#150 Kurdish Women's Voices: Interview with Houzan Mahmoud
“I am exceptionally delighted to present these stories to readers. I feel I have managed to put the pieces together, to create an image, a moment, a memory or just even a glimpse of who we are and could be as Kurdish women”
We speak to Houzan Mahmoud, a Kurdish feminist, writer and anti-war activist from South Kurdistan. She was one of the speakers at the anti-war rally in March 2003 in London and is the co-founder of the Culture Project, a platform for Kurdish feminists, writers and activists. Houzan’s book, conceived as part of Culture Project's self-writing program, is essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand the struggle of Kurdish women through their own words.
This is a recording of a FiLiA Feminist Book Club event, part of the FiLiA Legacy Project.
You can order Houzan’s book from News From Nowhere
Listen Here (Transcript below):
Transcript
Lisa-Marie from FiLiA in conversation with Houzan Mahmoud
Lisa-Marie: So this is part of the FiLiA Legacy Project. FiLiA is a women's rights organisation. We work to amplify the voices of women, particularly those who are less often heard or purposefully silenced. I'm Lisa-Marie, and I'm the CEO of FiLiA. And just welcome everybody. It's lovely to see you all here. So Houzan is a Kurdish feminist, a writer, a public lecturer, and anti-war activist and co-founder of the Culture Project.
She's also winner of the 2016 Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize and the secularism award in 2018 from One Law for All, for your tireless work in defence of women's rights and for championing secularism in Kurdish society. Houzan, welcome, I’m trying to remember where we first met, I couldn't remember where we first met, but we spoke together at the Defending Progressives event in London, which you helped organise.
You've been a part of FiLiA for a few years now, and you've done a podcast and a blog with us and you've organized sessions at the conference as well. The last one being on Kurdish women's experience and political alternatives.
Houzan: Yes, that's true. We met many years ago in Victoria station. Remember, and you talked to me about FiLiA.
Thank you so much for organising this beautiful book club, I love feminist book clubs, by the way. And thank you everyone for joining us from different places, all over the world, Europe, Kurdistan, and London and Manchester and Portsmouth everywhere. It's so nice talking to you and for making time exactly six o'clock London time which is time for dinner basically.
And we have to talk about all these heavy subjects surrounding Kurdish women, their struggle, their resilience and their survival in a war zone really, and in a zone of genocide as well, surrounded by four dictatorial regimes. And this book really represents the stories of Kurdish women from the divided Kurdistan in Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq, as well as in diaspora populations.
So, yeah, I'm ready for your questions.
Lisa-Marie: Thank you very much for joining us and thank you for the book. So the book we're looking at tonight is Kurdish women's stories. And I really do want to start and add a bit more to that context because when I started to learn about this topic that I hadn't heard of and it just changed the way I view a lot of things.
So thank you to you and thank you to Rahila Gupta as well for bringing this to my attention and teaching me so much. So, as I understand it, and if I get things wrong please let me know.
So as I understand it, a century ago, a commitment was made to the Kurdish people to create an independent Kurdistan, a land for the Kurdish people.
And that commitment still has not been fulfilled over a hundred years later. And the Kurdish population, I learned, makes up the largest people without a nation state. So I think for those who maybe don't know much about the context in which this book was written, can you just put a little bit of that context into the conversations so that women understand where this book came from?
Houzan: Yeah. I mean, this book comes from a region that is really historically, difficult to talk about because it's so complex and it's so kind of different. History has written about this region from a different perspective.
And obviously from the perspective of powerful states and imperialist powers as well as local colonisers. Kurdistan, strictly speaking is located in a region called Mesopotamia before, before the division of the region and before the collapse of the Ottoman empire and a reshaping of the map of the middle east and by French and English and lots of other colonisers basically who had political and economic interests in this region.
The Kurdish people have always lived there, these are their lands. This is the places of their ancestors and they are not refugees or they haven't migrated to this region and when the Ottoman empire collapsed or defeated, there was various conferences in Europe to kind of divide the region and rename and reshape what we know now as to the so-called middle east.
In that particular time period, they divided Kurdistan along those four nation states. I mean, when you look at it really, there are many other ethnic minorities as well who have been subjected to genocide, like the Armenians, like the Assyrians, lots of minorities have been subjected to genocidal campaigns in addition to Kurdish people as well by Turkey and Iraq.
So yeah, it is a very problematic area still to this moment. And as you can see, we have had an inspirational revolution in Rojava. All of you have heard about that and the powerful woman who are leading these revolution, but you can see how Turkey is invading and occupying different bits and pieces of Rojava, you know, towns and villages and demographically changing the entire region as well as killing and maiming people.
So I really think we have a very long history of facing genocidal campaigns, occupations, demographical changes as well as Turkification and Arabisation and Persification, I mean, each country, each state tries to really force you to assimilate, to melt in their so-called nation states pot, which it doesn't help and it doesn't work.
Kurdish people do survive and have resisted these genocidal and assimilationist policies to this moment. I mean, it's very bloody, it's very difficult, but obviously for women it's far more difficult and far more bloody in my opinion. And some of the stories that you have read in this book represent at least five generations of Kurdish women from different region and how they have endured these type of wars and genocidal campaigns and chemical bombardments as well.
In addition to family violence, in addition to gender based violence, in addition to imprisonment and survival on daily basis, education, employment, art, literature, poetry, I mean, you'll have all kinds of stories in the book written by different women telling their experiences.
Lisa-Marie: Thank you. It's a critically important book. So you were born in Iraqi Kurdistan. Are you happy to share some of your story with the listeners before we move onto the book?
Houzan: So I was born in Iraqi Kurdistan. I'm 48 years old. I came to UK in 1996 as a political refugee. And ever since then, I've been living in London. Temporarily I live in Germany. My life in London has been a rollercoaster of really a relationship of love and hate because of many difficulties, again, as women, as a refugee and starting over from scratch, it wasn't easy.
But I have been politically active ever since. But also I grew up in a political family. My family were involved in armed struggle against Saddam's regime. So I have witnessed first-hand, how people were up in arms fighting against the Saddam dictatorship, and also I've witnessed Iran-Iraq war, the first Gulf war, the sanctions that was put on Iraq by the coalition.
All my life has been under dictatorship and its wars, basically. So it hasn't been an easy childhood and adolescent years. It has always been traumatic and full of problems, full of killing, full of events that out of our control as women, as people, as Kurdish. So we have really lived in very difficult, tough times. I mean, this is the history, this is the story and the history of many Kurdish women in the region, basically.
Lisa-Marie: Thank you. Thank you. And so you did what many women do actually, which is they come through immense hardship and they turn around and they say, and they think, what can I do now to support other women? What can I do to support other people so that they don't go through this or so that we find solidarity in fighting against them? What you did was you started the Culture Project. And this is a unique platform for Kurdish writers, feminists, artists, and activists and it seeks to amplify voices from Kurdistan and the Kurdish diaspora and critically actually gives space to express ideas, centring freedom of thought. And you explicitly state the Culture Project rejects sexism, rejects patriarchy, religious intolerance, nationalism, class racism, and tribalism. Tell us more about the Culture Project and then how your book emerged from that.
Houzan: It’s a big question. I mean, I have always been involved in women's rights campaigning, organisations, issues, writings, lots of things really for the past 25 years. But at some point I felt like there's the need in terms of broadening this struggle in terms of involving various voices, different voices, writers, artists, campaigners, political activists, philosophers, both men and women. And then that's how we came about to create this digital magazine in Kurdish and then in English and to turn it into a platform for fresh thinking and critical thinking and ideas, both about Kurdish culture and politics, but also on the status of Kurdish women as well.
We are all fighting against Fascisms and we are fighting against injustice and so on, but that doesn't mean that the Kurdish struggle is free from sexism, is free from racism or patriarchy and so on, no, in fact it is in Kurdish culture and language and cultural productions as well. Like many other on this planet is full of sexism and patriarchal reproductions. So I think one of the ways to do this was also to critically write about these issues and to bring to the fore more women's voices in art and literature and poetry and culture, as well as in politics and other arenas of activism.
And one of the first things that I like to do was to bring women to writing. And I remember in the beginning of Culture Project, I reached out to people, different Kurdish women to write about their experiences. I mean, I know Kenny's here, my wonderful friend, she's an artist from Kurdistan.
I approached her to, to write about her experience as an artist in Kurdistan. And she wrote such beautiful short article about her experience and lots of other people, women about music, about their different experiences. And also we made reviews about their work and interviews and writing articles and so on and hosting seminars and conferences in addition to this book, which took us two years to gather these stories, to read them, to edit them as well as to translate them into English. And they were written in Turkish Farsi, Arabic, Kurdish Kurmanji as well and Kurdish Sorani. So we had to translate all of this to Kurdish Sorani as well as to English and it was a long process. That's why it took us two years and we are still in the process of many other projects.
Lisa-Marie: Where did the idea of the book originally come from?
Houzan: I think as I said, I started reaching out to women to write about their experiences, because when I was really doing all this activism I realised that we don't really talk about ourselves. Even as women activists, myself included, we talk about women. We don't even talk about ourselves. We don't even talk about women's experiences as such, because I think in Kurdish society we are not encouraged for several reasons and I spoke about it in the introduction chapter of the book.
First, we don't see our lives and our contribution to the struggle and to the society as valued or as necessary or as important. Whereas lately in the last few years I saw courageous bookstores in Kurdistan were full of books written by X generals and X freedom fighters talking about their glorious days of armed struggle and so on. But when you look at them now, they're all corrupt. They're corrupt rulers in the Kurdistan regional government.
So I thought, where were the woman then? I mean, they even hardly admit or acknowledge the role that their wives and sisters played and if they do, it’s like: my wonderful wife was this or my mother, they were good and loyal and they helped us. Okay. It was not only helping because I witnessed it first-hand, how my mother and sisters were actually doing a lot more than the freedom fighters in the mountains. They were risking their life two times in the city. If they were caught, they would have been executed or raped or tortured in prison. So I thought there was a lot of injustice done to Kurdish woman in telling those narratives. So this is why I reached out and I made a call for women to write.
And I really wasn't sure even if I was getting one story, because it's not easy for Kurdish women to write about themselves for some reason, at least until that point. But luckily from now on, I can see other women have started writing about their lives and their contribution to the struggle to imprisonment, to other things as well.
So I think it was a new breaking point that it's our time and it's our right as well to, to be told and to say and to write and to have a text as well as Kurdish woman. So I think it was just a lot of things that were a lot of factors that were involved in the birth of this book.
Lisa-Marie: Thank you. And I love the way that you talk about it as being a right, a woman's right to tell her story, to speak up, to be heard. I really liked that.
So I I'd like to suggest that we now explore some of the themes that come through in the book, starting with this idea of fighting on many fronts. The stories are stories of war, displacement, loss, detention, torture, and overlaid with this, women have to face patriarchal norms and traditions such as forced marriage.
I read a report the other day about femicide in Kurdistan. So can you start, you've touched on it, but are you able to talk a little bit more about those many fronts that women and girls are having to navigate?
Houzan: I mean, just to continue from the last question. So many times in history, why women don't have much presence because there were always men who would write their own stories, they would always tell the history, they will always narrate. They will always take the place and claim the place and claim the victories and the revolutions and the ideas and the thoughts that women were also part of it. But they kind of detach themselves from the women. They detach the women from the reality of reproduction of ideas and thoughts and revolutions.
So I thought if as women, we don't have a story to tell, we don't have existence. This is why generations of women before us, we don't know anything about them because they didn't write their stories because they didn't tell us who they were, what they did. So I think it's about time for us to tell those stories and to say that we exist really and this is what we've done.
Kurdish woman are fighting on many fronts is not in the media. obviously there's an element of truth that we have to fight. We have to be upping arms, even in the very Ancient stories of fighting between the kingdoms. The Mesopotamia Kurdish woman still fought in those days They still fought, led armies as well and that story is happening today as well in the Rojava revolution. That's because you have no choice because your Homeland, yourself, your body, your entire being is being attacked by enemies, by colonisers, by Islamists by misogynist and patriarchal forces.
So I think the arms struggle is an element out of our choice. It's there. We have to do it. But that isn't everything, that is not the only identity. We are not one dimensional women. As Kurdish woman. We have multi identities. You could be a writer, a poet, and an artist. You could be a singer, a musician, a mother, a homemaker, I don't know, a teacher, a cleaner, a driver, anything, you could be any of those, but on top of it, you could take up arm the next day because you are under attack.
But also you could be facing violence at home. And the same thing, you could be facing violence outside. You could be forced into a marriage, but you don't give up. You could be a victim of FGM or a survivor in my opinion, and then you could move on and to become an activist and so on.
So I think you don't stop there. You don't stop at the point of victimhood, and I'm not really with the idea of kind of emphasising a lot on victimhood. Victimhood is about taking away agency and it's a status. Patriarchal forces want us to stay there, to remain there. And I think we have to break that and we have to say, we might be a victim, yes, a victim of your violence, a victim of your wars, a victim of your colonisation, but we are a survivor and a fighter and resisting, agents, people with agency, women with agency. And I think this is what Kurdish woman, really even without a guide or a manual or a kind of school of thought, they have been doing all of that in terms of solidarity with each other, in terms of reaching out in terms of being really extremely creative in terms of facing, all these multiple wars. A war at home, a war out on the street, another one in the neighbourhood, another one with the enemy.
I mean, how many enemies you can have from the one inside your own home to the one that is on the border coming across.
So I think it's really, really important to look at the powerful agency of Kurdish woman in this stories as well from those who are age 70 to those who are aged 20, who are struggling with finding themselves who are struggling with knowing who they are in this world and facing all these problems and the remnants of war, the remnants of patriarchal misogynistic ideas that accumulate by eruption of every violent clashes with Islamist or with the fascist regimes and dictators in the region.
Lisa-Marie: Thank you very much Houzan and I think the ways that women resist, they resist in many different ways as well. So examples in the book are protests against forced failing or resistance within the education system, taking up arms and participating in hunger strikes.
Can you talk about a couple of these methods of resistance or methods of resistance in the book, stories of resistance that particularly inspired you when you listened to the women's stories and ones that were particularly effective as well. So what touched you about women's resistance?
Houzan: it's so hard to choose and pick, like to choose one story. All of them. I know so many of them, I have met them face to face, but some of them I haven't even met and I don't know, but they have sent their stories via a friend or people who knows us, but the first couple of stories, from this lady Nazanin Hassan, the first one, chapter one.
And chapter two, Mother Sabria, she talks about the day that she has to go to bring the body of her 17-year-old executed son and how the authorities are trying to break her and to make her cry in front of them. And she refuses. She even refuses to collect the body because she tells them it's Eid the Islamic celebration. It's Eid, I don't want to ruin it for my family. I'm going and coming back later, I met her, we launched the same book in Kurdish, she came to the book launch and her and Nazanin, they both told their stories over again and you could see so much defiance in their face, so much courage and so much pride that they really did not let, as they say, the enemy to take joy of their breaking down and so on. I mean, there are stories of being forced to marry as a child. And then she refused, then she struggled and resisted and it didn't happen. But now she's a teacher, a high school teacher and she successfully married someone that she likes and so on.
So it's important for us. I mean, there's another story of imprisonment in Iranian regime in East Kurdistan that for three years she was tortured so badly and there is really very detailed information that I don't want to say that when you can read it, how much they have tortured her just to extract information about people that she was politically active with, to confess on other people. She refused. I met her a few weeks ago here. She came to my house. She lives here and she is so powerful. And she carried this story for so long for like, I don't know, 30 something years after her imprisonment. And it was never told anywhere it was never written about it. And when I told her there's such a book, why don't you share your story?
And luckily it was already written by her friend, so they authorised us to publish the story. And she was so happy. She just said like, now we are entering history for the first time. Like she was so happy about that. These are like really legendary stories of Kurdish woman and how much, and they were all young in their nineteens and twenties back then in such patriarchal societies that they managed to break everything and they managed to be political, to be in prison, not to give up. I think there's many, many important and interesting stories in this book that really, you can talk about each one of them for hours, in my opinion.
Lisa-Marie: I think you're absolutely right. I think every single one of them has something very, very important to say. And when you say legendary women, I think again, you're absolutely right. They are legendary women and, and critically important stories. And the first story that you talked about. And she says, and all the pain she's been through ‘to their disappointments.’ I think she's talking about the guards. They're expecting to see her crying. She says to their disappointments, I turned my pain into love for the Homeland and sang Long live the Kurds and Kurdistan and what was I afraid of now?
And there are many moments like that throughout the book. It's palpable that sense of resistance and pride and determination in the face of torture and horror in many cases.
So I want to talk about a specific tactic of what is cultural genocide. And that came through a number of the stories in the book actually, and how language or preventing language is used as a means of oppression and some of the ways that women have resisted having their language taken away from them.
Houzan: Yeah, one of the big problems in the four parts is like the government always had the assimilationist or the genocidal policies. Be it in terms of physical, like they subject you to physical genocide by killing you. In Iraq, they are still uncovering mass graves, babies, as young as one-year-old have been subjected to genocide.
So you can tell the policies of such state against an entire people, against an entire nation, how far it can go. And then they prevent you from speaking your language from writing in your own language. We have many writers and poets. Who are extremely well-known in the Arab world or in the world even, or in Turkey, they're originally Kurdish, but they had to write their stories, their novels and poetry in either Turkish, Farsi or Arabic, because that was the only language that they were taught in school and they were allowed to speak and to talk.
Whereas in my part, it was a little bit different because there was a lot of struggle and back and forth. We managed to study in Kurdish from 1970s onwards. So I was educated in Kurdish. So I have my own mother tongue. That's why I did the book in Kurdish Sorani as well. But still, that was a big problem.
I mean the government would allow you certain newspapers or certain magazines in my time in 1980s. And it was very limited. But nowadays it's different in Iraqi Kurdistan, and we are a little bit semi-autonomous for now. At least there is like TVs and everything in Kurdish it's everything is in Kurdish language.
However, for the other parts, it's still a huge problem. They teach kids at home how to speak and write in Kurdish. So one was sentenced to two years in prison in Iran for teaching her mother tongue at home to kids.
A Kurdish teacher was executed in Iran. In Turkey it’s another level. I mean, it's just crazy how regime is just targeting Kurdish people left and right and that's why they had to write in Turkish and Farsi and Arabic. But I said, this should not be a problem because these women, they lived and experienced life as a Kurdish person. They were subjected to genocide and terror and imprisonment as a Kurdish person. That's why they lived as Kurdish, but they spoke in Turkish for example, or they had to go to school and be educated in Turkish or in Farsi. So I think that's why it's important for us to cut across these imposed artificial and dictatorial language imposition and to translate them back into Kurdish, but also into English so that the outside world can know as well about the stories of these women.
Lisa-Marie: Yes. And the book being written in Kurdish is a form of resistance in itself. Isn't it? And I was stunned that, I mean, the concept of banning studying the Kurdish language and not even one of the women mentioned it, not being able to register a birth, if that name is a Kurdish name that you want them to give to the baby and one mother in one of the chapters says, one of the stories says, whenever you can, speak Kurdish. Very powerful.
So we're going to ask a couple of questions now. So if anyone's got any more questions, do you put them in there in the Q and A section? So Rebecca, hi, Rebecca, Rebecca has said in the absence of a national state, if this is the right way to describe it, what would you say it is that makes a person Kurdish? Is it language or is it something else?
Houzan: Okay. It's not really just the language because like I'm Kurdish, but I speak different languages. It's not the language only that makes you part of one place, but it's your roots, you know, and where you come from and where you lived. I mean, from as far as I remember my ancestors and their ancestors and their ancestors have been in Kurdistan and this is where their place is, and these people have a shared culture, history, traditions, music, literature, poetry, they share a lot of things in common.
I mean, I, myself am not with that type of modern nationalism that denies other people, their rights and being in order to create my own nation state and so on. I'm not really with that typical nationalism, but I am for so somehow national liberation for Kurdish people, because 100 years of oppression and genocide is a lot.
Interestingly, the same people who are oppressing us they claim so much right for themselves. They claim so much, they demand de-colonisation. They demand a lot of rights and freedom for themselves in Europe and so on, but they actually denied the same things to Kurdish people in our own lands.
And I think that is something that we need to talk about that we need to expose that we need to fight against and we have been doing that.
Language is an important part and Kurdish language is a rich diverse language with many accents as well. I mean, it's a language of Kurdish literature and we have Kurdish poetry and literature as well, novels and short stories that is really of a world-class, but unfortunately it hasn't been so far translated into English. I mean, you have art, you have music, you have a lot of things that has a kind of Kurdish authentic touch to it.
So I think that's how you can recognise people from that or clothing, for example, from time to time, I wear my Kurdish clothing because this is something that my mom and her mom and their mom, they all wear this type of clothing and that is distinct to our region because it's mountainous and it's green, and it's beautiful.
A lot of things that really makes you share your Kurdishness with millions of other people and the history that you've all gone through, in my opinion,
Lisa-Marie: Thank you. And Zena has put, unfortunately I can't speak English very well. I just bought a book and have read only Houzan’s introduction.
It is very well written. We need more volumes. We need Kurdish Women's Stories 2, Kurdish Women's Stories 3. We also need a Kurmanji version. Someone else has said, are there any more books planned as well?
Houzan: Yes, there are, there's Kurdish Women’s Stories 2, on the way, but I'm not going to mention anything about it. That is even a really very powerful. Thank you for your positive comment. If time helps me, I have a lot of more interesting projects lined up, but let's see if we survive Corona.
Lisa-Marie: And Rebecca has said thank you, this is so interesting. The absence of books in the lives of the women, my age really, really shocked me.
Do you have a sense of the response to the book? Has it been well-received?
Houzan: Yeah, I have received a lot of good feedback, really. I mean, lots of people sharing on Twitter, social media, and even letters that I get from Kurds and non-Kurds alike.
They have really clicked with these stories and they thought that the book provides a new kind of description of who Kurdish woman are, as I said, they're not one dimensional either a victim or a warrior with a gun, young and beautiful with a gun. No, but they have different lives and different struggles and different aspirations and dreams. And they are a dreamer like anyone else and they could experience life like anyone else. But in addition to a lot of problems that they face because of being a women and Kurdishhood and who they are in that region.
So I think the book intentionally tries to provide that diversity in worldviews and in experiences as well.
You might be a Kurdish woman that might not even have thought about politics for one day, you know? So it's interesting to get those stories as well, not only women who were involved in politics or things like that.
Lisa-Marie: Thank you. So Clara has put a question. Thank you, Clara. Thank you for such an interesting talk, she says, you mentioned earlier that the women were risking more in the cities than the freedom fighters and the mountains men could you elaborate on what kind of work these women were doing?
Houzan: Thank you Clara. When I say that, really, because you have the men up in arms in the mountains where they can hide, they can fight.
Obviously there were a lot of killing and backlashes with the men as well. I mean, a lot of family members of myself were killed, struggling in that fight against a dictatorial regime, but the woman, because you are in the city and you are like directly under the surveillance of the Ba'athist of the intelligence services as well. I mean, a lot of Kurdish women were imprisoned. And when I speak about that specific time in the 1980s, because there was a lot of intensification of this struggle between Kurdish people and the central regime. So, any woman who was arrested and taken to prison, she would be viewed as somebody who have been raped. That's in my part of Kurdistan. Unfortunately, there was a lot of misogynistic views. Although the women were political, they were carrying out a lot of planned activism, such as organising in hiding, getting logistics and money and resources to send to the freedom fighters.
I mean, how could they live in the mountains. If the woman in the cities and men alike, were not sending support and money and food and clothing and everything. Plus, they were the messengers of bringing political literature back into the cities because they could hide it in their bodies, not under their clothes.
So they were doing a lot of things really in terms of putting their lives at risky. Now, they were the main front-liners in my opinion, but then again, their roles were not really so recognised by the freedom fighters as such at, at least back then. Nowadays people like us criticise and then bring these issues to the fore.
But at that moment, that is how it was. Women were meant to be loyal and supportive like my own sister-in-law she was with my brother in the mountains for 10 years, supporting them, cooking for them, cleaning, I mean, even taking up arms. So it was much more difficult for women to do all of that.
I mean, how much you can go can be loyal to a man who has chosen to take up arms against the regime. And it's like, really the expectations placed on women were too much, that it was not easy to perform all of them. You know, expectations, you are meant to be a good sister, good wife, you need to keep the family together. You need to provide for them. Even so many of them would work outside to gain money, to send it to the husband or the, to the brother outside on the mountains, but also in the city, you had to do a lot more things. I'm talking about the society in the 1980s, where women were hardly given jobs because most women were staying home. It was only a certain number of women, either a teacher or a nurse or a doctor here and there, but really the big majority of women were at home or supposed to be at home.
So that's why their share of this struggle in my opinion, was a lot more and the price they paid was a lot higher.
Lisa-Marie: Thank you. So I've got a question that I want to ask on revolutionary politics, and we've got a couple more questions from Fatima, Rebecca, so the question on revolutionary politics is something that really struck me as I started to learn about Rojava and other areas as well.
So when faced with the politics of colonialism, the population displacement, you talked about assimilation and genocide. What has definitely emerged from the Kurdish struggle or significant challenges to the status quo serve I think as examples for the rest of the world, and these are ways of organising that are based upon a quality grassroots participatory democracy that put women and sustainable ecology at the front and centre. And I think this is a critical importance and contributes to why the attacks are so fierce.
Can you tell us a bit more about this revolutionary politics?
Houzan: Yeah, I think the revolutionary politics in Rojava is not a product of today. It's a product of many years of mobilising, education, political education, and also a political social program as well, that kind of nurtured this society, at least those who are involved in politics, to have such thinking about and to involve women in the national question as well, and in the struggle for the liberation.
But also, generally speaking in the world today with the globalisation and neo-liberalism wherever there is a hope for collectivism for solidarity between human beings, for a kind of radical alternative in terms of cutting down on privatisation, cutting down on selfish, new liberal individual type of ideal in today's world. I think everybody would want it to fail in terms of superpowers and as well as local and regional, misogynist states like Turkey, like Iran, like any other Islamist misogynist states who are all practicing Sharia law in their personal status law, when it comes to women's rights and you have this small region coming up with the secular law you know, freedom for women equality and so on and, and taking out the religion out of the constitution and saying that it's a personal matter. I think that is an alarm for them to wake up and say, oh no, no, we don't want this to happen in our own countries.
So I think that's why Rojava is a hope for so many people, not only in the region, but really around the world who are tired to death with what neo-liberalism is doing here and there as well.
And I think that's why I have been really trying to support that hope as much as I could and I call on everybody to continue to do that as well.
So I think that's what makes them unique. And that's what makes their struggle by putting gender equality on the top of the agenda. And that's what we need as well. Not just women in the arms struggle and after that go home, you know, you have no role in society.
I think hopefully until this moment we haven't seen this and they kind of made sure that women themselves really made sure that they are represented and they're everywhere and that their role is taken seriously in politics as well.
Lisa-Marie: I think as feminists, we have much to learn from this social revolution. I really do. So Rebecca is asking, is there a strong tradition of oral storytelling in a context where it is hard to get hold of books?
Houzan: Yes. I mean, I would say in my generation, like my mom would be the best story teller. And when I was collecting these stories, one of the things that I blamed myself for was why I never got to record my mother when she was telling these stories. I mean, obviously she was telling me stories when I was a kid and I wouldn’t let her sleep until she tells me the story. I mean, she had many stories, ancient stories, that were really, really interesting that I vaguely remember, but then you grow up and you don't think these things are important, but actually nowadays I think I should have really done that. Or obviously my mum died in 2010 and at that time I wasn't so conscious to do this, to record her when she was telling all these stories.
So her generation were a great generation of storytellers. They were women who knew many stories by heart. The reason for that is because again, lack of, language to write in. I mean, so they could speak Kurdish at home. Many people could speak Kurdish at home if they couldn't speak it outside so one of the ways to keep these stories going was by telling it to their children and yeah, and I think Kurdish people generally speaking are good storytellers, but they haven't turned it into writing. And this is what I try to do to get the women, to put it into writing.
Lisa-Marie: Thank you. Fatima says: what would give Kurdish women the real sense of liberation or even an identity?
Houzan: I think for colonised people, it's very difficult to unlock a lot of damage that colonisation, occupation, oppression, and fascism and dictatorial regimes plant in you. And I think for us, it is very important to start with those questions and to see who we are as Kurdish women and what we want regardless of what the political project is, because we have various political parties and I think we should, as Kurdish women look and search for our own identities and beings and aspirations, but regardless of what political projects are there in our society, I mean, I, I don't mind women joining army, fighting, struggling being political, part of political parties, but I want women to do this with a female consciousness that is really not compromising women's rights.
That is really not acting as a feminising décor for the patriarchal male political parties. So for me, I would really want to see that, and I hope and I think as well, the more and more Kurdish women are trying to unlock and trying to really come out from the effects and internalisation of what the other coloniser and the oppressor is trying to instil in you.
I think it's about time. And I said, one day in one comment that 21st century should be the century for Kurdish women to claim their rightful place in history, because we have been denied the right to exist in history. And this is our time to do that. And we can do that only by ourselves not to be puppets of particular male organisations and political parties to present you: ‘This is a woman, that's our woman.’ I don't like that. I want to be me. And I want to basically create an identity and find an identity that fits me, not that fits the idea of nationhood and the nation and the political party. And I hope we go to that direction and to find ourselves more and to bring back ourselves into the centre of politics and society and history as well.
Lisa-Marie: Very, very well put Houzan, can you see the chat? Cause you know, it's a written a question and I just would love it if you could read that one.
Houzan: It says, ‘unfortunately for the mother tongue we often say in Kurdish Kurmanji the language of parents and grandparents, the land of parents and grandparents, stories of parents and grandparents. We need a feminist language.’
I agree with and this is the kind of thing that really cultural projects from the day one until now where we are like six years old, by the way. But we've been fighting on many friends to kind of argue for the world view, not only language, but a worldview that is based on women’s perspective as well, because what we have had so far in terms of politics and cultural production has been one dimensional, a male view, a male worldview, really in terms of language and literature and poetry, even. I mean, if you look at women's depiction in poetries, and literature in Kurdish, you will see how they have constructed the female, which I totally disagree with. And I have said that, I mean, I have been talking against that in my many Kurdish interviews as well.
So I think we need a language that we claim ourselves. We claim us, our bodies and our beings and our aspirations and ideas. And that's what we need really. Unfortunately, Kurdish language like any other languages in the world, It's typical. Like they always, the male is the centre. The male is the main category and the other is the woman.
So I think we need to get rid of that. And we need to kind of produce work of art work of literature, work of writing memoir and biographies from our own worldview and perspective. That could be the solution.
Lisa-Marie: Another question: What do you think of sisterhood between female fighters in the mountains? Did they speak about the hierarchy between women fighters?
Houzan: That's an interesting question, actually. The problem with hierarchy, hierarchy exists where we live in capitalist societies. And this is something I'm not, I cannot talk about the female fighters of Rojava. I haven't been there. but from what I see, there's a strong sisterhood and solidarity among the women from what I see from what I hear and from the witnesses who have gone there and came back and talked about all of that.
But in Iraqi Kurdistan, where in 1970s and 80s, there were really the presence of women in the fight in the mountains was not that much. It was very limited because the political forces were not very female friendly in terms of allowing women in their own ranks because they said women should be in the city. And it's difficult for them to be in the mountains and it’s not for women.
But I think even among those women, the women who were wives or sisters or daughters of the high ranking, official male officials, they would usually have more authority and more power in the organisation. And that is still the case in, Iraqi Kurdistan to be honest with you.
They just appoint wife of someone and daughter of someone to be head of something to be head of that or to be director of this minister of that. It’s all kind of, the loyal wife, the loyal daughter and loyal sister of this political officials who get first places in politics and in running of society.
You have many more strong women but because they're not politically affiliated or they're not really the kind of female decoration, they don't get far away in life. So that is the reality of hierarchies among women, unfortunately.
Lisa-Marie: There's a call within the book for women to stand in solidarity with the women's revolution and with the Kurdish people. For our listeners who are on the call now, and who'll be listening to this and a podcast later, how can we best stand in solidarity with the women's revolution?
Houzan: I think it's an ongoing struggle and I think Kurdish issues and Kurdish woman matter for humanity, because what they have been doing is fighting against all kinds of dictatorial regimes, misogynistic groups like ISIS who only bring misery and suffering and terrorism to the world. So I think Kurdish women and Kurdish people in general have been in the forefront of paying a high price to basically defeat such forces, which is a threat to the world, not only to the Kurdish people.
And I think they deserve that support and solidarity. It could be done through anything. I mean, you have various organisation in Rojava, women organisations and the YPJ and all of that. I mean, you can support them in any way that you can. There are usually calls coming out for support for signature, or like you have other humanitarian organisations who are founded in Rojava. They are created by the people you have the woman's village. I think it would be important to support such feminist initiatives, in my opinion, logistically medically, by visiting Rojava, going there, spreading the news about these initiatives, I think it would be important.
Their progressive struggle matters to all of us in the world. We need many more geographies that can present alternatives so that we can really defeat neo-liberalism in the world.
Lisa-Marie: How have women who participated in the book Kurdish Women's Stories who gifted their stories to the book, responded to it being published?
Houzan: So many of them, the ones who I could talk to, they were extremely happy and they couldn't believe it, that it would be published in English and that it will have so many readers around the world. And they were really, really, so happy. And some of them, their daughters shared their stories, the stories of their mothers on Instagram and social media, even the daughters, they didn't know the stories that these things happen to their moms. And because as I said in the beginning, so many times we don't even talk about these things, that happened to us, to our own children because we just think, oh, okay, it's past, let's not dwell on it. We just move on. And I think in one way, it's good, on the other hand is not good as well because our children need to know who we are and they need to know where we come from and how we did all of this. I mean, so many of them were thrilled. I mean, they're their children. Some of them are university students. One of them was actually trying to organise a seminar for me online. The daughter of one of the women who put her story in the book. I mean, as I said, so many of them were really filled with joy because they thought it's a collective initiative of 25 women. And it's not just my story, you know, I'm the hero. I'm this and that, no, it is 25 stories from age of 70 to age of 20. And it's so nice. It's like really too much work has gone into it. A lot of women were also involved and men in the production of this book. So that makes it very unique.
It was published in Kurdistan and is published abroad in UK as well as in Canada, University of Alberta Press also printed their own version. So I think it's an achievement for all of us, and I'm really grateful to all and each woman who volunteered to share their story with us and to trust us and to have published their stories. For me it's a great honour.
I could not really be as happy as I am now that I've managed with a great team in Cultural Project to produce this book of such a quality.
Lisa-Marie: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And that idea of it being a collective effort is very important. At the beginning, you talked about Kurdish women being portrayed either as eternal victims of male violence or as heroin freedom fighters and you said that like all women throughout the world, they too have their own diversity of experience.
And I'd just like to say that you talk about having created a glimpse of who Kurdish women are and who they could be and unequivocally you have done that. So please pass on our, thanks to all the contributors and a huge thanks to yourself Houzan and to mention that FiLiA does stand in solidarity with the Kurdish struggle, and I look forward to working with you in the future.
And thank you ever so much to all the attendees for all your questions. Sorry. We couldn't get through all of them. But I hope Houzan you will come back with version three and version two and so on so hopefully we will call you back for a continued discussion.
Houzan: Thank you so much, Lisa, for all your support and sisterhood. It means a lot to me. You've always been there for us and thank you FiLiA so much and everyone, and to this wonderful feminist book club who made sure to read it and to come and ask these questions and thanks everyone else who just joined us, I'm really, really happy and proud to have spoken to all of you.
And I'm grateful forever. Thank you so much.