This dissertation examines a practice of private song-making, one whose existence is often denied, among a small number of amateur Iraqi Jewish singers in Israel. These individuals are among those who abruptly emigrated from Iraq to Israel in the mid twentieth century, and share formative experiences of cultural displacement and trauma. Their songs are in a mixture of colloquial Iraqi dialects of Arabic, set to Arab melodic modes, and employ poetic and musical strategies of obfuscation. I examine how, within intimate, domestic spheres, Iraqi Jews continually negotiate their personal experiences of trauma, grief, joy, and cultural exile through musical and culinary practices associated with their pasts. Engaging with recent advances in trauma theory, I investigate how these individuals utilize poetic and musical strategies to harness the unstable affect associated with trauma, allowing for its bodily embrace. I argue that, through their similar synaesthetic capability, musical and culinary practices converge to allow for powerful, multi-sensorial evocations of past experiences, places, and emotions that are crucial to singers’ self-conceptions in the present day. Though these private songs are rarely practiced by younger generations of Iraqi Jews, they remain an under-the-radar means through which first- and second-generation Iraqi immigrants participate in affective processes of remembering, self-making, and survival.
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Exiled nostalgia and musical remembrance: songs of grief, joy, and tragedy among Iraqi Jews
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