She bursts into languages: trauma and multilingualism in One Woman's War: Da (Mother)

This paper asks what happens when we include multilingualism in our theorization of trauma by focusing on war experiences of multilingual subjects. In analyzing Da (Mādar): Khāterāt-e Seyyedeh Zahra Hoseini, beh ehtemām-e Seyyedeh A’zam Hoseini [Da (Mother): Memories of Seyyedeh Zahra Hoseini with Supervision of Seyyedeh A’zam Hoseini] (2008)—an Iranian war memoir narrated by an Iraqi-born Kurdish-Iranian woman—I examine the intersection between momentary emergences of ethnic languages and the representation of war sufferings. For this multilingual subject, the paper shows, trauma manifests through restless code-switching and language entanglement. Although the book is written in Persian, Iran's national language, there are many instances where the text switches between Persian and the narrator's native languages: Kurdish, Arabic, and Luri. The momentary emergences of the “minor languages” in the work—languages that are marginalized by a hegemonic national language—are closely tied to remembering the experiences of loss.