Surviving an unsettled pain

When I first read about this project, “Refugee Wales: The Afterlife of Violence,” I immediately identified with the idea of the afterlife of violence. This idea is closely related to my personal experience as an Iraqi survivor of wars, an asylum seeker and a former academic in my home country, struggling at some stage, to set my foot in the British academia. Moreover, my PhD research “Contemporary Iraqi Women’s Fiction of War” and my publications focus on war-related trauma and on how memory and identity function to shape and define the lives of survivors. 

In my PhD research, I analyzed narratives of the three decades of wars, sanctions and occupation in Iraq and I examined how survivors of traumatic events undergo a “crisis of survival” which transform them into victims to their survival. The crisis of the characters in the narratives takes different forms: sorrow, guilt, uncertainty, fear, and loneliness. However, the characters are determined to live and can put up with the hardships they are facing by means of the strategies of coping: denial, escape, daydreams and through the act of narration.

 Not only fictional characters could survive the woes of war, but also the writers of the texts and myself. In my PhD research, I added my personal memories of war to the experiences of the characters and the writers to generate one story of dealing with loss of a country and of loved ones and of putting up with the sorrow of an unfinished political disarray. My recollections of war work as a personal testimony to a historical fact and locate me as a historian and in my thesis also as an author who narrates the history of the political conflict in Iraq.

Unfortunately, this conflict was enlarged to engulf Syria, a very close country to Iraq and with which Iraqis share similar culture, traditions, and values. And above all we share Arabic language which enabled me to work as a volunteering interpreter with the Syrian refugees in the UK since 2012. 

In my role as an Associate Researcher in the “Refugee Wales Project,” I am responsible for meeting with Syrian refugees in Wales and of conducting interviews with them. The data collected from the recorded interviews will be translated, analyzed and be part of a book later. Thus, I am offered a great opportunity to add my initial PhD research findings and my personal story of displacement, of longing and of belonging to the stories of refugees who are striving to build a new life in Wales. Together we will produce another narrative of survival and a historical record to generations of Syrians who would be longing to hear testimonies from the witnesses who are seeking to integrate while enduring an unresolved misery back home.

https://refugee.wales