This paper will discuss two Jordanian historical novels published in the 1990s. Each engages issues of identity and identifications from personal, social, cultural, and national perspectives. As contemporary historical fictions, they capture in their vicissitudes the complexity of experiences within Jordanian society, engaging with histories and historical texts that suggest a polyphonic collective memory embedded with the oral and textual lore and ethnic identifications of a multifarious society. In this way they appear to work against a nationalist discourse, but instead, suggest an uneasy articulation of “being Jordanian.” The two novels are distinct from each other: Al-Karuj min Sawsar?qah by Zahra ‘Umar (1993) articulates a Circassian cultural voice. It is the first novel to engage with this subject, and exploits myth, folktale and origin stories. As ‘Umar claims in her introduction, this novel is a way of reclaiming Circassian history for both herself and the diaspora, whom, she asserts, have become illiterate in both their language and cultural histories. As much as this novel is a work of reclamation, it is also a novel that interposes a Circassian cultural voice into the Jordanian, and by extension, Arabic literary field. As well, we read this voice not as an artifact, but rather, as an essential component of an active discourse. In the novel al-?amr?w? (1992) by Rama??n al-Raw?shidah, it is narratives, such as A 1001 Nights and Kalila wa Dimna, and Sufi thought, as opposed to historical events or people, in which the novelist searches for a way to mend the psychological fissure the main character finds himself in. Transversing time and texts in a kind of back and forth that conveys madness or “the non-reality of our reality,” the characters of this novel assert their respective continuities in relation to history, but also to the struggles and threats that are faced throughout the ages, i.e hunger, oppression, poverty. By exploring the narrative strategies and (hi)stories these two novels evoke, this paper aspires to disclose and analyze those inspirations of the past that inform the present.