Inherited Voices: A Theatre of Borrowed Authority
Recently, I’ve found myself drawn to a popular podcast on YouTube where an Iraqi theatre director interviews artists, writers, and intellectuals. It’s an engaging and thoughtful show, but one recurring pattern keeps troubling me. Almost every conversation opens with a quote from a Western thinker. The implication seems to be that invoking these names is necessary to lend legitimacy to the ideas that follow. I find myself asking: why? Why must we lean on these distant intellectual giants to justify Iraqi creative and intellectual existence?
It’s not that these figures offer nothing of value; they do. But the overreliance on them, the instinct to lead with their words before our own, betrays something deeper: a form of internalized intellectual colonization and hegemony. This realization didn’t arrive suddenly. It emerged slowly, over years of academic training, cultural exposure, and while living in the West, where I began to gain a comparative lens. From the heart of the dominant culture, I began to notice just how deeply our minds have been shaped by its standards, frameworks, and languages of legitimacy.
Between Admiration and Erasure: The Western Canon in Iraq
In Iraq, as in much of the Arab world, the influence of Western intellectual and artistic traditions runs deep. Our education systems are steeped in European epistemologies. Our universities prioritize the Western canon. In theatre studies, students are expected to master Aristotle, Shakespeare, Brecht, Grotowski, Artaud etc., while barely brushing the surface of indigenous performance traditions. I vividly recall being told during my undergraduate and graduate studies not to use the pronoun “I.” It was considered unacademic, unprofessional. Who was I to claim authority? The “correct” approach was to cite, to lean on “big names,” to ventriloquize voices already stamped with approval.
I remember sitting in the Union of Iraqi Writers building, tucked away in the slums of Ashar in Basra, sipping tea from a chipped cup while slouched on a threadbare couch. The sharp stench of sewage hung in the air as I listened to a lecture on dialectical thinking and the revolution of the mind. The speaker cited Hegel, Marx, and Althusser, but not a single local thinker, poet, or dramatist. It struck me as both tragic and absurd. Here we were, discussing liberation and self-realization in a wretched condition and in the language and logic of someone else’s intellectual tradition.
This internalized hierarchy (the belief that Western thought is inherently more sophisticated and superior) is perhaps the most insidious legacy in a postcolonial Iraq. It doesn’t operate by force, but by admiration and aspiration. We want to sound intelligent, so we quote Foucault, Derrida and Nietzsche. We want our productions to be taken seriously, so we reference Beckett or Genet. And yet, many so-called intellectuals haven’t read these thinkers or writers in depth. Their names become signals of status, not instruments of thought.
This problem isn’t limited to podcasts or lectures. It runs through our classrooms, our literary criticism, our theatre productions, and even our books. Open almost any book about Iraqi theatre and you’ll see a predictable pattern: the majority of content is devoted to Western theatrical history. When Iraqi theatre finally appears, it’s typically relegated to a final chapter. Even then, it’s framed entirely through Western theory: interpreted via Aristotelian structure, Brechtian alienation, or postmodern philosophy. It’s as if we cannot understand ourselves without the lens of the other.
The identity of Iraqi theatre remains elusive: fragmented, contested, and often obscured beneath layers of borrowed frameworks. Rather than emerging from a coherent lineage of local forms and voices, it has largely been shaped in reaction to, or imitation of, Western theatrical models. This lack of a clear, rooted identity is not due to a lack of tradition, but due to decades of intellectual displacement, where indigenous expressions have been marginalized or dismissed as pre-modern or folkloric. As a result, Iraqi theatre often struggles to define itself on its own terms, caught between the aspiration to be globally recognized and the need to be locally relevant.
The over experimentalizing has affected how theatre is both made and received in Iraq. The gap between highbrow “intellectual” theatre and popular accessible theatre has widened drastically. Iraqi audiences often feel alienated by productions steeped in Western philosophy or stylized Shakespearean poetic Arabic that feels remote and ornamental. Theatre becomes something to be studied, not felt. When someone praises a play like al-Khait wa al-Asfour (The Thread and the Sparrow) or Bait wa Khams Biban (A House with Five Doors), works that resonate with common Iraqi audiences, they’re dismissed by cultural elites as “low-brow” or “commercial.”
But this isn’t a debate between quality and entertainment. It’s about relevance, rootedness, and liberation from colonial legacy. Can Western theatre theories be applied wholesale to the Iraqi context and still resonate? Sometimes, yes. But often, no. Even the most skillful adaptations can feel like borrowed clothes. They may fit, but they do not belong to us.
Bridging the Gap: Quiet Resistance on Stage
Of course, there are exceptions, important and commendable ones. Several Iraqi theatre artists have been actively working to bridge the gap between abstract stylized theatre and the lived realities of their audience. Their plays avoid the extremes of trauma spectacle, screams, or derivative avant-garde trends. Instead, they offer thoughtful experimentation: rooted in society, responsive to the present, and committed to meaningful engagement. These works neither pander nor alienate. They invite reflection rather than performance of sophistication. Sadly, these efforts are often overlooked by institutions still clinging to imported aesthetics and the metrics of academic prestige.
None of this is to say we must reject Western theatre or theory outright. On the contrary, learning from others is vital. But learning must involve critique, not worship. As Moroccan scholar Khalid Amine has argued, one of the dominant perspectives in Arab theatre studies is that Western theatre is the “supreme model,” while local traditions are reduced to folklore or pre-theatrical forms. This is the product of Eurocentric historiography; a structure that excludes, absorbs, or distorts other cultural traditions. And yet, Western theatrical tradition is itself not a monolith. It is complex, fractured, and evolving. The illusion of a single, superior theatrical lineage is just that: an illusion.
Looking Across, Not Up
In Iraq, this cultural imbalance has roots in the early formation of modern theatre. Figures like Sami Abdul Hamid, Haqi al-Shibli, Ibrahim Jalal, and Hanna Habash (many of them educated in Western institutions or by Christian clergy) helped build Iraqi theatre as we know it. Their contributions were foundational. Yet, in their translations, adaptations, and reverence for European works, they also helped establish a hierarchy that privileged the foreign over the indigenous.
Today, that hierarchy is often upheld not by outsiders, but by our own scholars, professors, directors, and critics. Cultural colonization no longer arrives through armies or textbooks alone; it is perpetuated internally, through aspiration. Through the desire to appear “global,” “refined,” “serious.”
Ironically, it was while living in the West, surrounded by the very culture I once idolized, that I began to see its limits, and my own erasure within it. Having a comparative lens helped me see that the goal is not to discard the West, nor to romanticize the local, but to reposition ourselves. To stop looking up and begin looking across: to enter the global conversation not as imitators, but as producers.
Writing from outside Iraq, I’m reminded of what Edward Said described as the condition of exile; not just physical distance, but the unsettling clarity that comes with being between cultures. Said believed exile could offer a “comparative vision,” a way of seeing beyond inherited boundaries. I don’t speak from authority, but from that in-between space, aware of both privilege and dislocation. Still, I hope this reflection can serve not as a critique from above, but as a shared question: what might our theatre look like if we stopped measuring it by someone else’s standards?
Perhaps it’s time to begin unlearning the idea that credibility must always come from elsewhere. Instead of waiting for external validation to legitimize our voices, we might turn inward: toward our own archives, our forgotten stories, and the richness of our cultural traditions. This isn’t a call to reject the outside, but an invitation to engage with what we already have; to build frameworks rooted in our own realities.
And yet, even as I write these words, I’m aware of the contradiction: I’m writing in English. Not because I believe it’s superior, but because I lack access to platforms and visibility in Arabic, my own language. This, too, is part of the problem. The very structures through which we express ourselves are shaped by colonial hierarchies of language and power.
I also understand that a perspective like mine (spoken from the West) may be met with skepticism or even resistance at home. That is fair. Distance can create distortion. Privilege is real. A critique from afar can feel detached. But I hope this is read not as judgment, but as an offering, a reflection. A conversation between selves still trying to untangle the contradictions of belonging, expression, and cultural authority.
Decolonizing knowledge is not a single activity; it is a lifelong practice. It demands discomfort, humility, and constant vigilance. But it begins with noticing. With asking: whose voice am I using? Whose language? Whose framework?
My own awakening came slowly, shaped by experience and privilege. But it is never too late to begin. And for the future of Iraqi theatre and for the broader landscape of Arab cultural production, we must begin not by imitating, but by daring to invent.
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
This post was written by Amir Al-Azraki.
The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.
