“If sorrow [shajan] were a man, I would not have killed him but prayed that his life may be long”: thus opens In‘am Kajahji’s 2008 novel al-Hafida al-Amrikiyya (The American Granddaughter). The novel is about an Iraqi-American, Zayna, who returns to Iraq in 2003 as a translator with the American army. There, she reestablishes contact with the Iraq she had left as a teenager, with her elderly grandmother and her community – except that she is on the other side of the fence. As the atrocities of the war unfold and the truth about Zayna’s job sinks in with her grandmother, the elderly woman seeks to imbue her with Iraqi patriotism. Faced with Zayna’s intransigence, the grandmother dies, it is suggested of a grief-stricken heart, and the translator returns to the US with an enduring shajan that she feels will rectify her, keeping alive within her the memory of Iraq. As the proposed presentation would argue, the novel makes multiple thematic and structural use of the bilingual and bicultural identity of Zayna to bear witness to a traumatized Iraq while consistently calling into question both Iraqi and American nationalist ideologies. That Zayna speaks of her competition with “the authoress” – her quasi-superegoic Iraqi nationalist double – underscores her exemplary status as a divided subject. This split makes her emblematic of a range of Iraqi positionalities even as she becomes the battle-ground for competing agendas and loyalties. How, then, to interpret the function of shajan at the end of a novel that closes with the Biblical “If I forget you, Baghdad, let my right hand forget her cunning”? I would submit that shajan in Zayna’s articulation, as a form of abiding “melancholia” rather than a “mourning” that can be worked through (see Sigmund Freud), is offered as the locus for the nation. That is, melancholia signals the haunting by an unburied but irrecuperable Iraq; it is the response that suggests both inadmissible yet undeniable national trauma. Yet, this ambivalence calls for a critical ambivalence about the potential for political incapacitation: “trauma” and “melancholia” broach the limits of representation. The paper, therefore, frames this issue through theoretical interventions – by Cathy Caruth, David Eng and David Kazanjian – that have tackled the question where to situate the ethico-political within conditions of trauma and melancholia. The conclusion would propose a dialectic between mourning and melancholia, relating this to the structure of the novel.