Rojava: A Novel of Kurdish Freedom
Sharam Qawami, translated by Kiyoumars Zamani, edited by Patrick Germain
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.
PRODUCT DETAILS
Author: Sharam Qawami, Kiyoumars Zamani, Patrick Germain
Publisher: Common Notions
ISBN: 9781945335105
Published: July 2024
Format: Paperback
Size: 6 x 9
Page count: 400
Subjects: Syria / Iraq / Yezedis / Kurdistan
About THE AUTHOR
Sharam Qawami is an Iranian-Kurdish writer and literary critic, born in Sine (Sanandaj), Iran, in 1974. He was expelled from the university for political reasons. Qawami has been actively writing short stories, poetry, novels, and literary critiques for many years, navigating state censors and political exile. He is the author of several books and whose work holds a special place among Kurdistan’s literary class.
His first collection of short stories is entitled My Mother's Most Historical Wound. In 2003, the license for his first novel, Soveyla, was rejected by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, which he published in Iraq. His second novel, Birba, was deemed too radical, and led to his arrest and imprisonment at the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Sanandaj Intelligence Prison. In 2007, he published a book of literary criticism, The City of Groups and Bands, in Iran. In 2008, he published his third novel, Long Overcoat, in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq. Iranian security forces prevented the Persian translation. In 2010, he published a collection of poems entitled We Are Just Getting Old and Lonely without permission.
Sharam Qawami settled in Frankfurt, Germany after being forced to leave Iran in 2010 where he resides to this day. In 2017, he published his first novel written in German, Brücke des Tanzes, which was subsequently published in Kurdish. Sharam Qawami's latest work of fiction, Rojava, was written in both Kurdish and German simultaneously. The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance of Iran refused publishing permission for the Kurdish and Farsi manuscripts due to their breach of Iranian laws. Quwami decided to publish Rojava in both Kurdish and Farsi without permission. The book is now available in both languages within Iran. Rojava is his first work to be published in English.
Kiyoumars Zamani is a translator of Kurdish and Farsi literature and labor activist born in Sanandaj, Iran, 1977. He has written and translated from English into Farsi widely on topics including financialization, illiberal hegemony, revolution and counterrevolution in Syria, Marx’s materialist conception of history, as well as articles on Rojava, Russia and Ukraine-NATO war, feminist, popular, and working class uprisings in Iran (Jin-Jiyan-Azadi), and Kurdish politics.
Patrick Germain lives in Philadelphia, by way of a small town in Connecticut, Montreal, New York, and Taipei. He graduated from McGill University with a bachelors in Philosophy and East Asian Studies, the latter focusing on Chinese language. An autodidact trained in several languages, including Kurdish, his study of philosophy, cultures, languages, and history is motivated by those bright flashes in time when people transcend the current system and find ways to live more freely and cooperatively.