‘Xwîna Jin Halala’: Kajal Ahmad discusses love, war, and the unchanging experience of women in Kurdistan
In Kurdistan, shame moves like wind, and love like mountains – especially for women.
Declared by society and affirmed by our realities, women are not individuals. We do not possess the right to an opinion, a decision, a life. We are merely vessels for the honor of the men. If we dare see ourselves as more, we discover that the honor we carried barefoot over broken glass was, in fact, insecurity, and the instability it creates in men is exposed by the subsequent actions of our community. “I want to find a street where a woman’s blood has not been spilled,” Kajal Ahmad said in reference to her poem “In the Country of Terror I Love Streets More than Men.”
Maryam Yacoob, Jinwar Issa Tajiki, Doski Azad, Iman Sami Maghdid, Sarwin Khurshid Rashid, Zahra Jassim…Stabbed, shot, strangled, or burned to death, these are only a few of the women murdered in Başûr (South Kurdistan) this year. The nameless graves of the victims of femicide in Slemani serve as a reminder that a man’s alleged honor takes precedence over a woman’s life; his ego holds more value than her blood.
Kajal Ahmad is a poet and journalist who has spent decades writing about the untreated societal diseases from which women in Kurdistan suffer. “Writing is about knowing when to say what,” she said. This does not translate to ensuring comfort for the reader though; in fact, it usually entails the opposite. Both for her words in defense of women and of Kurdistan, she has faced resistance. Ahmad was not only targeted under Saddam’s government for writing about Kurdish oppression, but has also been threatened with honor killings for her poetry depicting the haze of sexism that engulfs our communities.
“The Insanity of Existence” is one poem in which Ahmad analyzes the relationship between resistance of the occupation of Kurdistan and the oppression of women. “I die for Kurdistan. But its patriots won’t / let it be my Kurdistan. In a land of men, under a sky of men, under / a God of men, how did this No / grow to my height?” she writes.
Neither Kurdistan nor women have achieved liberation and neither will with the other left behind, Ahmad said.
Kajal Ahmad was born in 1967 to the street called Taba Malla Abdulla in Kirkuk. Inhabited by many of the ethnic and religious groups from the region, the diversity of the street on which she grew up is one of the major factors she credits for her perspective and mindset. Ahmad’s mother herself was Assyrian and the neighborhood comprised a mix of Kurds, Turkmen, and Arabs. Originally from Slemani, her family returned to the city when Ahmad was still young. “It is the city of poets,” she said. “I cannot live without Slemani.” Ahmad explained that throughout centuries of battles and wars, the people of Slemani have remained defiant and, for that reason, the city’s soil is sowed with bravery.
From an early age, Ahmad expressed interest in poetry and especially literature written by women because it was both rare and a confirmation that she could be a writer. Her teachers encouraged her to write as they saw her capabilities and the potential she had. She began writing about women and children when she was 14 years old and distributed her work to women serving as Peshmerga. Soon after, Kurdistan also became one of the main themes of her writing. By her early 20s, Ahmad was visiting cities around Kurdistan to recite poetry – often while donning the Peshmerga uniform, widely considered to be traditional men’s clothing. She visited Halabja in 1988 for a reading, accompanied by other poets from the region. Two weeks later, the Iraqi military attacked the city with chemical weapons, killing thousands of people in a matter of minutes. As a mixture of poison gases rose through the air, life in Halabja came to an abrupt end. Ahmad was in Slemani at the time and witnessed the exodus of those who managed to escape the massacre.
Afflicted with grief and rarely possessing any means through which they could express their emotions, depression was widespread among people in her generation, Ahmad said, and recovery is ongoing. “We never saw ourselves as kids. We didn’t have a childhood,” she said, illustrating the cemented layers of trauma prevalent in her generation.
After the Anfal campaign, her work as a journalist forced her to remain informed on the events unfolding in Kurdistan. She strengthened her dedication and increased her investment in the national movement as a result. Though, for making Kurdish liberation a central aspect of her poetry, she became a target. Well aware that her life was at risk, Ahmad continued to write.
Much of her poetry has not been received well from within the community, however, and she has faced intense harassment over the years for supposedly having a negative influence on women. The accusations and hostility made a significant impact on her daily life. “They believe that war is something to be proud of and love is something to be ashamed of,” Ahmad said, “but it’s the opposite for me.”
In her poem “Verge of Doubt,” Ahmad touches on a subject avoided even in seemingly progressive circles: virginity. She writes, “Oh, mullah, oh, teacher of confusion, / if you only knew what virginity means / to women, and what we do / to preserve it.” For a woman, the cost of a love letter could be her life. Even the perception of a potential love can lead to her death. It is not unlikely for women in these situations to be murdered by family members or driven to suicide by the community’s intense vilification of her existence.
In a culture where women are justifiably murdered for simply speaking with a man, the shadow cast by the rumoured status of a woman’s virginity leaves her in a continuous state of fear until the day she is married. Even after, it may continue to cloud her life, because the word of a man is paramount. Kurdish men can often be heard bragging about their supposedly open-minded beliefs, only to go home and forbid their sisters from going to a restaurant with friends that night. Dissonance leads them to criticize the lack of freedom women have in our society and, in the same breath, admit that they refuse to marry a woman who is not a virgin, knowing full well that they will never apply those standards to themselves.
Ahmad also discussed the backlash she faced from certain feminist circles after she decided to begin wearing the hijab. “I am Kajal Ahmad regardless of what I am wearing,” she said. “You are free to do whatever you want and you shouldn’t be judged.” Though Ahmad no longer wears the hijab, the criticism she faced for it is a consequence of the narrow-minded view that a woman who wears the hijab is inherently oppressed and one who does not is liberated. These stereotypes only reinforce the brand of white feminism that maintains our oppression. People will point to relative freedom of expression as an indication of Kurdistan’s progress regarding women’s rights, yet the argument simply exposes another obstacle in the struggle for liberation: change is obstructed by the illusion of progress.
Images of women driving to the bazaar, wearing dresses assumed to liberate them, and speaking freely to men at work are claimed to be an indication of independence and freedom – even from within our community, and especially according to men. What people fail to see or acknowledge, however, is the weight of the male authority in her life.
Whether it be her husband, father, brother, uncle, cousin, or even son, her movement and actions are restricted to what he deems permissible. He insisted on accompanying her when she wanted to shop at the bazaar. He told her to change out of her pants and into a dress. He forbade her from going out with her coworkers if he was not present. Any deviation can be used as justification to preserve his honor.
In the words of Kajal Ahmad, “the blood of women is halal.”
Like a sacrificial lamb, the murder of a woman who fails to appease the fragile ego of a man is not only permissible, it is holy.
