The Shahrazād of Sablakh Speaks in Many Tongues

Abstract

Abstract Shlūmū al-kurdī wa-anā wa-l-zaman (Shlūmū al-Kurdī, Myself and Time) (2004) is the final novel of Iraqi-Jewish author Samīr Naqqāsh. Considering the text in light of the cultural politics of memory and articulation, this article posits the novel as a true fabrication of a fictionalized memoir. By thematizing aspects of speech, movement and scriptural ecumenism within an Islamicate cultural memory, the text simultaneously narrates and mourns the WWI-era social collapse of multiconfessional Sablakh in Iranian Kurdistan. The narration employs a modified, self-amplifying tripartite narrative structure and a self-sustaining momentum born of the looping of prophetic and traumatic temporalities; together, such structural moves enable a cascade of witnessing of a marginal(ized) site of loss. The text thus intervenes in officially sanctioned genealogies of loss and overcoming while crafting an affirmative Eastern Jewish self-in-community beyond the linguistic, geographic, and epistemological confines of Mizrahi identity within the State of Israel.