Kurdish women and war-related violence in Iraqi Kurdistan

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the experiences of various female characters in the period immediately before and during the Persian Gulf War (1990–91), the Kurdish popular Uprising in Iraq, their subsequent mass-exodus to the Turkish and Iranian borders, and the creation of a quasi-independent Kurdish state in the north of Iraq. Studying Qasham Balata’s Runaway to Nowhere in 2010 and Sindis Niheli’s Hizar d Werçerxana da, Bergé Éké (Hizar and the Vicissitudes of Life, Part One) in 2013, the article deals with the lives and experiences of two female characters, focusing on their transformation from voiceless victims to well-informed social and political activists. By incorporating feminist themes of social inequality, domestic abuse, violence against women and women’s social and political activism into broader questions of nationalism and national struggle for liberation, the novels selected here affirm the significant and problematic interplay between feminism and nationalism in the Kurdish context.