Iraq listens only when women fall silent

Why the surprise when Afifa Iskandar, the singer, and Shahad al-Rawi, the novelist, appear in the same frame, an image of an Iraq that cannot bear a beautiful woman who sings´-or-writes?
Between a voice dismissed from recognition for being beautiful, and a text excluded from critique for being unapologetically feminine, two female experiences intersect in modern Iraqi history: Afifa Iskandar, who sang before she was heard, and Shahad al-Rawi, who wrote before being read with fairness by Iraqi eyes. Both faced the same accusation: to be a woman and produce meaning is an unforgivable crime in the eyes of Iraq’s male-dominated critical taste.
In the 1940s, Afifa was not seen as a voice but as surplus beauty. The Iraqi composer Saleh al-Kuwaity hesitated to write music for her, not because of poor performance, but because he was unsettled by a woman who sang not as a victim, but as a fully expressive being. He gave her only one song before emigrating to Israel, while he poured the pain and questions of those years into the voices of Salima Murad and Zakia George.
I have read everything Shahad al-Rawi has written, wielding a tender yet captivating pen that stirs longing, pain and questions, even in her journalistic pieces. As I await her third novel, I recall how Afifa Iskandar once shut the door in my face in Baghdad, at the height of her retirement and isolation. I had come with journalistic passion, carrying questions about her photo with Ali al-Wardi, and how she felt the pain in the melodies of Khazal Mahdi and Ahmad al-Khalil. She was not rejecting me as a journalist, but rather rejecting a time that saw her only as a consumed past.

Musical phrases poured forth in front of her voice, yet no one asked about her when she suddenly disappeared. Iraqi memory acknowledged her only after she fell silent, while Baghdad Radio never stopped airing her songs. As if Iraq only listens to women when they stop speaking.
Shahad al-Rawi’s language did not emerge from the cafés of Al-Barlaman, Hassan Ajami´-or-Al-Brazilia, nor did it play the victim, the hallmark of Iraqi literature when politics are involved. Her voice came from the grip of blind siege, hunger and occupation, from a generation trying to define itself while the world failed all Iraqis.
She wrote The Baghdad Clock like a rainbow suddenly appearing in the sky of narrative prose, delicate, dazzling, unlike the wailing and elegies of the villages. Her novel reached the Booker Prize, was translated into eight languages, yet Iraqi critics saw only “a writer who doesn’t resemble Iraqi authors.”
No Iraqi could fill his lungs and shout “freedom” with all his might, because the roar of American tanks drowned out every voice. Political freedom, the idea of liberation from occupiers, ceased to be a national concept and became material for historical films. In 2018, Shahad addressed readers at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in English, from Baghdad, a city living its own distorted historical moment. Freedom, for her, became a set of new meanings. She wrote a novel that lived inside her, one that did not need that scream. She had to write while evading the new militias unleashed by the occupation.
In that brilliant speech, Shahad reminded the Edinburgh audience of Isaiah Berlin’s famous line, Margaret Thatcher’s favourite philosopher and adviser: “Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.” In this sense, freedom no longer refers to a transcendent´-or-essential meaning for Iraqis after the occupation, but rather a freedom that demands explanation.
In Above the Republic Bridge, Shahad wrote a national elegy that does not ask for sympathy, but commands respect. A mother becomes a box of bones after dying in exile, and the living memory insists that this box be buried in Al-Adhamiyah. Dalia, one of the novel’s characters, ascends in a bombing on the Republic Bridge. Nothing is found of her body, leaving the pain of her death fresh in the memory of the protagonist,´-or-perhaps in Shahad’s own memory. This text does not wail-;- it dismantles ruin. And that, criticism cannot bear.
Because fake Iraq has never reconciled with the idea of a woman as a producer of meaning. It wants her beautiful,´-or-sad,´-or-silent,´-or-weeping with the masses toward historical myth. But to sing like Afifa,´-or-write like Shahad, threatens the literary narrative that monopolises expression to play the role of the perpetual victim, ineffective in the ongoing political performance.
When beauty and language meet in a woman, they are seen not as art, but as deception. That is what Afifa faced, and what Shahad continues to face.
The imagined image that places Afifa and Shahad in the same frame is not nostalgia, it is resistance. Resistance against a taste that still sees women as mirrors, not inverted mirrors. Because the inverted mirror does not beautify-;- it dismantles the image and reassembles it. And that, dominant taste cannot tolerate.
Both represent the Iraq that is excluded because it does not scream-;- it sings and writes. An Iraq not defined by ruin, but by Afifa’s rosewater bottle and Shahad’s lace-like language.
What brings joy is that the Arab world today celebrates Shahad al-Rawi as a true Iraqi voice amid a worn-out social and political scene, full of sectarian screams and lamentation. Meanwhile, Iraqi criticism, regrettably, sees her novel as representing only Al-Adhamiyah, the setting of her second book.
In the era of fake Iraq, the need for Afifa and Shahad is more urgent. They embody the feminine face of Iraq that resisted marginalisation through beauty and meaning, not through shouting´-or-pretence. They are not symbols, but scandals, hanging in the face of criticism that still fears women when they produce meaning.

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