The Shadeless Border

Jiyar Jahan Fard
Translated by Chiya Parvizpur

Fiction & Literary Nonfiction

Over a single day, a family faces grief and exile and history in a surreal tale set at contested borders.

On one side of the border, Azad’s mother stands in her grief, waiting to bury her son. On the other side, his uncle and cousins wait with his body, barred by unrelenting guards from bringing him home without a passport. Borders are a thousand kinds of violence, a vicious declaration of who belongs and who does not. For generations, the Kurdish people have lived divided by these cruelties, carved out amid the ruins of war and empire. This is The Shadeless Border.

Over the next twenty-four hours at the crossing, an uncanny tale unfolds through a chorus of surprising voices: Death and the Border speak to us like old friends; a coffin and a stringed instrument, both carved from the same tree, remember Azad’s family history. Set at the contested frontier between Iran and Iraq, Jiyar Jahan Fard’s masterpiece is a work of haunting intensity, written along the delicate line between Kafka and Kundera, and tracing the man-made boundaries that define the reality of modern-day Kurdistan.