Özet:

This article attempts a reading of Hiner Saleem's My Father's Rifle. Saleem's book on nationalism without being nationalist can be defined as a subaltern work that narrates the experience of the Kurds in Saddam Hussein's Iraq through the author's autobiographical narrative. The book is thus open to interdisciplinary readings such as literature, politics and history. This article first sheds light on what kind of history the nation/party-state in Iraq proposes, and how the book's main character Azad's story puts an portrayal on this whole process. The article is divided into two parts. Before two intermediate chapters, it will be explained why Kurdish literatures should contain a plural definition that includes oral literature and refers to more than one language, region and country. The first part focuses on the rise of the Baath Party and its use of education, language and ideological propaganda to construct Iraq as a nation-state. This part investigates the use of the personality cult of Saddam Hussein in envisioning an Iraqi nation. This part of the article hence examines how citizenship, the rights brought by citizenship, political parties and communities establish an Iraqi identity in Iraq from the 1960s through the 1990s. The second part examines how the Kurds, especially under the leadership of Mustafa Barzani, presented an Iraq proposal against the nation-state of the Baath Party and how this proposal used art, technology and language during for their own congregation. In this section, it is suggested how the sovereignty relations created by the Baath Party affect Kurdish nationalism. The tension in Azad's relationship with the borders, lynchings, violence and propaganda created by nationalisms in Iraq forms the basis of this chapter. This chapter creates a complementary theme, as Azad will be transformed into a subject that is becoming increasingly nomadic in the Iraqi imagination of both minority and majority nationalisms through this destructive tension. The position of Iraqi Kurdish women in this whole process is discussed as a point of comparison to examine the ways in which nationalisms construct historicity and sociality. The article aims to examine the marginalization of the Kurds during the creation of Iraq through Azad's story, as well as to propose the following critique: the Kurds use a very similar method to the Baath Party when establishing their own communities. Thus, the possibility of a subaltern reading on the Kurdish and Baathist nationalisms is provided through Hiner Saleem's book.

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