A Psychoanalytical Study of Dehumanization in Bakhtyiar Ali's Bandar Fayli

Bakhtiyar Ali is one of the famous contemporary Kurdish writers whose literary works represent sufferings of the Kurdish people in the lands occupied by the totalitarian governments, and on a larger scale, the image of the oppressed humanity of the contemporary man in the era of the hegemony of war and violence. The novel Bandar Fayli, which depicts the genocide and deportation of the Fayli Kurds, is a true account of the destruction of the life of a Fayli child whose people faced denial of their identity. The fate of the child and his mother is caught in the Baathists' vortex of dehumanization resulting in suffering, lack of freedom and the trampling of their human dignity. In the absence of research on the phenomenon of dehumanization that occurs in the novel, the present research is concerned with the ways in which Bandar Fayli represents the forms and mechanisms of dehumanization and their connection with other related concepts. To this aim, the author has used a descriptive-analytical method informed by a psychological study of the dehumanization features in this novel. Ethnic dehumanization, double dehumanization, mechanical dehumanization, animal dehumanization, demonization, and dementalization are among the most frequent manifestations of dehumanization in the novel and serve as a pretext to justify acts of genocide and deportation as means to continue the process of mental and physical torture to exert the utmost control over the victim's fate, in a way that has accelerated the cycle of destruction of the character's personality as a suppressed subject.