Sara Jajou

is an Assyrian-Chaldean artist working at the intersection of contemporary histories and ancient futures. 


Publications
Exhibitions
CV
About
Contact
Instagram

Selected Works
  1. Shimane ‘d Bakhtathe 
  2. Apparitions
  3. I like to be a girl with fur
  4. (My mother's song) أغنية أمي
  5. I met my lover barefoot
  6. My Jidu tells good stories
  7. English-Sureth Dictionary
English-Sureth Dictionary (2023)
Sara Jajou, English-Sureth Dictionary, 2023, digital, 130mm x 290mm.

Sara Jajou, English-Sureth Dictionary, 2023, paper, 30 x 130mm x 290mm.

Exhibited in Go Home Yankee (and take me with you) in 2023 at GalleryGalleryInc. This image shows my Jidu, Petros, reading each word one by one, suprised about the meaning and origin of the words.
The urgency of an anti-colonial movement demands a vocabulary to enable it. English-Sureth Dictionary is an ongoing dictionary project and begins with 21 new words developed for usage by Sureth-speaking people in Naarm. These words are transliterations of Wurundjeri/Woiwurrung words and language groups,  designed to support discussion around settlership and allyship in the Australian colony. This work also brings to attention under-used words documented by Assyrian scholars Tobia Gewargis (2007), Alexander Joseph Oraham (1943) and Bailis Yamlikha Shamun (2014).
My mother-tongue is Sureth, an endangered Northeastern Neo-Aramaic language which makes use of the East Syriac (Madnhaya) script. It is also known as Assyrian, and manifests as many different dialects spoken by Assyrians, Chaldeans, Arameans and Syriacs. Sureth-speaking people, called Suraye, are one of the minorities indigenous to the lands now demarcated by new imperial borders, namely the nation states of Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran. As one of the many effects of colonialism, it is difficult for Suraye to agree on the name of the language and the best way to preserve it.

Language erasure has been aggravated by waves of ethnic cleansing, forced displacement, assimilation, Arabization policies and American occupation. When translating gallery texts with my mother, we realised there were many words that did not exist, we did not know of, or had been replaced by Arabic or Turkish loan words. There is no current vocabulary in use that supports dialogue in Suraye communities about Indigeneity, settler-colonialism, positionality, race, American occupation, cultural hybridity and significantly, allyship.

If Suraye diaspora wish to revive language, we must recognise it is inseparable from decolonisation. Despite our indigenous roots, Suraye in the American, Canadian and Australian colonies tend to support right wing conspiracy, racial propaganda and colonial policies. In choosing to align with whiteness and the myth of a ‘model minority’, Suraye end up facilitating further violence against other immigrant groups and the indigenous people of these colonies. Alarmingly, Suraye also become responsible for directing the war machines of the West towards their own people and families still living in the homelands.

Alexander Joseph Oraham, Oraham’s Dictionary of the Stabilised and Enriched Assyrian language and English (1943)

Bailis Yamlikha Shamun, English-Assyrian-Arabic Dictionary, Volume 1 (2014).

Tobia Gewargis, English-Assyrian Dictionary, (2007)



Sara Jajou, English-Sureth Dictionary, 2023, paper, 30 x 130mm x 290mm.