Kurdish Women’s Stories: Resisting Erasure Through Writing
By Houzan Mahmoud
“It is our duty to search for the buried voices of powerful women who have been erased from history. No matter how women have been deprived of their lives, their accomplishments, and their rightful place in history, however, still they rise.”
A series of endless wars, armed struggle against dictatorial regimes, and self-sacrifice through imprisonment and execution have been the main features of Kurdish existence. For women of my generation who have witnessed the harsh reality of living under dictatorship and growing up in a family engaged in the armed resistance against the regime, life was nightmarish. The sight of death, the devastation of entire families, and the fear that constantly loomed over our communities was the norm.
This climate of dread made life seem like an endless succession of uninterpreted horror stories, its characters oblivious as to why they had to have a part in such a tragedy, a tragedy that transformed what should have been normal lives and activities — going to work or school, sitting down to meals — into a struggle for bare survival.
Kurds in all four parts of their divided Kurdistan — Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria — survive through and resist different venomous dictatorships. Movements for the liberation of Kurdistan have existed for a century and are still active. Until the recent Rojava revolution, the main figures and ‘saviours’ within these liberation struggles were mainly men.
Women, despite their vital roles, remained invisible or were relegated secondary status as endless attention was awarded to men.
In the part of Kurdistan I come from (Iraq), we have managed, through sustained pressure and campaigning, to maintain a semi-autonomous government. It is by no means perfect, but we can at least experience a measure of freedom.
In Kurdistan, autobiographies and stories of heroic men who fought against the former dictator fill the bookstores. Men have claimed all the spaces in media debates and narrate the entire struggle from a male-dominated perspective. I thought to myself: Where were the women? Why were they absent in these stories? Even if men did mention their wives, sisters or mothers, it was only to acknowledge their roles as “dutiful,” “sacrificing,” “devoted,” and “supportive” in relation to the men.
Women’s existence in these texts were not a representation of the actual role they played in the struggles, but it was only a limited existence reduced to being a wife, sister or mother of hero fighter who is male. This was done with the support of male-dominated media and publishers. The dominant discourse is about the glorification of men in politics and occupying too much space in history.
Women in Kurdistan, at least a big number of them, feel reluctant to write or tell their own stories of struggle; they don’t feel it’s of particular importance. Women of earlier generations were also ill-equipped with the knowledge, education and feminist conciseness necessary to challenge the foundations of Kurdish patriarchy and patriarchal politics. In addition to these factors, the absence of initiatives and groups that could offer spaces and platforms for women to use as a realm of self-assertion likewise contributed to a dearth in representation.
After much deliberation, taking into account the obstacles that would lie ahead, I decided to collect the stories of women across Kurdistan, as told and written by them. This is when I realised that curating a book consisting of women’s stories could be a platform, a realm for empowerment and self-assertion. I discussed the idea with my team at Culture Project. They welcomed the idea and began to spread the word about our ‘women’s self-writing project.’ We soon started receiving stories and calls from women who were curious to know more and get involved.
It took us two years of gathering, translating and editing stories by Kurdish women from all four parts of Kurdistan and the diaspora. The book contains stories written by 25 women from the ages of 20 to of 70 years old, spanning five generations of lived experiences. They told stories of political involvement, imprisonment, exile, armed struggle, love, sex-based violence, art and literature. They hailed from all backgrounds, classes, and education levels. For so many of them, this represented the opportunity of a lifetime — that of telling their stories as part of a collective endeavour. One woman told me: “I am finally relived from the pain of carrying my story with me for more than 30 years. I am relaxed because it has now been written down.”
My aim in collecting these stories was to convey authenticity, to enable these women to narrate their experiences without filters, restrictions, or expectations. I truly believe that women’s voices and narratives are vital to the formation of a new understanding and to the production of research into the intimate and personal events that shaped their lives. Writing has a liberatory potential for women to reclaim their rightful place in history — and the present.
It is our duty to search for the buried voices of powerful women who have been erased from history. No matter how women have been deprived of their lives, their accomplishments, and their rightful place in history, however, still they rise, as Maya Angelou says in her poem:
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
Whether the book Kurdish Women’s Stories is referred to as memoirs, autobiographies, or oral history, the stories contained therein are veritable windows onto Kurdish women’s turbulent and complex lives, full of upheaval, loss, love, struggle, survival, and optimism. I feel delighted and honoured to have worked with a dedicated team from Culture Project to provide readers worldwide with this collection of accounts from 25 inspiring Kurdish women.
Houzan Mahmoud is a Kurdish women's rights and anti-war activist born in Iraqi Kurdistan. She was a speaker at the anti-war rally in March 2003 in London and is the co-founder of the Iraqi Women's Rights Coalition, and of the Culture Project, a platform for Kurdish feminists, writers and activists. https://www.facebook.com/kurdishcultureproject.org