Microhistory Narratives, Alternative Epistemologies and Epistemic Credibility: A Comparative Study of Haifa Zangana's City of Widows and Leilah Nadir's Orange Trees of Baghdad

ABSTRACT

Life writing has been read as a factual account of people's lives written from the very perspective of the subjects experiencing the world. Some critics consider women of colors' memoirs as narratives of victimhood published by western publishers due to the political economy behind publications. Some consider them as political accounts of refugee and immigrant lives with utilitarian purposes. They are also often taken to be critical micro-narratives of history attempting to challenge and fill in the gaps of the grand narrative of history. In this paper, I critique the mentioned trajectory of reading lived-experience and approach the genre of life writing from a decolonial and Post-positivist Realist perspective, looking at these narratives as theory-laden and epistemically salient. I argue that as much as testimony narratives might be affected by hegemonic discourses of power, such as imperialism and the Western dream of multiculturalism, there is still autonomy to lived experience as an epistemic body. I look at Iraqi women’s life writing narratives written with the purpose of archiving the contemporary history of Iraq post-invasion and occupation. Their historiographical story-telling ripens into a discourse of resistance challenging white saviour, imperialist and colonial narratives produced to justify the American invasion as a benevolent act.

KEYWORDS:

• Haifa Zangana
• Iraqi women writers
• Leilah Nadir
• epistemic credibility

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Epistemicide is a term coined by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, in his Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide and is defined as ‘the murder of knowledge’ by which he means ‘[u]nequal exchanges among cultures [which] have always implied the death of the knowledge of the subordinated culture, hence the death of the social groups that possessed it’. In case of the European expansion, Santos argues that ‘epistemicide was one of the conditions of genocide. The loss of epistemological confidence that currently afflicts modern science has facilitated the identification of the scope and gravity of the epistemicides perpetrated by hegemonic Eurocentric modernity’.

2 A term coined by Marianne Hirsch which has been defined as ‘the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right’ (Hirsch 2008).

3 Mariana Ortega describes multiplicitous selves as those selves ‘whose experience is marked by oppression and marginalisation due to their social identities’. These identities are mostly ‘multicultural, queer, border dwellers’ and are constantly travelling worlds, in order to reach adaptability and assimilation (Ortega 2016, 58).