Constructing Anti-Memory in Kurdish Novel: Reading Ata Nahaee’s Novels

Abstract

In the present study, Foucault's concepts of popular memory and anti-memory perspective are employed in order to re-construct memory and anti-memory strategies in Kurdish Novelistic discourse. The major assumption is that the Kurdish novel has undertaken this reconstruction, and so we have used the method of narrative analysis for this. Ata Nahaee’s first novel, Shoran Flower, with a realistic style to the strategies of re-reading the political realities of the past through the strategy of confronting the people with the imposed government, as well as the help of folklore and symbolizing the characters, speaks of events that took place in the middle of the First World War. Secondly, and at the same time as state-building, it has brought nationalist treatment to the Kurdish people in Iran, and this has caused confusion and memory loss among them. Nahaee’s second novel, Birds in the Wind, deals with the experience of a generation and the experience of its defeat. With reminiscent strategies for recreating generational memory and romanticizing space and tone to portray the tragedy of oblivion, the novel tells the story of a generation that did not achieve its dreams and was forgotten. Nahaee’s third novel, Bet on the Fate of Halale, re-reads the history of Iranian Kurdistan and its political realities. The novel betting on the chance Halale seeks to create a new experience of generational memory by politicizing folklore and using anti-memory metaphors, as well as discussing immigration and asylum and re-creating history. These three novels seek to recreate a generational and anti-memory memory that is bottom-up and anti-memory of Iranian nationalism.

Keywords

• historical memory
• universal memory
• anti-memory
• generational memory
• kurdish novel