April 15, 2020 • 36 mins
In Rojava, the desire to build a society free of misogyny has led to the creation of an entire village just for women. From this place, Jinwar, they seek to heal themselves and then their society.
Episode Transcript: https://www.thewomenswar.com/
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Women's War, a production of I Heart Radio.
Rojava might be the friendliest place on earth. And I
mean that in a purely literal sense of the word friend.
See in Kurdish the word have all means friend. I'm
(00:23):
not a linguist, and I can't explain to you exactly
how it happened, But over the decades of fighting in
Turkey and Syria, the word have all came to take
on a deeper meaning. Today it's used in a manner
similar to the way the Soviets used comrade. And so
when people in Rojava are trying to refer to the
revolutionaries in their land, the people in this region who
truly believe in the ideology of Abdulla Alan, they often
(00:43):
call them the have alls. Now, if we were in
the United States, a heavily armed group of true believers
calling themselves the friends would absolutely be a terrifying death
cult of some sort. But for whatever reason, the word
have all has a friendly quality to it that somehow
stops it from being on settling. Well, there's a certain
militant formality to the word comrade. Have all just feels warm.
(01:05):
You cross a checkpoint and the assay you say hello, friend,
a soldier offers you a cigarette and you say thanks friend.
There's something addictive about the term, and Jake and I
fall easily into using it on a regular basis. The
morning of July two thousand nineteen starts with us both
packing up our crap, paying for our time at the hotel,
and meeting a lawn outside. He picks us and our
(01:27):
gear up. At around eight am, Alan offers us cigarettes.
Were both hungover thanks to the terrible case of Turkish
beer I bought last night, and neither of us particularly
wants to smoke, but we take the cigarettes and say
spats of all anyway that means thanks friend. After our
first puffs, we rather performatively smile at Alan, look up
to him and say bush that means good. A Laan
(01:49):
responds with a ray, a grin and the words sus bush,
which just means thanks. Good for the rest of our
time together. Whenever a lawan offers us a cigarette, he'll
wiggle his bushy eyebrows and grunt spas bash at us.
It's a light, friendly jab at the fact that, like
most foreigners, Jake and I have only learned the words
thanks and good in Kurdish We get on the road
(02:10):
and we roll through a checkpoint just outside of Drek.
Alan slows to a stop to hand over his papers.
I look out the window with the men and women
manning the checkpoint, and I'm struck by how good looking
they all are. Jake seems to notice the same thing,
and he leans over to me to say, everyone here
is gorgeous. My eyes are particularly drawn to the man
in command of the checkpoint, a grizzled male. A saysh.
(02:31):
I find myself staring at him for a while he
converses with his colleagues. He has a broad, sculpted chin
with a perfect John McClain level three days stubble. His
hair is a dusky brownish blonde. He looks like a
militant Kurdish George Clooney. There's a cigarette in his left hand,
while his right stays behind his back, gripping the magazine
of his rifle. As we pass by, he catches me
(02:51):
staring at him and he smiles. Slah have all, he
says to me. It means hello, friend. Calling the folks
in rojav a good look or attractive doesn't quite get
at what Jake and I kept noticing. It's not that
everyone here looks like a runway model. It's more that
they all look like the exact kind of people you'd
cast if you were making a movie. The folks here
are all striking, and Jake and I are not the
(03:14):
first Westerners to come to Rojava and notice this. In
the nineteen thirties, Agatha Christie, author of Murder on the
Orient Express and about a billion other books, traveled to
Kurdistan with her husband. He was an archaeologist. Christie herself
was quite an adventurer, and she traveled widely through much
of the region that's now Rojava. She wrote this about
the appearance of the people here. Kurdish women are gay
(03:35):
and handsome. They wear bright colors. These women have turbans
of bright orange round their heads. Their clothes are green
and purple and yellow. Their heads are carried erect on
their shoulders. They are tall, with a backwards stands so
that they always look proud. They have bronze faces with
regular features, red cheeks, and unusually blue eyes. The Kurdish
men nearly all bear a marked resemblance to a colored
picture of Lord Kitchener that used to hang in my
(03:57):
nursery as a child. The red brick fete, big brown mustache,
the blue eyes, the fierce and martial appearance. We're waved
on through the chat point and a line continues down
the highway. As I stare out the window, slightly hungover,
drinking coffee and smoking horrible cigarettes, I think about something
Cabat mentioned yesterday. She told us that a decent amount
(04:17):
of the men that she worked with in Rojava weren't
really committed to the gender equality aspect of the revolution.
She thought they were mostly kept in line by the
fact that at the moment, the weight of societal inertia
was behind equality. In her opinion, a number of Rojava's
men were just too afraid of being publicly shamed to
rock the boat. No one wants to be Like, as
(04:39):
soon as you feel astra size from your friend, you
do anything to get back. You know, that really works naturally.
So it's like they see everyone like, oh women now
eventually exactly even it's those men. I'm sure deeply they
are not conversed, some of them, or like they are
not really but what they were gonna say, but just
(05:07):
that that's it and do it. Then it became a habit.
Hollis is a bit of Arabic slang that kabat uses
a lot. It means finished or done. She's saying that
in another generation, the bigotry hidden under the surface of
some of Rojava's men will disappear, because those men will
die and they'll be replaced by young men who have
only ever known women as their equals. This is a
(05:29):
heartening fact, but it's also a scary one. While the
change is still skin deep, it's easy to revert. I
pondered this as we drove on, and it led me
back to thinking about my own country. In November two nineteen,
the FBI reported that hate crimes in the United States
had hit a sixteen year high as the coronavirus descended
upon American society. Hate crimes against Asian Americans searched for
(05:51):
the first time since World War Two. I think many
people were shocked to see so much racist of violence
and bigotry bubble up into the mainstream. Up until two sixteen,
they felt like the fight against this stuff had been
one for the last few years. We've all had to
confront the reality that this was not the case. Some
of the explosion in bigotry is new racism. People converted
in dark corners of the Internet. But much of it,
(06:13):
and probably most of it, is a result of people
who were quiet bigots for years until they decided it
was finally safe enough to be loud. As a lawn's
van trundled into the outskirts of Comichelo, my eyes were
caught by a trio of young girls on their way
to school. They walked together, heads bare, laughing and giggling,
and weighed down with probably twenty books between them. Not
(06:34):
too long ago, these girls had stared into a horizon
dominated by the black flags of Isis. I wondered what
their future would bring. My mind was drawn back to
something I had seen the night before in the bustling
streets of Darek. Jake and I had been poorly navigating
the crowded market looking for beer. As we'd stumbled about,
my eyes had been caught by a young soldier on
his drive home atop a scooter. His wife in full
(06:56):
MiCab sat on the back, her face towards the traffic
at their rear. It felt like a clear illustration of
the fact that many of the people here could still
go either way Rojava's revolutionary sentiments, its radical equality. That
stuff did enjoy a lot of popularity, and still does.
But the continued progress of those ideals relies on the
mass of folks in the middle acquiescing to progress because
(07:18):
that's where they feel the weight happens to be. The
most important question I had to ask about Rojava was this,
will any of it really last? And I knew that
my only chance at getting an answer lay in the
hearts of the people here. As we pass along, it
became obvious that tensions in the area had ratcheted up overnight.
The guards at checkpoints all checked our papers thoroughly, and
(07:39):
there seemed to be more of them than the day before.
A quick search through Google revealed that Turkey's president Radone
had recently made more threats against the Syrian Democratic Forces
or SDF. The military of Rojava. U SMS series were
said to be in route to the region. As we
waited in traffic, I couldn't help but stare up at
the Turkish border wall up in the not too distance.
I couldn't see them, but I out the weight and
(08:00):
guns of NATO's second largest army just beyond the horizon.
We pick up Kabat outside of her apartment in Comichelo,
She greets us with a thernis of instant coffee and
we go again to her favorite food stand for more
falafel burritos. For months afterwards, I found myself periodically craving
them the closest US equivalent. I found the garlic sauces,
probably the sauce at Zankow Chicken and Los Angeles, but
(08:20):
it's not nearly as good as we eat kabat walks
us through our schedule, she set up a meeting with
the head of the women's Economic Development Council for the
city of Kamischlow. The building is located in a residential neighborhood,
one floor in a tall, dusty brown apartment block. We
park outside and Jake and I grabbed the minimal necessary
equipment to bring inside. We've been warned that this location
(08:41):
is a particular target for ISIS sleeper cell attacks. Security
is high. I leave my backpack behind and I just
bring my recorder, but I forget to remove my pocket knife.
As a little bit of context, I always have a
good solid knife on me, particularly when I travel. I've
used it to pry open bathroom doors into crepit public
facilities in Serbia's grape Off Nazi graffiti on abandoned buildings
(09:02):
in Los Angeles, and to open more beers than I
care to mention in more places than I can remember.
Bringing a knife is so second nature to me that
I often forget that I haven't. And that's what happened
as I stepped up to the middle aged Assayish guard
running the security checkpoint. His partners, I notice, are two
women in their mid twenties. All three of them have
a K forty seven's and they all seem to be
(09:22):
on high alert. But the old man is by far
the most thorough and the rest. He catches my pocket
knife tucked into the waistband of my pants, and he
is profoundly frustrated to find it. He laboriously explains to
Chabat that I will have to pick up my blade
on the way out. I say that's fine, but I
can tell Hoobat's face that she is somewhat amusedly frustrated
with me too knifeless. We are allowed to enter the building.
(09:45):
The Women's Economic Development Headquarters is the cleanest building we've
been to in Rojava. It smells sweet, a little like
flowers and a little like fresh laundry. Pictures of female
martyrs are during the walls, and my eyes are immediately
drawn to a colorful portrait of a Rin mir Khan,
one of the most review eared Shahids or martyrs in
all of Rojava. Arin was one of the y PGS
(10:05):
female fighters. In two thousand fourteen, during the desperate battle
for Kobani, she stymied an ICE's advance by throwing multiple
grenades into squads of fighters and then, in a last
desperate act of defiance, charging into their ranks and blowing
herself up. She is reported to have killed dozens of them.
I will come to know her face well, her straight
black hair, her wide honest smile, white teeth and flush
(10:27):
round cheeks. Arin Merkhan hangs in thousands of homes and
public buildings all around Rojava. In the Kamischlo Women's Economic
Development Council meeting room, it hangs on the wall opposite
from a gigantic woodcut portrait of Abdulla Ajalon Apo, the
founder of the p k K. One end of the
room holds a heavy bookcase filled with Appo's books. There
are two long couches on either wall. Jake Cabat and
(10:50):
I take our seats and Horium Chamid, head of the
Woman's Economic Development Council, walks in and greets us. She
takes a seat underneath the enormous apo wood cut and
we begin to talk. My first question is one I've
been pondering for a while. What does she see as
a bigger struggle, the battle against Isis or the battle
of the women in this region against entrenched male supremacy.
(11:12):
We see the women's struggle as much more difficult than
the struggle against Isis. Of course, Isis are barberous enemy.
You come to fight them and either you eradicate them
or they eradicate you. But the struggle against customs and practices,
against religion which limits the rights of women, the struggle
to change the mentality of women, this is much harder.
In Horim's view, the victory against Isis was just one
(11:34):
battle in a long struggle. Women have been suffocated in
society by the politics of the Syrian state. Their rights
have been limited, and this mentality has suffocated them. So
they are scared to resist, to resist against the oppression
around them, to rise up and say this is my right.
I exist. We have difficulties with this. Isis were well
(11:56):
known throughout the world. There were a barbarous enemy, not
just for women but for all people. But women also
have hidden enemies around them, oppressive men, customs, practices, economic repression,
hidden things women struggle in secret. Much of Horium's work
centers around helping the women of Rojava and their struggles
(12:17):
against misogyny and bigotry. Rujava's war with Isis captured the
imagination of world media, but this quieter war is the
one that will bring actual, lasting victory to the women here.
There was a woman whose husband was martyred in the
war against Ices. His family wanted to take her children
back because she had no money and they felt she
(12:39):
had no opportunities. She was basically given the choice to
either find a new man or give up her children
to their dead father's family. Our job was to provide
her with a belief in herself the economic opportunity to
struggle against her family anxiety. Before the war, educational opportunities
for women in Syria varied widely depending on their family
background and location, and after eight years of fighting and
(13:01):
years of ISIS occupation, many women in Northeast Syria haven't
benefited from the kind of basic education that gives them
a chance to survive as a single mother. This particular
woman's situation was all the more challenging because she was deaf,
but Horium Senter helped her find adult education classes that
taught her how to sew, which gave her a marketable skill.
(13:22):
She works in Taylor's shop now, and her economic situation
has improved. Her children are with her, and her late
husband's family now has no excuse to take them. Years ago,
when I worked for a website called Cracked, I spent
four long days reading nearly a thousand pages of ices propaganda.
It was filled with pictures of young men posing with
enormous rifles, wielding swords, and galloping on horseback, firing rocket
(13:44):
launchers and on rushing tanks, in between articles about the
proper care and raping of sex slaves. It was a
veritable cornucopia of toxic masculinity. And I thought about that
as I sat in the air conditioned meeting room and
looked at the portraits of Shahid's on the walls. These
women had been martyred in a struggle against the human
distillation of misogyny. Horium clearly venerated them, but during our
(14:05):
conversation she labored repeatedly to make the point that these
martyrs were but the tip of an iceberg. Even more
women are being martyred by the male mentality and by
the capitalist mindset. In these times, our economy is based
on money and earning money. Women who get caught up
in this can lose themselves in it, and they too
become martyrs. In two thousand and thirteen, American billionaire and
(14:28):
Facebook chief operating officer Cheryl Sandberg published the book lean In.
It advised women that they could move forward, fight against
entrenched sexism in their industries, and succeed under capitalism if
they did stuff like refused to take off work just
because they were pregnant. Lean In was a guide for
women to excel under capitalism by pushing through the unfair,
unreasonable demands and biases they faced until they reached success.
(14:51):
Cheryl herself realized that her advice was not quite as
good as it seemed when her husband died and she
found herself trying to lean in as a single mother.
The rest of the world realized that Cheryl Sandberg might
not be the best source of advice on anything. When
the Cambridge analytic as scandal broke. This was followed by
an ocean of bad pr for Facebook, the worst example
being an ethnic cleansing in Myanmar fueled by viral Facebook posts.
(15:14):
It was soon clear to everyone that Sandberg, the adult
in the room at Facebook, had really just used her
credibility to help gloss over the social networks reckless culture.
I am certain that Horium never read lean In, but
Cheryl Sandberg's mentality, the idea that women can force capitalism
to treat them equally, well, that is very much what
Horium was arguing against. Equality, in her eyes, was not
(15:36):
about enabling women to exploit people from money just as
well as men. It was about providing women with tools
to take care of themselves. Western women they work, but
received less. They work in mentality of the men. If
I am free here, I can only be as free
(15:57):
as the other women here. What we talk. One of
Horium's assistants brings in tea. Kurdish tea is normally served
with lots of sugar. Often half the glass or more
will be sugar, But today the tea arrives unsweetened. Horium
tells us about her son who fell Shahed, fighting against Isis.
She believes he died to make this woman's revolution possible,
but that's only a part of her motivation. Horium is
(16:19):
a fierce looking woman, tall with a pointed jaw and
large eyes that burrow into me. She answers our questions politely,
but she radiates a strange coolness the whole time. It's
not unfriendliness or anger exactly. I described the sensation of
sitting in the room with her as a little like
talking to a coiled spring. Later, over the course of days,
I'll come to recognize this particular type of energy. Horium
(16:42):
is from the mountains. That's the term people in Rojava
use for the old fighters, the members of the p
k K who started off as Marxist guerrillas in the
mountains before coming down to help build this place. The
people from the mountains have a definite hardness to them,
an edge that sets them apart from everyone else we meet.
It helps explain a little bit of where Horium is
(17:03):
coming from. At the end of the interview, we bid
Horium goodbye, gather our gear and make to leave the
Woman's Economic Development Center. On our way out, Habbat points
to a brightly colored mural on the wall. It says
jin Jian Azadi. This Habbat informs me is one of
Rojava's most popular slogans. It means women, life and freedom.
(17:38):
On our way back to the van, we wave hello
to the two young female soldiers at the guard post
outside the center. They smile back and wave excitedly, so
we asked them if we can come take some pictures.
The older male, Asaish, the gruff man who'd taken my
knife earlier, comes up to hand it back. He trundles
away afterwards, rifle in hand, scanning the alleyways around us.
I find myself wondering how he feels about working with
(18:00):
two women who are young enough to be his granddaughters.
I wonder how committed he actually is to this revolution
for gender equality. Cabat looks over to me. She's anticipated
my question. Should we talk to him? She asks, Her
question is rhetorical. We walk over to him, and he
stiffened slightly in surprise. Before stopping to talk, he steps
away and puts his back to the wall, standing in
(18:20):
the place that gives him the most secure view of
his surroundings. Kobat asks him first what he thinks of
the Women's Economic Development Center and the work that hori
Um and her colleagues do there. His answer is simple.
In my view, it's a very good organization. We have
many women who haven't had a chance to be educated.
(18:42):
This helps that. Next, I have Hubbat asked him how
he felt as a soldier the first time he saw
women in his community picking up guns to fight for
their liberty. I was very happy. It's nice to have
women in the military, and I support them. Finally, I
have Cabat ask him point blank, does he consider himself
(19:02):
a feminist. I wonder if perhaps Kabbat will have to
explain the term to him, but he doesn't ask for clarification. Instead,
he scrunches up his eyebrows a bit, considers the question,
and then answers, no revolution can succeed without the women.
We thank the old soldier for his time and get
back in the van just in time for a lan
to hand Jake and I two more of his precious
(19:24):
terrible cigarettes. Spas, We say, spas, bash Alan replies with
an eyebrow wiggle. Our next destination is a place I've
been excited to see for months, since long before I
started planning this trip. In earnest jin War easily one
of Rojava's most ambitious projects. Genoir is a village for
only women and their children. Most of the inhabitants here
are survivors of abuse, women who have had to leave
(19:46):
violent spouses or oppressive traditionalist families. Genoir is a place
where these people can remake themselves by building a new
town from the ground up. The word jin means women
in Kurdish and jin War is a living expression of
one of the concepts of Rojava's founder of the law Augelon.
Along with the democratic confederalist system that runs this place,
Aujelon is the creator an advocate of something called genealogy
(20:10):
or the science of women, or very literally women's studies.
It's sometimes referred to as Kurdish feminism, but that definition
doesn't really convey what's going on here. At its core,
all of Aujelon's modern beliefs are rooted in the idea
that women must be liberated in order to liberate the world.
The oppression of the patriarchal system extends past just legal
(20:30):
codes and religious rules and into the realms of what
we'd call the social sciences. Genealogy, then, is the process
by which women reevaluate history, economics, art, education, health, and
many other things. In an attempt to cast off male
centered biases on a societal level. Advocates of genealogy hope
that this will lead to a more equitable civilization and
a more accurate understanding of the world. On an individual level.
(20:53):
Genealogy is a big part of the justification for women's
only spaces like jennar As. A line written on the
walls of gen War states, until women educate and empower themselves,
no one is free. My first glance of gin Wir
is of a lightly fortified desert compound, a dozen or
so spacious uniform homes with lavender painted walls and a
tall iron gate manned by a young woman with an
(21:15):
a K forty seven. Atop the gate is the word
gin War, which literally means women's land. We've arrived in
gin War around nine. It's hot, dry, and sunny. Today.
The ground below us is baked rock hard, and it
appears to be that way everywhere but the rows of
crops in the middle of gin War. Outside the walls,
(21:35):
there's more farmland and rising pillars of black smoke. There
are constant brush fires in northeast Syria during the summer.
Some are natural, some are caused by isis sleepers, and
some surely are the result of careless cigarette smokers. We're
greeted by two women. One is in her mid twenties
(21:55):
and Kurdish, and the other is a tall German woman
in her thirties. She's the first foreign volunteer that I've
met in Rojava. She's heavily tattooed and initially suspicious of
Jake and I. She questions us politely about our intentions
here and what she's satisfied with our answers. She agrees
to an interview. What is your family think you're being here?
M yeah, I mean, it's of course, um, let's say
(22:23):
it's also process. Yeah, I think it's generally like affected
by the of course, like the mass madea and in
general dessituation when you when you say that you live
in northern Syria and if you sounded like this, it's
of course like the things which comes to the mind
(22:44):
of many people's war and war and war. So it's
hard kind of to convince them to understand what is
it and actually me, I'm like in the process of
like them understanding better or not, like they wouldn't probably
you know what, Oh, no, good, thanks, you know water,
just coffee, thank you. Yeah, it's uh. When I told
(23:06):
my family I was coming here, I think their vision
was that I'd be dodging sniper fire the whole time.
And yeah, yeah, I spilled coffee there, says it's fine though.
Spilling coffee is good luck if you don't do it
on purpose. We sit and talk for a bit, feeling
each other out. Our Kurdish host asks me how aware
most Americans are about what's happening in Syria right now.
She makes a point to ask me if they think
(23:28):
that our country's effort here in supporting Rojava is seen
as being a lot like the Vietnam War. I have
to cringe and explain that most Americans know very little
about Syria. They know there's a civil war, they know
Isis was here, but that's most of it. They've probably
never heard of the term Rojava. She is not overjoyed
by this answer. In the UK, like most people, they
(23:52):
don't really know about it, but they'll just be like
the curtains Syrias. Oh yeah, they're the good guys, right,
that's you know, that's about it. Yeah, a lot of
Americans were here, Yeah, like we like the like my
friends at home, probably have no idea what's going on,
but they just think they seem cool, like they seem okay,
you know, like that's about it. Yeah. Yeah, they recognize
that they seem you know, and they would probably say
(24:13):
the Curds in Syria the pesh Murga because you're asking
a lot for an American. There was a lot of
laughter at the idea that Americans would confuse Iraqi Kurds
with Syrian Kurds, and tension broken. I pivot to another question,
based on something she'd said a few minutes earlier before
I started recording. I was interested, she mentioned earlier, seeing
(24:34):
growing up seeing that like it seems like all the
people writing books whom and all the philosophers are men
um And you know, there's a picture of a male philosopher,
two of them on the walls of this room. Would
she like to see a picture of a woman philosopher
adorn it or adjoin it? At some point? The male philosopher,
I mentioned, there is a delage on gin Warri's town
hall hosts the obligatory very large framed picture of Apo.
(24:57):
He looks a bit like Bill Cosby in this one,
crossing his hands on or his chin and grinning impishly
out at the world. I'm still concerned about the new
life without our leader. Patches I've seen on some soldiers uniforms.
The fact that Oppo's portrait hangs in the center of
almost every meeting room doesn't diminish my worries. Her response
is thankfully not the response of a zealot. She explains
(25:17):
to me that students of genealogy, the women's science that
they study in Rajava, have spent years combing through history
books to find examples of female scientists, philosophers, inventors, and
thinkers whose stories were buried by the traditional education systems
of the area. So this section of the geneology of researching,
they found out that they are still on the process.
(25:38):
They came out with the many philosopher romans, and they
really going to take the picture of all of them,
that maybe there will be no place for the picture.
The women of gen war haven't separated themselves from men
because they hate them, or because they advocate for a
permanent segregation of gender. The why of this place is complex,
but a large part of it is rooted in history,
not just Kurdish history or Arab history, but human His
(26:00):
story over coffee, we talk about the oppression of midwives
and wise women for witchcraft in European and American history.
After coffee, they take me on a tour of the
largest building in gen War, the school they've built for
their children. It's clean, orderly, and decidedly low tech. In
one corner of the room is a bookshelf covered in
pictures and recreations of ancient artifacts. The one that catches
(26:21):
my eye is a large, colorful picture of the Venus
of Willendorff. You've seen this, even if the name isn't
instantly familiar. It's that small prehistoric statue of a rotund,
large breasted woman. So it's the symbol of of the woman.
It's like the woman body, the like the fert symbol
like it's like the woman goddess who was representing the society,
and it's it's clear message. The venus dates back more
(26:43):
than twenty five thousand years. It's the oldest known depiction
of the naked female form, and starting in nineteen o eight,
the universal archaeological consensus was it's porn. The name is
even a form of mockery. European archaeologists thought this statuette
was erotic art from a primitive civilization. This remained the
scientific consensus until nineteen ninety six, when professor's Leroy McDermott
(27:05):
and Kathleen mc coyd carried out some novel research to
suggest an alternative theory. They took photographs of heavily pregnant,
naked women possessitioning the camera and the rough location of
the subject's eyes. Then then compared those photographs to similar
shots of the venus and found that they were nearly identical.
The venus of Willendorf, long assumed to have been sculpted
by a man, looked precisely like the kind of sculpture
(27:27):
a pregnant woman might make if she was attempting to
create a clay representation of her own body. This analysis,
when you look to the body of the of the
of the venus, it's like the women body looking them
from top. Back in two thousand sixteen, I actually published
a book, A Brief History of Vice, and it discussed
the venus of Willendorff and the theories around it. I
(27:48):
interviewed Professor McDermott and he explained to me that the
venus was likely the very first medical device in recorded history,
an obstetric aid made by women for women. He explained,
quote women alone un face the inevitable, life threatening and
painful event of giving birth, and it is very likely
that the thought of preparing for it had crossed the
mind of a woman before the process became of intellectual
(28:09):
interest to men. It's always been fascinating to me that
everyone just agreed for nearly a century that the venus
must be pornography, rather than even considering another possibility. And
seven thousand miles away from my door, the women of
gin War had been struck by that same reality. And
it's but it's crazy, you know, I feel for example,
if you go to different places and then there's an
(28:29):
archeological research and there's like figures appeared many times. Of
course the interpretation, oh, it was the goddess, it was
the representation of the of the society, it was the
symbol of the clan. If those whatever, and when it's
like a statue with women body found, then like the
interpretation that is pornographic or that it's you know, it's
you can already see like the mentality in it. How
(28:51):
like the historical moment in the historical like a foundation
so in the gin War exists for the same reason
that the White PJ exists, and the same reason that
towns and Rojava have women's councils as well as town councils.
There's an understanding here that the sheer depth of oppression
women face means that they need dedicated spaces to build
(29:12):
and to rediscover their history. And in keeping with the
bottom up nature of governance here, gen War's creation wasn't
ordered by some central figure or agency. The initial idea
came from the collaboration of a number of different local
women's organizations, including Congrega Star and the Free Women's Foundation
of Rojava. These local groups and international NGOs provided some
of the funding, but many of the raw materials that
(29:33):
built this place were donated by the villages and towns
around it. The villages around they from from one region.
That because the houses, the foundation of the houses the
stone's foundation, so like it's a really big amount of
stone which needs to be tought. So for example, that
was the one donation. Other donations which is usually for
example really expensive sync is the vote because there's not
so much wood. So from the different region, like people
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from different places, they donate. This gin War is one
of the most peaceful places i've ever been. The color
lavender is everywhere. The buildings are short, squat and handsome,
resembling the architecture one finds in New Mexico. It's very quiet,
but outside its walls, wildfires race across the land, burning
through dried brush in the brutal Syrian summer. I watch
as a small fire tornado. Hall's asked just a football
(30:18):
field or two away. Our guide admits that fire is
a constant threat. Fortunately like nothing bigger happened, No like
nothing like, no cables, no uh, people was heard. The
children two times were equated, and we together with neighbors
are so with like help of the surrounding people, we
very fighting with the fire. With the woman here, it's
almost kind of like it's an immediate danger, but there's
(30:41):
also like it's kind of symbolic. As we were driving
up here, we saw that big wall Turkey built sort
of that that threat looming. I don't know, it seems
like it's like an expression of it. Not I was
also thinking about it. Not, it's like the direct threat
here also to the attack and for the like the
political situation of the like of the Turk troops and
of the occupation of the Turks. It's still it's really
(31:04):
it's really present, so it's kind of fair you could
see that. It's three months after I visit, the Turkish
military surged forth from behind its walls. Artillery fire and
missiles rained down on the land around gin Wir, and
the town was temporarily abandoned by its residents. I was
surprised by how hard the news hit me. Seeing the
fires from miles away doesn't make it hurt any less
(31:26):
when they reach you. After our tour, we head back
into the town hall. A few more of gen War's
women have assembled and agreed to talk to us, so
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we have another cup of coffee and sit down for
an interview with a young Arab woman. She's a large
flower tattoo on her left forearm and a T shirt
that says every day is a second chance. I'll play
a little bit of the audio from this, but I
have to tell my recorders started having issues at just
this point in the day. If you didn't understand that,
(32:08):
I'll repeat This young woman was explaining to me that
this month she was the village representative that made her
the point woman for talking to journalists, and it also
meant that she was expected to represent gen War to
the other towns in the area. All the women here
take turns doing this job, which is scary for some
of them, but our host points out it also forces
them to grow as people. She and most of the
(32:28):
women we talked to prefer not to use their names,
but she explains to us how she came to gen War.
Her husband, she says, was a tattoo artist, but over
time he developed a problem with alcohol and then he
became violent. At first, she thought that maybe having a
child would fix their issues these problems. So she gets
first child and it was like not that bad, but
(32:48):
it was like still on the problems there. So then
she get another child. She thought that it would be
fixed there, have more children and their relationship would be
more tight. But doesn't but last of her life with
him because it's too bad and she couldn't manage to
to offer that anymore, so she started. When she decided
she'd had enough, she went to the women's house in
(33:09):
her town and reported him these places. The women's houses
were formed by an organization called Congreya Star, a confederation
of different women's groups across Rojava. Their core belief is
that no society can be truly free unless it's women
are liberated. It's basically the same sentiment that old fighter
had expressed a Hoobatani, there is no revolution without the women.
(33:31):
The people at the women's house helped her divorce from
her husband separate her life from his. They told her
about gen War and suggested it might be a good
place for her to go make a new start, So
she took her children and moved there. In the months since,
she has learned to farm, how to help manage a store,
and how to administer a small village. I asked if
she would ever have been able to consider leaving her
husband before the revolution. Her answer is simple, law is
(33:54):
the Arabic word for no. We next talked to a
woman who introduces herself as the wife of a she Heed.
She is also Arab, and she wears more conservative clothing
and a fuller head scarf. One of the criticisms you'll
hear sometimes is that Rojava is really a Kurdish supremacist
movement and that Arabs are oppressed in the area. It's
an idea that the Turkish government has a vested interest
(34:14):
in pushing. Several months after I conduct these interviews, in
the wake of their invasion, the Turkish government will force
hundreds of thousands of Kurtish civilians out of their homes
and move in Arab refugees from elsewhere in Syria to
take their place. It's a deliberate act of ethnic cleansing.
We see no evidence of racial animosity here in genoir,
though our next INTERVIEWE expresses that her kids are happy here,
(34:36):
learning with the Kurdish children and studying both Kurdish and
Arabic languages. She and a number of the women we
talk to engen War don't express a great depth of
knowledge about Abdula Jolan's ideas or about any of the
radical politics that have made this place such a cause
celeb among the global left. And I suppose some people
might find that disappointing to me. It's a pretty clear
(34:56):
statement about the relative lack of brainwashing that occurs here.
The ideological underpinnings of this place are important to many
of its residents, but no woman is denied a place
to live here because they haven't read enough political theory.
Gin War is not large, just a bit over a
dozen families, but it's also very young. Our hosts explained
that the goal is to build more places like it,
(35:17):
and not just women's villages, but other villages made using
the eco friendly construction methods used in the creation of
these homes. The buildings in gin War all have high
ceilings and carefully positioned ceiling fans in order to stay
comfortable during the blazing Syrian summer without using air conditioning,
and it is in fact very comfortable inside. One day.
They tell me villages like this will help to reduce
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the influence, size and ecological toll of overcrowded cities like
Kamischlow sentiments like this are common in Rojava. The goals
of the true believers here are always spectacular and ambitious,
and it would be easy to see them as a
lot of hot air if it weren't for the huge
amount of work that's evident all around me. It is
far too early to say if the things they're aiming
for will ever actually happen. Of course, everyone I speak
(36:00):
to is conscious of the fact that this could all
be swept away in the space of an evening, with
the speed of a wildfire tearing across a wind swept plane.
But in spite of that, they struggle on putting one
foot forward in front of the next doing the work
and hoping they'll get the chance to keep doing it tomorrow.
We say our goodbyes, pile into Alan's van, and drive away.
I look back as we roll off, and I noticed
(36:21):
that the word jin war atop the gate has been
split in half by its opening. Now I see the
two halves of the word as separate terms. Gin Women's
War game in the moy The Women's War is a
(36:42):
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to the Women's War, a production of I Heart Radio.
Rojava might be the friendliest place on earth. And I
mean that in a purely literal sense of the word friend.
See in Kurdish the word have all means friend. I'm
(00:23):
not a linguist, and I can't explain to you exactly
how it happened, But over the decades of fighting in
Turkey and Syria, the word have all came to take
on a deeper meaning. Today it's used in a manner
similar to the way the Soviets used comrade. And so
when people in Rojava are trying to refer to the
revolutionaries in their land, the people in this region who
truly believe in the ideology of Abdulla Alan, they often
(00:43):
call them the have alls. Now, if we were in
the United States, a heavily armed group of true believers
calling themselves the friends would absolutely be a terrifying death
cult of some sort. But for whatever reason, the word
have all has a friendly quality to it that somehow
stops it from being on settling. Well, there's a certain
militant formality to the word comrade. Have all just feels warm.
(01:05):
You cross a checkpoint and the assay you say hello, friend,
a soldier offers you a cigarette and you say thanks friend.
There's something addictive about the term, and Jake and I
fall easily into using it on a regular basis. The
morning of July two thousand nineteen starts with us both
packing up our crap, paying for our time at the hotel,
and meeting a lawn outside. He picks us and our
(01:27):
gear up. At around eight am, Alan offers us cigarettes.
Were both hungover thanks to the terrible case of Turkish
beer I bought last night, and neither of us particularly
wants to smoke, but we take the cigarettes and say
spats of all anyway that means thanks friend. After our
first puffs, we rather performatively smile at Alan, look up
to him and say bush that means good. A Laan
(01:49):
responds with a ray, a grin and the words sus bush,
which just means thanks. Good for the rest of our
time together. Whenever a lawan offers us a cigarette, he'll
wiggle his bushy eyebrows and grunt spas bash at us.
It's a light, friendly jab at the fact that, like
most foreigners, Jake and I have only learned the words
thanks and good in Kurdish We get on the road
(02:10):
and we roll through a checkpoint just outside of Drek.
Alan slows to a stop to hand over his papers.
I look out the window with the men and women
manning the checkpoint, and I'm struck by how good looking
they all are. Jake seems to notice the same thing,
and he leans over to me to say, everyone here
is gorgeous. My eyes are particularly drawn to the man
in command of the checkpoint, a grizzled male. A saysh.
(02:31):
I find myself staring at him for a while he
converses with his colleagues. He has a broad, sculpted chin
with a perfect John McClain level three days stubble. His
hair is a dusky brownish blonde. He looks like a
militant Kurdish George Clooney. There's a cigarette in his left hand,
while his right stays behind his back, gripping the magazine
of his rifle. As we pass by, he catches me
(02:51):
staring at him and he smiles. Slah have all, he
says to me. It means hello, friend. Calling the folks
in rojav a good look or attractive doesn't quite get
at what Jake and I kept noticing. It's not that
everyone here looks like a runway model. It's more that
they all look like the exact kind of people you'd
cast if you were making a movie. The folks here
are all striking, and Jake and I are not the
(03:14):
first Westerners to come to Rojava and notice this. In
the nineteen thirties, Agatha Christie, author of Murder on the
Orient Express and about a billion other books, traveled to
Kurdistan with her husband. He was an archaeologist. Christie herself
was quite an adventurer, and she traveled widely through much
of the region that's now Rojava. She wrote this about
the appearance of the people here. Kurdish women are gay
(03:35):
and handsome. They wear bright colors. These women have turbans
of bright orange round their heads. Their clothes are green
and purple and yellow. Their heads are carried erect on
their shoulders. They are tall, with a backwards stands so
that they always look proud. They have bronze faces with
regular features, red cheeks, and unusually blue eyes. The Kurdish
men nearly all bear a marked resemblance to a colored
picture of Lord Kitchener that used to hang in my
(03:57):
nursery as a child. The red brick fete, big brown mustache,
the blue eyes, the fierce and martial appearance. We're waved
on through the chat point and a line continues down
the highway. As I stare out the window, slightly hungover,
drinking coffee and smoking horrible cigarettes, I think about something
Cabat mentioned yesterday. She told us that a decent amount
(04:17):
of the men that she worked with in Rojava weren't
really committed to the gender equality aspect of the revolution.
She thought they were mostly kept in line by the
fact that at the moment, the weight of societal inertia
was behind equality. In her opinion, a number of Rojava's
men were just too afraid of being publicly shamed to
rock the boat. No one wants to be Like, as
(04:39):
soon as you feel astra size from your friend, you
do anything to get back. You know, that really works naturally.
So it's like they see everyone like, oh women now
eventually exactly even it's those men. I'm sure deeply they
are not conversed, some of them, or like they are
not really but what they were gonna say, but just
(05:07):
that that's it and do it. Then it became a habit.
Hollis is a bit of Arabic slang that kabat uses
a lot. It means finished or done. She's saying that
in another generation, the bigotry hidden under the surface of
some of Rojava's men will disappear, because those men will
die and they'll be replaced by young men who have
only ever known women as their equals. This is a
(05:29):
heartening fact, but it's also a scary one. While the
change is still skin deep, it's easy to revert. I
pondered this as we drove on, and it led me
back to thinking about my own country. In November two nineteen,
the FBI reported that hate crimes in the United States
had hit a sixteen year high as the coronavirus descended
upon American society. Hate crimes against Asian Americans searched for
(05:51):
the first time since World War Two. I think many
people were shocked to see so much racist of violence
and bigotry bubble up into the mainstream. Up until two sixteen,
they felt like the fight against this stuff had been
one for the last few years. We've all had to
confront the reality that this was not the case. Some
of the explosion in bigotry is new racism. People converted
in dark corners of the Internet. But much of it,
(06:13):
and probably most of it, is a result of people
who were quiet bigots for years until they decided it
was finally safe enough to be loud. As a lawn's
van trundled into the outskirts of Comichelo, my eyes were
caught by a trio of young girls on their way
to school. They walked together, heads bare, laughing and giggling,
and weighed down with probably twenty books between them. Not
(06:34):
too long ago, these girls had stared into a horizon
dominated by the black flags of Isis. I wondered what
their future would bring. My mind was drawn back to
something I had seen the night before in the bustling
streets of Darek. Jake and I had been poorly navigating
the crowded market looking for beer. As we'd stumbled about,
my eyes had been caught by a young soldier on
his drive home atop a scooter. His wife in full
(06:56):
MiCab sat on the back, her face towards the traffic
at their rear. It felt like a clear illustration of
the fact that many of the people here could still
go either way Rojava's revolutionary sentiments, its radical equality. That
stuff did enjoy a lot of popularity, and still does.
But the continued progress of those ideals relies on the
mass of folks in the middle acquiescing to progress because
(07:18):
that's where they feel the weight happens to be. The
most important question I had to ask about Rojava was this,
will any of it really last? And I knew that
my only chance at getting an answer lay in the
hearts of the people here. As we pass along, it
became obvious that tensions in the area had ratcheted up overnight.
The guards at checkpoints all checked our papers thoroughly, and
(07:39):
there seemed to be more of them than the day before.
A quick search through Google revealed that Turkey's president Radone
had recently made more threats against the Syrian Democratic Forces
or SDF. The military of Rojava. U SMS series were
said to be in route to the region. As we
waited in traffic, I couldn't help but stare up at
the Turkish border wall up in the not too distance.
I couldn't see them, but I out the weight and
(08:00):
guns of NATO's second largest army just beyond the horizon.
We pick up Kabat outside of her apartment in Comichelo,
She greets us with a thernis of instant coffee and
we go again to her favorite food stand for more
falafel burritos. For months afterwards, I found myself periodically craving
them the closest US equivalent. I found the garlic sauces,
probably the sauce at Zankow Chicken and Los Angeles, but
(08:20):
it's not nearly as good as we eat kabat walks
us through our schedule, she set up a meeting with
the head of the women's Economic Development Council for the
city of Kamischlow. The building is located in a residential neighborhood,
one floor in a tall, dusty brown apartment block. We
park outside and Jake and I grabbed the minimal necessary
equipment to bring inside. We've been warned that this location
(08:41):
is a particular target for ISIS sleeper cell attacks. Security
is high. I leave my backpack behind and I just
bring my recorder, but I forget to remove my pocket knife.
As a little bit of context, I always have a
good solid knife on me, particularly when I travel. I've
used it to pry open bathroom doors into crepit public
facilities in Serbia's grape Off Nazi graffiti on abandoned buildings
(09:02):
in Los Angeles, and to open more beers than I
care to mention in more places than I can remember.
Bringing a knife is so second nature to me that
I often forget that I haven't. And that's what happened
as I stepped up to the middle aged Assayish guard
running the security checkpoint. His partners, I notice, are two
women in their mid twenties. All three of them have
a K forty seven's and they all seem to be
(09:22):
on high alert. But the old man is by far
the most thorough and the rest. He catches my pocket
knife tucked into the waistband of my pants, and he
is profoundly frustrated to find it. He laboriously explains to
Chabat that I will have to pick up my blade
on the way out. I say that's fine, but I
can tell Hoobat's face that she is somewhat amusedly frustrated
with me too knifeless. We are allowed to enter the building.
(09:45):
The Women's Economic Development Headquarters is the cleanest building we've
been to in Rojava. It smells sweet, a little like
flowers and a little like fresh laundry. Pictures of female
martyrs are during the walls, and my eyes are immediately
drawn to a colorful portrait of a Rin mir Khan,
one of the most review eared Shahids or martyrs in
all of Rojava. Arin was one of the y PGS
(10:05):
female fighters. In two thousand fourteen, during the desperate battle
for Kobani, she stymied an ICE's advance by throwing multiple
grenades into squads of fighters and then, in a last
desperate act of defiance, charging into their ranks and blowing
herself up. She is reported to have killed dozens of them.
I will come to know her face well, her straight
black hair, her wide honest smile, white teeth and flush
(10:27):
round cheeks. Arin Merkhan hangs in thousands of homes and
public buildings all around Rojava. In the Kamischlo Women's Economic
Development Council meeting room, it hangs on the wall opposite
from a gigantic woodcut portrait of Abdulla Ajalon Apo, the
founder of the p k K. One end of the
room holds a heavy bookcase filled with Appo's books. There
are two long couches on either wall. Jake Cabat and
(10:50):
I take our seats and Horium Chamid, head of the
Woman's Economic Development Council, walks in and greets us. She
takes a seat underneath the enormous apo wood cut and
we begin to talk. My first question is one I've
been pondering for a while. What does she see as
a bigger struggle, the battle against Isis or the battle
of the women in this region against entrenched male supremacy.
(11:12):
We see the women's struggle as much more difficult than
the struggle against Isis. Of course, Isis are barberous enemy.
You come to fight them and either you eradicate them
or they eradicate you. But the struggle against customs and practices,
against religion which limits the rights of women, the struggle
to change the mentality of women, this is much harder.
In Horim's view, the victory against Isis was just one
(11:34):
battle in a long struggle. Women have been suffocated in
society by the politics of the Syrian state. Their rights
have been limited, and this mentality has suffocated them. So
they are scared to resist, to resist against the oppression
around them, to rise up and say this is my right.
I exist. We have difficulties with this. Isis were well
(11:56):
known throughout the world. There were a barbarous enemy, not
just for women but for all people. But women also
have hidden enemies around them, oppressive men, customs, practices, economic repression,
hidden things women struggle in secret. Much of Horium's work
centers around helping the women of Rojava and their struggles
(12:17):
against misogyny and bigotry. Rujava's war with Isis captured the
imagination of world media, but this quieter war is the
one that will bring actual, lasting victory to the women here.
There was a woman whose husband was martyred in the
war against Ices. His family wanted to take her children
back because she had no money and they felt she
(12:39):
had no opportunities. She was basically given the choice to
either find a new man or give up her children
to their dead father's family. Our job was to provide
her with a belief in herself the economic opportunity to
struggle against her family anxiety. Before the war, educational opportunities
for women in Syria varied widely depending on their family
background and location, and after eight years of fighting and
(13:01):
years of ISIS occupation, many women in Northeast Syria haven't
benefited from the kind of basic education that gives them
a chance to survive as a single mother. This particular
woman's situation was all the more challenging because she was deaf,
but Horium Senter helped her find adult education classes that
taught her how to sew, which gave her a marketable skill.
(13:22):
She works in Taylor's shop now, and her economic situation
has improved. Her children are with her, and her late
husband's family now has no excuse to take them. Years ago,
when I worked for a website called Cracked, I spent
four long days reading nearly a thousand pages of ices propaganda.
It was filled with pictures of young men posing with
enormous rifles, wielding swords, and galloping on horseback, firing rocket
(13:44):
launchers and on rushing tanks, in between articles about the
proper care and raping of sex slaves. It was a
veritable cornucopia of toxic masculinity. And I thought about that
as I sat in the air conditioned meeting room and
looked at the portraits of Shahid's on the walls. These
women had been martyred in a struggle against the human
distillation of misogyny. Horium clearly venerated them, but during our
(14:05):
conversation she labored repeatedly to make the point that these
martyrs were but the tip of an iceberg. Even more
women are being martyred by the male mentality and by
the capitalist mindset. In these times, our economy is based
on money and earning money. Women who get caught up
in this can lose themselves in it, and they too
become martyrs. In two thousand and thirteen, American billionaire and
(14:28):
Facebook chief operating officer Cheryl Sandberg published the book lean In.
It advised women that they could move forward, fight against
entrenched sexism in their industries, and succeed under capitalism if
they did stuff like refused to take off work just
because they were pregnant. Lean In was a guide for
women to excel under capitalism by pushing through the unfair,
unreasonable demands and biases they faced until they reached success.
(14:51):
Cheryl herself realized that her advice was not quite as
good as it seemed when her husband died and she
found herself trying to lean in as a single mother.
The rest of the world realized that Cheryl Sandberg might
not be the best source of advice on anything. When
the Cambridge analytic as scandal broke. This was followed by
an ocean of bad pr for Facebook, the worst example
being an ethnic cleansing in Myanmar fueled by viral Facebook posts.
(15:14):
It was soon clear to everyone that Sandberg, the adult
in the room at Facebook, had really just used her
credibility to help gloss over the social networks reckless culture.
I am certain that Horium never read lean In, but
Cheryl Sandberg's mentality, the idea that women can force capitalism
to treat them equally, well, that is very much what
Horium was arguing against. Equality, in her eyes, was not
(15:36):
about enabling women to exploit people from money just as
well as men. It was about providing women with tools
to take care of themselves. Western women they work, but
received less. They work in mentality of the men. If
I am free here, I can only be as free
(15:57):
as the other women here. What we talk. One of
Horium's assistants brings in tea. Kurdish tea is normally served
with lots of sugar. Often half the glass or more
will be sugar, But today the tea arrives unsweetened. Horium
tells us about her son who fell Shahed, fighting against Isis.
She believes he died to make this woman's revolution possible,
but that's only a part of her motivation. Horium is
(16:19):
a fierce looking woman, tall with a pointed jaw and
large eyes that burrow into me. She answers our questions politely,
but she radiates a strange coolness the whole time. It's
not unfriendliness or anger exactly. I described the sensation of
sitting in the room with her as a little like
talking to a coiled spring. Later, over the course of days,
I'll come to recognize this particular type of energy. Horium
(16:42):
is from the mountains. That's the term people in Rojava
use for the old fighters, the members of the p
k K who started off as Marxist guerrillas in the
mountains before coming down to help build this place. The
people from the mountains have a definite hardness to them,
an edge that sets them apart from everyone else we meet.
It helps explain a little bit of where Horium is
(17:03):
coming from. At the end of the interview, we bid
Horium goodbye, gather our gear and make to leave the
Woman's Economic Development Center. On our way out, Habbat points
to a brightly colored mural on the wall. It says
jin Jian Azadi. This Habbat informs me is one of
Rojava's most popular slogans. It means women, life and freedom.
(17:38):
On our way back to the van, we wave hello
to the two young female soldiers at the guard post
outside the center. They smile back and wave excitedly, so
we asked them if we can come take some pictures.
The older male, Asaish, the gruff man who'd taken my
knife earlier, comes up to hand it back. He trundles
away afterwards, rifle in hand, scanning the alleyways around us.
I find myself wondering how he feels about working with
(18:00):
two women who are young enough to be his granddaughters.
I wonder how committed he actually is to this revolution
for gender equality. Cabat looks over to me. She's anticipated
my question. Should we talk to him? She asks, Her
question is rhetorical. We walk over to him, and he
stiffened slightly in surprise. Before stopping to talk, he steps
away and puts his back to the wall, standing in
(18:20):
the place that gives him the most secure view of
his surroundings. Kobat asks him first what he thinks of
the Women's Economic Development Center and the work that hori
Um and her colleagues do there. His answer is simple.
In my view, it's a very good organization. We have
many women who haven't had a chance to be educated.
(18:42):
This helps that. Next, I have Hubbat asked him how
he felt as a soldier the first time he saw
women in his community picking up guns to fight for
their liberty. I was very happy. It's nice to have
women in the military, and I support them. Finally, I
have Cabat ask him point blank, does he consider himself
(19:02):
a feminist. I wonder if perhaps Kabbat will have to
explain the term to him, but he doesn't ask for clarification. Instead,
he scrunches up his eyebrows a bit, considers the question,
and then answers, no revolution can succeed without the women.
We thank the old soldier for his time and get
back in the van just in time for a lan
to hand Jake and I two more of his precious
(19:24):
terrible cigarettes. Spas, We say, spas, bash Alan replies with
an eyebrow wiggle. Our next destination is a place I've
been excited to see for months, since long before I
started planning this trip. In earnest jin War easily one
of Rojava's most ambitious projects. Genoir is a village for
only women and their children. Most of the inhabitants here
are survivors of abuse, women who have had to leave
(19:46):
violent spouses or oppressive traditionalist families. Genoir is a place
where these people can remake themselves by building a new
town from the ground up. The word jin means women
in Kurdish and jin War is a living expression of
one of the concepts of Rojava's founder of the law Augelon.
Along with the democratic confederalist system that runs this place,
Aujelon is the creator an advocate of something called genealogy
(20:10):
or the science of women, or very literally women's studies.
It's sometimes referred to as Kurdish feminism, but that definition
doesn't really convey what's going on here. At its core,
all of Aujelon's modern beliefs are rooted in the idea
that women must be liberated in order to liberate the world.
The oppression of the patriarchal system extends past just legal
(20:30):
codes and religious rules and into the realms of what
we'd call the social sciences. Genealogy, then, is the process
by which women reevaluate history, economics, art, education, health, and
many other things. In an attempt to cast off male
centered biases on a societal level. Advocates of genealogy hope
that this will lead to a more equitable civilization and
a more accurate understanding of the world. On an individual level.
(20:53):
Genealogy is a big part of the justification for women's
only spaces like jennar As. A line written on the
walls of gen War states, until women educate and empower themselves,
no one is free. My first glance of gin Wir
is of a lightly fortified desert compound, a dozen or
so spacious uniform homes with lavender painted walls and a
tall iron gate manned by a young woman with an
(21:15):
a K forty seven. Atop the gate is the word
gin War, which literally means women's land. We've arrived in
gin War around nine. It's hot, dry, and sunny. Today.
The ground below us is baked rock hard, and it
appears to be that way everywhere but the rows of
crops in the middle of gin War. Outside the walls,
(21:35):
there's more farmland and rising pillars of black smoke. There
are constant brush fires in northeast Syria during the summer.
Some are natural, some are caused by isis sleepers, and
some surely are the result of careless cigarette smokers. We're
greeted by two women. One is in her mid twenties
(21:55):
and Kurdish, and the other is a tall German woman
in her thirties. She's the first foreign volunteer that I've
met in Rojava. She's heavily tattooed and initially suspicious of
Jake and I. She questions us politely about our intentions
here and what she's satisfied with our answers. She agrees
to an interview. What is your family think you're being here?
M yeah, I mean, it's of course, um, let's say
(22:23):
it's also process. Yeah, I think it's generally like affected
by the of course, like the mass madea and in
general dessituation when you when you say that you live
in northern Syria and if you sounded like this, it's
of course like the things which comes to the mind
(22:44):
of many people's war and war and war. So it's
hard kind of to convince them to understand what is
it and actually me, I'm like in the process of
like them understanding better or not, like they wouldn't probably
you know what, Oh, no, good, thanks, you know water,
just coffee, thank you. Yeah, it's uh. When I told
(23:06):
my family I was coming here, I think their vision
was that I'd be dodging sniper fire the whole time.
And yeah, yeah, I spilled coffee there, says it's fine though.
Spilling coffee is good luck if you don't do it
on purpose. We sit and talk for a bit, feeling
each other out. Our Kurdish host asks me how aware
most Americans are about what's happening in Syria right now.
She makes a point to ask me if they think
(23:28):
that our country's effort here in supporting Rojava is seen
as being a lot like the Vietnam War. I have
to cringe and explain that most Americans know very little
about Syria. They know there's a civil war, they know
Isis was here, but that's most of it. They've probably
never heard of the term Rojava. She is not overjoyed
by this answer. In the UK, like most people, they
(23:52):
don't really know about it, but they'll just be like
the curtains Syrias. Oh yeah, they're the good guys, right,
that's you know, that's about it. Yeah, a lot of
Americans were here, Yeah, like we like the like my
friends at home, probably have no idea what's going on,
but they just think they seem cool, like they seem okay,
you know, like that's about it. Yeah. Yeah, they recognize
that they seem you know, and they would probably say
(24:13):
the Curds in Syria the pesh Murga because you're asking
a lot for an American. There was a lot of
laughter at the idea that Americans would confuse Iraqi Kurds
with Syrian Kurds, and tension broken. I pivot to another question,
based on something she'd said a few minutes earlier before
I started recording. I was interested, she mentioned earlier, seeing
(24:34):
growing up seeing that like it seems like all the
people writing books whom and all the philosophers are men
um And you know, there's a picture of a male philosopher,
two of them on the walls of this room. Would
she like to see a picture of a woman philosopher
adorn it or adjoin it? At some point? The male philosopher,
I mentioned, there is a delage on gin Warri's town
hall hosts the obligatory very large framed picture of Apo.
(24:57):
He looks a bit like Bill Cosby in this one,
crossing his hands on or his chin and grinning impishly
out at the world. I'm still concerned about the new
life without our leader. Patches I've seen on some soldiers uniforms.
The fact that Oppo's portrait hangs in the center of
almost every meeting room doesn't diminish my worries. Her response
is thankfully not the response of a zealot. She explains
(25:17):
to me that students of genealogy, the women's science that
they study in Rajava, have spent years combing through history
books to find examples of female scientists, philosophers, inventors, and
thinkers whose stories were buried by the traditional education systems
of the area. So this section of the geneology of researching,
they found out that they are still on the process.
(25:38):
They came out with the many philosopher romans, and they
really going to take the picture of all of them,
that maybe there will be no place for the picture.
The women of gen war haven't separated themselves from men
because they hate them, or because they advocate for a
permanent segregation of gender. The why of this place is complex,
but a large part of it is rooted in history,
not just Kurdish history or Arab history, but human His
(26:00):
story over coffee, we talk about the oppression of midwives
and wise women for witchcraft in European and American history.
After coffee, they take me on a tour of the
largest building in gen War, the school they've built for
their children. It's clean, orderly, and decidedly low tech. In
one corner of the room is a bookshelf covered in
pictures and recreations of ancient artifacts. The one that catches
(26:21):
my eye is a large, colorful picture of the Venus
of Willendorff. You've seen this, even if the name isn't
instantly familiar. It's that small prehistoric statue of a rotund,
large breasted woman. So it's the symbol of of the woman.
It's like the woman body, the like the fert symbol
like it's like the woman goddess who was representing the society,
and it's it's clear message. The venus dates back more
(26:43):
than twenty five thousand years. It's the oldest known depiction
of the naked female form, and starting in nineteen o eight,
the universal archaeological consensus was it's porn. The name is
even a form of mockery. European archaeologists thought this statuette
was erotic art from a primitive civilization. This remained the
scientific consensus until nineteen ninety six, when professor's Leroy McDermott
(27:05):
and Kathleen mc coyd carried out some novel research to
suggest an alternative theory. They took photographs of heavily pregnant,
naked women possessitioning the camera and the rough location of
the subject's eyes. Then then compared those photographs to similar
shots of the venus and found that they were nearly identical.
The venus of Willendorf, long assumed to have been sculpted
by a man, looked precisely like the kind of sculpture
(27:27):
a pregnant woman might make if she was attempting to
create a clay representation of her own body. This analysis,
when you look to the body of the of the
of the venus, it's like the women body looking them
from top. Back in two thousand sixteen, I actually published
a book, A Brief History of Vice, and it discussed
the venus of Willendorff and the theories around it. I
(27:48):
interviewed Professor McDermott and he explained to me that the
venus was likely the very first medical device in recorded history,
an obstetric aid made by women for women. He explained,
quote women alone un face the inevitable, life threatening and
painful event of giving birth, and it is very likely
that the thought of preparing for it had crossed the
mind of a woman before the process became of intellectual
(28:09):
interest to men. It's always been fascinating to me that
everyone just agreed for nearly a century that the venus
must be pornography, rather than even considering another possibility. And
seven thousand miles away from my door, the women of
gin War had been struck by that same reality. And
it's but it's crazy, you know, I feel for example,
if you go to different places and then there's an
(28:29):
archeological research and there's like figures appeared many times. Of
course the interpretation, oh, it was the goddess, it was
the representation of the of the society, it was the
symbol of the clan. If those whatever, and when it's
like a statue with women body found, then like the
interpretation that is pornographic or that it's you know, it's
you can already see like the mentality in it. How
(28:51):
like the historical moment in the historical like a foundation
so in the gin War exists for the same reason
that the White PJ exists, and the same reason that
towns and Rojava have women's councils as well as town councils.
There's an understanding here that the sheer depth of oppression
women face means that they need dedicated spaces to build
(29:12):
and to rediscover their history. And in keeping with the
bottom up nature of governance here, gen War's creation wasn't
ordered by some central figure or agency. The initial idea
came from the collaboration of a number of different local
women's organizations, including Congrega Star and the Free Women's Foundation
of Rojava. These local groups and international NGOs provided some
of the funding, but many of the raw materials that
(29:33):
built this place were donated by the villages and towns
around it. The villages around they from from one region.
That because the houses, the foundation of the houses the
stone's foundation, so like it's a really big amount of
stone which needs to be tought. So for example, that
was the one donation. Other donations which is usually for
example really expensive sync is the vote because there's not
so much wood. So from the different region, like people
(29:56):
from different places, they donate. This gin War is one
of the most peaceful places i've ever been. The color
lavender is everywhere. The buildings are short, squat and handsome,
resembling the architecture one finds in New Mexico. It's very quiet,
but outside its walls, wildfires race across the land, burning
through dried brush in the brutal Syrian summer. I watch
as a small fire tornado. Hall's asked just a football
(30:18):
field or two away. Our guide admits that fire is
a constant threat. Fortunately like nothing bigger happened, No like
nothing like, no cables, no uh, people was heard. The
children two times were equated, and we together with neighbors
are so with like help of the surrounding people, we
very fighting with the fire. With the woman here, it's
almost kind of like it's an immediate danger, but there's
(30:41):
also like it's kind of symbolic. As we were driving
up here, we saw that big wall Turkey built sort
of that that threat looming. I don't know, it seems
like it's like an expression of it. Not I was
also thinking about it. Not, it's like the direct threat
here also to the attack and for the like the
political situation of the like of the Turk troops and
of the occupation of the Turks. It's still it's really
(31:04):
it's really present, so it's kind of fair you could
see that. It's three months after I visit, the Turkish
military surged forth from behind its walls. Artillery fire and
missiles rained down on the land around gin Wir, and
the town was temporarily abandoned by its residents. I was
surprised by how hard the news hit me. Seeing the
fires from miles away doesn't make it hurt any less
(31:26):
when they reach you. After our tour, we head back
into the town hall. A few more of gen War's
women have assembled and agreed to talk to us, so
(31:47):
we have another cup of coffee and sit down for
an interview with a young Arab woman. She's a large
flower tattoo on her left forearm and a T shirt
that says every day is a second chance. I'll play
a little bit of the audio from this, but I
have to tell my recorders started having issues at just
this point in the day. If you didn't understand that,
(32:08):
I'll repeat This young woman was explaining to me that
this month she was the village representative that made her
the point woman for talking to journalists, and it also
meant that she was expected to represent gen War to
the other towns in the area. All the women here
take turns doing this job, which is scary for some
of them, but our host points out it also forces
them to grow as people. She and most of the
(32:28):
women we talked to prefer not to use their names,
but she explains to us how she came to gen War.
Her husband, she says, was a tattoo artist, but over
time he developed a problem with alcohol and then he
became violent. At first, she thought that maybe having a
child would fix their issues these problems. So she gets
first child and it was like not that bad, but
(32:48):
it was like still on the problems there. So then
she get another child. She thought that it would be
fixed there, have more children and their relationship would be
more tight. But doesn't but last of her life with
him because it's too bad and she couldn't manage to
to offer that anymore, so she started. When she decided
she'd had enough, she went to the women's house in
(33:09):
her town and reported him these places. The women's houses
were formed by an organization called Congreya Star, a confederation
of different women's groups across Rojava. Their core belief is
that no society can be truly free unless it's women
are liberated. It's basically the same sentiment that old fighter
had expressed a Hoobatani, there is no revolution without the women.
(33:31):
The people at the women's house helped her divorce from
her husband separate her life from his. They told her
about gen War and suggested it might be a good
place for her to go make a new start, So
she took her children and moved there. In the months since,
she has learned to farm, how to help manage a store,
and how to administer a small village. I asked if
she would ever have been able to consider leaving her
husband before the revolution. Her answer is simple, law is
(33:54):
the Arabic word for no. We next talked to a
woman who introduces herself as the wife of a she Heed.
She is also Arab, and she wears more conservative clothing
and a fuller head scarf. One of the criticisms you'll
hear sometimes is that Rojava is really a Kurdish supremacist
movement and that Arabs are oppressed in the area. It's
an idea that the Turkish government has a vested interest
(34:14):
in pushing. Several months after I conduct these interviews, in
the wake of their invasion, the Turkish government will force
hundreds of thousands of Kurtish civilians out of their homes
and move in Arab refugees from elsewhere in Syria to
take their place. It's a deliberate act of ethnic cleansing.
We see no evidence of racial animosity here in genoir,
though our next INTERVIEWE expresses that her kids are happy here,
(34:36):
learning with the Kurdish children and studying both Kurdish and
Arabic languages. She and a number of the women we
talk to engen War don't express a great depth of
knowledge about Abdula Jolan's ideas or about any of the
radical politics that have made this place such a cause
celeb among the global left. And I suppose some people
might find that disappointing to me. It's a pretty clear
(34:56):
statement about the relative lack of brainwashing that occurs here.
The ideological underpinnings of this place are important to many
of its residents, but no woman is denied a place
to live here because they haven't read enough political theory.
Gin War is not large, just a bit over a
dozen families, but it's also very young. Our hosts explained
that the goal is to build more places like it,
(35:17):
and not just women's villages, but other villages made using
the eco friendly construction methods used in the creation of
these homes. The buildings in gin War all have high
ceilings and carefully positioned ceiling fans in order to stay
comfortable during the blazing Syrian summer without using air conditioning,
and it is in fact very comfortable inside. One day.
They tell me villages like this will help to reduce
(35:39):
the influence, size and ecological toll of overcrowded cities like
Kamischlow sentiments like this are common in Rojava. The goals
of the true believers here are always spectacular and ambitious,
and it would be easy to see them as a
lot of hot air if it weren't for the huge
amount of work that's evident all around me. It is
far too early to say if the things they're aiming
for will ever actually happen. Of course, everyone I speak
(36:00):
to is conscious of the fact that this could all
be swept away in the space of an evening, with
the speed of a wildfire tearing across a wind swept plane.
But in spite of that, they struggle on putting one
foot forward in front of the next doing the work
and hoping they'll get the chance to keep doing it tomorrow.
We say our goodbyes, pile into Alan's van, and drive away.
I look back as we roll off, and I noticed
(36:21):
that the word jin war atop the gate has been
split in half by its opening. Now I see the
two halves of the word as separate terms. Gin Women's
War game in the moy The Women's War is a
(36:42):
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Host
Robert Evans
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