While nationalist readings of contemporary Kurdish literature dominate the field of Kurdish literary studies, this paper argues that Kurdish literature should be analysed in the context of a political geography much wider than nationalism. Contrary to the nationalist reading which projects the map of Kurdistan on many literary works, some narratives deliberately avoid such ideologization. Being rooted in the very local specific of songs, fairy tales and memories, the three short story cycles by Mehmet Dicle Asûs (2005) Nara (2010) and Ta (2015) include diverse strategies of geographical naming. These strategies challenge the established power of the Turkish state but do not suggest the “Kurdish state” as a substitute. This paper draws theoretical inspiration from Doreen Massey’s (1993) notion of the progressive sense of a place and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s (2006) perspective on cosmopolitanism understood as the ability to be rooted in ever new locations and their networks of human relations. I suggest that some Kurdish writers construct a new space and a new geography of human relations that go beyond the image of the local or the independent state. This space is not exclusively “Kurdish” but open to other minorities. It often blurs some aspects of the represented world and invites intertextuality which is rooted in both local and global literary contexts. What is more, in comparison to the oral tradition modern Kurdish writers widen the area of ‘implied readers’ and universalise the traditional stories and landscape to make them more familiar for global audience.

In Kurdish-Syrian writer Salim Barakat’s 2019 Arabic novel, Madha ‘an a-Sayida al-Yihudia Rahil? (What about Rachel, the Jewish Lady?), the author highlights the ways in which minority identities are constructed and delineated in twentieth century Syria. Barakat writes on the multicultural and interreligious relationships that existed before the Jewish exodus from Syria, in order to honor and preserve vestiges of this nearly forgotten Kurdish-Arab-Jewish history. Specifically, Barakat employs the character of Kihat, a sixteen-year-old Kurdish protagonist, to interrogate the place of his Jewish neighbors within Syrian national culture, and navigate the ethnically diverse city of Qamishli. Barakat represents Kihat’s coming of age story alongside the stark social and political changes that occur in Syria, following the Six Day War in June 1967. Notably, the young man’s inability to comprehend the ensuing cleavages between Israel and the Arab nations sets the tone for the novel, and foreshadows the tragic loss of Jewish life in the Middle East and the Maghreb in the mid twentieth century. It is at this historical juncture, and in light of Israel’s overwhelming victory after only six days of fighting, when conditions begin to transform for Mizrahi Jews in Syria. Given this historical backdrop, and the importance of minority alliances and identifications in the novel, this paper will analyze the ways in which a Kurdish character helps resurrect Jewish memory in the Arabic text. Although the novel is monolingual, and thus, is solely intended for and accessible to Arabic readers, the story, nevertheless, portrays a rich community of Jews, Kurds, Armenians, and Turks living as neighbors in Syria. Barakat illustrates the distinctively textured Qamishli, the city of his own childhood, to pay homage to cultural hybridity and multiethnic stories within Syria’s national sphere. He commemorates the lives of Qamishli’s former residents, and beseeches his readers to remember the vibrant spaces of a shared community in his former home. Therefore, perhaps comparable to Barakat’s book-length poem, Syria—which literary scholar Huda Fakhreddine considers his “elegy of self and homeland” (Syria)—this novel, too, serves as a form of elegy, a means to mourn the loss of a place where Jewish and Kurdish-Syrians could once live together—and be mutually embraced and celebrated.

Iraqi Kurdish author Bakhtiyar Ali’s fourth novel, Shari Mosiqare Spiyekan (The City of the White Musicians, 2006) was translated from Sorani to German by Peschawa Fatah and Hans-Ulrich Müller-Schwefe under the title Die Stadt der weißen Musiker in 2017, and was soon celebrated by German writer and critic Stefan Weidner as “a major novel about art and reconciliation” comparable to Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. The novel, hailed by Weidner as “an epitaph for the victims of the Kurdish wars” and “a manifesto for the power of poetry and life”, became more formally associated with the genre of genocide literature when its author was awarded the Nelly Sachs Prize on December 10, 2017. In this paper, I examine the narratological tools Bakhtiyar Ali employs in his novel to explore themes of justice, forgiveness, truth, beauty and morality. These include a unique plot structure, in which the four main characters' dreams, nightmares and searches – rather than a linear series of events – drive the narrative forward; and an array of symbols and magical realism elements that convey key messages about the (sometimes uncannily similar) emotional experiences of Anfal survivors, like Jeladet the Dove, and perpetrators of war atrocities, like General Samir Al-Babilee. Additionally, these characters’ interspersed philosophical conversations about truth and justice, often set in surreal spaces such as underground art tunnels and makeshift courtrooms, reveal a captivating world of oppression, genocide, regret, survival and perseverance. With this close reading of a now transnational text, I aim to demonstrate how Bakhtiyar Ali counters, by expounding his view of art as peaceful form of resistance and salvation, the extremism and political hate that destroyed his people during and after Iraq’s 1988 genocide campaign. I also bring his novel into conversation with scholarship on the ethics of fiction that seeks to represent rape, torture, and genocide in order to explore the human capacity for darkness and, more importantly, healing (Vice, 2000; Budick 2019; Gallimore & Herndon, 2019). Finally, I argue that Bakhtiyar Ali’s Shari Mosiqare Spiyekan is just one of dozens of contemporary Turkish- and Iraqi-Kurdish novels whose authors, by virtue of their transnational status, have initiated an interactive process of witnessing in and through literature, a process that does not end with the text, but rather, engages the readers of multiple nations in contemplating ‘unspeakable’ human rights violations.

When food systems are put under pressure due to resource scarcity, informal economies arise that allow communities to cope with changes in food production or distribution. Beginning after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Iraq experienced some of the most severe economic sanctions every levied by the United Nations, including almost a complete embargo on foodstuffs and medicine. The Kurdish communities and their food systems in northern Iraq experienced the sanctions and coped in unique ways that have long term implications for local food systems and Iraqi Kurdish food ways. While some scholars have provided documentation of the consequences of those economic sanctions on the food system during the 1990s until now, there is less known about the coping mechanisms that producers and distributors used to survive that time period. Interviews with over 100 participants involved in various aspects of the Iraqi and especially Kurdish food systems provided data on topics including changes in food production strategies and changes in distribution strategies from people working in the public sector and the private sector in Slemani governorate, Iraqi Kurdistan. The qualitative data analyzed using grounded theory will build a conceptual framework that highlights unique Kurdish coping mechanisms in comparison to a more general illustration of how Middle Eastern food systems adapt to the pressures of economic sanctions and conflict. Specifically, families used three key practices to cope within the food system disrupted by sanctions. Gulechna was a form of gleaning only used in times of the most extreme financial hardship to collect wheat or other crops for processing into a flour to make bread. Smuggling occurred at all borders within the Kurdish region and increased community access to food but was especially high risk in the 1990s due to the presence of the Iraqi military and the prevalence of newly widowed women using the smuggling of food as a livelihood strategy. Partnerships related to crops and livestock shared the financial risk of agriculture across multiple parties with each strategy carrying its own term, including niwakari and sapan. While these strategies were specific to the Iraqi Kurdish food context of the 1990s, the general way in which these coping strategies evolved can be mapped onto other communities to help understand the relationship between economic sanctions, food systems, and conflict. This framework could be used by other researchers to understand similar, more current situations arising in other parts of the Middle East.

Maps have legitimizing force. While typically perceived as accurately capturing objective reality, it has been well established that they are often manipulated to serve a pre-set agenda. Cartographers utilize boundary demarcations and toponyms, among other tools, to construct particular narratives. This paper studies how such critical cartographical tools have been used in political, conflict and geo-cultural maps of the Kurdish entity over the past forty years. It specifically focuses on the constitutionally recognized autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq and the de facto self-governing experiment in Rojava in northern Syria. The purpose is to analyze maps produced by both sides of the conflict and those utilized by media outlets covering it to understand how maps are rendered to constructed texts through which to interpret the socio-political discourse of their respective creators and publishers. The study is based on maps procured from the Library of Congress, the Perry Castaneda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas, non-profit organizations like the Kurdish Institute (Institut Kurde de Paris), and various news media outlets. A longitudinal comparative analysis of the boundary demarcations and toponyms of the various types of maps is carried out. When applicable, maps are placed within the context and text of their sources and platforms. The study shows that platforms explicitly supportive of Kurdish initiatives for autonomy generally include thematic (both conflict and geo-cultural) and political maps that focus solely on the general area that Kurds inhabit, clear boundary demarcations for Kurdish administrations, and inclusion of Kurdish toponyms instead of Arabic ones where applicable. On the other hand, the Kurdish entity and its symbols were found mainly absent from neutral and pro-Iraqi or pro-Syrian platforms. While such findings are expected, it is in the analysis of the tools utilized and manipulated and the evolution over the years that the importance of this study lies. In a region prevalent with contentious borders, critical cartographic analyses are much needed in Middle Eastern studies. With the exception of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there is lack of in-depth cartographic comparative analysis across contending entities. Cartographic studies of the Kurdish case have mainly focused on geo-cultural maps and their shifting depictions over time on different platforms and how they are used to disseminate the concept of Greater Kurdistan and arouse Kurdish nationalism. Left unstudied are conflict maps, the tools used in constructing them, the narratives they covey, and their utilization by various sides of the conflict.

According to sociologist Nira Yuval-Davis, belonging is the result of emotional attachment that causes an individual or group to feel “safe” or “at home” in a particular context; the politics of belonging, on the other hand, comes into focus when this feeling of safeness or at-homeness is threatened, resulting in a collective response that constructs not only belonging but also the collective itself (2011). For many diasporic Kurdish communities, the politics of belonging is a result of having been displaced from their nations of origin, targeted in acts of state aggression or even genocide, and relocated to places in which their fellow Kurds might not even speak the same language. Given the importance of radio and other broadcasting technology in the formation of a transnational Kurdish “listening public” (Blum and Hassanpour, 1996), how has Kurdish popular music reflected the unique challenges of a Kurdish politics of belonging? In this paper, I attend to this question by analyzing the 2013 pop song “Take Me Home,” featuring Kurdish artists Li Dinê and Dashni Morad. On their group’s website, the three members of Li Dinê, who have ties to Turkish Kurdistan, describe their music as the result of blending “eastern” and “western,” as well as old (Kurdish folk) and new (R&B/hip-hop), traditions. Including Dashni Morad (originally from Iraqi Kurdistan) in “Take Me Home” allows the group to craft a musical politics of belonging that represents the vast majority of the Kurdish homelands. Analyzing the visual and sonic features of the song and the accompanying music video, I show how its politics of belonging reflects the struggles of a Western-oriented, transnational Kurdish listening public. In particular, I highlight the song’s use of themes such as nostalgia, rurality, and lovesickness to emphasize a shared, pan-Kurdish past, even as others of the song’s sonic and visual markers suggest an affiliation with urban centers of capital and feminist critiques of contemporary Kurdish society. I argue that the resulting image of “home” created by the song represents not so much a geographic home for Kurds as a reimagining of the diasporic Kurdish community itself.