I would like to preface this blog post with two notes: the fact that my legal name is Al-Hassan Al-Shaibani and that I am of a mixed background (Iraqi-Czech).
Leading up to 2003, a decade-long dance of political and economical sanctions imposed on Iraq included a ban on all international flights. The resulting passageway between Iraq and the remaining world was a long stretch of barren highway stitched onto the northeastern corner of the Hejaz desert towards Jordan. Unlike many geopolitical borders whose map lines follow rivers, mountain ranges or other physical features, the Sykes-Picot tessellation of the Middle East in the early 20th century carved unnaturally straight lines to define nationhood (it is often joked that they used a ruler to divide up a map of the Middle East after World War I). In addition to a political and geographical margin, the Iraqi-Jordanian border crossing has come to inhabit a cultural and identity hyphen of those born in Iraq under the sanctions.
Baptized the “Karamah” border crossing in Jordan, the Iraqi name for the arid corridor leading in and out of the country is “Trebil.” This word is an anglicized version of the Arabic name, which ironically is a bastardization of the English word “Trouble.” Back in the early 20th century, the colonial British presence in Iraq gave that location the nickname “Trouble” to signify the harrowing paths crossed by desert nomads and the difficulty of travelling to the emirate trans-Jordania. “Trouble” was Arabicized to Trebil and then re-translated to English as “Trebil.” Decades later, the history of the name came to announce the stringent travel limitations imposed on Iraqis and soon became part of the cultural memory.
In Diamond Grill, Fred Wah writes, “Maps don’t have beginnings, just edges.” I find this statement inapplicable to Trebil; here, the man-made borders and names do have a beginning which play a role in shaping, re-shaping and defining a populace. Soon enough, Trebil was a familiar inhabitant of Iraqi daily talk. The difficulty of successfully or easily passing through that border crossing is a tale too common amongst those living in Iraq during the sanctions of the 90s and early 2000s.
It appears that you cannot locate or describe Trebil without referring to an in betweenness or a hyphen. It is so entrenched in the identity of this location that it seems to embody the hyphen. Trebil was, and to some extent still is, a keystone of Iraqi identity and a bridge to everything outside.
Thanks so much for sharing these thoughts, Al!
I appreciate the challenge you give to Wah’s conception when it comes to maps having no beginnings. I am reminded of Johnathan Lear’s Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Mind you, I think it’s implicitly violent for non-Indigenous people to talk about Indigenous peoples’ experience with cultural devastation, but I do think that a valid and constructive idea the work highlights is when the Crow’s chief talks about “nothing happen[ing]” after the buffalo disappeared. For the Crow people, living with and off of buffalos embody their way of life. Having these animals disappear *is* an end to the Crow’s means of survival, and more importantly, the meaning of survival for them in the first place.
Failing to recognize this as a real end, and failing to recognize Trebil as a legitimate “beginning” for a people erases the ways in which imperialism and colonialism radically change the identities of colonized peoples.
One point I would like to bring up within this discussion is how the people (at Trebil) *do* resist colonization through the ways in which they engage with that hyphenated space. For instance, Indigenous people on these lands are actively resisting colonialism, in spite of ongoing genocide.
(I’ll let at least one author speak for herself: http://nationsrising.org/not-murdered-and-not-missing/ Here is Leanne Simpson insisting on an end to gender violence against Indigenous communities, which I find an appropriate segue into discussing Missing Sarah!)
– Jane Shi
I thoroughly enjoyed your allusion between Wah’s delineation of Chinese and Canadian identity and a more physical hyphenation between Iraq and Jordan in the form of Trebil and its effect on identity in a very different part of the world.
While the carving up of the previously occupied British colonies created this stark contrast in identity between these nations with absurdly straight edges, I was brought to thinking about how a region like Kurdistan (though not near Trebil) could grapple with identity despite not having acknowledged borders or an overarching jurisdiction. All people who associate as ‘Kurds’ are forced into an identity hyphenated merely through the fact that their selfhood is mediated through four other states, Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. It then seems as though to be ‘Kurdish’ has implicit in it some other undefined nature of a state of different culture and society. Abbas Vali, an academic of comparative studies at Duke University characterises their ‘fragmented identity’ thusly: “Their [the four nation states] structural dynamics charted diverse paths of modernization and development, with diverse effects on the general political and cultural processes of denial and exclusion of Kurdish identity in their respective national territories. Kurdish national identity has borne the mark of this political and cultural diversity of the “other;” it has been deeply fragmented since its inception.” (cssaame.dukejournals.org/content/18/2/82.full.pdf)
Their identity comes through in their cuisine (as in Wah’s experience) and music. Kurdish music was banned in Turkey from 1982 to 1991 (http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/09/turkey-krg-iraq-kurds-anti-kurdish-discourse-hdp.html#), signifying the stark dissolve, the hyphen between this non-political culture and the political one they are subducted beneath. Gradually, as evident from the article posted above, being Kurdish is losing its stigma in places like Turkey, much like the transition that happened (is happening) in Canada for Chinese people.
It seems certainly true that Wah’s beginningless maps have import in some places and not in others. Trebil seems to be a place where it does not, due to its clear genesis. Likewise, Kurdistan seems edgeless, at least according to the political world. It is fluid and permeating. But it still has that clear genesis from colonial trouble.
While I don’t feel I’m refuting your point or even expanding on it to any great degree, your fantastic post got me thinking about other middle-eastern identities–those clear and those more undefined.