Living In Uncertainty In Suleimani Analysis

Everyday narratives: Living in uncertainty in Suleimani

This chapter focuses on ethnographic vignettes from ordinary people from the city of Suleimani, Kurdistan. I specifically analyse narratives highlighting living under uncertainty, as part of the bigger theme of everyday politicizing narratives addressed in my thesis. The everyday narratives have resulted from intermittent fieldwork conducted in 2015 and 2016, supplemented by previous reflections and encounters from 2011 in the city of Suleimani. This section provides everyday ethnographic narratives weaved together with ethnographic literature on the everyday and precarious living in other areas around the world to enrich the analysis. For ethnography of the everyday I draw from Veena Da’s work focusing on ordinary everyday narratives and the eventfulness of the everyday, in her work on New-Delhi (Das 2007:6-8) In her monograph, Life and words, regarding attentiveness to the everyday and the ethnographer’s task, Das illustrates,

“… I am suggesting that self-creation on the register of the everyday is a careful putting together of life—a concrete engagement with the tasks of remaking that is mindful of both terms of the composed expression: everyday and life. It points to the eventfulness of the everyday and attempt to …show more content…
But today like then, everyday narratives of people retell a story of uncertainty and of careless political decisions responsible for the lack of “stability and permanence”. And even though today residences of the city have succeeded in building mansions, stable homes and Western style high-rises, they remain sceptical of living and certainty, for they believe anything could happen anytime due to lack of independent leaders and permanency. Uncertainty remains the norm and current Kurdish leadership are blamed like the ones before and everyday lives’ of people is still trapped by