Voices from the uprooted: The vegetal narrator as a medium of diasporic testimony in Arḍ Al-Khayrāt Al-Malʿūnah by Yasmeen Hanoosh

Studies of Iraqi diaspora fiction have concentrated on human narrators of trauma, and ecocritical scholarship on Arabic literature has rarely treated plants as narrators of violence and displacement. The few responses to Yasmeen Hanoosh’s plant-narrated anthology identify its vegetal voices without examining how they shape testimony. To address this gap, this study examines how vegetal narrators and narrative arrangement shape diasporic testimony in Hanoosh’s Arḍ al-Khayrāt al-Malʿūnah and how vegetal uprooting relates to human displacement and the transmission or disruption of memory. After reading all thirty-six texts, the authors selected eleven for interpretive close reading, supplemented by three comparative stories. Phytographia, testimony, and iqtilāʿ ‘uprooting’ guide analysis of bodily traces, sources of narrative knowledge, and relations of displacement. The findings show that plants mediate violence through bodily involvement, human accounts, and inherited memories. Their narration preserves human speech while conveying judgments shaped by dependence, attachment, and limited understanding. Reverse chronology brings colonial settings into relation with later violence, while disagreement between the opening and closing narrators contests the authority to frame these accounts. Uprootedness connects botanical appropriation, forced displacement, and disruptions of language and memory, with consequences that vary according to coercion, care, and continuing relationships. Diasporic testimony emerges through these exchanges across places and generations, including accounts in which human voices remain present. The study contributes to Arabic diasporic literary scholarship by showing how vegetal narration sustains memories of violence and questions the authority to represent suffering and assign moral value to displacement.