Finding a Common Language: Iraqi and US Women Seek Reconciliation in Dubai

In December 2017 three artists from Iraq and four artists from the Boston, Massachusetts area, all women, traveled to Dubai for a four-day workshop. Poet and visual artist Elham Nasser al-Zabeedy, visual artist and gallery owner Thaira Al-Mayyahy and visual artist Mariam Mohsen Al-Barguth came from Iraq. Poet Jennifer Jean, visual artist and filmmaker Anne Loyer, documentary filmmaker Lillie Paquette, and I were the Boston-area artists in attendance. Anne and I had coplanned the workshop. We were joined by three Iraqi translators: Nadia Abdulridha Sakran AlEsi, a PhD candidate at the University of Wollongong, Australia, originally from the Iraqi city of Basra; Dina Fadil, an Iraqi filmmaker formerly from Basra, now residing in Calgary, Canada; Amir Al-Azraki, a playwright and academic formerly from Basra, now working in the Toronto, Canada, area. Titled HER STORY IS, a feminist adaptation of William Faulkner’s quote “History is not was, it is,” the...