Rebuilding Baghdad: Placing Memoir in the Archive in Marina Benjamin’s Last Days in Babylon (2007) and Tamara Chalabi’s Late for Tea at the Deer Palace (2010)

Archives are not the only holders of a nation’s history; it can be found in the writing of memoirs. In this chapter, I focus on two recent memoirs, Marina Benjamin’s Last Days in Babylon: The Story of the Jews of Baghdad (2007) and Tamara Chalabi’s Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: Lost Dreams of my Iraqi Family (2010), to elucidate the role that memoir can play in preserving a nation’s memory. Benjamin’s and Chalabi’s use of “Last Days” and “Lost Dreams” evokes impermanence and transience as a result of what has been lost by both these authors’ families: having to flee their homeland due to political instability in the country. These memoirs serve not only to reclaim family origins but also function as a response to the lost ancestral home in Iraq.