Murrani, Sana, Rupturing Architecture, Spatial Practices of Refuge in Response to War and Violence in Iraq, 2003-2023, Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2024
Rupturing Architecture, Spatial Practices of Refuge in Response to War and Violence in Iraq, 2003-2023 by Sana Murrani reads like a thesis that was turned into a book. It follows a common format of laying out the literature on the topic which is trauma and space, then goes through the theories that will be used, the research which was interviews with Iraqis about their experiences during the war and 2019 protest movement, and finishes with some suggestions. Murrani wanted to analyze how people reacted and adapted to violence in the spaces that they lived in. The highlight is the firsthand stories of the Iraqis. Unfortunately Rupturing Architecture is a failure overall because the theory adds nothing to the subject matter.
Murrani’s work is not written for the average person. One needs a background in college level social science terms to decipher it. Without that background the book is unintelligible.
The book is meant to explain how trauma impacts people and the spaces they lived in and how they responded to it. The author believed the interviews highlighted four factors. The first was intimate memories of places and notions of seeking refuge during war. The second was the impact upon their homes and lives. The third was how violence impacted the environment and over time and the last was the choices and options people had in the face of war.
This leads to the author’s research which is by far the best part of the work. People from different Iraqi communities were included although they were all professionals.
One person lived in Basra near government buildings that were bombed during the 2003 invasion. One explosion threw the person across a room and shattered all the windows in the house.
Several talked about the civil war years of 2006-08 when militias and insurgents fought each other and carried out sectarian cleansing of neighborhoods. Women were especially vulnerable being forced to completely cover themselves when they went out in public and were victims of attacks for religious reasons and kidnappings for ransom. Movement for everyone was restricted and checkpoints were the bane of people’s existence because they were run by different sects and could lead to your death if you belonged to the wrong group.
Two people lived through the siege of Mosul in 2017 when the Iraqi forces attempted to liberate it from ISIS. Others were Yazidis who fled the Islamic State’s genocide of their community forcing them into displacement which continues to this day because their home area was never rebuilt and remains largely destroyed. Murrani captured some amazing stories and the middle of the book.
The author then had her subjects map their experiences. They included traditional topographic maps that showed their movement during the war when many had to flee their homes with some becoming displaced within Iraq and others leaving the country for good. They also included pictures of their memories of their lives. Pictures are included of their maps and they are very moving and interesting.
The rest of the book is a disaster. For one, the author develops a rambling style where she never goes into any depth on her examples made worse by skipping back and forth between issues many times including unrelated material.
One section was about how rural people moved to Basra city. That is never really explained. Instead it talks about the national housing crisis and how the government never had any plan to address it. An interview is included but it talks about housing in Mosul and Baghdad, not Basra.
Another time it talks about the 2019 protest movement when young people demanded that the government address their concerns for jobs and freedom. It then switches to climate change and how it hit women harder than other groups. Neither time does Murrani relate the examples to trauma which was the topic of the book. There are sections that are far worse.
Last and most importantly the theories that Murrani spent so much time discussing at the start of the book do nothing for the research. They do not add any depth to the interviews. They provide no overarching explanation for the trauma that people experienced during the war.
In one section the author tries to discuss how trauma impacts people over time. She begins with the Amiriya bomb shelter which was destroyed during the Gulf War killing hundreds. Interviewees were asked if they ever used government bomb shelters during the 2003 invasion but everyone said no. They didn’t feel they were safe and didn’t want to leave their homes abandoned. The book claims this was how the Amiriya bombing affected people over a decade later. The problem was that connection was never made as no one mentioned it. It didn’t spend much time trying to explain it either.
If Murrani had successfully linked her research with her theories of trauma and violence then Rupturing Architecture would be a worthwhile read even with its academic writing. Unfortunately that didn’t happen. The interviews are quite interesting but they don’t save the work because the author didn’t connect them with her theories. Nothing is gained from their inclusion. If the book had skipped the theories and just gone into more depth on the people’s experiences it would have been much better.
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