Frontiers Augmented highlights selected authors from our issues to create a means for deeper engagement with the content published in the Frontiers Journal. The most recent issue 45.3, edited by Frontiers Co-Editors Debjani Chakravarty and Wanda S. Pillow, highlights author Elizabeth Schmermund, Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Old Westbury.
As a woman of SWANA descent, I will never forget a debate in my high school social studies class in the months after September 11, 2001. A student in my class stated that all Arabs and Muslims living in the United States should be put into internment camps. Some students gasped at this, while others nodded in agreement. I sat there in silence, terrified and angry. My mother’s favorite Jordanian market, where we bought our labneh and sfeeha, was now shuttered after bricks were thrown through its windows. I was devastated by the events of September 11, particularly living on the outskirts of New York City, but I also couldn’t understand how grief could turn into irrational hate for whole groups of people.
Years later, I met my husband, whose father had left Iraq as a young man. His family had been devastated by the 2003 American invasion, as well as the post-1991 UN embargo. They had lost family members and their homes, and would eventually escape the war to live as refugees across the globe. Their resilience astounded me. Even at the height of the war that my country had instigated without just cause, they never treated me with anything less than love. They didn’t view me as only being the product of my nation, or the sum of the actions of my government. They taught me about grief, but they also taught me that grief and love can and do coexist.
My article “‘The Keeper of the Flame’: Dunya Mikhail’s Wartime Laments” is a product of not only years of studying Mikhail’s work, but also of this personal and familial history. In this article, I trace a lineage of female poets working in the lament genre of poetry in the Middle East. I argue that Mikhail builds upon the work of these early female poets in order to ritually mourn those lost during the 1991 and 2003 Gulf Wars but also to grieve the attacks on Iraq’s cultural heritage.
One of the justifications for the United States’ invasion of Iraq was to “liberate” Iraqi women. We know now how flawed these justifications were, although we haven’t fully grappled with the consequences of this war. But I still often see Arab and Muslim women depicted in western—and even feminist—discourse in stereotypical ways and as solely victims of their own culture. Mikhail subverts this flawed view, illuminating a long history of female poets in her own work that is foundational to Iraqi literary heritage.
I wish I had spoken out when that student said those hateful things all those years ago. But this article aims to bring attention to the work of talented Iraqi writers and poets like Dunya Mikhail and, in doing so, shows their humanity. In exposing ourselves to literature that would otherwise be unfamiliar to us, I hope we can better empathize with others in their grief and avoid the black-and-white thinking that ignores or oversimplifies the lives of civilians, and especially women, affected by these wars.
Elizabeth Schmermund, PhD, is an assistant professor in the English Department at SUNY Old Westbury where she teaches multicultural and world literature. Her research is focused largely on women’s narratives of the 2003 Iraq War and trauma in women’s fiction. She is also a published poet and essayist. Her academic work and other writing can be found on her website: www.elizabethschmermund.com.