Sharam Qawami’s Rojava and Haritha Savithri’s Zin reimagine the Kurdish liberation struggle through fierce female protagonists, offering twin perspectives on identity, trauma, and revolution
The imprisoned Kurdish liberation leader Abdullah Öcalan recently issued a call to disband the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and end the four-decade-long conflict with the Turkish government. Coincidentally, I completed reading two novels centred on that very struggle: Rojava: A Novel of Kurdish Freedom by Iranian-Kurdish writer Sharam Qawami and Zin, a Malayalam novel by Haritha Savithri.
The consequences of Öcalan’s ceasefire declaration remain to be seen. However, these two novels vividly portray the complexities of Kurdish identity politics, shaped over centuries. Despite being written in different languages around the same time, both works complement each other while maintaining distinct narrative styles.
The political landscape of Kurdish fiction
I bought the Malayalam original of Savithri’s Zin a few years ago, determined to read it. This was before it won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award and was published in English translation by Penguin Random House. I started reading it the day I bought it but couldn’t get very far. Even before reaching the city of Sur in the first chapter, I set the book aside. A severe case of reader’s block — triggered by an unusual reason — was to blame. It began with the name of the protagonist: Seetha. For someone like me, deeply entrenched in sociopolitical anxieties, the name carried a political weight that evoked an inexplicable unease.
Right at the beginning, the description — “Like a cloud bursting open, pieces of cotton enveloped Seetha, denser than a ‘woollen blanket’ in an instant” — created another dissonance that made reading difficult. (However, in the English translation by Nandakumar K, where ‘fleece blanket’ is used, the reading becomes smoother.) Progressing beyond that initial difficulty felt suffocating. Still, I tried hard to follow Seetha and Timur’s journey through Sur. But by the end of the first chapter, I had no choice but to abandon Timur on the road and close the book.
I often wondered if changing the protagonist’s name to something like Aruna might have made reading easier. But the effort required to make that mental adjustment was too overwhelming. Though I stopped reading the novel, I continued to explore its political landscape. That’s how, through a study on Kurdish fiction, I came across Qawami’s Rojava. Obtaining a copy proved challenging — I searched extensively before finally finding the e-book edition, published by Brooklyn-based Common Notions, a press dedicated to amplifying social justice movements. Translated by Kiyoumars Zamani, the book was available on Storytel.
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Qawami, born in Sanandaj, Iranian Kurdistan, was expelled from university and later from the country due to his conflicts with the regime. He was imprisoned multiple times before the age of 50. Now living in Germany, most of his Kurdish writings remain banned in Iran. The moment I found the book, I was drawn to it, though I was unfamiliar with Qawami’s literary world. With the experience of Zin still lingering in my mind, I treaded carefully.
How Rojava and Zin complement each other
The protagonist and narrator of Rojava is Heval Jînçin, also known as Kajin, a young woman at the heart of the Kurdish liberation struggle. While Seetha in Zin travels from Barcelona to Sur in Turkish Kurdistan in search of her boyfriend, Jînçin embarks on a clandestine journey across the autonomous territories of war-torn Kurdistan — traversing Başûr (southern Kurdistan, in northern Iraq), Bakûr (northern Kurdistan, in southeast Turkey), and the remote mountains of Rojava (western Kurdistan, in northeastern Syria) to follow her father’s path.
Zin by Haritha Savithri, Translated by Nandakumar K (Penguin Random House India, pp. 416)
Her father, an Ezdi (Qawami politically challenges the pronunciation Yazidi in the novel), left Germany one morning, reached Syria, took up arms for the Kurdish liberation struggle, and became a martyr — something Jînçin had to come to terms with. At the beginning of the novel, we see Jînçin among Kurdish liberation fighters, hiding in the mountains to evade detection by Turkish military drones. Until a few months ago, she was teaching at a university in Frankfurt; now, she has become one of the guerrillas. She hasn’t yet received her official code name in the organisation, and for now, her comrades call her ‘Hevala German.’
‘Hevala means ‘comrade’ for women, ‘Hevale’ for men, and ‘Heval’ in the plural for comrades. By the time I understood this without needing a footnote, something miraculous had happened. The reading block that had plagued me had completely disappeared. Rojava took me by the hand and led me forward, eventually bringing me back to Zin as well. From the first chapter of Rojava, titled ‘The Era of Drones’, I jumped straight to ‘Timur,’ the second chapter of Zin. A nonlinear reading plan unfolded before me, and the narratives of both novels advanced together, complementing each other.
Liberation beyond the Western ideal
While both works align ideologically with the Kurdish liberation struggle, they differ in their approach toward the fighters. Zin narrates like a long drone shot, descending from the skies over Diyarbakir and zooming into Sur, Cicika, and other places, focusing on the Kurdish people’s survival, providing a macro perspective loosely juxtaposed with the Indian political context. In contrast, Rojava brings us closer to guerrilla life, presenting the fighters’ personal and ideological struggles.
Unlike Seetha, who finds herself hopelessly trapped in the violent jaws of totalitarianism, Jînçin strides determinedly into the war zones of Rojava. Many of the guerrilla women in Rojava would likely be familiar with Arman or Dewran of Zin. Some among them would have heard the blood-soaked cries echoing from the underground cells of Cizre.
The political nuance of Rojava is encapsulated in the episode of Befrin, a ‘Kurdish cat with a Turkish’ name, adopted by the guerrillas. When asked whether the cat is Turkish or Kurdish, Jînçin initially responds aligning with the pragmatic retort — whether it can catch mice — echoing the Chinese Communist logic. However, as her political consciousness evolves, she is forced to reconcile with the deeper implications of this question.
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Jînçin’s political awakening becomes most evident in her recognition of the Kurdish-Ezdî identity, a realisation that takes shape towards the end of her stint with the YPJ. This subtle political thread allows Rojava to explore the identity crises faced by Ezdîs within Kurdish communities, as well as the Kurdish party leadership’s veneration of Abdullah Öcalan.
Even a Kurdish guerrilla group led by a strong woman like Hevala Rûken only begins to reflect on its own internalised patriarchal values after Jînçin’s arrival. At the same time, the greatest lesson Kurdistan teaches Jînçin is that liberation holds possibilities beyond the confines of Western liberal ideals of freedom.
The Kurdish liberation dream
Zin takes its name from a tragic heroine in Kurdish folklore. The novel’s entry point is the romance between Seetha and Dewran. In contrast, Rojava is built upon an absence of love. Even the guerrillas’ celibate way of life is tied to their hopes for the future, as Heval Saro tells Jînçin. Interestingly, Jînçin only narrates her sexual encounter with Saro after she boards a flight from Kurdistan to Germany.
And this is the moment she reveals that the seemingly dull boyfriend waiting for her in Frankfurt is none other than the novelist Qawami. Zin is not told from Seetha’s perspective, for she has been captured by the Turkish military, brutalised in confinement, and left to endure the silent grief of losing Dewran’s unborn child due to gangrape. The novel reaches its conclusion with her release and departure to Spain — a journey marked not by triumph, but by the weight of all that has been taken from her.
However, Jînçin departs for Frankfurt with a deepened understanding of guerrilla political consciousness — particularly the decision to free, rather than kill, the captured soldiers who have committed rape, possibly including Seetha in Zin.
“How long have you been in Kurdistan?”
“Almost one year.”
“A year as a tourist, Hevala Jînçin?”
I burst into laughter and say, ‘No, as a terrorist.’”
This exchange between Jînçin and her fellow traveller as they land in Germany is where Rojava ends. Seetha of Zin might have uttered the same words upon landing in Barcelona, but in a different manner, maybe without that laughter.
It is extremely rare for two novels written in different languages at the same time to complement each other in a way that provides the reader with such political clarity. Perhaps this says something about the profound international significance of the Kurdish liberation dream.
