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ئارین

It’d crossed the minds of the Tawakuli women before, of course. Nuclear apocalypse! It wasn't such a distant possibility, and a matter of gravity like this was always bound to come up. At dinner around the bowls of mehîr, makluba and pilaf and cups of mastaw they regularly spoke about dark things with the candour of chirpsome little birds, and on one such halogen-rinsed dusk the topic was raised. The small minds of kulbar women always needed much for brightening.

But first, wait, what was an apocalypse? They all wanted to know. Was it when the bombs fell, or the Americans failed to show up, or when their fields and orchards had all been razed to the ground? Because in all those cases, an apocalypse was no different from any state of affairs Tawakul had already reckoned with, and her elders couldn't see the need for a new contingency plan not yet covered by their emergency procedures.

“We could build some underground bunkers,” Haydar said on this occasion, hand poised over the kelane platter, his fingers coming away with the fine rim of golden oil as he pinched and tore a section of the scallion-freckled dough apart. “So we have a safe place to go to.”

“With what tools, baba?” Soheila piped up. “We’d need to dig way below ground. A little cavehole like the one you make in your blanket when you don’t want to wake up won’t suffice.”

People laughed. But Arîn caught on to that opening: “I think Haydar has a point. We should have a plan in place, at least. Evacuation protocols.”

“We live in the mountains. We should be using the elements to our advantage. Evacuation’s the wrong thing to talk about.”

Arîn wasn’t deterred. “The idea’s that we should have a backup. If we can all stay together and plan an escape route towards Rojhilat, that means we can come back when Tawakul is stable. We’ll have a better chance of survival. Better to prepare, remember?”

“Better to call an assembly first,” Chiya muttered from the corner.

“Of course,” Arîn offered right away. “We can do a non-hierarchical participatory mapping and budgeting exercise. Make sure nobody’s views are left out.”

An instant wave of protests through the room: “That wasn’t an idea, heval.”

“Nah. Let her share her words of wisdom.”

“She’s twenty.”

“That’s the point.”

“Be quiet,” Soheila said to them all, and bravely gestured at Arîn to go on.

The muttering continued. Arîn remembered that some of these women preferred to be left to their Friday naps than to volunteer their divine opinion for self-governance. But she smiled to herself anyway. This was important. What was a textbook hypothetical for Americans was really intimate danger for them.

Warfare wasn't such a faraway prospect, what with the chafing footprint of Anfal in the elders’ minds, and when the history books said mutually assured destruction they conveniently left out the mutually forgotten collateral: settlements like Tawakul. Tawakul’s women lived next to the Iranian border. You never knew if the Iraqi government would get trigger-happy and set an atomic Ring of Fire off. You could never count on any higher powers.

But you could count on democratic confederalism, anti-capitalism, jineology. The optimistic creed of women, and life, and life lived through women. Abdullah Öcalan never wrote about nuclear freezing, but Arîn knew that wasn’t the point. The point was how you expanded on the foundations given to you. Öcalan himself had adapted Bookchin’s teachings to help Kurdish liberation and the Middle East after all, with only his independent study in prison to help him. Practice was simply the compassionate manipulation of theory for the future.

Her people deserved a plan, for the thinkable unthinkable. So she would do the work of a commander who could help them figure out what to do.

“I do have some ideas for everyone,” Arîn said, holding her cup, and spoke her words of wisdom.

ژنۆلۆژی

She couldn’t remember a life before jineology. She’d been born into it—this brave, trembling, fearless status quo—long before there was any name for it.

So when Arîn officially learned about jineology at fourteen, that was her first crush. Her teachers in school were among the first adopters of Öcalan’s new ideology outside Hawler when the KCK switched philosophies. A year or two later she eavesdropped on lecture materials from the PKK’s infantry academy through their radio with help from a daya, and read about the subtle arts of non-violent conflict resolution and ecofeminist doctrine. Women at the centre of government. Women at the centre of society’s liberation quest.

And for the first time she found something that could explain the environment she grew up in, that slotted right into the fulcrum of the world she wanted to stand for. Where others saw Tawakul and the Qandil Mountains as a high-altitude wasteland, a rugged isolated refugium, Arîn knew Tawakul really was the seat of the democratic future. All the NGOs and ERC research groups and even David Graeber said so.

She’d been adopted into the doorways of Tawakul’s many mothers, after her birth mother died in a freak accident called childbirth. Left her an orphan from day one.

“But at least you hadn’t been stillborn, eh?” her eighth nana used to remark to her as she rocked her to sleep. “Dead like your mother, bless her soul. Lucky, lucky girl. Good jineology running through this place, looking after you.”

She was nicknamed the daughter of Tawakul, inducted into the hall of every person whose lifeblood had been embroidered into Tawakuli soil, and became Arîn Tawakuli. She considered the circumstances of her birth a blessing. When you were motherless, that freed you to find mothers anywhere and in any person. She belonged nowhere and everywhere at once, running between the steps of the hundred families of Tawakul, searching for communal drips of maternal affection, playing by newly planted grass on tilled topsoil.

Yet she was never placeless, stateless, or adrift. She belonged here, this soil upon the valleys and gorges that made up the Qandil Mountains, her heart and soul birthed by the eternal elements that anchored the universe. Rock, water, dirt, and hard-eyed but hospitable women. The cradle of Kurdistan lived between the Tawakuli women’s heart-strings and naggings, and didn't depend on borders or the bloody pursuit of territory: she knew, because she heard and brushed past and saw it daily.

That was how she grew up: Arîn, daughter of everyone, favourite of nobody, a communal product. The first patriot of democratic confederalism.

خەجێ

“Beautiful,” Arîn whispers. “Look at that! It’s nature’s self-restoring means of production in action.”

Khaje sneers in disgust. Before them is an old deer carcass on the wild grass, left long enough for flies to gather and the meat to rot. She calls this a lost cause and potential bacterial biohazard. But Arîn sees in it some puzzle piece of the universe’s underlying pattern, the ecological dialectic of decay and regeneration.

“The only thing it’s producing is a terrible smell.”

“But it’s recycling its nutrients back into the earth, you see? Soheila says the mountains are now an ecotone, a laboratory for the frontier of sustainable husbandry. We did this.”

No, Khaje doesn’t see. The smell is pungent, wafting through the needle-point shade of trees arching over them. Nothing jineological about that. Their village smells like washed linen and brick-layered construction and the leftover cleanliness of fresh steam-baths, thank you very much.

Arîn called her here because she was sober for once. It’d be good team-building, she said, and Khaje could just see the starry constellations of a mentor-protege relationship Arîn was dreaming up behind her eyes. It’ll be fun, she’d also added. We’ll get to shoot some deer and relieve our stress.

Fat hope, Khaje had answered, but she followed her anyway.

Now Khaje is sitting here with a girl she can only just tolerate. Except Arîn’s company’s not so bad.

Khaje sighs. “Let it self-restore and self-flatulate in peace. I’m off to find another spot.” But she walks with just enough noise that her steps stay within Arîn’s earshot.

In Arîn’s social ecology pamphlets she learned about Gleason’s theory of succession and Clements’s pure climax state, about the Western tendency to sort everything into diametrically opposed boxes. The world needed to transcend the alienating effect of speciesism and nature-culture binaries more than ever, and she quickly set about putting a Tawakuli spin on received ideas. No, instead of succession and stasis, there ought to be centralisation and decentralisation, except that these things weren't opposites. One led to the other. It was about what was good for the greater democratic whole, what could enlarge Kurdistan’s overall situation. Liberation that benefitted only individuals was no liberation at all.

For trophic abundance you needed human flourishing too, that interconnected duology the Westerners called Kurdish buen vivir or autonomist greening and which the Tawakuli women just looked on bizarrely as what got things done in their commune. It just made sense. Humans weren't detached from their environments. Murray Bookchin had said the key to resilience in any society was the ecological principle of superdiversity and restoration of humanity’s intimate ties to land, its organic place in the biocenose. The time for othering nature and seeing it as an object of conquest was over.

But most of all Arîn wanted to help the old scarred women in Tawakul, the women who still felt the aftershocks of Anfal. It wasn't about the policy experiments or the Eventual Revolution. Those were just stepping stones. Any time the Western social scientists made a fuss about not being able to do more about the plight of Halabja and cited the conduct of situated knowledge or anti-extractivist research paradigms, she would simply spin around and say: we are free and liberated people. You are not, not yet. You are thralls to the capitalist world-market system. We only wish we had something to give you.

It was about what they could make, right here, a revolution that was eternal because it happened in the everyday: a mountain-wide garden for children to play in, a haven at the world’s edge for people who’d suffered enough.

She was part of the mountains too. Not because of some mystical connection, but because she worked its soil every day, went to sleep with blisters from the cold.

The first place she pictured when someone said jineology was this: Tawakul, doors opening and closing, the steam-stack of someone baking naan out of Khaje’s sight. On balmy peaceful nights she sat outside for hours, listening to the twilight sounds of birds sleep-chirping in their perches and nests, an intangible array of avian communication, wondering at the internal poetry of their unknown murmurs.

Khaje was one of Arîn’s favourite mothers to try and convert to jineology, because she gave you no bullshit, never did the half-hearted nodding act just to placate you. Arîn heard early on about her daughter. Jiyan had been dispatched to Germany for a foster family and then ended up in the USA. Khaje hated talking about her, so Arîn found other ways to coax Khaje into friendship.

Khaje acted like she couldn’t stand Arîn, but she’d won some of Khaje’s trust and reluctant admiration because she unfailingly showed up on her doorstep and offered help with the chores every day. Arîn gifted her a copy of Liberating Life: A Woman’s Revolution, and victory coursed through her when she saw it atop Khaje’s prototype library one afternoon, creased pages thumbed open. They eventually developed an unspoken routine where Arîn would sometimes insist on sleeping in her house or vice versa, curling her bedroll up next to hers no matter how Khaje groaned and protested. She did it because Khaje drank less on those nights.

PTSD was tough to weather alone, of course. You could turn aggressive without being aware of it, prey to your nightmares, that amnesiac somnabulist but utterly rational reenactment of what had fucked you up. Khaje muttered the same few names in her sleep, the feverish ghosts of her muscle memory: Hamali, Serhang, Tirej, Agrin. Arîn recognised the wound in Khaje, though they almost never talked about it: the hole Jiyan had left.

شاڵاوی ئەنفال

It was unavoidable, to hear about Anfal. There were the different valences of stories. If a nana related a horrific anecdote to her with a laugh, it was bad. If she didn’t, and told it haltingly, with an unchanging face, it was unerringly bad: there was no silver lining to be found in it at all.

But the story of how Tawakul was left untouched was one of Arîn’s treasured stories, and also a puzzle, because fifteen years and more after the Iraqi incident, nobody could figure out how a seven year-old girl was able to shoot six prisoners. All very appalling! It was almost surreal enough to be a myth, except it wasn’t. Arîn visualised Jiyan every night before she slept, moulded her essence out in flesh and blood. Khaje didn't keep any photos of her daughter, so Arîn had to go off Khaje’s features, and she imagined a woman both rugged and beautiful, sans the drinking problem. Jiyan—Anna—would have a chiselled divot in her philtrum, and be fit, and sport intense brown eyes that could spear you deep and silent as a tranquiliser dart did.

Everyone spoke about her like she was a zahaki, but that made no sense. She’d been a little girl, with a gun placed in her hands. At seven Arîn had just figured out how to shepherd the sheep without scaring them off into the wrong direction. What would she have done, in that same situation? She could operate a gun because the women around her knew how to shoot and marksmanship had seeped into her head like childhood language acquisition, but it was only for close-range targets.

So what were the steps that could have led to the event? Tawakul’s compass of uncertain rebirth being forever bound up with the deaths on those plains. A little girl’s calculations amidst catastrophe. Did those steps lie in plain sight, in the coincidental push of circumstance forcing her hands that day?

Arîn looked up details about the Iraqi Kurdish diaspora in North America, as if Wikipedia could tell her answers about a mythical girl-demon from her community.

(“Look what I found,” she had told Shanar, who was darning her mother’s clothes next to her, in her bossy, affectionate hello-Shanar voice. She’d gotten a little sidetracked; there was always so much to learn about even through the crappy Korek internet. The summary for Reading Lolita in Tehran surfaced on her screen.

Shanar glanced at it, and glanced back to her pile of stitching. “Eh? A Western phenomenon? New York Times Bestseller?” She sounded incredulous.

“Yes! Surprising, isn’t it. Well, not really. It’s a book that affirms Western liberal feminist tastes and thus the Western liberal worldview.” Arîn switched back to Wikipedia. “I think someone should write a response book. Reading Öcalan in New York City might sell nicely.”

Shanar hummed a nondescript acknowledgement. “That would require us all to be in New York. And I don't think you would want to be.”)

Arîn knew about the USA well enough because of Murray Bookchin, funny sitcoms, the failings of Western corporate feminism and pure brutal geopolitical history—a contradictory collage of a socialist peninsula within an ocean of other deadly braids of bloodshed—but she wasn’t sure what she’d find, or what question she even wanted to answer. Would Jiyan Sinjari still speak Sorani, and keep up with the civil wars happening in her homeland? Would she have torched herself free of her past, exiling herself with ferocity from the village she helped create?

Was Jiyan also the mother of Tawakul, on a technicality?

She came across: Newroz celebrations. Essays on Anfal. Poetry remembering the homeland. Little Kurdistan, in Nashville (an interesting prefigurative experiment, not quite like Rojava but still worthwhile). Demonstrations for Kurdish independence. The temptation finally to search for Jiyan’s MySpace. The discipline to push that aside.

It was absurd even as the urge tickled at her brain, but it would’ve been like staring at a living myth in the face—too harsh and bright and utterly foreign to her world of ground, dirt, fervent volition.

کوردستان

The week or so before the first nuclear blasts hit, Arîn cleaned her rifles as Khaje smoked outside her barous tree door, the daytime’s last yield of sunset dappling her in blue, purple, and gold wavelengths. Arîn wished she could take a photo of Khaje like this, for posterity; she always resembled a figure in an old oil portrait, burnished by her years of chafed experience into something regal rather than jaded. The fine artery of golden belief still lying somewhere beneath her layers.

The assembly had just concluded, and Khaje had seeded hints to start arming and preparing for fighting. Stay on your guard and watch out. Arîn didn't need the warning; she’d trained herself to switch between her many modes on a second’s tick, to defend her community. What else was a peshmerga commander for? They would soon transform the school classrooms into holding bays for ammunition, medical supplies, anything else to aid an oncoming crisis. But hopefully they wouldn't need to evacuate Tawakul for too long. Her heart protested the very thought.

She’d still been ready her whole life for something like this, of course. Infrastructural ruptures, precarious achievements of an only momentarily stable everyday. Khaje told her this, and secretly Arîn trusted Khaje’s premonition most of all because she’d survived so much shit: something always happens. A civil war, the PKK, the bastard Americans coming to fuck things up.

Arîn just had one question to broach to Khaje, after all this time. “Do you want to get in touch with…” she faltered. “Her? Your daughter?” Even her name felt like a forewarning—omen or promise, too sacred to speak aloud. Didn't Khaje send her away? Did Khaje still even miss Jiyan?

Khaje turned and stared at her, with the gathered intensity of her bloodshot eyes. “It’s not about want. She’s coming, whether we all like it or not.”

This was the first time Arîn was hearing about this. “How are you sure?”

“Trust me. I know. I've been promised.”

Ah. So it wasn't exactly a choice, again.

What Arîn would never confess was that Khaje was like an earthly angel of the old Zorostrian tales, what with her family and hearth braided so intimately into the triumph-tragedy of Tawakul’s recent survival. And if Khaje wasn't living basically next door to her with her Khaje-blackout-drinking-episodes and Khaje-assembly-vetos and monumental anger about the government’s response to Anfal, Arîn might have prayed about Khaje, held her in her chest like a guardian angel, no matter how much the real Khaje wouldn't want it.

What an awful origin story. What a miracle, that the Iraqis had spared Tawakul alone. What a stroke of stochastic cruelty. It could've all gone donkey-sideways. It very much did, for everyone else.

So Arîn could be forgiven if Jiyan took on the quality of a dream-figure too, or a dream-antithesis. This girl, who had grown up into an ethical dilemma, whose life was one big long moral sacrifice; who’d laid the steady subsoil for Arîn’s jineological tenets to flourish in, who’d gardened the society of Tawakul without meaning to.

That, then, was the unwritten axiom of Arîn’s heart: she’d grown up with Jiyan as an invisible sister she’d never touch, a shared relative whose mistakes paved the way for your better successes. Jiyan’s existence was relegated to the fiction of the present and future. They had always been suspended in the mirrored balance of an hourglass, her and Jiyan: Jiyan within the Tawakul before, her living the Tawakul after, separated by Anfal’s inflection.

And now they were going to meet. The hourglass was going to break, sand flowing askew.

Was there a name for this ineffable, mysterious link they shared?

Later that night after she debriefed her women, Arîn repeated the creed she was always reminding herself of: all my mothers and grandmothers survived the most unimaginable disasters to return here and rebuild. We are nothing without Tawakul, and Tawakul is nothing without us, without its people. I will defend this valley with my life and breath. We, the peshmerga, have prepared ourselves as well as we can. May we all hope to live and die gloriously, like Sakîne Cansiz the martyr.

زەهاکی

In the end the nuclear blasts came down in Kurdistan. The Anthropocene sounded its death knell. And hell really, really broke loose when Khaje found Jiyan again.

ئارین

Khaje was becoming a fervent believer of jineology by the hour. Arîn had never seen anything like it.

“We’re not fighting for Kurdistan for the fun of it,” Khaje was insisting to Jiyan. “Seizing land and being Marxist-Leninist agitators were goals of the past. We don’t need a recognised homeland to achieve our rights. The homeland is in our local communities and municipal assemblies and equal representation for women. It’s already here, in our hands.”

“Okay, and you’re saying this because…?” Jiyan muttered. “Because you didn’t like that I shopped for bras at Victoria’s Secret and went to Kurdish protests in the memories Ssrin showed you?”

“That’s not the point. The point is that aesthetic patriotism won’t help anyone. A real revolutionary—“

“Yes, yes, I know! You’ve said it two or three times.”

It was after dinner, and neither Khaje nor Jiyan made an effort to keep their voices low. By Arîn’s guesstimate they thought there was no point: their tumult was basically shared history anyway, a family struggle spun into legend. Nothing to hide, no records to redact. They’d clarified loudly and publicly in the village square that Khaje had sent Jiyan away because her daughter was a morally repulsive canker sore, thank you! and not because Khaje was poor.

If Arîn wanted to be facetious, and she rarely was, she’d say that Khaje and Jiyan were facing off in a grand tournament of jealousy, except the subjects of their jealousy were each other. It was all an attempt to stitch back the years of aching distance between them, an attempt to show off all the other party had missed out on. It looked like the best motivation for becoming a flag-carrying jineologist was getting ammunition to prove a point to your estranged daughter.

Jiyan was standing here now, trying to dry her hands of the dishwashing, a mythical figure given flesh and blood and flaws and cropped curls. She was the most American relative Arîn had ever met in real life, which wasn’t saying much. This innocent figure of worship with hairline cracks in its kaolin.

Jiyan barked out a sarcastic laugh from the sink. Arîn turned her face away.

In actual fact, little was strange about the fact that they now had a snake alien aiding them. Stranger things had happened. Ssrin was recuperating somewhere in the caves, officially, or she could be among them right now, spectating their human disputes. Arîn had wanted to bring a sheaf of Apo Öcalan’s writings and a bell to Ssrin, but Khaje had put her foot down. What a pity! A missed chance to make Ssrin the first intergalactic ambassador of jineology.

So she threw herself deeper into her Tawakuli mission—violent as the cornflower-heart of unmelted ice, tender as the fresh sprout of kingir within her perfectly tessellated farming plots.

Anna was trying to relearn how to quarter venison cuts and brew qazwan coffee and churn the yoghurt in a barrel. All these arts of living she’d been forced to shaft in Germany and New York City, struck a compromise with by learning Farsi to find her way back here someday. The work of existence continued in an apocalypse, of course. That was Tawakul’s mission.

Being back in Tawakul was earth-shattering and predictably domestic all at once. She was conscious every minute of how she didn't fit in: the turbulence of her footsteps next to the peshmerga’s strategic prowl, her American accent, the way she occasionally filled in gaps in Sorani with English loanwords.

She’d known she could never fully prepare herself for her first trip back in decades, not with any amount of reading about the aftermath of Anfal. But the cliché stood: she hadn't known what to expect.

Had she thought she was going to be like Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road, coming back to the ruins of some of what she remembered, screaming in anguish over an interrupted return after an unimaginable journey of tribulations? No, Tawakul was thriving in her absence. She wasn't sure if her Anna-brain was happy or insulted about that. Shouldn’t she be overjoyed? Or maybe she was too self-respecting to accept her absence as a boon. A lesson from Roman she was trying to practise in his memory.

One question remained: Anna didn't know if she would have to abandon Tawakul once more, by the end of all this.

ژیان

Arîn was preparing to lead the cave survivors back to Tawakul, when Jiyan found her. This time her voice was urgent, a reversal of their typical conversations in the past hours: “Arîn, you need to bring the others and leave now. It’s not safe.”

A chill reverberated through Arîn. No: her first thought. Leaving was the last resort. She tugged her mule’s harness close to her.

“Please,” Jiyan pleaded. “My mother’s instructions. The others can hold Iruvage off for a while, but this is your only chance to—” Save everyone.

Instead Arîn said, “Do you know anything about us, at all?”

She was about to bicker with Jiyan, until Jiyan grasped her face and kissed her forehead, long and firm. Her eyes widened.

“Go,” Jiyan said finally, the loudest echo in the miniature eternity between them. “Do what we did. Survive.”

Arîn paused, not weeping but perhaps near to. She’d been trained for a singular thing all her life, the purity of commitment and loyalty armouring her skin, and now at this crossroads: a decision counter to that. History was recursive, after all. She glimpsed a figment of Jiyan’s Glock being pressed into her hands as a child.

Except things were different now. Everything had the opportunity to be different. There was no sacrifice here, except her ideals of where Tawakul should be. At the epicentre of circumstance, Jiyan was asking her to carry the burden of both archivist and witness.

Jiyan kissed her forehead again when Arîn didn’t move, apparently because she might as well. I trust you. Arîn was stunned.

And then Arîn saw it: she’d been trained for a singular thing all her life, but it’d prepared her for the opposite path too, branching away for a contingency with fate.

She nodded, and went to gather the survivors.

There was no opportunity to bid goodbye to Khaje, as she made her way out of the Qandil Mountains. Time and speed was the priority. But once the ribbon of lush valley and beloved water-veins of the mountains had shrunk to a speck in the distance, Arîn comforted herself.

She’d never see Khaje again. But that didn't mean she couldn’t keep her however she wanted: a candlelit flame, eventually, an orange scarf she’d retie around her head every day. A poster of Margaret Shello in her room.

As she left all known population centres behind, along with the weary patches of America’s footprints with its limited box of goodwill and the landfills left by its geopolitics, she walked towards Rojhilat and braved a smile. She was safe in who she was, here at the end of the world: Arîn, daughter of Tawakul, sister to Jiyan and all other survivors, the vanguard of Tawakul’s lifeblood.