Feathers from Heaven: or what the paprika plant said to the hero

This article discusses some aspects of the ‘problem of identity’ explored in the novel al-Rı¯sh (1990) by the Syrian-born Kurdish writer Salı¯m Baraka¯t (b. 1951), against the background of the typology of history suggested in Bernard Lewis’s History: remembered, recovered, invented (1975). As a member of a minority community denied their full cultural and political rights, Baraka¯t is arguably particularly sensitive both to the constructed nature of history and identity, and to how the processes of remembering, discovering/recovering and inventing work. The article presents a detailed analysis of al-Rı¯sh, concluding that the ‘problem of identity’ is never solved in the work: rather, the novel presents us with an array of partly conflicting, partly complementary identities, while the characters remain caught in a quest for a stable identity that disintegrates like a mirage as they approach it.