Gulistan is searching for her husband, Çiya, who has disappeared without a trace. She looks for him among friends, at his workplace and at the police, but encounters indifference and contempt. As she asks more questions, she becomes a target of state terror. Karosh Taha’s novel “Gulistan” traces how, under such conditions, even speaking a name can become dangerous.
The novel’s form reflects the insecurity and disorientation experienced by its characters. Taha disrupts the text with stammering, omitted punctuation and winding lines that blur who is speaking and where events are taking place. The characters’ Kurdish language and origins are part of the reason they are persecuted, making language itself both a marker of identity and a source of danger.
A second narrative thread begins with the voice of Saddam Hussein’s doctor, who fled to Germany in 2003 and struggles to speak in English. His broken sentences introduce a motif of doubled identities that runs through the book. The boundaries between speakers and stories become uncertain, and even words and images are difficult to trust. Çiya later appears in a crowd wearing Saddam Hussein’s uniform.
Taha also depicts torture as an assault on the body and on a person’s sense of self. The novel suggests that torture is intended not simply to kill, but to drive its victims to destroy themselves. Its fragmented, many-voiced narrative leaves much unresolved, while Gulistan continues to speak despite threats, deception and her own inability to find words. Taha was born in the Iraqi part of Kurdistan in 1987 and fled to Germany with her family as a child during Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship.
Sources: FAZ.