Late Ottoman writers whose mothers were formerly enslaved were haunted by the mother’s arrested mourning for her lost mother/land in the Caucasus. “Intimate biofiction” by these writers – potential masters and sons of slaves – offers a unique narratorial point of view distinct from first-person slave narratives and third-person abolitionist literature. Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan’s long narrative elegy, Vâlidem (My Mother), written at the time of her death around 1897 and published with a sequel in 1913, triangulates the mother/land, the father/land, and the son on his diplomatic and exilic itinerary. In Ottoman Turkish and aruz meter, Hamid imagines the melancholic crypt of the mother, the paradigmatic child of Gothic literature who remains undead – a phantom haunting her own progeny. In a melancholic inversion of loss, Circassia is reincarnated as the mother/land who lost her. Hamid’s mother is resurrected in a sequel to give birth to the sons of the new fatherland. Her narrative overwritten once again, the same mother appears in Mihrünnisa Hanım’s counterpoetics alongside the nanny who stayed. The metonymic chain of exilic replacement mothers extends even to Hamid’s last, teenage bride from Belgium.

The article aims to refute a long-standing thesis first put forth by Vladimir Minorsky about how the various copies of the dīvān of Shah Ismāʿīl might reflect shifts and changes in the religious and political landscape of early modern Iran. Contrary to the luminary Russian Orientalist’s claims, it demonstrates and contextualizes the observation that there were several textual traditions and that most of the copies continued to reflect messianism and “extremist” notions of religiosity well into late Ṣafavid times, appealing to a broad audience which was likely made up of Sufi adepts and nomadic Qizilbash, as well as a more refined echelon of courtly connoisseurs, residing in the borderland between the Ottoman lands and Iran. At the same time, it suggests that the main theme of Shah Ismāʿīl’s messianic poetry was sainthood and that in this sense Ṣafavid messianism was not a unique aberration but comparable and connected to such similar ideologies as are known from the Timurid, Ottoman or Mughal context.