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Bringing worlds closer with words
Bringing worlds closer with words
Critical inquiry. Creative writing. Literary translation.
About
Yasmeen Hanoosh is a fiction writer, literary translator, and professor of Arabic at Portland State University. She is an award-winning literary translator. Her translation Closing His Eyes (Luay Hamza Abbas), received an NEA translation fellowship in 2010, and her translation of Scattered Crumbs (Muhsin al-Ramli) won the Arkansas Arabic Translation Prize in 2002, and has been since excerpted in a number of publications. Yasmeen’s other English translations of Arabic fiction have appeared in various literary journals and publications, including World Literature Today, Banipal, ArabLit Quarterly, Michigan Studies Quarterly, Jadaliyya, Words Without Borders, The Iowa Review, among others. She is a scholar--her academic books include Beyond Refuge in Arab Detroit (co-editor, Wayne State University Press, 2025) and The Chaldeans: Politics and Identity in Iraq and the American Diaspora (author, I.B. Tauris, 2019). She is a fiction writer--here Arabic short story collection Ardh al-Khayrat al-Mal’unah (author, The Land of Cursed Riches, al-Dar al-Ahliyyah 2019) was long-listed for the international award Almultaqa Prize for the Arabic Short Story in 2022.
Education
Ph.D., Arabic Literature, Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of Michigan, 2008
M.A., Arabic Literature, Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of Michigan, 2003
B.A., Philosophy and Studies in Religion, Univeristy of Michigan, 2001
Current Project:
Yasmeen Hanoosh and Huda Fakhreddine grew up in warzones in Iraq and Lebanon respectively. In this conversation, they assess their encounter with the US empire, the academic and literary hegemony of imperial culture, and the impasse of the colonized translator.
Yasmeen Hanoosh and Marilyn Booth discuss the outlines and possibilities of gender-conscious translation, how a translator can be transparent about their choices, and Marilyn’s translation of Alis al-Bustani’s صائبة, (Sa’iba 1891), and the “need to advocate for, and translate, these earlier works.
maia tabet and Yasmeen Hanoosh are Arabic-English literary translators who have spent decades living and translating from multiple diasporic locales. In this conversation, they retrace the trajectories of their experience as translators, uprooted Arab women, and bilingual diasporic subjects to identify intersections and divergences along their paths.
Publications
Scholarly
(selected works)
Modern Chaldeans are an Aramaic speaking Catholic Syriac community from northern Iraq, not to be confused with the ancient Mesopotamian civilization of the same name. First identified as 'Chaldean' by the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, this misnomer persisted, developing into a distinctive and unique identity. In modern times, the demands of assimilation in the US, together with increased hostility and sectarian violence in Iraq, gave rise to a complex and transnational identity. Faced with Islamophobia in the US, Chaldeans were at pains to emphasize a Christian identity, and appropriated the ancient, pre-Islamic history of their namesake as a means of distinction between them and other immigrants from Arab lands. In this, the first ethnographic history of the modern Chaldeans, Yasmeen Hanoosh explores these ancient-modern inflections in contemporary Chaldean identity discourses, the use of history as a collective commodity for developing and sustaining a positive community image in the present, and the use of language revival and monumental symbolism to reclaim association with Christian and pre-Christian traditions.
Praise
“The Chaldeans offers a superbly textured account of the shifting interplay of religious, racial, national, and ethnic designations and self-designations of community identity, moving compellingly from the late Ottoman era to the present. Addressing the modern revival of ancient Mesopotamian civilization, Hanoosh develops a densely complex narrative of the fraught ideological politics swirling around “Iraq's Christians," especially as articulated vis-à-vis Arabness and Islam. In this astute analysis of the efforts to stabilize definitions of belonging, the book insightfully captures the tensions and paradoxes embedded not simply in regional but rather in transnational processes of minoritization.”
―Ella Shohat, Author of Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices
“The Chaldeans is the first study that successfully frames the community in a social fields perspective and retains an analytic lucidity that makes the work beautifully clear for scholarly and classroom audiences alike. Hanoosh demonstrates an unmatched ability to weave together competing perspectives in a way that compassionately represents them without condescension or side-taking. The book's findings are impressive on their own, but I was doubly struck by her modeling of empathetic scholarship for the many communities she writes about. ”
―Stacy Fahrenthold, author of Between the Ottomans and the Entente: the First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora, 1908- 1925
“Hanoosh has written one of the most provocative 'identity' studies to date, compelling us to rethink key notion of relationality, citizenship, and displacement. The Chaldeans is a timely and sobering book precisely because it demonstrates that we come late in understanding the discursive politics that form our identities. Focusing on the complex historiography of Chaldean identities, it powerfully reveals how questions of ideology, history and geography set certain demands upon identity that can both be unsettling and revealing. This is a new classic that will forcefully redefine notions of minority, religion, ethnicity, and sectarianism in Iraq.”
―Mohammad Salama, author of Islam, Orientalism and Intellectual History: Modernity and the Politics of Exclusion since Ibn Khaldun
“This is a vital book and essential reading for anyone who cares about the Christian minorities now living in a region beset by sectarian violence and colonial ambitions that map religious identities onto the landscape while also trying to erase them. The Chaldeans is brave, interesting, and well researched. It completely eviscerates the existing literature on the subject, which traps Chaldeans in their stores and churches and deprives them of political and cultural agency. Hanoosh's exploration of these themes is personal and sharply critical. She nonetheless holds open the possibility of defining self and community in alternative ways that defy and transgress institutional and national framings.”
―Sally Howell, author of Old Islam in Detroit: Rediscovering the Muslim American Past
Edited Volume
Detroit's Arab and Chaldean communities are now over a century old. Their neighborhoods, business districts, and cultural influence continue to grow. Whether Muslim or Christian, Yemeni, Iraqi, Palestinian, or Lebanese, these Detroiters are building new lives and new worlds in distinctive spaces that cannot be described simply as immigrant or refugee, religious or ethnoracial. In Beyond Refuge in Arab Detroit, a multidisciplinary team of nineteen contributors considers how these worlds are connected to other times and places and what new identities are emerging in them. They explore US census counts, local politics, activism, refugee resettlement, patterns of racism and Islamophobia, and tense interactions between new immigrants and the well established. The contributors warn that, despite its deep roots and dynamism, Arab Detroit is at risk. As its residents struggle for change on their own terms, they no longer perceive greater Detroit as a sanctuary or temporary home, but as a place where Arabs and Chaldeans can live permanently as citizens.
Praise
Beyond Refuge in Arab Detroit opens the frontiers of a coming minority-majority United States where Middle Easterners, North Africans, and others project and protect worlds in formation and transformation. With field-tested and seasoned swagger, the volume's contributors and organizers offer fresh insights into the vitality and vulnerability of the self-styled capital of our Arab America. Their activist and critical approaches to Arab Detroit point to a United States that is not only an unsure shelter amid white nationalist resurgence but also a self-assured ground for rainbow coalitions that lead in multiple directions.
~John Tofik Karam, professor, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign
Beyond Refuge in Arab Detroit invites scholars, students, and the interested public to examine the evolution of community agency while making sense of solidarities, tensions, and contradictions encompassing the lived experiences of the Arab, Muslim, and Chaldean communities. This book offers a much-needed follow-up story that captures the energy of such communities while acknowledging in critical ways competing narratives of trauma and resilience. Overall, this will be a nice addition to Wayne State University Press's previous volumes and has the potential to become an authoritative reference on contemporary modes of agency in Detroit. This is the go-to resource for those seeking to learn about Arab Detroit's history and present reality.
~Dr. Waleed F. Mahdi, president of the Arab American Studies Association
This compelling, carefully researched, effectively edited volume challenges the old stereotype of the Middle Eastern stranger on the move, physically and culturally out of place. It reveals instead how Arab and Chaldean Detroiters are always also making material, affective, political, and spiritual homes amidst precarity and for a variety of purposes.
~Edward E. Curtis IV, author of Muslims of the Heartland: How Syrian Immigrants Made a Home in the American Midwest
Beyond Refuge in Arab Detroit is one of the most profound works in Arab American studies. This third installment of a longitudinal interdisciplinary study of Chaldeans and Arabs is unparalleled in its exploration of the transformations of complex communities and their experiments in making new worlds for themselves.
~Akram Khater, professor, Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies, North Carolina State University
Beyond Refuge in Arab Detroit makes an important contribution to Arab American studies. It marks a departure from a focus on systematic racism—essential for recognition and change—to one of community growth and complexity, to ways of settling in amidst being cast out, and to community action that stakes a presence but restlessly so. Scholars will benefit from the many insights provided in this book, even if their locations don't match the size, longevity, or breadth of Metro Detroit.
~Louise Cainkar, professor, Marquette University
Literary Translations
(selected works)
By Muhsin al-Ramli
Set in an Iraqi village during the Iran-Iraq war, Scattered Crumbs critiques a totalitarian dictatorship through the stories of an impoverished peasant family. A father, a fierce supporter of Saddam Hussein―here called only “The Leader”―clashes with his artist son, who loves his homeland but finds himself literally unable to paint the Leader's portrait for his father's wall. The narrator remembers the disintegration of his family as he leaves the village to search for his cousin, even as he realizes that the only thing he really knows of this cousin is his absence. Translator Hanoosh says that the novel “evokes the processes of deterioration undergone both by the country and by the individual characters caught up in the maelstrom.” Scattered Crumbs was first published in Arabic in Cairo in 2000. This translation captures the subtle sarcasm of the original text and its elliptical rhythms.
Praise
“A very fine satiric novel and an excellent translation.”
—Marilyn Booth, translator of The Tiller of Waters by Hoda Barakat, Nawal Saadawi’s Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, and other works
By Luay Hamza Abbas
The seventeen stories of this collection offer multiple articulations of the everyday violence lived by ordinary people in Iraq during the past decade. Without sacrificing its spatial or historical particularity, Abbas was able in these stories to portray the Iraqi experience as a universal one of fear, disillusionment, nihilism and liminality. Through minimalist sketches of nebulous characters who transgress various Iraqi spaces like apparitions, without fully inhabiting them, Abbas paints the shifting, tenuous contours of the collective identity in a country that has gradually but chronically lost its quotidian stability and cultural definiteness. Ambiguity and abstraction are the qualities that distinguish Abbas’ short works in this collection. The duality of dream and reality, of lucidity and delirium, and the absence of direct references to names of historical events and places all provide for a literary context where the subjective experience of violent death—unjustified murder in particular—is masterfully communicated.
The Siege of Najaf
Excerpt from the novel al-Sayyid Asghar Akbar
by Murtedha Gzar
Al-Sayyid Asghar Akbar has been hailed as “unique in its magical realist narration,” and a “harbinger of a new style of narration that departs completely from the literary output of multiple generations of Iraqi narrators.”1 Part of this uniqueness comes from the ways in which the novel restructures iconic Iraqi places, mainly the Shrine city of Najaf, transgresses intradiegetic time, and reconstructs historical discourses. By so doing it defies our expectations and media- and government-cast collective images of twentieth-century Iraq. Instead, it negotiates a discursive space that lies on the peripheries of two hegemonic, official narratives of Iraqi culture: the national narrative of the Ba`th regime and the religious counter-narrative of the traditional Shi`i opposition. It exposes a discrepancy between two authoritative, normative processes of historicizing; the ‘Rewriting of Iraqi History Project’ and the Najafi ijtihad and taqlid traditions.
Ultimately, in this complex work Gzar accomplishes a skeptical deconstruction of Iraq’s cultural formations and a new, post-Ba`thist reading of Shi`ism, Najaf, and Iraqi identity by telling the story of three generations of family genealogists from the Shi’i shrine city of Najaf. The narrative time spans the period between 1871, the year the grandfather Asghar Akbar arrived to Najaf aboard a ship that was transporting corpses from India to be buried in the holy grounds of Najaf’s cemetery; and 2005, the year his three childless granddaughters, Nadhmah, Mu`inah, and Wahidiyyah, conclude his lineage and are found buried in the vault of their grandfather’s house.
By Dhia Jubaili
"The Chechen’s demand for my ‘identity’ reminded me of the many times that the Military Discipline units would ask bus passengers at checkpoints, which dot the country from north to south and east to west, to show their ‘identities’. Some would reach into the back pockets of their trousers to take out these ‘identities’, whereas the elderly would reach into the front pocket on the left-hand side of their jackets. It’s as though as young men, we don’t care about these ‘identities’, which are more than just a card, so we stick them in that place on purpose, reaching behind to feel our backsides whenever someone enquires about our ‘identity’. Yet as we age and become sluggish men in retirement, we begin placing our ‘identities’ in the front pockets of our jackets. We do that gently, patting our hands on that location if we misplace them, looking like someone with an aching heart, as if the very earth will reject our corpses if we don’t preserve these ‘identities; close to our hearts."
Dust by Adania Shibli is a poetic and fragmented story exploring everyday life under occupation. It follows a young Palestinian woman’s life, capturing her frustration amid the shadow of conflict as she attempts to cross Israeli checkpoints that render her captive in her own home. Shibli’s sparse, lyrical prose emphasizes sensory details and the emotional toll of living under occupation. Through intimate, impressionistic scenes, "Dust" reflects on the lasting effects of trauma and the quiet, pervasive presence of political violence in the lives of Palestinians.
"Hungarian Hut" and "Orient Tavern" by Azher Jirjees
Two stories, “Orient Tavern” and “The Hungarian Hut,” first published in Azher Jirjees’ short story collection, Sani‘ al-Halwa [The Candy Maker] (Milan: Al-Mutawassit Press, 2017), retrace trajectories of post-2003 Iraqi struggles.
The Palm Tree and the Neighbors
(Forthcoming from the American Univeristy in Cairo Press)
The Palm Tree and the Neighbors by Ghaib Tu'ma Farman is an Iraqi novel set in Baghdad during the 1950s. It offers a vivid portrayal of daily life in a poor neighborhood, focusing on the struggles of ordinary people. Through interconnected stories, the novel explores themes of poverty, social injustice, and human resilience. Farman's social realist narrative style and deep empathy for his characters provide a compelling social critique, capturing the complexities of life in mid-20th-century Iraq.
On the Relations of the Circle
(Forthcoming from Archipelago Books)
On the Relations of the Circle is the debut novel by acclaimed Lebanese writer Elias Khoury. It tells the story of a Beirut orphan in a manner reflective of the earliest literary processes of a confident novelist in the making.
Even before Khoury’s participation in the war with a leftist alliance and his injury that caused his temporarily loss of eyesight, his first fictional work exhibited nascent themes that he would later develop and elaborate throughout his oeuvre—the experience of trauma, the act of remembering and the illusive production of memory, and the fragmentation and disintegration of a Lebanese society plagued by stratification and intergenerational violence.
Arabic Fiction
(selected works)
أرض الخيرات الملعونة
أرض الخيرات الملعونة
(Land of Cursed Riches)
...أن تتحول الأشجار والنباتات الى أطياف شخصيات فتتولى هي الكلام بصفتها راوية أو ساردة، مستعيرة ضمير المتكلم، فهذا نادرا ما حصل أو يحصل. ولعل كتاب القاصة العراقية ياسمين حنّوش هو أحدث ما يصدر في هذا الحقل، بل قد يكون أشبه بالمفاجأة الجميلة التي تلقي الضوء على تجربة فريدة وسباقة عربيا، وعلى كاتبة تدخل المعترك الأدبي بجرأة ووعي، خائضة مغامرة غير مألوفة في السابق كثيرا.
...في هذه القصص أو اللوحات القصصية التي لا تخضع لمعايير القصة القصيرة الجاهزة او التقليدية، تلقي الكاتبة مهمة السرد على النباتات أو الأشجار نفسها، مفسحة لها الفرصة لتكون هي ذاتها بصفتها النباتية والطبيعية أولاً، ثم لتؤدي دور الكاتبة التي تتذكر وتستعيد اجزاء من ماضيها وطفولتها وأمكنتها الأليفة على ألسنة النبات. وأصبحت النباتات هنا كائنات نباتية حية، تروي حكاياتها الشخصية والبيئية و"العناصرية" ومعاناتها اليومية، وكذلك ذاكرتها الخرافية والاسطورية، هي المحكومة ببيئتها
وتربتها وجذورها والمناخ الذي يهيمن عليها، علاوة على علاقتها بما يحيط بها من بشر وحيوانات. ومن ناحية أخرى تروي هذه الكائنات تمثلاتها البشرية وكأنها تتلبس في أحيان شخصية الكاتبة بحنينها الداخلي وذكرياتها وتلاوين روحها، ولا سيما علاقتها الوجدانية والوجودية بأرضها الاولى التي هي العراق.
Short story about the 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein's regime in southern Iraq.
أطفال الجدار
أطفال الجدار
Children of the Wall
Children of the Wall
Short story that explores the concept of borders and the fantasy of their disappearance in an imaginary post-2003 Iraq.
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