Postcolonial Recycling of the Oriental Vampire in Habiby's Saraya, the Ghoul's Daughter and Mukherjee's Jasmine

Notes

1. The Yazidi are a Kurdish-speaking people who adhere to a branch of Yazdanism that blends elements of Mithraism, pre-Islamic Mesopotamian religious traditions, Christianity and Islam.

2. Translations from Saraya in the present text are mine.

3. The Six-Day War, known in Arabic as an-Naksah (The Setback), was fought between June 5 and 10, 1967, by Israel and the neighboring states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. The Sabra and Shatila massacre took place in the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon between September 16 and 18, 1982, during the Lebanese civil war.

4. The Sikhs wished to secure an official homeland for a Sikh majority population in the northwestern part of the subcontinent. Khalistan (Land of the Pure), however, is a territory that was never created, and since Independence in 1947, the desire for a Sikh homeland has cast a dark shadow over the part of northwestern India known by the name of Punjab—itself an unstable designation over the decades.