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Commemorating the Kurdish-Arab-Jewish City in Salim Barakat
Abstract
In Kurdish-Syrian writer Salim Barakat’s 2019 Arabic novel, Madha ‘an a-Sayida al-Yihudia Rahil? (What about Rachel, the Jewish Lady?), the author highlights the ways in which minority identities are constructed and delineated in twentieth century Syria. Barakat writes on the multicultural and interreligious relationships that existed before the Jewish exodus from Syria, in order to honor and preserve vestiges of this nearly forgotten Kurdish-Arab-Jewish history. Specifically, Barakat employs the character of Kihat, a sixteen-year-old Kurdish protagonist, to interrogate the place of his Jewish neighbors within Syrian national culture, and navigate the ethnically diverse city of Qamishli. Barakat represents Kihat’s coming of age story alongside the stark social and political changes that occur in Syria, following the Six Day War in June 1967. Notably, the young man’s inability to comprehend the ensuing cleavages between Israel and the Arab nations sets the tone for the novel, and foreshadows the tragic loss of Jewish life in the Middle East and the Maghreb in the mid twentieth century. It is at this historical juncture, and in light of Israel’s overwhelming victory after only six days of fighting, when conditions begin to transform for Mizrahi Jews in Syria. Given this historical backdrop, and the importance of minority alliances and identifications in the novel, this paper will analyze the ways in which a Kurdish character helps resurrect Jewish memory in the Arabic text. Although the novel is monolingual, and thus, is solely intended for and accessible to Arabic readers, the story, nevertheless, portrays a rich community of Jews, Kurds, Armenians, and Turks living as neighbors in Syria. Barakat illustrates the distinctively textured Qamishli, the city of his own childhood, to pay homage to cultural hybridity and multiethnic stories within Syria’s national sphere. He commemorates the lives of Qamishli’s former residents, and beseeches his readers to remember the vibrant spaces of a shared community in his former home. Therefore, perhaps comparable to Barakat’s book-length poem, Syria—which literary scholar Huda Fakhreddine considers his “elegy of self and homeland” (Syria)—this novel, too, serves as a form of elegy, a means to mourn the loss of a place where Jewish and Kurdish-Syrians could once live together—and be mutually embraced and celebrated.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
The Levant
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries