Description
Poststructuralist thought has pushed the conceptualisation of state and society as constantly interacting with, and part of, social discourse. This places political memoirs in an important position; they have the ability to give insight into the core makings of the state. Iraq’s modern history has seen several publications, spanning the British Mandate and the Hashemite constitutional monarchy era. The 1921-1958 timeframe has been analysed with multiple claims and arguments made about the reasons for the failure of the Iraqi state apparatus. However, political memoirs have seldom been used beyond providing shallow confirmations of historical events.
Utilizing poststructuralist discourse, viewing the State through social interaction, these memoirs offer an opportunity for understanding diverse conceptualizations of Iraqi state apparatus. I couple memoirs with discourse analysis to demonstrate how politicians like Ahmad Mukhtar Baban and Tawfiq al-Suwaydi were speaking at the intersection of Lacanian articulations of desire and ‘symbolic order’, as state leadership. In turn, I aim to open avenues into dissecting language, how events are portrayed, and that which is not written. Specifically, the research attempts to better understand the way in which the politicians interpreted their positionality as leaders of the state. In line with Epstein’s (2011) argument that ‘while the state does not speak it is talking’, the memoirs of Baban and al-Suwaydi are considered to analyse the perdurant (and at times violent) discourses upon which the Iraqi state was being built on.
