Sharam Qawami
Translated by Kiyoumars Zamani
Edited by Patrick Germain

Fiction / Anticolonial Politics

A young Kurdish woman discovers a commitment to liberation, both personal and collective, through a harrowing journey in Rojava with armed freedom fighters.

Jînçin is a young professor living in Berlin, born to a Yezedi father who years earlier was shunned and exiled for marrying outside his community, but who late in life makes the surprising decision to return to his homeland to defend his people and join the Kurdish People's Defense Units (YPG) in their fight against the Islamic State.

Searching for an understanding of why the father she adored would give his life for such a cause, the young woman journeys to the remote mountains of northeastern Syria, into the autonomous Kurdish region of Rojava, to join the freedom struggle. With little training and without warning, she immediately confronts the extremist threat that faces the Kurds, from bloody skirmishes with ISIS to drone strikes and the clandestine operations and brutal human rights abuses of the Turkish military. 

Her new life as a guerrilla is a bitter and arduous one, defined by party discipline and sustained only by the most basic meals, river water, and the rare goods that can be smuggled into the mountains. At first, Jînçin finds such an austere existence intolerable and resolves to flee from the seemingly doomed experiment in Kurdish autonomy. As she contemplates abandoning the new comrades she begins to realize the hidden complexity of the society in formation around her, full of philosophizing, humor, and affection. She gains profound insights into her own history and heritage, the struggles that Kurds and particularly the Yezidis face, as well as the richness of life in a gender-liberated society, and the practice of democracy in an autonomous society. 

Transformed in the heat of battle and by the demands of living and fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with her comrades, the illusions that unwittingly restrain Westerners’ freedoms and their comprehension of the world around them fall away. Over months of mournful, intimate, and often-times playful conversations, as well as narrow escapes from grave danger, Jînçin finally grasps her place and her purpose in the world. She and her comrades grow to gain a mutual sense of understanding and solidarity that permits them, in spite of the odds stacked against them, to achieve remarkable acts of resistance against the forces of domination that seek to destroy their life, dignity, and freedom.

Ultimately, Rojava is the story of people from the same social stratum who have decided, regardless of the present world order, to build a society free from any discrimination, based on the dignity and autonomy of individuals with religious, ethnic, ideological, and gender differences.