DECADES OF FIRE

• Published in: Michigan quarterly review 2022-04, Vol.61 (2), p.165-167
• Main Author: Fakhreddine, Huda
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Diaspora; Literary devices; Military withdrawals; Narratives; Pedagogy; Rhetorical figures; Traditions
• ISSN: 0026-2420; 1558-7266

On that erected stage, we learn to perform the script dictated by these labels, in niche areas of engagement allotted to us in universities, in the media, on the job market, on the pages of a literary journal, in the headlines and the subtexts of the knowledge produced about this region. [...]why not start from here, from our tropes and tools, and see what insights another collation or arrangement might bring? "Decades of Fire" documents the region's political, social, and cultural transformations in the last three decades, not because we have privileged the narrative of war and victimhood, but because there is an inescapable reality with which the writers in the region and its diasporas creatively and deliberately continue to grapple. Since the US storming of Iraq to violently establish a "new world order" to the "Arab Spring" in 2011 and its yet unfolding reverberations to the most recent American withdrawal from Afghanistan, these three decades have shook and shattered the region's economies, its infrastructures, and its social and cultural networks. "Decades of Fire" might have lured you with what you know in the hopes of presenting you with what you don't expect: experiences of pasts, presents, and futures unlike those recorded in textbooks or anticipated in expert reports, languages within languages for which no rubric or pedagogy can account, landscapes of imagination that will not fit squarely into "objective" histories and imposed timelines.