While scholars of the Middle East have offered critiques of US imperialism in the region from a variety of disciplines, it is still rare to learn about the impacts of US-led actions from the perspectives of those who are directly affected by them. How might our analyses and critiques of ongoing US military actions overseas change, especially those of us who are located in the US, with more exposure to and engagement with first-person accounts from everyday people whose lives have been disrupted by state-sanctioned violence? In Return to Ruin, Zainab Saleh explores the history of US imperialism in Iraq and its effects through life stories of Iraqis who have fled the country (during and after Saddam Hussein's regime) and now live in London, which houses one of the largest Iraqi diasporic communities and is a seat of Iraqi political activism outside of Iraq. Saleh argues that Iraqis both in Iraq and in the diaspora are “imperial subjects” in that imperialism has shaped both their political subjectivities and the fault lines within their communities. The United States has a long history of involvement in Iraq that precedes direct invasion: from the CIA-backed coup in 1963 that led to the rise of Saddam Hussein's brutal regime, which murdered and tortured thousands of communists, clerics, Shiʿa, Kurds, and others; the backing of the Iran–Iraq War in the 80s, which precipitated the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991; the US invasion of Iraq during the first Gulf War and the following decades of economic sanctions; and the 2003 invasion and occupation of the country under the rubric of the “War on Terror,” which amplified violence and fueled sectarianism. Iraq and the United States are entangled through imperial encounter. The way that most Americans and others access the violence in Iraq, however, is through culturalist understandings, which evacuate the history of imperialism and instead reduce Iraqis to primordial sects; in fact, Saleh notes, there is almost a complete absence of the term “Iraqis” in US state documents after 2003 in favor of sectarian categorization (p. 17).
In order to address this erasure, Saleh conducted intensive fieldwork among London's Iraqi diaspora over the course of 14 years, listening to her interlocutors’ memories of Iraq, their nostalgia for both the past and the future, and their opinions on the country's trajectory and the diaspora. Saleh presents her ethnographic research through the life stories of five interlocutors. This method parallels how Iraqis in diaspora constantly narrate their own life stories to each other as a way to present their subjectivities as exiles and to make sense of displacement: “life stories became a means to bear witness and to write themselves back into a history and a country that was erased constantly by imperial violence” (p. 5). Saleh connects her method to a long tradition of storytelling in anthropology, which has been a form of resistance and theory in the discipline, especially for marginalized people. Each chapter of the book explores one life story, which the author uses to carefully parse the histories of differently situated political actors in Iraq, the waves of exodus from the country to locations of diaspora, and the predominant ways that Iraqis in diaspora relate to each other and understand their ongoing relationship to Iraq.
Along with her interlocutors’ narratives, Saleh also presents her own life story as an Iraqi who lived in the country under Saddam Hussein's regime and through the hardships that came with US-imposed sanctions. Before each chapter is a brief vignette from Zainab's experiences that corresponds with some of the experiences of her main interlocutor for the chapter. Saleh's story is very impactful, highlighting her own stakes in the project and the way her political subjectivity has developed alongside other Iraqi exiles, and it complements the chapters well. She discusses the politicization of her parents, harassment by the Hussein regime, pressure to perform loyalty, experiences of state violence, having to deal with the disappearance and death of friends and family, and the intense economic hardships under sanctions.
Through these life stories, Saleh produces a gendered, religious, and classed analysis that introduces us to the older generation of Iraqi communists and nationalists, the younger generation which is more pious, and newly arrived Iraqis, who are considered more authentic due to enduring both the Hussein regime and the US occupation. While many earlier arrivals had established networks in London, they were mostly cut off from contact with Iraq until the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Instead of being able to connect to Iraq directly, the diaspora has had to largely rely on memory. In addition, they advocate for change in Iraq thorough political organizing and lobbying other governments to intercede, which has also included support for US military intervention. After 2003, contact with Iraq became possible, and many people were able to visit. Dreams of return quickly vanished, however, as returnees witnessed a destroyed country wracked with violence. Iraq became a place of disillusionment, and the diaspora more firmly constructed London as a permanent home. Saleh explores how the nostalgia of those who fled Iraq and the younger generation which has never been is “a moral critique of the present” (p. 30).
We are first introduced to Hanan, a communist party member of the older generation, who is nostalgic for an idealized past because she is disillusioned by the present. Hanan's story of activism in Iraq in the 1950s and 1960s is one full of revolutionary promise. We learn about anticolonial and communist politicization during that time period, and about the emergence of ideas around a new modern (unveiled) Iraqi woman. For Hanan, the 1958 coup that toppled the monarchy was life-changing—a time of great hope and a period of cultural renaissance. She was also an integral part of the feminist reform being pushed at the time. Saleh explores how Hanan's nostalgia reflects an investment by many of the older generation in keeping a secular and romanticized version of Iraq alive in London, but along with a sense of guilt for having left. Hanan's disillusionment with the future for Iraq has to do with rising piety among the younger generation, and with the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion. However, Hanan's nostalgia is based in a middle-class urban political subjectivity, one that minimizes political differences and hardships of the past.
In contrast to Hanan, Khalil, also part of an older generation, questions utopian nostalgia, and has chosen to create an alternate nationalist political space in London based on visions of an inclusive nation that has reckoned with past mistakes. Through Khalil we learn about how opposition politics have developed in exile: attempts to build a nationalist coalition politics have had varying success, as religion and ethnicity have started to increasingly define people's investments. Khalil envisions a civil state, and sees the multicultural UK as a model. Khalil presents an activist subjectivity that is not radical but rather liberal, middle class, and urban.
We are also introduced to members of a younger generation, like Ali, who fled Iraq as a child with his activist parents to South Asia, and then arrived as a teenager in London. He has not been to Iraq and refuses to visit, preferring to maintain his idealized version: Ali has nostalgia for a place he never knew. He is a devout Shiʿi who presents an alternative to the idea of a secular Iraq by looking to its holy places of religious history. Saleh shows us through Ali's story how religious scholars were important in anticolonial politics, and that Hussein persecuted clerics and Shiʿa. Ali uses reform Islam to critique rising sectarianism in the community and religious intolerance.
Another devout Shiʿi who forms her political subjectivity through religion is Hadjar, who came to London from Iran, after her family was deported from Iraq to Iran and their belongings confiscated. Through Hadjar we learn about the deportation of merchants to Iran in 1980, following Iran's revolution. The Hussein regime painted those who identified as “Persian” under Ottoman rule as Iranians and a threat to the regime. These anxieties about “Persians” go back to British rule and the 1924 nationality law, which created second-class citizenship based on Ottoman categorizations. In Iran, denaturalized Iraqis faced state exclusions, economic hardship, and social stigma. Saleh explores through Hadjar's narrative how home is a shifting concept—Hadjar feels connected to but also set apart from the United Kingdom, Iraq, and Iran. She has a hybrid identity that is not fixed but rather continually in a process of becoming. Finally, Rasha's story introduces us to newly arrived immigrants and a shifting discourse within the Iraqi diaspora about authenticity. It is no longer the middle class who represents Iraqiness but those who endured poverty and suffering by staying in Iraq through Saddam's regime, especially women.
The life history method that Saleh employs could easily slip into presenting individual interlocutors as composites or “ideal types,” but the author effectively does justice to each story's nuances and contradictions while also using the stories as springboards to discussing Iraqi history, politicization, and diasporic experiences in depth. Return to Ruin would be a welcome text for students to learn about Iraqi postcolonial history and the impacts of US imperialism at the undergraduate and graduate levels. These impacts have been so violent that many in diaspora now have nostalgia for the time of Saddam Hussein, while earlier many had supported US intervention because of how terrible Saddam's regime was. The hopes for return have died out among the diaspora. While many scholars of the Middle East know basic facts about Iraq, learning from Iraqis themselves is both illuminating and tragic. As an American, Return to Ruin was necessary reading, highlighting how my own imperial subjectivity is inextricably intertwined with theirs.
