Against the backdrop of war and violence, social-political as well as lingual repressions, and the challenges presented by a patriarchal society, Kurdish poetesses have been creating meaningful work throughout the centuries. This collection of translated poems brings to light some of these underrepresented female writers, whose work has been essential to the development of Kurdish poetry. Representing various Kurdish regions and dialects, this volume of selected poems touches upon themes such as sexuality, violence, gender domination, intimacy, fantasy, and romantic love. While this collection offers illuminating insights into the work of Kurdish poetesses, it is the hope of its creators, the Exeter Kurdish Translation Initiative, that it inspires further translations and publication of Kurdish literature. This beautiful and groundbreaking collection of English translations from Gorani, Sorani, Kurmanji, and Arabic was achieved through an innovative collaborative translation project in the Centre for Kurdish Studies, University of Exeter. From the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, it expresses women’s voices on politics, nationalism, gender, love, science, education, and everyday Kurdishness in memory, elegy, dream, and discourse. See such haunting lines from Gulîzer as “May those who have stayed not say the leaving is easy./ May those who have left not say the staying is simple.” Or “When two rivers separate/ How do they part their water?” Anyone interested in women’s poetry, diaspora, translation, and transnation will want to hear these poems. – Regenia Gagnier FBA, author of Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century and editor, The Global Circulation Project The vivid image of love, lost, hope, beauty, desire, violence, pain, and suffering that are sketched in this book enchant and attract readers to enter into a more intimate lives of Kurdish women. In this exquisite collection of poems written by Kurdish women and translated into English for the first time, we are exposed to a more imaginative way of hearing Kurdish women’s voices. It is in the interstices of lived words and the lifeworld that Kurdish women poets candidly dream freedom and suggest ways to move beyond all forms of oppression and violence. – Shahrzad Mojab, Professor, University of Toronto and the editor of Women of Non-State Nation: The Kurds. CONTENTS Translating Kurdish Poetry as a Collective Endeavour – Farangis Ghaderi and Clémence Scalbert Yücel Unsung Poets of Kurdistan: A Reflection on Women’s Voices in Kurdish Poetry – Farangis Ghaderi and Clémence Scalbert-Yücel Mestûre Erdelan Hêmin Fayeq Bêkes Jîla Huseynî Diya Ciwan Tîroj Trîfa Doskî Viyan M. Tahir Gulîzer

Literature, images, and metaphor are often where most of a nation’s history are embedded. A study of modern Kurdish literature highlights a fealty to a rich literary past and a rich source of historiography. The articles in this volume address many facets of the literary in the Kurdish world: proverbs, feminist literature, and resistance in literary works, poetry, prose, etc. In the end, the volume offers a general paradigm of the complex literary framework of the Kurds, their continuous resistance for nationhood in their history, and their modern reinventing of the self. An overview of some of the works in modern Kurdish literature points to both asymmetry and commonality in comparative literary studies. These works highight the thematic reach in Kurdish literary studies.

Women of Kurdistan: A Historical and Bibliographic Study documents a century long history of Kurdish women’s struggles against oppressive gender relations and state violence. It speaks to bibliographic silences on Kurdish women; silences that are systemic and structured, with many factors contributing to their (re)production. The book records extensive literature on violence perpetrated by the family, community, and the state as well as presenting the reader with a vibrant archive of resistance and struggle of Kurdish women. The analysis avoids the fashionable state-centered scholarship, which purifies processes of nation-building, state-building, and disguises their violence. The image depicted of the women of Kurdistan in this bibliography is shaped also by the languages we have chosen: English, French, and German. It is a record of material in languages that are not spoken by the majority of the Kurds. It will, therefore, be different from a bibliography of works in the Kurdish language, which have a majority of Kurdish authors, with more entries on topics such as poetry, fiction, education, and arts. "Love and learning made the making of this bibliography imaginable. It began more than 20 years ago when Amir was expanding his theoretical ground for class analysis of nationalism and peasant movement in the Kurdish region of Mukriyan (Hassanpour, 2021). Simultaneously, I was engaged with debates on Marxist feminism and transnational feminism while grappling with post-al tendencies in feminism such as post-colonialism, post-structuralism, and post-modernism. We wanted to better understand the explanatory power and political implications of Marx’s dialectical historical materialism in explicating the intersecting and refracting relations of gender, class, race, culture, nation, and nationalism. This commitment, nonetheless, did not remain in the realm of epistemology as a disembodied intellectual exercise. As a member of a dominant nation–a Shirazi born Iranian–I wanted to critically confront this national “identity” and the sense of “belonging.” Amir sought to scrutinize patriarchal structures and gender relations in Kurdish history, society, culture, and nation. This intertwined mind and heart desire put us onto a path of renewed discoveries of our personal and intellectual relations. In a nutshell, this was the beginning of the making of Women of Kurdistan: A Historical and Bibliographic Study." Women of Kurdistan provides a meticulously researched source book for readers interested in women, gender, and sexuality in Kurdistan and the Middle East. It covers a wealth of bibliographic material, including both scholarly and non-academic publications, many of which have not previously been accessible to broader audiences. But Women of Kurdistan is more than a source of information. It is also an eloquent reflection on the entanglement of knowledge production and political power, and a call to recognize scholarship’s potential in shaping historical change. Above all, it is a passionate statement about the impossibility to comprehend the intersection of colonial, capitalist, and nationalist forces without attention to women’s lives and struggles. - Marlene Schäfers, British Academy Newton International Fellow, University of Cambridge. Women of Kurdistan is simply an excellent template for how to chronicle women’s resistance politics. By framing the Kurdish women’s struggles within a historical materialism under different modes of production and discussing the political influence of five different nations on the Kurdish peoples, the authors offer a rich context that surpasses the common fetishization of women’s armed resistance. Internationally known for their Marxist and feminist works, Mojab and Hassanpour apply theories of nationalism, capitalism, peasantry, knowledge production, and relationship between state and non-state to understand the Kurdish experience, while honouring the struggle, voice, and poetry of Kurdish women activists. The book is as unapologetically critical of regional and religious hegemonies as it is of Kurdish patriarchies and is candid about the slipperiness of the concept of the “ideal Kurdish woman,” while skeptical of the benefits of transnationalization for the women honoured in this book. - Afiya Zia, author of Faith and Feminism: Religious Agency or Secular Autonomy? CONTENTS PART I. THE MAKING OF THE BIBLIOGRAPHY THE STATE OF KNOWLEDGE ABOUT KURDISH WOMEN WOMEN OF KURDISTAN PART II. WOMEN OF KURDISTAN: A BIBLIOGRAPHIC STUDY GENERAL WORKS ARTS AND CULTURE CUSTOMS AND BELIEFS DISPLACEMENT, REFUGEES, AND MIGRATION EDUCATION ETHNIC FORMATIONS FEMINIST AND WOMEN’S MOVEMENTS GENDER RELATIONS GENOCIDE, GENDERCIDE, WAR CRIMES, AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY GEOGRAPHY HEALTH AND MEDICINE HISTORY LANGUAGE LAW LITERATURE POLITICS RELIGION SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION WAR AND PEACE APPENDIX INDEX

Unique, timely, and up-to-date, this volume is the first comprehensive bibliography on Kurdish culture and society. Compiled to help students, educators, researchers, and policy makers find relevant information with ease, the book includes more than 930 items in four major languages--Arabic, English, French, and German. This work covers the fields of anthropology, archaeology, art, communication, demography, travel, economy, education, ethnicity, health, journalism, language, literature, migration, music, religion, social structure, urbanization, and women's studies. The volume includes books and book chapters, journal articles, Ph.D. dissertations, conference papers, articles in dictionaries and encyclopedias, and important Web sites. Essays provide an overview of Kurdish society as well as surveys of Kurdish life in Syria, the former Soviet Union, Europe, and Lebanon. An invaluable guide for researchers interested in the Kurds and Kurdistan, this book will aid in the location of information that is highly diverse and scattered. With its focus on a timely subject, this book fills a major gap in the bibliographic literature.

Kurdistan Chronicle is a non-partisan monthly magazine in English, published in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Kurdistan Chronicle provides timely and informative coverage of news, politics, culture, history, business, and more. The content found within Kurdistan Chronicle covers a wide range of topics from politics, culture, economics and more. It also features interviews with prominent figures in Kurdish society along with opinion pieces written by local and international writers and journalists who provide valuable insight into issues affecting everyday life throughout the region. Additionally, this publication serves as an educational resource for those looking to gain knowledge on various aspects related to Kurdish history, culture, politics and practices that may not be widely known outside of its borders.

Ezidi people (Yezidi/Yazidi) and their culture suffered greatly at the hands of Daesh before, during, and after the 2014 Sinjar (Shingal) Genocide. Since the resulting forced migration, the Ezidi ­community as one of the most marginalised societies in the Middle East has undergone a significant amount of society-wide transformation. New avenues for agency have opened, and Shingali Ezidi women have taken these opportunities to express transformed identities, filling spaces previously unavailable, and altering “traditional” gender roles. This first extensive ethnographic work ever conducted with Ezidi women examines origins and developments of transformations in their female identity and agency. The analysis of their expressions and performances is particularly notable because of the subaltern position under numerous layers of minority, e.g. ethnicity, geography, religion, politics, culture, language, as well as gender. The aim of this study is to investigate the utilisation of subaltern identity to actualise agency among women after genocide.

Charting the life of exile and displacement, terror and betrayal, repression and the subjugation of women, family love, flight, survival, and the mixed blessings of a mixed marriage in Britian, this book is a collection of poetry.

An extensive collection of contemporary Asian and Middle Eastern poetry includes the work of four hundred contributors from a variety of backgrounds, in a thematically organized anthology that is complemented by personal essays.