Memory
4 articles filed under this keyword.
Identity Conflicts and Complexities in Joyce Carol Oates' Black Girl/White Girl
Mahmood Nawzad Hassan Khoshnaw
Joyce Carol Oates' novel Black Girl/White Girl (2006) entertains a complex relationship of race and contradictions of identities illuminated through the plight of a young black girl and her white college roommate. This research attempts to examine the difficulties and complexities of identity formation for Minette Swift and Genna Hewett-Meade which have been underdeveloped through both individual agency and the sociocultural context. The main instruments dictating their identity construction and contradictions are memory, social expectations, religion, and white guilt. These interconnected factors underscore difficulties in their identity formation and pose challenges to both characters and shape their individual and group experiences. This shared heritage, experienced, accepted, or rejected, gives an illusion of the construction of categories of culture and identity. An illusion irrelevant to the complex interplay among the individual, interpersonal, organizational, and societal contexts and realities. The characters’ Inherited memory serves as a catalyst for resistance and a counter for subjective experiences. Religion becomes central to the internal logic of their identity structure and points to the strengths and weaknesses of their characters. Overemphasis on White guilt results in more defensiveness and negative attitudes. Their immediate context and relationship are influenced by these sources and determinants, resulting in complex and multifaceted levels of discomfort, isolation, ostracization and disengagement.
Volume 12 · Issue 5 · October 2025Faili Kurds Political activities in the memory of Southern Kurdish 1969 - 1946
Shakhawan Abdullah Saber
Recording the memories with the experienced people who are the witness of the events is the source of written history, more important than this, the person himself is main character of the event or he is the witness and tangible evidence of the events. Meanwhile those who recorded their memories as participants in the events are noticeable important to our history because these events have not been written at any sources but the researcher will find out thru their memory or interviewing them, that is why recording the data from these sources are very important because it is taken from their memories and with their death all the information will be vanished. Faili Kurds are the origin part of the Kurdistan especially because of two reasons firstly because of their nationality and secondly due to their doctrine since they are shiia. Faili Kurds have gone through many upsets from prisoning, taking their National ID, and exiling them. Though geographically they were far from Kurdistan, they lived mostly at Baghdad, center and Middle Euphrates, but despite that neither their geographical nor the lampers came to their road made them forget their roles in political and cultural activities as Sothern Kurdish. This research sheds lights on their role in the memory of Southern Kurdish between. 1969 - 1946.
Volume 7 · Issue 3 · August 2020Halabja in Iraqi Contemporary Poetry: The Tragedy of A Memory and A Memory of The Tragedy
Dhiya Abdulrazaq Ayub
This study focuses on Halabja in the contemporary Iraqi poetry: The Tragedy of Memory and the Memory of Tragedy. The genocide that Halabja suffered from has inspired my poets to write about that. The wound of the city is too deep to recover, too tragic to stop shedding tears, and too inhuman that made its images and cries live in our memory forever. This human calamity has created a haunting memory in the minds of the Arab and Kurd poets in the contemporary poetry because of its brutality and vehemence. Therefore, this adversity has provided poets with a fertile ground on which they have implanted their poems and realistic images that inspired their pens. The study is divided into four sections and a preface. The preface is concerned with the poeticness of the city in the Arabic poetry. The first section deals with Halabja: the memory of pain. The second section studies Halabja and the portrayal of suffering. The third section delineates Halabcha the city of defiance and challenge. The fourth section focuses on the city of Halabja between reality and dream. The study comes up with the conclusion that shows the Iraqi poets’ revolutionary ideas to fight oppression in the world and change it, and replace it with freedom and justice. The poets have succeeded in portraying the pains and miseries of Halabja, and the suffering of the Kurds.
Volume 7 · Issue 2 · April 2020Memory of the wound : An attempt to interrogate invisible space
Dilshad Mustafa Raheem Razawa
The power of silence, however, it might attend an invisible discourse framework, it goes further to the sphere of killing the opportunity of exploring the invisibility codes. Exploring the space that has been explored previously, there was a simple narrative of the victims’ stories, that could help the researcher go much deeper through different kinds of concepts that could help in the interpretation process, or create an intentional approach for the sake of the victims' subjectivities and opening wider space for its appearance. In other words, to get out of the limitations of silence we must appropriate several terms from different context to help us face its hegemony and embarking in its strong boundaries. For instance, when we simply look at an image, we do not know the intention or purpose of the image (photograph in particular) is the process of perpetuating the moment of taking it, or to freeze the time in the moment of any process. We do not look at the circumstances and the situation that produces the image, as far as our focus goes to the faces and components within the image. This mainstream and simple comprehension is a clear sign of a lack of understanding to the image’s language. That language helps to show what is touring inside who has been captured, who simply says: I was there. This study tries to find the keys that give the power of expression to the image, so that it can represent the wounded’s memory, therefore, starts to convey it through a carefully deliberated process from invisible to visible, from narrative to imagery.Dealing with the memory of wounds spreading on the Kurdish body needs a different type of approach, in a way that has not been explored previously. Explore through different means away from the prevalent and familiarity.The researcher believes that taking benefit from the experience of others in the process of representing the wounded can help in the elimination of hesitancy domination and incursion into other more open spaces by exploring a set of criteria and factors that form other extents of expression such as motion picture, cinema for example. From this standpoint, we find that the process of representing the memory of the victims in the massacres of the Jews (The Holocaust) is the most successful process during the last century until nowadays. Therefore, taking into account how to take advantage of the methods and the forms that has been used in the Holocaust imagery process can take us to a broad and informed horizon. This research tries to explore a way that can help the victims to get rid of psychological constraints and express themselves through a trustable medium that could be cinema. In the case of Kurds, exploring that type of cinema which can enhance the victims to narrate their stories without any restrictions.