An analytical reading of Ahmadi Khani’s Mam u Zin
By Dr Kamal Mirawdeli
Part 1: Khani on his work
Mam u Zin is a self-conscious work. Khani knows what he is doing, how he is writing his book and what he wants to say and achieve. This kind of self-consciousness almost always produces theoretical and philosophical discourses. But Khani’s work is more than this. In fact through his own self-explanation he provides us with various guides to read his text or rather texts and delve into their depths and dimensions. Khani in the prologue of his book says that he uses the traditional Kurdish tale of the love between the Kurdish prince Mam and Kurdish princess Zin as a ‘bahana’ for knitting other discourses and texts into the story. ‘Bahana’ in Kurdish means excuse but a more perfect English word is pretext. In fact the story is only a pre-text that is an initial first text, to introduce and incorporate at least three more parallel texts into his drama: the literary dramatic text of Mam u Zin’s love, an elaborate philosophical text and an ethnological/nationalist text.
