Narrative as Identity: Perspectives from an Iraqi Women Refugees’ Oral History Project
Narrative as Identity: Perspectives from an Iraqi Women Refugees’ Oral History Project
This chapter consists of collected oral histories of Iraqi women refugees in Jordan. It examines the identity of Iraqi women refugees as revealed through their personal narratives. In the Ba’athist regime, the Iraqi identity was reinforced as an Arab identity. During the 35-year rule of this regime, Iraqis watched other Arab nationalities enjoying privileges while they lived in Iran. After the fall of the regime, the new government emphasized Iraqi identity as separate from the Arab identity. The new regime imposed an Iranian identity within the concepts of ethnic and sectarian power sharing. While this new identity posed a dilemma with the manner refugees formed representations of themselves in host countries and with the distribution of privileges they used to enjoy in the former regime, many of the Iraqi women refugees still saw themselves as Arabs and refused the sectarian criteria. All the women interviewed in this chapter expressed the notion that their identity was challenged as their life circumstances demanded them to accommodate the changes they experience.
Keywords: oral histories, Iraqi women refugees, Jordan, identity of Iraqi women, Iraqi identity, Arab identity, sectarian, identity
British Academy Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.