Iraqi Kurdish author Bakhtiyar Ali’s fourth novel, Shari Mosiqare Spiyekan (The City of the White Musicians, 2006) was translated from Sorani to German by Peschawa Fatah and Hans-Ulrich Müller-Schwefe under the title Die Stadt der weißen Musiker in 2017, and was soon celebrated by German writer and critic Stefan Weidner as “a major novel about art and reconciliation” comparable to Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. The novel, hailed by Weidner as “an epitaph for the victims of the Kurdish wars” and “a manifesto for the power of poetry and life”, became more formally associated with the genre of genocide literature when its author was awarded the Nelly Sachs Prize on December 10, 2017. In this paper, I examine the narratological tools Bakhtiyar Ali employs in his novel to explore themes of justice, forgiveness, truth, beauty and morality. These include a unique plot structure, in which the four main characters' dreams, nightmares and searches – rather than a linear series of events – drive the narrative forward; and an array of symbols and magical realism elements that convey key messages about the (sometimes uncannily similar) emotional experiences of Anfal survivors, like Jeladet the Dove, and perpetrators of war atrocities, like General Samir Al-Babilee. Additionally, these characters’ interspersed philosophical conversations about truth and justice, often set in surreal spaces such as underground art tunnels and makeshift courtrooms, reveal a captivating world of oppression, genocide, regret, survival and perseverance. With this close reading of a now transnational text, I aim to demonstrate how Bakhtiyar Ali counters, by expounding his view of art as peaceful form of resistance and salvation, the extremism and political hate that destroyed his people during and after Iraq’s 1988 genocide campaign. I also bring his novel into conversation with scholarship on the ethics of fiction that seeks to represent rape, torture, and genocide in order to explore the human capacity for darkness and, more importantly, healing (Vice, 2000; Budick 2019; Gallimore & Herndon, 2019). Finally, I argue that Bakhtiyar Ali’s Shari Mosiqare Spiyekan is just one of dozens of contemporary Turkish- and Iraqi-Kurdish novels whose authors, by virtue of their transnational status, have initiated an interactive process of witnessing in and through literature, a process that does not end with the text, but rather, engages the readers of multiple nations in contemplating ‘unspeakable’ human rights violations.