Abstract

Many Women, Many Words was a partnership project between Soran University (Kurdistan Region) and Lancaster University (UK) that went in search of the stories of older women who had lived through Saddam Hussein’s Al Anfal campaign – an act of genocide against the Kurds. A group of English-speaking Kurdish researchers was trained at Soran University and fourteen older women were interviewed by them. Their stories of resilience, survival and resistance were recorded, transcribed and translated and the data published. The stories themselves were temporally and geographically complex, dislocated and fragmented, evading easy categorisation as the personal merged with the political in scale and urgency. This paper will focus on the methodology of the project and its transformation of interview material into public performance. It will explore how the women approached speaking to a younger generation about their personal histories and memories. It will reflect upon the way that they used narrative as a means of reconstructing identity following the trauma of displacement, how violence to them and their families interrupted a narrative based in a traditional society that had to be reinstated in one in which many significant political, personal and economic changes had taken place.

Presenters

Muli Amaye
Coordinator MFA Creative Writing, Literary, Cultural and Communication Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Education, The University of The West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago

Details

Presentation Type

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

Theme

Social, Political and Community Agendas in the Arts

KEYWORDS

"Al-Anfal", " Women", " Stories"

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