Silent City: A Commemoration of Halabja’s Tragedy

Author: Mehrenegar Rostami

One of The Silk Road Ensemble’s well-received pieces, Silent City, commemorates Saddam Hussein’s chemical attack in 1988 on the Iraqi Kurdish city of Halabja. Silent City was composed by the prominent Iranian kamancheh virtuoso, Kayhan Kalhor for the Silk Road Ensemble in 2005. The ensemble’s musical collaboration memorializes the victims of Halabja in a performance that promotes the demand for justice through invoking the duty to remember. The Halabja genocide is often compared to the holocaust of Hiroshima. This genocide, however, has been ignored by the West and used as a propaganda tool by both Iranian and Iraqi governments in the Middle East.1 In contrast, the Silk Road Ensemble’s performance of Silent City honors this tragedy through fostering a sense of intercultural hospitality as an exemplar of peaceful interactions.