42 The photos of Halabja, this implies, are not presented as belonging to the past, frozen in time, but as situated within a broader framework that emphasizes that Kurdish citizens are systematically targeted by genocidal campaigns, elevating Kurdish victimhood and resistance to a symbolic level that transcends specific historical periods and different Others. The use of the word ‘holy’ to characterize Raparin in the introductory text displayed at the beginning of the museum stresses this symbolic role, apostrophizing Kurdistan as a nation that transcends these periods as well. 5.3   The Journalist as a Symbol of Justice and Heroism This introduces another symbolic element of the HMPM: the heroization of journalists as symbols of justice and purity. This is exemplified by the booklet, The Pictures that Provoked the World (2013), by the museum’s

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previous director, Ibrahim Hawramani. In this book, the former director describes how he tasked himself with finding the photographer of the iconic image of Omari Khawar cradling his dead son. In his explanation of the motivation for this endeavor, we find a clear illustration of the ways in which journalism is frequently linked to notions of an independent Kurdistan and international recognition, becoming a symbol of the suffering of the Kurdistanis and of the continuous longing to make the independent country of Kurdistan into a reality: He [Omar Khawar] was one of those who became the symbol of Halabja martyrs died by Baath’s poisoning gas attack. Transferring the scene of Omar Khawar’s martyrdom to the world medias through the journalists’ cameras had a key role in identifying our certain national case and explaining the anti-human massacre actions by Baath’s regime against our people. According to most observers’ point of view Halabja criminal attack pushed the case of our national movement internationally ahead. This led to the Kurdish uprising in 1991 and falling Baath’s regime when establishing the supreme court of crime. Moreover, Saddam Hussein and chemical Ali faced execution. (9)

The use of the word ‘martyrs’ strengthens the almost religious connotation provided to this photograph, linking it to the crucial role of journalists. Indeed, photos presenting actual proof of the cruelty of Saddam played an enormously important role in raising awareness for the Kurdish cause, resulting in more recognition than textual information about the Anfal campaign had done before. As Maria Six-Hohenbalken observes: “the European public no longer saw the Kurds as guerrilla fighters, but as victims of political suppression and persecution” (82). This, Six-Hohenbalken claims, made it possible to establish a “victim diplomacy.” Here, she cites Michael Humphrey to argue that this narrative indicated that “the politics of mobilizing international support/sympathy through the ‘truth’ of the suffering body of the victim has become a major strategy for decriminalizing the Kurdish national struggle” (83). The previous chapter identifies that in Amna Suraka extensive attention is given to Peshmergas and highlighting their heroic role. In fact, a whole exhibition room is dedicated to the Peshmerga forces. In Halabja, on the other hand, artistic representations like sculptures, mannequins and dioramas mainly represent civilian victims. Although this museum is also

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supported by the PUK, the political perspective of their ideology in the HMPM has mainly resulted in the exclusion of the Peshmergas’s story. One of the reasons for this is that, as explained above, for the people of Halabja it is difficult to maintain the narrative of Peshmergas as only heroes. And since it is impossible to criticize the Peshmergas in a museum driven by this political function, their story is left out, forgotten. This exclusion created a symbolic hole that had to be filled: the museum must present a hero, a symbolic example that can function as the site’s normative foundation, that transcends its political and cultural functions. This hero is the journalist and, especially, the photographer. As Hawramani told me during an interview: I must tell you that the journalists were neutral. What they have done is a Shoresh [meaning: resistance]. Halabja was made famous because of them. That did not happen with the 182,000 victims of Anfal, because their fate was not documented. Everything that happened to these people, whether it concerns the destruction of their homes or how they were killed themselves. They have no case because no evidence is available.43

The heroization of journalists finds its most direct expression in the exposition of their equipment, their cameras and typewriters. These instruments are almost displayed as the hero’s weapons, just as effective as—or perhaps even more than—actual weapons. The heroic deeds of journalists are celebrated in an exhibition room that displays the personal belongings of victims. In display cases on the right side of this room, we see a diverse range of objects: prayer beads, musical instruments, clothes, blankets, toys, notebooks and paintings of scenes typical of Halabja. This room also displays a photo of Jalal Talabani, again indicating the influence of the PUK and, therefore, the HMPM’s political function. On the left wall, we again see the photo of dead bodies in the back of a pick-up truck, with four survivors seated against a wall next to the truck. These survivors, including Akram, whose story is discussed above, are numbered, and in another more recent photo, we see them seated on chairs, again numbered. Below this photo, the following four testimonies are displayed, legitimized by their signatures (in the case of the grandmother, this is a fingerprint; she must have been illiterate). These testimonies are written in Kurdish, English, Farsi and Arabic. The English versions read as follows:

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1. Akram Mahommed Mahmood: The devoted artist who took the photos of Halabja gas attack, gave us the best gifts as his photos recorded the Halabja tragedy in the history forever although many other Kurdish towns were gassed too, and it was because of Ahmad Nateghi’s photos. 2. Hoshyar Omar Abdoullah: The Halabja tragedy belongs to the world not a region. Ahmad Neteghi was not only a photographer in that tragedy, but also he helped and supported many victims on that day, besides his photographs in the Halabja Museum there must be a big picture of himself so that Halabja people remember him forever. 3. Ameneh Amin Mohammed: I would like to say to Ahmad Nateghi that we will never forget his sacrifice and braveness for taking the photos of Halabja tragedy. 4. Bakthiyar Omar Abdoullah: Well done to Ahmad Nateghi, a young and brave photographer who took Halabja massacre photos and God bless him since he did not wear his gas mask during the gas attack because he saw that we did not have any gas mask to protect ourselves and to show his solidarity with us while he was taking those historical pictures of Halabja. These testimonies are not about what these people went through or what they experienced. Instead, they emphasize that their suffering was documented by a journalist who, at points, also suffered with them. This journalist is praised for his courage, which not only made him take photos but also help these people. It is for this reason, Hoshyar Omar Abdoullah argues, that a life-sized photo of him should be placed in the museum. This creates a persona of the selfless journalist, and makes him into a symbolic hero. 5.4   The Garden: A Continuation of Symbolism The museum’s garden—in which local families and individuals gather during the day of remembrance—contains three symbolic aspects as well, which overlap with the symbolic elements discussed above. Firstly, the garden includes a monument made by Khasraw Jaf, which joins remembrance with the symbolic values of resistance, hope and victory and the apostrophizing of an independent Kurdistan. This monument shows five bombs over which the Iraqi flag is painted. Under the bombs we read: “We won’t forget you.” Below the text are the colors of the Kurdish flag

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(red, white, and green) and across this, the number 1000 is painted in yellow. Together, these numbers refer to the 5000 victims of Halabja that are commemorated as the heart (the yellow sun in the Kurdish flag) of Kurdistan. Above the monument, a sculpture represents white doves flying towards the sky. The monument’s use of flags and the doves, an international symbol of peace, represents the museum’s focus on Kurdish pride and autonomy, presented in contrast with an aggressive Iraq, and in unison with a peace-focused international community. Secondly, the symbolic aura provided to journalists returns in large photographs of journalists who are introduced in Kurdish, Arabic, Persian and English as “The Jornalists [sic] who made Halabja known in the world.” Furthermore, the garden contains a statue of a journalist holding a camera (Fig. 5.7). This statue is surrounded by artillery that was used during the attack on Halabja, including bombs and an Iraqi fighter jet. The jet was stationed in Kirkuk but was later brought to Halabja (Rudaw, ‘Halabja War Museum’). Children often touch the plane, a phenomenon that, as described in Chap. 4, can be observed in Amna Suraka as well. The ability to constitute a form of physical contact with these weapons makes it possible to realize that they are no longer harmful. Thirdly, the garden contains sculptures of suffering people. Here, as noted above, we find a bronze sculpture of Omari Khawar (Fig.  5.7), which, the director told the journalist in his TV interview, was created by Zahir Sdiq on a budget provided by Nouri Maliki, the former Prime Minister of Iraq.44 Maliki presented it as a gift to the people of Halabja. The sculpture stands on a pedestal and is surrounded by authentic objects, such as the door of a collapsed house. This elevates the meaning of the original photo to the level of the symbolic. As mentioned above, it is understood by many, including the people of Halabja, as the photo that finally generated international awareness. One of the guides with whom I spoke even linked this photo to the apostrophizing of an independent Kurdistan: “It was actually the photo of Omari Khawar that drew the map of Great Kurdistan.”45 The ways in which statues are used to provide photos with a symbolic aura is evident in that there even was a plan to recreate the deaths of Akram’s family with a life-sized sculpture of the pick-up truck carrying their dead bodies. This would eventually have to be situated in the garden, near an actual pick-up truck that refers to the photograph currently displayed in the garden. When I asked him about this plan, Akram told me:

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That was originally the plan, but my cousin got in the way. The thing is, when you create such a thing, you must be able to protect it from people touching it. But you cannot guard this 24/7. It cannot be a temporal exhibition. So, these sculptures of bodies need to be maintained and cleaned.46

Akram and his cousins, in other words, are not against the idea of a direct representation of how their loved ones died, but their concerns are mainly of a practical nature relating to the dignity and symbolic meaning of these sculptures. When I asked him how these sculptures would be different from the photo of the same event, he replied: These two things are not the same. Some people do touch the photos and take selfies with them, but this not the same when it comes to sculptures. Touching them would be dishonoring, for this reason they have be protected and kept safe behind a marble or glass wall.47

This statement exemplifies the idea that the museum constitutes a hierarchy regarding different kinds of representations. Sculptures are regarded as coming closer to that which happened than do photos, but also have a symbolic aura of dignity and honor which would be tarnished by human touch. 5.5   Replacing the Functional with the Symbolic Nora, as explained in Chap. 4, argues that the different aspects of lieux de mémoire are often entwined and together make a site into a lieu. These aspects can also work together to provide a lieu with a specific meaning, again vulnerable to distortion and appropriation. This is the case because in a representation of the past, the balance can be shifted from the functional to the symbolic, providing elements that could have a political function with a symbolic aura instead, in this way depoliticizing them. This is most clearly done in the HMPM with the depoliticization of photographers. In the same booklet from which passages were cited above, Hawrami observes that several people photographed the same scene of Omari Khawar cradling his dead son. He writes that he found five of these photojournalists and concludes, based on his research: Before showing documents, we have to compare the date of the journalist’s visit to Halabja so that we can decide who the first journalist was who

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entered Halabja and took the photograph of Omar and his baby. I should mention the point that I do not want to decrease the efforts of other photographers who had the chance to publish the photograph of the scene later, but I just want to do my duty as a journalist and acknowledge the efforts of the first photographer who took the picture of Omar Khawar and his baby. It is obvious, when people ask about the first photographer; we surely answer them it is Ramazan Ozturk. (18).

Through the lens of Kurdish-Turkish journalist Ozturk and his colleagues, the booklet aims to convince us, the international world was made aware of the plight of the Kurdistani victims, and have even become witnesses to their last breaths (8). This statement highlights how the museum aims to depoliticize the stories of photographers who were present at the scene by shifting their meaning from a political to a symbolic one. Again, this is the influence of one of the museum’s stakeholders. What this side ignores is that the presence of journalists was, as mentioned above, of a political nature: many of these journalists were from Iran. One of them is Ahmed Nateqi, who claims to have been the first one on the scene, and to have taken the photo five minutes after the people were killed. In a personal interview, Hawramani told me: Because of the presence of the Iranian army in this area, a group of photographers was appointed to record everything that happened on the ground. This group operated under the supervision of Ahmed Nataqi, and consisted of Ali Fairdouni, Saidi Saddaqi and Hidaywulai Bahwadi, a journalist from Jwmhwriya Newspaper. This team was already in Halabja when the gas attacks took place. Saiddi Saddaqi has told me, for example, how they started to evacuate the dead and the wounded after the attacks, but eventually stopped doing this because this was not the reason why they were here. Their core reason was to take photos and find evidence for the cruelty of Iraq, so Iran would not be blamed for this. The first photo made by this group was that of the two kids wrapped in a blanket. There is a photo of Haidayatwulay Bahwdi and Ahmadi Nataqi carrying that child. I have seen a photo of that same child wrapped in a shroud. The group, however, could not stay there for long because they were also gassed just after the evening prayers, and they were, the same day, deported to Iran by helicopter.48

Although the quest for the ‘real’ photographer of Omari Khawar is presented as unpolitical and driven only by the quest for information, the

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explanation provided by Hawrami himself makes it possible to read the process of recording as driven by politics: Iran wanted to record the horrible events to convince the world that, despite the Geneva Protocol, it was Iraq using chemical warfare, and not the other way around. By attributing the photo to a Kurdish-Turkish (non-Iranian photographer), Iran’s involvement in these events is concealed by the museum. The photos are depoliticized, presented as a purely humanitarian act by elevating ‘the’ photographer to a symbolic level of hope and justice.

6  A Struggle for Meaning Haunted by Ghosts from the Past This concludes this fifth chapter, which has analyzed the HMPM through the lens of Pierre Nora’s three aspects of lieux de mémoire. As observed in Chap. 4 as well, these three aspects are entwined in the KRI’s memory culture, sometimes reinforcing one another and sometimes struggling for a hegemonic position. To show the results of this specific entwinement, this chapter has argued that the HMPM can be characterized as a ‘phantomic museum,’ a term developed in a critical dialogue with William’s notion of the memorial museum, Landsberg and Arnold-de Simine’s analyses of prosthetic memory, as well as the latter’s ideas about the memory museum. Not only does the phantomic refer to actual remembrance of the events commemorated by the site, it also alludes to a sense of suffering from a ‘phantom pain’ caused by the disappearance of loved ones whose bodies have never been recovered. As such, the museum presents a struggle for meaning, in which the officialized and institutionalized aspects of lieux de mémoire are combined with the personal, vulnerable and delicate elements of particular memories. This results in a hybrid of representation techniques that characterize the ‘phantomic museum.’

Notes 1. The anger towards the KRG and Kurdish political parties was felt so deeply, I found out during my fieldwork, that many people in Halabja also criticized the referendum for independence, organized a year before my visit in 2017. In informal settings, they expressed the idea that everything had been better under Saddam, because at least they then knew what they could expect. They felt that Kurdish political parties, in contrast, present

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themselves as friendly but eventually act as enemies of the people of Halabja. 2. For an extensive discussion of the Halabja protests and the destruction of the monument, see Nicole Watts’s article, ‘The Role of Symbolic Capital in Protest’ (2012). 3. Mlodoch notes that during this day, “survivors turned against the attendant Kurdish politicians and their guests, demanding better services instead of high-profile ceremonies” (‘Indelible Smell of Apples’ 359). 4. This idea mirrors Andreas Huyssen’s analysis of the nineteenth-century phenomenon of monumentality, and the role it played in national identity-­ formation (199). 5. A similar interpretation can be applied to Bachtyar Ali’s The City of White Musicians, explored in Chap. 3. 6. I noticed during my fieldwork that almost all guides in the museum tell visitors the same story that Sarkhel Khafar told during this televised tour, not because they had been instructed to do this but because they had copied this from one another. For example, all guides share the same information about the photographs that is discussed below. They know all the names, places and events represented in the museum by heart. This is different in Amna Suraka, in which the stories told to the public are more general and abstract. 7. Personal communication with the author, March 14, 2018. 8. In fact, Bremer was not the Minister of Foreign Affairs, but Presidential Envoy to Iraq and Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq. 9. Personal communication with the author, March 15, 2018. 10. Personal communication with the author, March 14, 2018. 11. When I asked whether this had a specific meaning, the guides told me no: they are planning to give all the other names the same color so they all stand out against the dark background. (Personal communication with the author, March 13, 2018) 12. Personal communication with the author, March 13, 2018. 13. Bengio also describes how a well-known Arab liberal called Sa’d al-Din Ibrahim, “who published a voluminous book on minorities in the Arab world in 1994, mentions Halabja in two laconic sentences. Furthermore, he does not even briefly recall the Anfal campaigns and the number of victims, despite the fact that Human Rights Watch had long before published its documented report on these campaigns” (Kurds of Iraq 283). 14. Again, as discussed in the previous chapter concerning Amna Suraka, the role played by the Peshmergas is not explicit here. In a 1993 Human Rights Watch report, the following is described: “As a reprisal against local support for the peshmerga, Iraqi troops had already bulldozed two entire

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quarters of the town, Kani Ashqan and Mordana, in May 1987” (‘Genocide in Iraq’ 78). In other words, Kani Ashqan was targeted because this neighborhood was used as the Peshmergas’s base, but this information is not provided. Instead, the event is presented without context as an example of the cruelties committed by the former regime. 15. About the survivors who testified against the former regime in court, one of the guide explained: “They have played two roles: one as eyewitness and the other as the prosecutor, since they themselves were present during the attacks and have relatives who were killed by the attacks” (Personal communication with the author, March 13, 2018). 16. Personal communication with the author, March 13, 2018. 17. Ibid. 18. Mlodoch describes the trial against Saddam Hussein as follows: “Saddam Hussein was already executed on December 30, 2006 for the massacres against Shiites in Dujail before the Anfal and Halabja trials had come to an end. Internationally, there has been a highly controversial debate about the legitimacy of the trials because of the strong U.S. role in the set-up of the trials, the victor’s justice involved and the non-compliance with international law standards. However, for the Anfal and Halabja survivors, these trials—the fact that survivors gave testimonies in a court of law facing the main perpetrators—were important milestones for restoring their sense of justice and satisfaction. Yet, many survivors were disappointed that Saddam Hussein was not executed for Halabja and Anfal, as they wanted his death to be linked in the historical record to these crimes” (‘Indelible Smell of Apples’ 358). 19. Personal communication with the author, March 13, 2018. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. On 29 April 2014, in the garden of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague, a replica of the statue of Omari Khawar was revealed. The statue is 2.5 meters high and is the first monument for Kurdish victims outside of Kurdistan. Again, we see the important role played by this person in the international recognition of the Halabja attacks. The fact that the statue is in The Hague links it to the UN’s International Court of Justice, where the adjudication of war crimes takes place, and the protection of human rights. In the same year, the Dutch government recognized Anfal as genocide. A peculiar detail is that the weapons used by Saddam were bought from Frans van Anraat, a Dutch war criminal who was arrested in 2004 and convicted in 2007. 23. Personal communication with the author, March 15, 2018. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid.

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26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Personal communication with the author, March 15, 2018 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. The other stakeholder of the museum is presented in the introductory text as Paul Bremer, who cannot be discussed here in detail. It could be argued, however, that although the building was not financed by the US government—everything is financed by the KRG—the prosthetic memory shaped by the museum is influenced by American foreign politics. The decision not to include the events of 1974 and 1987, discussed in the last part of this chapter, would have undermined—or at least problematized—the narrative of the Halabja attacks as a stand-alone and completely unpredictable event during which only innocent civilians were targeted by a cruel and evil dictator. This exclusion makes it possible to overlook that the international community likewise did nothing to prevent the earlier attacks from happening either. 33. Barham Ahmed Salih is the former Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Region (2009–2012) and a former Deputy Prime Minister of the Iraqi Federal Government (2006–2009). Salih held many positions within the PUK. In 2017, he started his own party, The Coalition for Democracy and Justice. A year later, he returned to the PUK and was elected President of Iraq. 34. See Hiltermann for more about the reprisals against residents of Kani Ashqan following the anti-government demonstrations of 1987. 35. Personal communication with the author, March 14, 2018. 36. Personal communication with the author, March 15, 2018. 37. See also personal communication with the author, March 15, 2018. 38. Personal communication with the author, March 13, 2018. 39. Personal communication with the author, March 13, 2018. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Personal communication with the author, March 14, 2018. 44. Personal communication with the author, March 13, 2018 45. Ibid. 46. Personal communication with the author, March 15, 2018 47. Ibid. 48. Personal communication with the author, March 14, 2018.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion: Memory as an Agent of Change

1   Synthesizing Overview The previous five chapters of this book have explored various aspects of the memory culture of the KRI. These aspects concerned different ways in which atrocities committed under Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime are commemorated and represented in this society. These explorations and interpretations were developed by engaging with and re-assessing concepts and theories primarily developed within the field of Memory Studies, but also within Trauma Studies, Museum Studies and Kurdish Studies. This multidisciplinary approach made it possible to examine various mnemonic processes and commemorative discourses in Kurdistani culture, and to be as sensitive as possible to the specific aspects of these different processes and discourses. In line of the latter, furthermore, the notions of the ‘apostrophic’ and ‘phantomic’ have been introduced in this book, primarily to grasp more nuanced elements of Amna Suraka and the Halabja Monument and Peace Museum. Nevertheless, aspects of the phantomic were also discussed in the context of Bachtyar Ali’s literary universe. Chapter 2 presented an initial exploration of the KRI’s memory culture, with a focus on educational textbooks used in Kurdish primary and secondary schools. The chapter argued that these textbooks shape two narratives, each driven by a different set of values that can be linked to two ‘memory carriers:’ the KRG and UNESCO. The first narrative mainly © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Majid, Towards an Understanding of Kurdistani Memory Culture, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37514-9_6

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shapes Kurdistani suffering during events that took place in the past by embedding it within a framework revolving around concepts of endurance, victory and autonomy. Furthermore, it constitutes a dichotomy between both a real and symbolic Us—namely, ‘the’ Kurdistanis who have overcome repetitive eras of suffering but keep striving for autonomy and freedom—and a Them comprised of various real and symbolic Others who inflicted this suffering and continue threatening the existence of the Us. The second narrative, constructed under the influence of UNESCO, points to a future characterized by reconciliation, forgiveness, community and citizenship. Both narratives come about in the society of the KRI, in which these books are deliberately produced to process what happened in the past and to work towards a future of peace, meant to overcome a long history of warfare and division. More generally, this means that the memory culture of the KRI—of which these two narratives form part—is embedded in and influenced, in different ways, by various historical, cultural and political contexts. One of these is the official Iraqi Ba’athist state narrative, in which a Sunnite heritage was emphasized and the histories of other marginalized groups, minorities and ideologies—Shiites, Kurds and communists—were underrepresented. In fact, as Haugbolle and Hastrup note, these groups were portrayed as enemies of the state “by associating them with ‘unpatriotic’ acts in the past” (137). It is this ‘official’ master narrative, developed during the Ba’athist regime, that the  Kurdish textbooks counter by contrasting it with other master narratives; one in which Kurdistani resistance against the Ba’ath regime is emphasized, and one in which cohesion and co-existence are underscored as universal values that should be embraced by a new generation of pupils. The latter narrative, as has been shown in Chap. 2, cannot be understood without positioning it on the geopolitical stage. The stability of the region is crucial for the international actors involved, which makes the ideal of reconciliation and peace important to maintain. Paradoxically, this has resulted in a perspective that, at times, perpetuates the Ba’athist hegemonic understanding of the various communities living in Iraq, since it ignores the differences between languages, ethnicities and cultures, and especially the role that representations of these differences played in the atrocities that were committed in the past, as well as in the ways in which people continue to be haunted by these atrocities. Chapter 2 also foregrounded the ‘forgetting’ of events that could destabilize a clear distinction between an Us and a Them, or that would corrode the idea of ‘the’ Kurdistanis fighting as one united front. This form

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of forgetfulness, the chapter has shown, cannot be understood without linking it to complex mechanisms revolving around guilt and humiliation experienced by many in this society, and especially Peshmergas who feel that they failed to protect citizens against various threats. This forgetfulness problematizes the attempt to apostrophize Kurdistan as an independent nation, as a homeland that all Kurdistanis have fought for together in the past. Furthermore, the chapter discussed the ambivalent status attributed to Jash, who find themselves in the morally hazy zone between the Us and Them. Chapter 2 concluded, however, that they are often pulled into the ‘Us’ by the ‘united’ narrative, making it difficult in the KRI to reflect on their responsibility for past deeds. Chapter 3 turned to alternative techniques meant to represent or allude to traumatic experiences or forms of extreme violence that took place in the past. In this chapter, such a technique was discussed in the context of Bachtyar Ali’s novelistic discourse, recognizing that literature may present a space where almost ineffable aspects of a traumatic past can be explored in a manner that is more subtle and inclusive than the master narratives shaped in the educational textbooks (or, as discussed in Chap. 4, in Amna Suraka’s apostrophizing of Kurdistan). Moving away from an allegorical reading of Ali’s writings, which tends to reduce literary texts too quickly to their meaning within strictly political and social contexts, various literary techniques used by Ali were highlighted, which in different ways revolve around forms of escapism. These techniques include, for example, the introduction of a ‘third-time’ framework, heteropathic identification as well as elements taken from the genre of magical realism. By employing these techniques, Ali presents us with a way of depicting traumatic experiences that highlights the complexity of understanding and representing ‘the’ past at all. Furthermore, Ali’s literature deconstructs the dichotomy between a unified Us and a unified Them, affecting the individual reader in ways that might trigger critique and self-reflection, sparking questions instead of providing answers. This, again, destabilizes the hegemonic, officially sanctioned ideological versions of the past that we find in the textbooks discussed in Chap. 2. Lastly, Chap. 3 introduced the notion of the ‘phantomic’ with help of Esther Peeren’s observations on the spectral metaphor, contrasting the rather vulnerable and ungraspable status that the phantoms of Anfal-victims occupy within The City of White Musicians with the more effective role played by specters. The second part of this book concerned two memory sites. In Chap. 4, an analysis of the museum of Amna Suraka was structured using Pierre

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Nora’s distinction between material, functional and symbolic aspects of sites of remembrance. The chapter foregrounded the observation that Kurdistani memory culture contains places where what the French historian characterizes as milieux and lieux de mémoire, and what Assmann defines as communicative and cultural memory, overlap and permeate one another. An important role in this blurring of conceptual distinctions, the chapter showed, is played by apostrophic processes. Commemorating the victims of past atrocities, but also those of recent traumatic events such as the war against Daesh, Amna Suraka continuously addresses and calls upon—apostrophizes—an independent, yet non-existent, nation of Kurdistan, thus institutionalizing ‘official’ versions of the past in favor of forgetting others. That Amna Suraka has elements of the apostrophic museum, however, does not mean that it can be reduced solely to this concept. Instead, Chap. 4 argued that its various expositions and rooms gain different functions within the memory culture of the KRI, sometimes created purposely and sometimes coming about, as it were, by accident. These functions include remembering and mourning, but also shaping a space wherein former detainees may break through ‘fossilized’ representations of their memories and are encouraged to share their experiences. The latter function specifically arises because of the affective presence of sculptures representing people in pain, posed in circumstances that represent those that occurred within the walls of Amna Suraka during its time as a prison. As material manifestations of former victims and detainees, these sculptures have a spectral dimension that provides these detainees and victims with a certain agency. Furthermore, it was argued in Chap. 4, they gained a vulnerable and fleeting phantomic aura as well when they touched the repressed traumatic memories of the former detainees that I interviewed. In line of the ‘forgetfulness’ discussed in Chap. 2, it is also crucial to note that Chap. 4 emphasized what the museum does not show. An example is formed by the difficulty with which female survivors share their stories and have their traumas acknowledged, which is reflected in the absence of their stories in the museum. The fifth chapter centered on an analysis of the Halabja Monument and Peace Museum. As in the case of Amna Suraka, the chapter focused on the objects displayed, the routes that visitors are led through and the signs that they read. This analysis was embedded within an interpretative framework supported by various interviews conducted at this memory site, as well as data collected as a participant observer. The main argument

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developed in this chapter revolves around the claim that whereas Amna Suraka apostrophizes the non-existent nation of Kurdistan, an important characteristic of the HMPM is that it holds a phantomic presence/absence of different traumatic memories. This presence/absence characterizes exhibits of photographs and dioramas, but also arises because of employees who themselves witnessed and experienced the chemical attacks on Halabja. In this way, the HMPM demonstrates elements of a ‘phantomic museum:’ a term developed to refer to the ungraspable memories of people who disappeared during or in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on Halabja, or to events that still haunt their witnesses, as an analogy to ‘phantom pain.’ Furthermore, Chap. 5 argued that this term encompasses the ways in which the museum is embedded in its milieu de mémoire in a more helpful and productive manner than do influential terms like ‘prosthetic memory,’ ‘memory museum’ or ‘memorial museum.’ A continual underlying thread within this book has been the notion of a decolonization of Trauma Studies and Memory Studies. Whereas these fields, for example, are often based on analyses of representations of the Holocaust, frequently resulting in defenses of high-modernist art forms, this book shows that although modernist elements can also be identified in the memory culture of the KRI—such as in the works of Bachtyar Ali, which frequently employ surrealist and magical realist techniques—it also contains different, more direct representations of trauma, such as the dioramas in the HMPM or the sculptures in Amna Suraka. While these representations could be rejected as kitschy, sentimental or unreflective from a modernistic perspective, it is important to embed them within the memory culture of the KRI, in which people are still trying to ‘make sense’ of, or process their relatively recent traumatic past experiences. The notions of the apostrophic and phantomic played a key role in contextualizing these aspects of the KRI. Furthermore, in an attempt at decolonization, this book has also departed from the event-based model of commemoration that often appears in Trauma Studies. According to this model, the trauma that is represented concerns a highly disruptive event that took place in the past and must be processed in the present. In the KRI, using the notions of the apostrophic and the phantomic, I argued that the represented events do not concern a single, extraordinary moment in the past with a definite and definitive beginning and ending, but instead revolve around memories that are permeated with continuous experiences of a threatened and contested society and culture. These are projected in different ways into a

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highly uncertain future, often by imagining an independent future Kurdistan with help of processes of apostrophizing. This book is, therefore, primarily concerned with the question of how the ongoing accumulation of events and dynamics play different roles in the KRI’s memory culture. Again, this is also why this book has emphasized that distinctions between milieu and lieu de mémoire, between ‘memory; and ‘history’ (according to Nora), and between communicative memory’ and ‘cultural memory’ (according to Assmann) are destabilized in this region.

2   Parki Azadi Another central theme of this book has been the movement between forgetting and remembering. In an insightful chapter in the 2012 book Memory and Political Change, Aleida Assmann reflects on the different roles that these two phenomena play in memory cultures. She describes, for example, how post-war Germany was characterized for a period of time by a ‘communicative hush-up’ (kommunikatives Beschweigen, a term she takes from Hermann Lübbe) regarding the past’s atrocities (58). Such a form of forgetting does not always have to be detrimental, she observes, since it might play a role in the rebuilding of a post-conflict nation. However, she writes, it does become problematic if it perpetuates trauma: [I]f family members remain lost, if their fate remains uncertain, if the wrong that has been done to them is not recognized and if there is no memorial place for posterity, then such a forgetting preserves the trauma. Such a society has not yet attained social peace but continues to be haunted by the ghosts of the past. A readiness to welcome a joint future can hardly come about before these urgent commemoration debts to the dead have been repaid. (57–58).

When denied or repressed, as Bruno Charbonneau and Geneviève Parent indeed observe in Peacebuilding: Memory and Reconciliation, trauma will eventually “manifest itself in various ways in new generations” (8). Assmann’s description can also be applied to several key characteristics of the KRI’s memory culture, which is not only haunted by the phantomic presence of unresolved traumas and the ghosts of those who disappeared, but also obstructed by the hegemonic presence of narratives that apostrophize an independent Kurdistan. Her observations therefore spark the

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question on which the remainder of this last chapter focuses: what do the analyses developed in this book imply for the KRI’s future? To show how various aspects of the KRI’s memory culture ripple through Kurdistani society as a whole, and continue to corrode its stability and solidity in the present and future, it is helpful to briefly examine several recent events concerning a park called Parki Azadi (Freedom Park), not far from Amna Suraka in Sulaymaniyah. Parki Azadi, which includes a restaurant, recreational garden, playground for children and exercise area, was built on a former military base of the Ba’ath regime. On 19 June 1963, during the short-lived Ba’ath government of that year, Kurdistanis who were considered politically threatening were rounded up and executed at this site (Bengio, Kurds of Iraq 37). To commemorate this day— recognized as ‘Martyr Day’—a white marble monument containing the names of those who were killed has been constructed in the park.1 Using Nora’s methodology, the monument could be characterized as a lieu de mémoire: it is official in nature, and meant to commemorate a gruesome day in the past that is presented as bygone from the perspective of a present that is ‘free,’ as the name of the park suggests. As a lieu, it seems to embody an official commemoration of one event, rooted in an uncontested, institutionalized and ceremonialized cultural memory that provides this event with one specific meaning. However, the context in which the Parki Azadi Martyrs Monument is embedded problematizes this characterization. This claim can be substantiated by referring to several seemingly unrelated events. Despite its gruesome history, the connotation that Parki Azadi has, especially for young people, is positive in nature: it is known by the public as ‘the lovers park,’ often visited by young couples for secret rendezvous. This positive meaning is symbolized by the Statue of Love, created in 2009 by sculptor Zahir Sidiq, which represents a man and woman embracing. It also returns in the shrine for renowned Kurdistani poet Sherko Bekas, who was buried in the park on 12 August 2013.2 This poet’s last wish was that his tomb would become “a corner for poets and lovers to celebrate and honor his life with what Kurds value most: poetry, music, and dance” (Sharifi). Since the Martyrs Monument is located close to both the grave of Bekas and the sculpture, and all three in a place named Freedom Park, the monument gains a specific meaning: the commemorated martyrs of the past, this context suggests, died for the freedom enjoyed by those who come to the park to celebrate the power of love and poetry in the present.

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The meaning of this trinity, however, is not uncontested. In October 2013, Bekas’s grave and Sidiq’s Statue of Love were vandalized by Islamic movements for supposedly undermining traditional Islamic values.3 To protest against this act of vandalism, war photographer Kamaran Najm (co-founder of Metrography, the first and only photography agency in Iraq), and his Dutch girlfriend took a picture of themselves kissing in front of the remnants of the demolished statue. This gesture was controversial, sparking anger and criticism especially among conservative and religious groups. Muhammad Hakim of the political party Kurdistan Islamic Group, for example, condemned the kiss and stated: “Everyone should be against the kiss. It’s an effort to disorient Kurdish Muslim youths” (Crowcroft). Simultaneously, the kiss was praised by others who posted photos on social media of themselves kissing, celebrating their romantic freedom. On 13 June 2014, Kamaran Najm was shot in a battlefield in Kirkuk, where he was covering a fight between Daesh, the Iraqi police and Peshmergas. As his family and friends later announced, he was not directly killed but kidnapped and held hostage by Daesh. Fearing retaliation, his inner circle had not announced his kidnapping in the media. Years later, however, his brother Ahmad Najm stated that due to the Peshmerga forces’ lack of experience, a rescue operation had failed. In an interview, his brother recalls how he, although he has let go of the hope of finding Kamaran alive, continues to search for his brother’s body: I was going to the mass graves found by the Iraqi government, and I was stealing bones and hairs from the dead bodies, just to take to Sulaymaniyah International Hospital to check the DNA. And one day the doctor of the hospital said, “Ahmed, let’s talk. Because you brought 73 or so different bones and hairs from dead bodies, and you are doing this on a daily basis. This is not good for you. I totally understand that you lost your brother, but this is killing you.” And I said, “I’m not doing this as a brother. I’m doing it as a journalist.” That’s why I’m disappointed by the government, they’re not doing anything about Kamaran. (qtd. in Thornburgh)

The story of the Najm brothers presents a micro-version of the region’s struggle with its past, and of the different tendencies, desires, ideologies and ideals that permeate the memory culture on which this book has focused, which is one of the reasons that I include it in this conclusion.

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Their story takes place on a site where traces of the area’s horrific past are still present and commemorated, about which this young photographer tried to make a point by implicitly contrasting his gesture of love with those of the anti-Kurdistani hatred and discrimination shown there by Saddam’s forces. The fact that he was later caught by Daesh, furthermore, illustrates that genocidal threats and extreme forms of violence are still present in the area, inspiring Kurdish youth to present themselves as progressive and anti-conservative not only in contrast with the ideology of Daesh, but also as belonging to a Kurdistani identity revolving around the freedom celebrated, for example, in Bekas’s poetry. This identity was itself contested by groups within Kurdistani society. Lastly, the fact that his younger brother is still searching for Kamaran Najm’s body, still plagued by the phantomic presence/absence of his brother, and that he expresses discontent with the ways in which both Peshmergas and the KRG have dealt, and still deal, with the situation, mirrors the experience of many relatives of Anfal victims, who are still trying to uncover the fates of loved ones who disappeared under Saddam’s regime; an experience that infuses the world shaped in Bachtyar Ali’s The City of White Musicians.

3   Bottom-Up and Top-Down Approaches This brief interlude on Parki Azadi sparks new questions about the KRI’s future. If memories of the past continue to haunt the present, and if these memories are not only contested by different parties but also filtered through an experience of ongoing threats, this future remains highly uncertain: it is likely that conflicts will arise again at some point. With regard to this issue, the arguments developed throughout this book both show the difficulties of transitioning to a peaceful future, and at the same time, may themselves contribute to this process as well. Only by analyzing, studying, foregrounding and reflecting on the various aspects of a memory culture, including its ‘forgotten’ dimensions and the mechanisms that drive this ‘forgetfulness,’ may a society be able to come to terms with its past and, in turn, work towards a better future. In the introduction to Memory and Political Change, Aleida Assmann and Linda Shortt make a similar point by arguing that memory can be an agent of change. They write:

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[M]emory is not only susceptible to changes, it is itself a powerful agent of change. Accredited with the power of transforming our relationship to the past and the ability to revise former values and attitudes, memory can create new frames of action. By working through past hatreds and resentments, memory can contribute towards reconciliation and new forms of co-­ existence, opening up the possibility of a common future. A mere change of regime cannot in and of itself usher in a new social contract. In order to achieve reconciliation and social integration, the often oppositional generational and cultural memories also need to be respected, and/or adapted and/or contained. For this reason, it is important to study how citizens of various ethnic, social, political groups or generations remember or refer to their experiences of violence and repression or to their experiences of a non-­ democratic regime so that we can extend our knowledge on the relations between individual, social and political memory in transitional processes and change. (4).

It is precisely this argument that emphasizes the importance of the analyses developed throughout this book, which studies different dimensions of the KRI’s memory culture to show the complexity involved in recognizing the suffering that took place in this region’s past. To do this as specifically as possible, the notions of the apostrophic and the phantomic have been developed to provide us with a vocabulary that foregrounds the mechanisms of remembering and forgetting that permeate the region’s collective memory. Only by doing this can memory come to function as an agent of change. That this is crucial is substantiated by the complexity referred to by Assmann and Shortt in the passage cited above; it was, however, ignored by the conflict resolution project that was set up in Iraq after the fall of Saddam in 2003. A survey conducted by the International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) and the Human Rights Center (HRC) resulted in the 2004 report, Iraqi Voices: Attitudes Toward Transitional Justice and Social Reconstruction. The report stresses the necessity of rebuilding ties between diverse members of the Iraqi community who, under Saddam’s regime, were encouraged to understand themselves as different from one another (vi). It does this by gathering first person narratives of severe human rights violations under the Ba’ath regime, and by providing a stage for Iraqis with different political and ethnic backgrounds to share and talk about their (traumatic) pasts (ii). The project failed for two reasons, each of which can be characterized in terms of Charbonneau and Parent’s analysis of ‘top-down’ and

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‘bottom-up’ approaches to peacebuilding processes. Within the top-down perspective, these scholars write, “peacebuilding is implicitly understood as external intervention, as something coming from outside and not built from within, to promote and build peace for a population needing to be saved” (7). They rightfully criticize this approach to post-conflict societies in the Global South: when structural stabilization in peacebuilding processes is prioritized by external actors, they observe, local dynamics and opportunities are neglected, and societal well-being is obstructed instead of encouraged because external values are then projected upon this society ‘from above.’ This weakness is visible in Iraqi Voices, which fails to do justice to the different narratives and commemorative frameworks present in Iraq, and ignores the specific realities of the area’s complex societies and cultures. Indeed, the approach adopted in the project was based on the workings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which revolved around the idea that public displays of forgiveness should play a major role in transitioning towards a peaceful society.4 As Ibrahim Al-Marashi and Aysegul Keskin observe in a critical analysis of the project: [T]he attempts to create truth and reconciliation in the post-war Iraqi context proved problematic. For example, whereas the South African model was based on private rituals of apology and forgiveness broadcast into the public sphere, in the Iraqi cultural setting televised broadcasts would have proven an insensitive medium damaging to the honour of either the victim or the accused. (258).

Instead of arguing that ‘the’ Iraqi society should be educated about the values already developed in other countries, as the Iraqi Voices report explicitly does (43), Al-Marashi and Keskin’s observation suggests that peace processes should instead revolve around the ideals, experiences, values and concepts already present within this society. Such an approach could be characterized as ‘bottom-up.’ Instead of projecting general values onto a society ‘from above,’ Charbonneau and Parent describe this kind of approach as focusing on that which happens “on the ground” (12). What makes Charbonneau and Parent’s analysis helpful, moreover, is that they critically note that one of the weaknesses of embracing bottom-up approaches is that they are too often understood as strictly personal and individual in nature. This is the case, they argue, because these approaches are mainly based on Western therapeutic models

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that have their roots in American Anabaptist groups, resulting in practices that use narratives of personal transformation that are unable to address the social and collective contexts in which these narratives are situated (11). Again, the weakness of a too individualized bottom-up approach was manifested by Iraqi Voices. Although several people formulated critiques on the commission’s international participants (ii), this commission still aimed to be as neutral as possible by including many different narratives existing in fragmented Iraqi society. This means that it was not only concerned with developing a top-down approach, but also with constructing a bottom-up perspective. As mentioned above and as indicated by its title, Iraqi Voices was based on the idea that individuals should narrate their own stories and share them with one another. This, however, culminated in the same problematic result as the top-down perspective. The report emphasizes the artificial character of differences as they were created along ethnic and/or religious lines under Saddam’s regime. We read that the Arabic participants in particular do not see the need for reconciliation with other ethnicities, because according to some of them, there already is national unity in Iraq (45). This perspective is not problematized by the report, although, as mentioned in Chap. 2 and above, it often played and still plays an important role in denying the past suffering of minorities. Instead, the report claims that there is a danger in Iraq that political parties might, in the future, exploit divisions between ethnic and religious groups to achieve their political goals. This, in turn, is presented as a threat to the development of a civil society, thus obstructing the reconciliation process (56). What this narrative ignores is that it is problematic to claim that the differences and fragmentations are experienced within the Iraqi society are mainly artificial in nature. The so-called bottom-up perspective presented by the report, in other words, does not recognize one of the main themes of this book: that many traumas within Kurdistani society were, and still are, caused by collective experiences of schisms and tensions between different ethnic and religious groups, infused with political and ideological ideals. Denying these tensions by exclusively focusing on individual narratives makes it impossible to truly acknowledge the socially shared nature of these traumas, even to the point of re-traumatizing victims by ignoring their reality and lived experience.5 In their critical analysis of top-down and bottom-up perspectives, Charbonneau and Parent conclude that social transformation in post-­ conflict societies should be based on a combination of peacebuilding

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policies designed to rebuild economies and infrastructures on the one hand, and the psychology of trauma on the other. To overcome the individualized character of the bottom-up approach, furthermore, they argue that peacebuilding should take into account traumatic narratives in their specific social and political contexts, and should not be framed as strictly personalized grieving: “While psychological symptoms are borne individually, they are created socially and shared reciprocally, and this is necessarily intertwined with political and economic processes and practices” (3). This argument illustrates the importance of the approach adopted in this book, and shows why and how memory can be an agent of change. After all, the previous five chapters have continuously emphasized the social and collective aspects of trauma by embedding representations of the past within the broader context of the KRI’s memory culture. Furthermore, they have shown that instead of arguing that this culture is embedded in a post-­ conflict society, the notions of the apostrophic and phantomic emphasize the different ways in which it partly remains in that which Britt Baillie characterizes as ‘conflict-time’ (Baillie).

4  A Scholarly Contribution It is important to stress that this book only forms the beginning of exploration into the KRI’s memory culture. For example, I was unable to study the exhibitions that were added to Amna Suraka after I completed my fieldwork in the region. Further research should, furthermore, explore the memory culture in areas in which the KDP is more dominant than the PUK. For example, on 31 July 2021, on its 38th anniversary, a monument and museum was opened in Erbil to commemorate the genocide of the Barzani tribe, which was part of the Anfal campaign and killed approximately 8000 people (Qadir). Another rich object of study will be examined by a project currently on hold: a Kurdistan Museum in Erbil, designed by Polish-American architect, Daniel Libeskind (Gintoff). The design of this museum not only invites comparisons with Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin and its representation of Germany’s memory culture and Holocaust commemoration, but its inclusion of a so-called ‘Anfal Line’ and a ‘Liberty Line’ can be—and should be—analyzed as a specific way of representing ‘the’ Kurdistani past. It adds yet another stone to a memory culture that is continuously developing.

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Nevertheless, the main aim of this book has been to show that each of the four discussed case studies carves out its own position in the KRI’s memory culture. These positions are sometimes intertwined or overlap, but they often conflict with one another. Furthermore, the different perspectives, ideologies, experiences and memories that together form this culture all play important roles in the society of the KRI, which means that only focusing on one of them would ignore other dimensions. By including a wide variety of perspectives, by focusing on various sites and objects, and by employing different theoretical disciplines, this book has been driven by the hope that it contributes to an understanding of the area’s traumatic past that is crucial for the constitution of a more peaceful future.

Notes 1. A close look at the monument shows that these victims were female and male, but some of the women who were killed remain unnamed, gendering the narrative of martyrdom that the monument tells. Next to the name of Jalil Nanewa, for example, we read that this person was executed together with his mother, whose name goes unmentioned. 2. Chapter 4 notes that a poem by Bekas is in one of Amna Suraka’s exhibition rooms. 3. This contradicted the idea that Sulaymaniyah often takes pride in presenting itself as an intellectual city that values literature and especially poetry, as manifested by the many sculptures of Kurdistani poets found throughout the city. 4. About this context, Aleida Assmann writes: “The model of the Truth Commission was developed in South America, where countries such as Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil transitioned from military dictatorships into democracies during the 1980s and 1990s. … They built on the transformative power of historical truth and the significance of active memory work. ‘To remember in order not to repeat’ developed generally into a political and cultural imperative. … This transformation of values became an important symbolic resource in the process of implementing the notion of ‘crimes against humanity’ into the global perception of justice.” (62). 5. It could even be argued, as is done in Chap. 2 in the context of the UNESCO-narrative shaped in educational textbooks, that the report implicitly perpetuates Saddam Hussein’s discourse around national unity, because its focus can only frame this struggle for autonomy as a threat to reconciliation and unity, instead of a struggle rooted in a much more complex past in which experiences of cultural and ethnic differences played and still play a fundamental role.

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Textbooks General Directorate of Curriculum and Publications (K-GDCP). Babata Komalayatiyakan: Poli Chwarami Bnarati [Social Studies: Fourth Grade]. Erbil, Ministry of Education, 2012a. Babata Komalayatiyakan: Poli Penjami Bnarati [Social Studies: Fifth Grade]. Erbil, Ministry of Education, 2010. General Directorate of Curriculum and Publications (K-GDCP). BabataGeneral Directorate of Curriculum and Publications (K-GDCP). Komalayatiyakan:Poli Shashamni Bnarati [Social Studies: Sixth Grade]. Erbil, Ministry of Education, 2012b. ———. Babata Komalayatiyakan: Poli Hawtami Bnarati [Social Studies: Seventh Grade]. Erbil, Ministry of Education, 2010a. ———. Babata Komalayatiyakan: Poli Hasthami Bnarati [Social Studies: Eighth Grade]. Erbil, Ministry of Education, 2010b. ———. Babata Komalayatiyakan:Poli Noyami Bnarati [Social Studies: Ninth Grade]. Erbil, Ministry of Education, 2012c.

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Film Material ‘Interview part 1 with Dara Haji Braimi Charmage.’ Panjamore. Rudaw Media Network, 14 February 2020., https://www.rudaw.net/sorani/onair/tv/episodes/episode/pencamor-­15022020. Accessed 1 August 2021. ‘Interview part 2 with Dara Haji Braimi Charmage.’ Panjamore. Rudaw Media Network, 21 February 2020., https://www.rudaw.net/sorani/onair/tv/episodes/episode/pencamor-­22022020. Accessed 1 August 2021. ‘Interview part 3 with Dara Haji Braimi Charmage.’ Panjamore. Rudaw Media Network, 28 February 2020., https://www.rudaw.net/sorani/onair/tv/episodes/episode/pencamor-­29022020. Accessed 1 August 2021. Memory  - The Red Security Building: Emne Soreke. Rekesh Shahbaz. YouTube, uploaded by Waar Media, 17 May 2021., https://youtu.be/A2PvQAp8JSg. Accessed 1 August 2021.

Index1

A Adams, Jenni, 123 Affect affective reading, 110–115 theory of, 111 Agamben, Giorgio, 111, 131 Ahmad-î Khani, 97, 102 Ahmadzadeh, Hashem, 97–101, 104–106, 109, 112, 116 Ali, Bachtyar, 4–6, 13, 18, 25, 95–136, 206, 224, 259, 266n5, 269, 271, 273, 277 American-led invasion, 5, 92n11 Amna Suraka, 6, 7, 9, 14, 17, 25, 26, 28–31, 33, 39, 41n11, 43, 74, 139–199, 203, 207, 214, 215, 218–220, 223, 247, 251, 255–257, 259, 262, 266n6, 266n14, 269, 271–273, 275, 281, 282n2

Anfal anfalization, 227, 229 stages, 1, 161, 164 victims, 30, 40n2, 119, 132, 136, 161, 166, 207, 258, 271, 277 Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Treaty, 2, 140 Apostrophe overhearer, 9, 10, 168, 183 poetic figure, 8 Apostrophic museum, 22, 41n11, 207, 272 Assmann, Aleida, 274, 277, 278, 282n4 Assmann, Jan, 13–17, 19, 60, 145, 191–193, 203, 272, 274 Attridge, Derek, 101, 107 Authoritarian regimes, 68 Autonomy, 41n7, 63, 80, 89–91, 168, 180, 250, 262, 270, 282n5

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Majid, Towards an Understanding of Kurdistani Memory Culture, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37514-9

301

302 

INDEX

B Ba’ath atrocities, 269 era, 48 regime, 3, 11, 17, 38, 47–49, 52, 55, 60, 66, 71, 73, 76–78, 109, 147, 159, 169, 170, 174, 181, 183, 194, 196, 197, 200n5, 220, 221, 229, 233, 270, 275, 278 Baillie, Britt, 21, 45, 120, 138n8, 281 Barzani, Masoud, 40n5, 72, 73, 141, 142, 144, 221, 248, 250, 281 Bekas, Sherko, 189, 275–277, 282n2 Bengio, Ofra, 1, 2, 23, 24, 40n6, 47, 48, 53, 54, 60, 64, 71, 227, 266n13, 275 Bible, the, 130 Buchenwald, 241 C Caruth, Cathy, 17–21, 115, 133 Chemical Ali, 34, 163, 230–232, 259 Citizenship, 43, 46, 60, 63, 81, 82, 90, 141, 270 The City of White Musicians (The City), 4, 5, 97, 103–105, 119–136, 206, 266n5, 271, 277 Collective memory, 5, 7, 13, 14, 16, 19, 29, 60, 66, 80, 83, 278 Collectivity, 18, 81–86 Communicative memory, 13–16, 22, 38, 159, 191, 192, 203, 274 Craps, Stef, 20–22, 212 Cultural memory, 10, 13–16, 22, 38, 191–193, 199, 203, 272, 274, 275, 278 Curriculum revision, 57, 79 social studies, 46, 58, 60, 62, 65 us vs. them dichotomy, 46, 48, 50, 51, 55, 59–64, 67, 68, 71, 78, 84, 91

D Daesh, 3, 15, 17, 29, 37, 39, 139, 141, 142, 160, 173, 179–181, 199, 200n4, 201n19, 201n21, 218, 272, 276, 277 See also ISIS De-Ba‘thification policy, 55 Democracy, 56, 79, 87–89, 142, 282n4 Demonstrations, 61, 62, 110, 140, 147, 205, 218, 227, 229, 250, 268n34 Derrida, Jacques, 10, 15, 96, 111, 124, 126, 206 Dioramas, 20, 207, 219, 234–243, 245, 247, 249, 257, 259, 273 E Education, 9, 16, 42n24, 43–60, 62, 78, 81, 87, 92n1, 142, 183, 204, 211, 221, 257 Empathy, 214, 215, 249 Emphatic listener, 28, 39 Erbil, 40n5, 48, 55, 63, 64, 110, 140, 144, 247, 281 Escape, 6, 11, 75, 95–97, 111–113, 115–119, 135, 137n1, 167, 168, 223, 227, 253, 257 Ethnicity competition over memory, 80, 83, 268n32, 270 Kurds, 2, 61 sectarian violence, 201n15, 271 Shi’ites, 24, 80, 270 Sunnis, 50 Ethnography double task, 25 thick-description, 26 thin-description, 25, 26 See also Fieldwork Evidence, 25, 155, 163, 166, 177, 182, 192, 226–229, 235, 260, 264 Ey Reqîb, 8, 43, 142

 INDEX 

F Family, 35, 37, 70, 76, 81–86, 108, 119–121, 137n6, 158, 159, 164, 172, 174, 176–178, 182, 185, 202n27, 210, 214, 221, 223, 224, 243–247, 252, 253, 258, 261, 262, 274, 276 Fieldwork interviews, 28–34 partial-truth, 29 positionality, 25 First World War, 23, 140, 162, 233 Fischer-Tahir, Andrea, 3, 70, 71, 76, 143, 162, 253 Forgetting, 68, 79, 116, 151, 193, 251, 270, 272, 274, 278 Forgiveness, 73, 85–90, 270, 279 G Garden, 218, 220, 238, 239, 261–263, 267n22, 275 Gender, 44, 58, 82, 214, 228 Genocide, 6, 28, 65, 70–72, 78, 139, 160–162, 182, 189, 206, 209, 228, 254, 267n22, 281 Greater Kurdistan, 2, 9, 10, 12, 15, 16, 19, 24, 29, 31, 37, 41n12, 42n22, 46, 49, 51, 53–55, 59, 61, 67, 73, 77, 83–85, 87, 102, 103, 106, 109–112, 116, 118, 123, 124, 132, 137n5, 139–145, 163, 167–169, 176, 179–187, 189, 190, 192, 196, 199, 207, 219, 228, 234, 250, 255–259, 261, 262, 267n22, 268n33, 271–274, 276 Grieving, 281 personalized, 281

303

H Halabja city, 34, 51, 220, 221, 229, 232, 240, 248, 254 history, 65, 212, 257 massacre, 4, 227–230, 258, 261, 267n18 Halabja Monument and Peace Museum (HMPM), 7, 8, 12–15, 25, 26, 29, 32, 33, 42n25, 203–265, 269, 272, 273 Halbwachs, Maurice, 13, 15 Hardi, Choman, 18, 27, 30, 32, 72, 161, 201n15 Hauntology, 10, 111 Heroism, 69, 78, 79, 91, 102, 185, 187, 190, 258–261 Heteropathic identification, 112, 271 Hiltermann, Joost, 1, 2, 40n3, 41n9, 71, 72, 162–165, 227, 228, 251, 268n34 Hiroshima clock, 241 Hiroshima Peace Memorial, 211 Holocaust, 20, 22, 27, 28, 34, 122, 123, 131, 162, 208–212, 215, 234–236, 273, 281 Holocaustal events, 208–212, 250 Homeland, 61, 83, 102, 103, 109, 110, 112, 116, 140, 271 Homer, 113, 114, 135 Homo Sacer, 111 Human rights, 60, 72, 73, 85–88, 120, 267n22, 278 Hussein, Saddam, 1, 5, 7, 24, 29, 35, 50, 58, 71, 74, 80, 88, 92n1, 104, 106, 108, 119, 121, 146–147, 163, 166, 220, 229, 230, 232, 233, 259, 267n18, 269, 282n5

304 

INDEX

I Identity Kurdistani, 2, 6, 9, 16, 19, 20, 60, 63, 64, 100–102, 137n3, 277 memory and, 4, 15, 19, 42n21, 60, 79, 108, 130, 200n6, 210, 212, 213 national, 3, 51, 55, 60–64, 200n6 social, 16, 19 Ideology and Curriculum, 4, 44 Imperial War Museum (North), 212 Intertextuality, 116, 130 Interviews techniques of, 34 See also Fieldwork Iraq history, 24, 48, 50, 51, 59, 90 wars, 36, 63, 163 Iraq-Iran War, 109, 164, 251 ISIS, see Daesh J Jash, 71–78, 91, 163, 194, 197, 271 Journalists, 30, 32, 40n4, 110, 168, 226–228, 245, 257–264, 276 Justice, 5, 86, 89, 91, 95, 131, 258–261, 265, 267n18, 279, 282n4 K Kafka, Franz, 116, 118, 135 Kani Ashqan, 229, 240, 250, 267n14, 268n34 Kirmanj, Sherko, 46, 48, 50, 51, 55, 59–65, 67, 68, 71, 78, 84, 91 Koraw, see Rakrdn Kurdish novel, 99, 100, 103–105, 112, 137n2 Kurdish poetry, 50 Kurdish Studies, 22–25, 39, 269

The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), 31, 43, 54, 55, 63, 64, 72–74, 92n1, 144, 194, 196, 248, 281 Kurdistani, 1–39, 43–91, 95–136, 139–141, 143–145, 147, 148, 160–162, 165–168, 170, 171, 174, 179–190, 194–199, 201n11, 201n19, 207, 219–223, 229, 230, 232, 234, 254–259, 264, 269–272, 275, 277, 280, 281, 282n3 Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), 43, 72, 167, 204 history of, 63, 204 Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), 1–39, 40n5, 41n8, 41n9, 41n15, 42n21, 43, 46, 49, 53, 60, 64, 65, 67, 70–72, 75, 76, 78, 79, 91, 95–98, 119, 122, 124, 132, 133, 136, 140, 141, 144, 145, 148, 160, 167, 183, 185, 190–192, 197, 199, 201n15, 206, 207, 214, 241, 242, 251, 265, 269–275, 277, 278, 281, 282 history of, 1, 4, 46, 60, 98, 141, 192 L Landsberg, Alison, 12, 206, 213–217, 235, 239, 241, 242, 249, 265 Laub, Dori, 27, 28, 34, 35, 39, 125, 136, 229, 253 The Lebanese Post-Civil War Novel, 5 Levi, Primo, 112, 131 Libeskind, Daniel, 281 Lieux de mémoire, 13, 14, 17, 19, 22, 27, 38, 145, 146, 151, 159, 169, 178, 181, 184, 190, 192, 199, 200n6, 207, 215–217, 254, 263, 265, 272

 INDEX 

Literature allegorical reading of, 103, 110, 135 literal reading of, 107 socio-political interpretation of, 135 M Magic realism, 104, 106 Majid, Ali Hussein, see Chemical Ali Mam û Zîn, 97, 102, 137n5 Mass graves, 4, 11, 18, 119, 120, 132, 164, 166, 204, 207, 223, 224, 226, 276 Materiality, 96, 146, 148–152, 155, 156, 159, 170, 199, 217, 219, 231, 235 Mediating Memory, 208–210, 213, 214, 217, 238, 249 Memorials, 6, 40n4, 169, 208, 210–212, 215, 216, 220–223, 265, 274 national memorials, 6 Memory as agent of change, 269–282 culture, 1–39, 43–91, 95–136, 140, 160, 191, 201n15, 205–207, 211, 212, 241, 247, 265, 269, 270, 272–278, 281, 282 multidirectional, 16 postmemory, 89–90 studies, 8, 10, 13–19, 21, 22, 25, 39, 60, 145, 205, 212, 269, 273 Mhamad, Akram, 221, 243 Milieux de mémoire, 13, 14, 38, 151, 170, 190, 217, 241 Militärhistorisches de Bundeswehr, 212 Mlodoch, Karin, 3, 40n2, 40n4, 201n15, 204, 266n3, 267n18 Mourning, 12, 119–122, 133, 136, 160, 169–179, 183, 208, 211,

305

215, 223, 224, 234, 255, 256, 272 Muhammad, Qazi, 8 Museum in Ypres, 212 Museums memorial, 6, 22, 166, 208, 210–212, 216, 220–223, 265, 273 memory, 6, 12, 22, 208, 210–217, 234, 238, 249, 253, 265, 273 Museum Studies, 8, 22, 205, 207, 212, 269 Music, 123, 126, 127, 129, 130, 132, 185, 246, 275 My Uncle Jamshid Khan whom the Wind always Carried with Itself (JM), 4, 97, 108 N Narrative master commemorative, 15 trauma, 20, 281 Nationalism Arab, 48 Kurdish, 102 Pan-Arabism, 50 Nation-state, 23, 24, 45, 63, 100, 141 Newroz, 34, 54, 84, 257 No-fly-zone, 53, 104, 167, 168 Nora, Pierre, 13–15, 17, 19, 42n16, 73, 145–146, 148, 150, 151, 159, 160, 169, 178, 181, 184, 185, 190–193, 198, 199, 207, 216, 217, 219, 220, 254, 263, 265, 272, 274, 275 the functional, 145, 159–181, 199, 207, 220–253, 263–265 the material, 145–159, 166, 190, 199, 207, 217–220, 254, 272 the symbolic, 145, 181–190, 199, 207, 217, 220, 254–265, 272

306 

INDEX

Novel, 4, 41n13, 42n22, 95, 97–100, 102–108, 110, 111, 116, 119, 122–124, 126–133, 135, 136, 137n4 memory, 98, 122 O Odysseus, 114 Official knowledge, 4, 44, 59 Omari Khawar, 232, 235–239, 259, 262–264, 267n22 P Parki Azadi, 274–277 Participant research, 29, 33 Parwana’s Evening, 106 Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), 7, 31, 43, 54, 55, 63, 64, 69, 73, 74, 92n1, 144, 148, 163, 187, 194–196, 248, 249, 260, 268n33, 281 Peace, 45, 46, 54, 72, 81–83, 87, 89–91, 109, 134, 179, 183, 221, 250, 254–256, 262, 270, 274, 279 studies, 270, 279 Peacebuilding bottom-up, 279, 281 processes, 279 top-down, 278 Peeren, Esther, 10, 11, 15, 41n14, 41n15, 96–98, 111, 133, 172, 205, 271 Peshmerga, 3, 40n4, 48, 53, 69–74, 76, 82, 142, 148, 151, 152, 162, 163, 166, 171, 179, 180, 187, 188, 190, 196, 198, 218, 250–253, 259, 260, 266–267n14, 271, 276, 277

Phantom, 11, 15, 41n14, 41n15, 121, 122, 133–136, 206, 207, 224, 229, 242, 247, 249, 265, 271, 273 limb, 12, 206, 224, 226, 231, 243, 253 Phantomic museum, 22, 207, 215–217, 220, 241–247, 265, 273 Photographs, 17, 20, 153, 161, 179, 187, 206, 225, 234–244, 247, 249, 256, 259, 261, 262, 264, 266n6, 273 Political prisoners men, 147 women, 147 Positionality, 25–38 Postcolonial theory, 15, 23, 41n8, 46, 113, 114, 128 trauma, 15, 20, 212 See also Witnessing Post-conflict conflict-time, 21, 45, 46, 136, 281 society, 21, 45, 46, 136, 279–281 Prisoner, 30, 41n11, 74, 131, 147, 152, 153, 155, 156, 158, 165, 166, 169, 172, 174–178, 186 Prosthetic artificial limb, 206, 213, 235, 243 memory, 12, 22, 206, 208–217, 234–247, 249–253, 265, 268n32, 273 R Rakrdn, 17, 36, 67, 152, 167 history, 168 See also Koraw Reconciliation politics, 90 processes, 54

 INDEX 

Research methodology participant research, 29, 33 Resistance, political, 91 S Said, Edward, 228, 229 Second World War, 68, 89, 234 Simine, Arnold-de, 162, 208–217, 234, 235, 238, 239, 241, 249, 253, 265 Sorani-Kurdish, 4 Spectrality, 11 (living) ghosts, 11 theory of, 10, 111 Suffering, 2–5, 12, 16, 17, 32, 60, 62, 64, 65, 67, 69, 70, 76, 79, 83, 85, 89–91, 92n11, 102, 104, 108, 109, 112, 113, 122, 124, 125, 127, 128, 132, 134, 135, 137n5, 139, 155, 157, 159, 161, 162, 167, 171, 174–176, 179, 181, 191, 194, 204, 206, 208, 211, 213–215, 226, 229, 245, 249, 258, 259, 261, 262, 265, 270, 278, 280 Sulaymaniyah, 7, 28, 31, 33–35, 40n5, 48, 53, 55, 57, 62, 74, 75, 110, 139, 140, 146, 147, 166, 170, 185, 197, 218, 219, 233, 241, 246, 247, 252, 256, 275, 276, 282n3 Sunnis, 24 Survivors, 3, 4, 27, 28, 30–33, 35, 39, 40n2, 40n4, 70, 72, 120, 122, 123, 126, 131, 132, 134, 136, 201n15, 204, 221, 224, 229, 242, 243, 245, 252, 260, 266n3, 267n15, 267n18, 272 perspective, 27, 28, 33, 201n15, 229

307

T Taimur, 120, 121 Talabani, 73, 248 Tarawge, 76, 77, 93n15 Temporality and literature biblical, 126–128 cyclical, 122, 126–128 linear, 126 messianic temporality, 122, 126–128 third-time, 122 Textbooks, 4, 9, 16, 25, 43–91, 112, 130, 142, 183, 191, 257, 269–271, 282n5 Trauma collective, 4, 17–21, 39, 42n20, 208, 209 cultural, 18–20, 65 definition, 17 narratives, 20, 281 re-traumatization, 31 social, 17–22, 25, 39, 269, 273 studies, 17–22 Truth and Reconciliation Commission South Africa, 279 Iraq (Iraqi Voices), 279 Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes, 211 U UNICEF, 89 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 4, 5, 43, 46, 57–59, 65, 78–81, 83–85, 87–91, 93n13, 269, 270, 282n5 Uprising (Raparin), 104, 147 Utopia, 95–98, 119, 127, 133, 136

308 

INDEX

V Van Alphen, Ernst, 107, 109, 111, 112, 119 Victim victimhood, 12, 32, 201n15, 257, 258 victimization narrative, 72, 132, 251 Vietnam, 114 Violence, 3, 6, 15, 21, 46, 58, 68, 82, 157, 201n15, 201n19, 212, 234, 247, 254, 271, 278 Visitors (museum), 10, 12, 17, 27, 30, 32, 148, 150, 153, 155–157, 159–161, 165–170, 172–174, 176, 178–183, 185–190, 192, 194–196, 199, 201n11, 206, 208, 209, 211, 213, 214, 216, 218,

219, 221, 222, 226, 229–232, 234, 235, 237–242, 244, 247–253, 255–257, 266n6, 272 W White, Hayden, 208–210, 214–216 Witnessing levels of, 34, 38–39 postcolonial, 20, 22, 212 Women memories, 201n15 narratives, 27, 30, 161, 201n15 taboos, 158, 201n15 World Trade Centre Memorial, 211 Writing the Modern History of Iraq, 23, 24