Memory, National Identity Formation, and (Neo)Colonialism in Hannah Khalil’s A Museum in Baghdad (2019)

Abstract

According to Ernest Renan, a nation is actually formed by its collective memory; it is a country’s shared experiences which enables it to become (in Benedict Anderson’s much later coinage) an “imagined community”. Building on these ideas, commentators such as Kavita Singh and Lianne McTavish have shown how museums play a key role in helping nations to form an identity and understand their past. However, as these critics and those from other disciplines (including postcolonial studies) have noted, museums can also reflect and reinforce the unequal power dynamics between nations which result from colonialism and neo-colonialism. This article demonstrates that these ideas are directly relevant to the 2019 play A Museum in Baghdad, by the Palestinian-Irish playwright Hannah Khalil. This play is set in the Museum of Iraq in three different time periods: “Then (1926), Now (2006), and Later” (an unspecified future date). Khalil uses specific characters – most notably, Gertrude Bell during the “Then” sections, the Iraqi archaeologists Ghalia and Layla during the “Now” sections, and a “timeless” character called Nasiya who appears across the time periods – to question the degree to which the museum is perpetuating Western views of Iraq and even deepening the West’s influence over Iraq.