A young Kurdish woman discovers a commitment to liberation, both personal and collective, through a harrowing journey in Rojava with armed freedom fighters.
J®n§in 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, J®n§in 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, J®n§in 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.
Industry Reviews
"Form Lu Hsun, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Wole Soyinka, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Ghassan Kanafani, Mulk Raj Anand, Munshi Prem Chand, national liberation struggles have always been a wellspring of stories and a source of inspiration for storytellers. Rojava is no exception. Gathered from the font of the Kurdish liberation struggles, Sharam Qawami weaves stories of real people engaged in real struggles into a story of the indefatigable human spirit. Far from refusing to succumb and let their humanity unravel in the face of fascism, militarism, patriarchy, ecological destruction, as well as the breakdown of comradeship and social relationships, the humanity of these characters resurface precisely in moments between despair and determination. Qawami lets the characters tell the story of a century-old struggle with all its contradictions, tensions, and dissensions in the past and present, and through the burning human desire for freedom and justice that holds them together. Whatever the twists and turns in the Kurdish liberation struggle, Rojava will continue to educate and inspire."
-Radha D'Souza, author of What's Wrong with Rights? Social Movements, Law and Liberal Imaginations and professor of law at the University of Westminster, London
"Sharam Qawami has packed much of the history of the Kurdish movement as a whole and of Rojava in particular into this highly readable and inspiring novel. In turns suspenseful, introspective, and even humorous, Quawami leaves plenty of room for nuance and the manifold stories of characters in their multiple dimension and complexity, while avoiding the pitfalls of romanticizing or heroising the history and ongoing struggle of guerilla fighters who dare to imagine and win freedom—all of which makes the novel immensely gripping and worth reading."
—Thomas Schmidinger, author of Rojava: Revolution, War and the Future of Syria's Kurds and associate professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Kurdistan Hewlêr
