Rojava: A Novel of Kurdish Freedom

A young Kurdish woman discovers a commitment to liberation, both personal and collective, through a harrowing journey to Rojava and the heart of armed struggle.

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, and who late in life makes the surprising and fateful decision to return to his homeland to join the Kurdish People’s Defense Units (YPG) in their fight against the Islamic State.

Searching for answers as to why the father she adored would give his life for such a cause, Jînçin embarks on a clandestine journey through various autonomous territories of Kurdistan, from Başûr in northern Iraq (southern Kurdistan), to the remote mountains of Bakûr in southeast Turkey (northern Kurdistan), and to Rojava in northeastern Syria.

With little training and without warning, she is plunged into the freedom struggle as she 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 fighter is a bitter and arduous one, but also one of rich discovery. Over months of mournful, intimate, and often-times playful conversations with her comrades, as well as remarkable acts of resistance and narrow escapes from grave danger, Jînçin finally grasps her place and purpose in the world.

Ultimately, Rojava is the story of people living and fighting shoulder-to-shoulder who have decided, regardless of the present world order and in spite of the odds stacked against them, to build a society free from discrimination, based on shared dignity and collective autonomy.

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.