“In a time of systematic erasure of collective memory by divisive parties and entities, the remembrance of certain time periods (in Iraq) is necessary”

Sinan Antoon
France 24 Interview

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How it all began

In February 2015 a group of five Iraqis had the first meeting of the “The Iraqi Oral History Project.” Over the next few months of that year, the members underwent training in oral history interviewing, material collection and ethics with Professor Ali Iğmen, The Director of the Oral History Program at California State University in Long Beach. By the end of the year, the group had established an independent archive housed at CSULB’s Oral History Program. The purpose of the project was to document the life histories of Iraqis at home and in the diaspora and to offer a lens into the modern history of Iraq through the everyday life experiences of Iraqi people. The storyteller is the grassroots historian, and this project was created with the intention to facilitate grassroots history-making.

Collective memory

The intention to create this project was grounded in the way stories and family memories were significant in our own lives. One of the first questions we reflected on as a group was to think who the narrators were for our own stories about Iraq, about our exile journeys, our identity, and the complex relationships we have to our homeland. For this reason, one of our earliest established tenets was that each interview we did was first and foremost to be returned to the interviewee and their family. In this way, we hope to contribute in a meaningful way to the Iraqi community’s collective memory and collective narrative. Moreover, we understand this form of knowledge production as one that allows a “turn to the everyday”, what Hayder Al-Mohammad underscores as necessary to the writing of “more complex and nuanced stories [..] of how life [is] still possible in Iraq” in the aftermath of decades of violence, dictatorship, occupation, invasion and multiple wars. This project acknowledges the centrality of life stories in anti-colonial struggles. 

Why oral history?

“[Oral history] [is] the primary vehicle for communities and cultures to share a common history and create strong intergenerational links.” Oral history is about contributing real people’s stories to a specific historical record. Oral testimonies of first-hand recollections help us to reconstruct the past by capturing the voices of people who are left out of historical accounts. This way of collecting material allows us to penetrate into deeper meanings and implications of the historical past. Spoken histories are dynamic; they involve documenting not the just the particulars of an event but people’s reactions, feelings and thoughts about it. Oral histories complicate traditional narratives by adding the perspectives and interpretations of real people onto the working knowledge we have of a given topic.

The Iraqi Narratives Project

Today, the project’s seven members have documented over 60 hours of audio and video recordings from in-depth, oral history interviews conducted in Iraq and the diaspora, across different generations, migration histories, political sensibilities and life experiences. From narratives of rural upbringing in Baghdad’s agricultural towns in the 1970s, to narratives of the deportations of Iraqi Shia families at the onset of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, to narratives of living under the airstrikes of the First Gulf War and the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation, the project has captured stories

  
We operate on multiple channels of dissemination from academic conferences to literary publications. The INP has presented twice at the Oral History Association’s Annual Meeting (2016, 2018) and at the Middle East Studies Association (2017) and published various one reworked oral history in the literary magazine, Khabar Keslan. The INP partnered with the StoryCenter in Berkeley https://www.storycenter.org/ for a second phase of training in Digital Storytelling in December 2018.