Dina Mousawi’s RETURN: a Compelling site of representing Women’s Status of Agency Under Occupation

Dina Mousawi’s RETURN: a Compelling site of representing Women’s Status of Agency Under Occupation

By Hind Sabah Bilal

A significant wave of theatrical productions emerged in the United States and the United Kingdom, engaging with real events surrounding the conflict amid the humanitarian crisis and prolonged violence in Iraq following the US-led invasion in 2003. Drawing on personal testimony, interviews, public records and oral histories, many of these works challenged reductive narratives that justified the war. They highlighted a multiplicity of voices and underscored the importance of lived experiences in navigating the complexities of occupation and resistance. Feminist theatre in the diaspora is one form of this emerging repertoire.

Since the 1990s, feminist theatre scholars and practitioners, particularly in the US and UK, have advocated for transnational feminist approaches that resist colonial stereotypes related to gender, race, and nationality. These frameworks emphasise the intersection of local and global contexts and the necessity of cross-border collaborations (Aston 2003, 8). In 2003, Elaine Aston called for a feminist perspective aimed at understanding and transforming the sociopolitical conditions shaping women's lives, one that recognises their heterogeneity (9). In their joint essay, Feminist Futures and the Possibilities of “We,” Aston and Géraldine Harris contend that despite the growing influence of utopic Post-feminism, women practitioners from different generations and locations still create compelling, politically active theatre and performance that highlight “pressing social concerns and political problems for women” in the present, expressing a collective, though nuanced, form of resistance (2006, 11-12). I argue in this article that Documentary theatre contributes to both creating politically-provocative drama and promoting a self-expressive medium that resists violence.

Documentary theatre, particularly verbatim theatre, has emerged as an essential genre for artists to express resistance. However, during the 2003 Iraq War, this form of theatre often centred Western viewpoints. Plays such as David Hare’s Stuff Happens (2004) and Emily Ackerman and K.J. Sanchez’s verbatim piece ReEntry (2009) explore the reasons behind the invasion and examine the psychological impact on American soldiers. Nonetheless, these works tend to overlook or diminish Iraqi voices, resulting in a lack of representation for Iraqi experiences, especially those of women. An example of Iraqi-authored documentary theatre, however, is 9 Parts of Desire (2003) by Heather Raffo, an American Iraqi playwright. Although not strictly verbatim, the play conveys authentic truths through poetic monologues and a hybrid structure that blends personal narratives with documentary elements, based on ethnographic interviews with Iraqi women.

Despite the growing body of work on documentary theatre in the USA and the UK post-9/11 and the ‘war on terror’, critical engagement with Iraqi-authored or Iraq-centred plays remains limited. This article seeks to address that gap by examining Dina Mousawi’s Return (premiered in 2012), a contemporary Iraqi verbatim theatre piece in the diaspora that centres the narratives of Iraqi women who lived through the invasion and its aftermath. I argue that Return operates as a crucial site of feminist resistance. It offers a platform for expressing feminist agency by witnessing the realities of post-war narratives as emotionally embodied, politically urgent, and culturally situated. By exposing the personal costs of global conflict and reclaiming silenced voices, Return reframes the occupation as a lived, gendered experience; one in which Iraqi women have not only survived but asserted their presence and power in the face of political, epistemological, and documentary erasure.

The British Iraqi artist Mousawi created Return in collaboration with 3Fate Theatre Company and director Poonam Brah. The production draws from Mousawi’s personal experiences of growing up in Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq War and her field work trip to the SWANA region in 2011, during which she interviewed Iraqi women living in Syria, Jordan, and Iraq to ask them about what it means to live under the occupation. In this project, Mousawi acts as both a witness and an interlocutor, incorporating video diaries, interviews, emails, and social media posts into the performance. The play interrogates dominant Western media representations of Iraq and Iraqi women, reframing these narratives through a feminist and diasporic lens. Mousawi observes that “the media typically portrays the men’s stories and the Western experience of involvement in Iraq when it comes to war, power and politics” (cited in Ditmars 2012). Return responds to this representational void by foregrounding the voices of Iraqi women, inside Iraq and in diaspora, across various religious, generational and social backgrounds: voices that are often neglected or stereotyped in mainstream discourse.

The play’s reception further underscores its feminist and political resonance. As Lauren Strain notes, Return presents “a complex, sensitively put together patchwork of experiences” with a particular focus on the “domestic changes” in women’s lives under occupation (Strain 2013). Similarly, Rachel Bower observes that the play “asks urgent questions that demand attention,” especially regarding the gap between official claims of liberation and the lived fears of Iraqi women. Her review affirms the play’s role in foregrounding defiance and determination, making women’s stories impossible to ignore (Bower 2012). Although Return has received some attention in theatre reviews, it has not been the subject of sustained academic analysis. This article helps fill that gap. By doing this, as Cathy Turner and Synne Behrndt assert in Dramaturgy and Performance, verbatim theatre avoids irony in favour of repositioning theatre as a socially engaged platform for public debate (2008, 194). Mousawi mobilises verbatim theatre to challenge patriarchal and imperial narratives, highlighting the resilience of women under occupation. Thus, this article marks the process relationship between theatre and reality, foregrounding the play’s construction through interviews with Iraqi women in a work of civilian journalism, political intervention, and feminist dramaturgy. The play becomes a vital performance that bridges testimonial, theatrical, and political registers, offering both an artistic and an activist intervention, specifically from the perspective of an Iraqi diasporic female playwright.

Dina Mousawi and her Iraqi Heritage

  Mousawi is a British Iraqi actress, performer, theatre-maker and producer residing in London. She was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England, in 1978 to an Iraqi father and a Ukrainian mother. She remained there for six weeks before her family moved to Baghdad, Iraq, and then returned in 1986. At eight years old, Mousawi and her family fled the dangers of the Iran-Iraq war conflict, which lasted for eight years (1980 - 1988) (Bradford Telegraph and Argus 2005). Spending the informative years of her childhood in Iraq, she still identifies Iraq as her home. Yet, she has a dual national heritage, and England is also her home (Mousawi, Personal Interview, 2023).

Mousawi’s creative impulse to develop a project centred on Iraq, her country of origin, emerged from a deep sense of frustration with the dominant narratives produced in the West. While she witnesses the increase of UK-based films about Iraq, such as Green Zone (2010) and In the Valley of Elah (2007), Mousawi’s work is rooted in the desire to correct this imbalanced representation and to reclaim how agency of the  Iraqi identity, especially female identity, is portrayed on stage and screen. Reflecting on her experiences in the British film industry, Mousawi recounts her disillusionment during the casting process for The Devil’s Double (2011). Although the film featured several female roles, she was overlooked for auditions and later brought in only to record background Arabic dialogue (ADR). Watching a white actress, disguised as an Iraqi woman, perform a role she herself could have embodied highlighted for her the erasure of Arab women from their own narratives. This moment provoked her sense of exclusion, not only from the industry but from stories that should have been hers to tell. These experiences, coupled with the emotional weight of witnessing her homeland, both physically devastated by war and misrepresented in Western media as well, stimulated Mousawi’s resolve to create her own work. Her writing asks urgent questions: Where are the Iraqi women in these narratives? How have war and occupation impacted their lives? How do they wish to be represented? Her project is a response to these silences, a deeply personal and political act of storytelling that places Iraqi women at the centre of their own histories (Mousawi 2021, 8).

Mousawi’s RETURN to Iraq: Production and Style

With the help of funding from the British Institute for the Study of Iraq (BISI) and the Arab British Centre, Mousawi collaborated with 3Fates Theatre Company to produce Return, which premiered at The Yard Theatre/ London in July 2012. Between 2012 and 2014, Return was showcased in various stages of its development, including Tara Theatre/ London 2012, The National Theatre Studio/ London 2013, Liverpool Arab Arts Festival/ Liverpool 2013, and the Aat International Theatre Festival/ Amman, Jordan 2013 (Auster 2017), and finally two sold-out shows at Rich Mix/ London in February 2014, attracting 200 people (Ditmars 2012). This piece connects an Arabic-speaking audience with the British mainstream spectators, promoting discussions with a greater understanding of life in Iraq.

Skilfully shaped from interviews into a theatre performance by the British Asian female director Poonam Brah, the play “uses texts and videos to great effects” (Ibid.), projecting onto the screen some of Mousawi’s own Facebook messages to her mother from the time of her travels. It also features a diverse, all-female cast of five, that includes Mousawi, three actresses with Arabic heritage, and two British actresses. This diverse ensemble serves as a performative medium, showcasing the layered stories of Iraq’s postwar upheaval. They portray the physicality of the experience through a total of 16 named characters and one unnamed character, inspired by interviews with local Iraqi women in Iraq and migrant Iraqi women in Syria and Jordan, as well as some of the people Mousawi encountered along the way during her journey to the region.

All cast members were tasked with playing multiple roles, bringing to life a spectrum of characters ranging from ordinary housewives, simple workers and students to activists, poets and political advocates for women’s rights. Some characters narrate their stories in monologues; each staged with distinct lighting and settings that highlight their resilience and the individuality of their experiences under occupation. The play gives voice to vulnerable Iraqi women who are also talented, positive, and inspired. Most importantly, it sheds light on their experiences and choices in adapting to the new changes in their lives following the invasion. Mousawi, performing the character of Dina, represents her personal journey in this theatrical project. As a character and actor, Mousawi shares her opinion on Iraq under occupation, in contrast to her nostalgic perceptions of her pre-invasion homeland. Some scenes include touching reflections on old memories of Mousawi’s mother, father, and grandmother, who is known in the play as Nana. In my interview with Mousawi (October 2023), she expressed pride in her return to Baghdad and in the theatre project, describing it as a deeply personal journey. She also spoke about her desire to teach her young son Arabic, reflecting her commitment to preserving cultural continuity. These reflections underscore the diasporic consciousness embedded in Return, where personal memory and political critique converge.

Methodology

In my analysis of Return, I follow a qualitative, performance-based approach, drawing primarily on the unpublished play script received through Professor Salih Mahdi Hameed, ^[1] who obtained the script directly from Mousawi, translated it into Arabic, and published it in 2021. Supplementary materials include my interview with Mousawi (2023), conducted via the Zoom platform, in which she described key mise-en-scène elements. Additionally, my information about the performance is derived from published production photographs, performance footage from YouTube, and the 3Fate theatre website. Published reviews by Rachel Bower and Hadani Ditmars, along with audience feedback on the 3Fate website, also inform the reception analysis.

This study is framed within transnational feminist perspectives, with a particular attention to Arab feminist scholarship. The concept of agency is informed by the work of Saba Mahmood (2001, 2005), who emphasises how autonomy and resistance can be expressed through culturally embedded practices, especially within religious and social structures. Similarly, Lila Abu-Lughod (2013) critiques Western narratives that portray Muslim women as passive victims in need of saving, urging scholars to consider the specific historical and political contexts that shape Arabic/Muslim women's lives. These perspectives help situate the representation of Iraqi women in Return as contextually grounded, resisting simplistic binaries of oppression and liberation.

Additionally, the analysis draws on verbatim theatre tools, recognising Return as a form of documentary performance that foregrounds real voices and lived experiences. As Peter Weiss argues (1998), documentary theatre seeks to expose political realities through aesthetic means. Stephen Bottoms (2006) further elaborates that verbatim theatre resists passive consumption by demanding critical engagement from audiences. These frameworks help assess how Return uses verbatim techniques, such as monologues, direct address and transmedia storytelling, to challenge dominant narratives and promote ethical spectatorship.

The play’s representation of Iraqi women is analysed through two selected scenes out of the twenty-four available scenes. These scenes were chosen for their thematic relevance to the article’s focus on women’s agency under occupation. Due to word limit constraints, a broader analysis was not feasible, especially as each scene presents a distinct narrative that would require separate study. The selected scenes offer compelling portrayals of resilience and resistance. Rather than depicting them as passive victims, Return presents women as culturally grounded agents shaped by both tradition and the chaos of occupation.

My analysis endeavours to addresses two central questions:

1. How do these representations, directed at a Western audience and written by a second-generation Iraqi woman playwright, challenge dominant portrayals of Iraqi women in Western media and culture?2. How does contemporary Iraqi diasporic theatre resist occupation through performance?

The Western Gaze and the Spectacle of Liberation:

The performance opens with a daring and ambivalent scene that questions women’s agency under occupation. Behind the transparent plastic curtain, the audience can see a bride being dressed by two other women who are singing a joyful traditional Iraqi wedding song. The light is dim, initially creating a mood of quiet intimacy and anticipation. However, a heartbeat begins to throb beneath the surface of the soundscape, turning the atmosphere threatening. Suddenly, the woman is pushed through the curtain; no longer a bride in ceremonial garb but bound by ropes in a visual echo of captivity. This transition violently fractures the audience’s expectation, subverting the promise of celebration with the spectacle of restraint (Mousawi, 2021, scene 1:3). Ditmars, in his review of Return, states that “this moment in Return heralds not only the beginning of a powerful piece of theatre, but also serves as a metaphor for the East/West conundrum” (Ditmars 2012). This collision of celebration and coercion reconfigures a traditionally joyful cultural ritual into a haunting spectacle of control, rendering it a terrifying embodiment of stripped feminine agency under occupation. Such imagery critiques how occupation, though often framed as liberation, distorts cultural norms and extinguishes individual freedoms. Staging this moment through the use of shadow play, plastic barriers and lighting shifts highlights the idea of perception: how cultural rituals are perceived from the outside versus how they are experienced within. The plastic curtain serves both as a veil and a screen; what lies behind it is obscured, distorted and ultimately misrepresented, echoing the Western gaze that Mousawi critiques.

This moment encapsulates a broader thematic concern in Return: the paradox of ‘liberation’ under military occupation, particularly within the context of gender. The bride’s transformation into a prisoner or a captive visually challenges the rhetoric of emancipation adopted by occupying forces. Rather than empowering women, such interventions often impose new structures of control, replacing one form of oppression with another, although under the guise of progress. Leila Abu-Lughod provides a key lens through which to understand this scene. Abu-Lughod critiques the way Western media and policy often frame Muslim women as passive victims of their own culture, in need of liberation by external (often military) forces (Abu-lughod 2013). In this performance, the representation of a vulnerable bride shows the simplistic and conventional understanding of the West, which potentially serves to perpetuate societal expectations and beliefs about women as submissive individuals who are prone to victimisation by their family male members. Mousawi inverts that logic: the bride is not liberated through intervention but is rendered voiceless, immobilised and thus lacks agency. Her bondage does not originate in her cultural tradition of the marriage system, but in the violence of occupation. Thus, the play does not critique Iraqi customs, but rather the misrepresentation and manipulation of these customs by external forces. From a theatrical standpoint, the use of sound (heartbeat), lighting changes, and the plastic curtain emphasises dissonance. The heartbeat rising beneath the scene functions as a sonic marker of impending trauma, suggesting both human vulnerability and the intrusion of militarised power. Patrick Duggan examines how sound design, particularly repetitive or rhythmic elements like a heartbeat, can reveal signs of trauma. He discusses how such auditory cues can create an “affective elongation of the experience” (Duggan 2012), immersing the audience in a profound sense of upcoming violence and human vulnerability. This technique disrupts the spectators’ ability to distinguish between representation and reality, thereby intensifying the emotional impact of the performance (Ibid., 67-8). Similarly, during this moment of staging, changes in lighting can signify shifts in narrative or emotional tone, while the plastic curtain can serve as both a visual barrier that reveals and conceals. The moment the woman is pushed through the curtain is not just a visual disruption but an assault on audience expectations. We are forced to reckon with the reality that what lies beyond the ‘curtain’ of occupation is not freedom, but a reconstitution of dominated power.

Moreover, this scene visually challenges Western feminist discourse regarding the homogenisation of ‘Third World women’, as argued by Chandra Mohanty who emphasises the transnational feminist attitude of acknowledging women’s cultural specificity (Mohanty 1984). By beginning with a culturally specific and intimate moment, a traditional Iraqi wedding song, the performance invites empathy and identification. The choice of a bride and the wedding setting is particularly evocative. In many cultures, including Iraqi society, the bride represents not only personal joy and familial continuity but also cultural identity and a rejoicing tradition. By invoking this deeply rooted symbolism, Mousawi creates an atmosphere of intimacy and celebration. However, that intimacy is shattered, revealing how global conflict distorts cultural practices. The ropes binding the woman’s body symbolise not tradition, but the geopolitical machinery that assumes the authority to ‘free’ her. In doing so, Mousawi exposes how the West projects oppression onto the East while simultaneously enacting its own forms of control.

Furthermore, Mousawi’s transnational identity as a British Iraqi helps shape this critique. Her perspective bridges both the Western feminist and SWANA experiential frameworks, allowing her to examine the ideological contradictions embedded in interventionist narratives. This positionality enables her to challenge simplistic dichotomies, East/West, oppressed/liberated, and to centre complexity of Iraqi women’s lives under occupation. By dramatising the contrast between a bride’s traditional preparation and her sudden objectification as a prisoner, Return forces the audience to confront how ‘freedom’ is too often performed as spectacle rather than truly experienced.

Resistance Through Representation: Mousawi’s Transnational Identity

In Return, Mousawi stages more than a verbatim performance: she enacts a politically charged return to a homeland she knows only partially, signifying both a literal and symbolic act of agency. It represents a challenge commonly explored by second-generation migrant and diasporic theatre: the desire to reconnect with an ancestral homeland while acknowledging the privilege and distance created by life in the West. For Mousawi, this return is neither romanticised nor heroic; it is an act of responsibility and solidarity.

Mousawi locates herself within a complex network of diasporic identity, political urgency and feminist ethics. Her decision to travel to Iraq during the US occupation despite her mother's concerns, both in reality and in the play, is emblematic of her commitment to first-hand witnessing. In scene 2, her character Dina firmly asserts the importance of hearing directly from local Iraqi women:

Dina: I have to meet women there and interview them for my theatre project.

Mum: Can’t you just interview Iraqi women living in England?

Dina: No, it’s not the same thing. (Mousawi, scene 2:4)

This exchange encapsulates a key element of Mousawi’s transnational feminist position in which she refuses to homogenise Iraqi women’s experiences by relying solely on diasporic voices. Instead, she confronts the physical and emotional risks of the return: “Dina: I'm not stupid, I know that it is a dangerous place and I'm taking all precautions to ensure I'm as safe as possible.” (Scene 11:12). Mousawi brings to the stage a hybrid identity that allows her to mediate between Eastern lived experience and Western modes of storytelling, crafting a counter-narrative that resists reductive tropes about Arab and Muslim women so prevalent in Western media and political discourse. In my interview with her, Mousawi emphasised:

We didn’t want the audience to feel sympathetic and consider the Iraqi voices as poor women, poor Iraqis. We wanted people to feel inspired and humbled and moved in a sense of resilience. Iraqi women are resilient... Some are funny, clever, motivated, and businesswomen. We wanted to show that as well. (Oct 4, 2023)

This intention is clearly realised through Return, particularly in scene 12, a powerful moment of two narratives occurring in tandem that embodies the complexity and diversity of Iraqi women’s lives. The scene is divided between two actresses performing: Nahal, a Christian mother who tears paper silently, indicating her stress as she recounts three near-death experiences of her son, and Nasreen, a Muslim woman who shares a story of love between her Christian friend, Saria, and an American soldier. As the stories unfold simultaneously from opposite sides of the stage, they interweave emotions of grief, faith, love and irony (Mousawi, 13-14). However, representations of the narrative style of this scene were far from showing victimisation or passivity. On the contrary, Nahal ends her monologue not with despair, but with spiritual resilience: “Nahal: Alhamdulillah, we left in peace...God has never left us.” (scene 12:13). Her words are not passive; they represent a form of situated agency in which faith is a mode of empowerment in a context where choices are limited. As Saba Mahmood argues, religious expression can be a legitimate form of agency rather than a sign of subjugation (Mahmood 2005). Thus, Nahal’s prayers became her means of resistance, not in a Western liberal feminist sense, but within a framework of spiritual and cultural meaning.

Nasreen’s story, in contrast, highlights the limits of gender freedom within Iraqi familial structure. She admires her Christian friend’s father for supporting his daughter’s marriage to an American soldier, while lamenting her own inability to attend their wedding in Turkey because her family forbade her from traveling alone: “Nasreen: My parents were like ‘you can’t go alone’.” (scene 12:13). This juxtaposition reveals how patriarchal constraints persist in Iraq, but it also resists turning these limitations into spectacles of victimhood. Nasreen’s voice is critical and reflective; she understands her cultural context and the precautions of safety under occupation yet is not broken by it. The celebratory ending of the scene, enacted by Nahal joyfully throwing the torn pieces of paper into the air, with projected snowfall bathing the stage (13), reframes these stories not as sites of trauma, but as moments of endurance, joy and shared humanity.

The structure and direction tools of Return consistently support this style of framing representations. Scenes often conclude with disruptions that prevent the audience from dwelling in pathos. This is done as actresses move and change their costumes onstage and in front of the audience in preparation for the next scene, breaking the fourth wall. Mousawi described the production process as being highly transparent and open to the audience. The set designer, Alice Malia, for example, worked on the scenes directly in front of the audience, cutting papers, hanging them on or sticking them on actors’ bodies (Author interview with Mousawi, 2023). The play’s tone frequently shifts towards humour, everyday banter or logistical transitions, drawing the audience away from sentimental consumption. These are intentional performative tactics, which move beyond empathy to reach what Diamond describes as “the pleasure of cognition” in Brecht’s theory of reception (Diamond 1988). This entails ethical spectatorship where spectators are not only emotionally moved but also critically engaged. Moreover, Mousawi’s use of transmedia elements, such as narrating her journey through the projection of her Facebook posts and emails from her travels in Iraq, inserts the diasporic experience into the real-time media consumption habits of Western audiences. This both demystifies the process of cultural return and democratises the reception of these stories, inviting spectators not to pity but to listen, connect, and understand.

Conclusion:

In examining Return, Mousawi offers powerful counter-narratives to externally imposed stories of liberation by centering Iraqi women’s lived experiences under the US-occupation. By interrogating the terrain of women’s agency, Mousawi’s verbatim theatre mobilises her diasporic insight to subvert the stereotype of the passive, victimised Eastern woman and instead render women as active interpreters of their own survival strategies.

Mousawi’s second-generation Iraqi heritage and Western education enable her to reframe Iraqi women’s resilience through a hybrid aesthetic: she neither sentimentalises suffering nor reduces agency to Western-centric notions of emancipation. She rather reveals how agency is negotiated within and sometimes through the very cultural codes that patriarchy enforces.

Through its verbatim style and transmedia elements, Return challenges dominant Western portrayals of Iraqi women by foregrounding their voices, choices and contradictions. The selected scenes demonstrate how Iraqi women assert situated agency through literacy, imagination, solidarity, and everyday resistance, while remaining embedded in complex social constraints.

In this way, Return resists occupation not only through its content but through its form. It transforms theatre into a site of ethical representation, where testimony, memory and performance converge to reclaim narrative authority. Mousawi’s work becomes a transnational feminist intervention, resisting the consumption of trauma as spectacle and offering instead a textured portrayal of Iraqi women as culturally grounded subjects who act, adapt, believe, and survive within the structures of occupation and tradition. This form of situated agency reflects how power and autonomy can operate within specific socio-religious and political constraints. Return, therefore, becomes a political act of rewriting the representational structure of Arab womanhood and asserting the role of diasporic theatre in resisting occupation through storytelling.

^[1] Dr Hameed is a retired Iraqi scholar and professor of English drama, who is based in Iraq. I first came to know Dr Hameed as a drama professor who taught me during my graduate studies, then subsequently, as my MA thesis supervisor and as an academic referee for my PhD study at the University of Exeter, UK. He continually supports me, whether spiritually through words of praise and encouragement or academically, sharing with me ideas and plays!