Ali Ashouri | Exclusive to iKurd.net

The anniversary of Sherko Bekas’s death is not merely an occasion to remember the passing of one of the greatest modern Kurdish poets; it is an opportunity to revisit the work of a poet who transformed poetry into a space of freedom, memory, and human dignity. In an age when poetry often risks becoming either a political slogan or a purely formal exercise, Bekas followed a different path. He did not simply write about freedom; he allowed freedom to become present within the very structure and movement of his poetry.

For Sherko Bekas, freedom was not only a political aspiration. It was an existential experience, a way of inhabiting the world, a condition necessary for language, imagination, and human connection. His poetry suggests that when freedom disappears, something deeper than political rights is lost: the ability to dream, to create, and to preserve the meaning of life itself.

Bekas emerged from the wounded history of Kurdistan, a history marked by conflict, displacement, silence, and struggle. Yet his poetry never remains confined to the representation of suffering. Pain in his work is not an endpoint; it becomes a starting point for creation. From destruction, he builds language; from silence, he recovers voices; from loss, he searches for the possibility of renewal.

This is one of the defining characteristics of his poetry. Bekas does not transform suffering into despair. Instead, he transforms it into an aesthetic and ethical experience. His poems preserve the memory of wounds while refusing to surrender the future. In this sense, his work is not merely poetry of resistance; it is poetry of survival — an art form that protects human dignity against forgetting.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Bekas’s poetry is its profound relationship with nature. Mountains, trees, rivers, rain, birds, and wind are not decorative images in his poems. They possess presence, memory, and voice. Nature becomes a living archive, carrying experiences that official histories often fail to preserve.

In Bekas’s poetic world, nature is not simply a refuge from human suffering. It is a witness. Trees remember, rivers carry stories, and birds become messengers of freedom. Through this relationship with nature, Bekas creates a poetic universe in which the human and the natural worlds remain connected. The destruction of one inevitably affects the other.

This understanding brings his poetry close to a broader philosophical question: how can human beings preserve memory in the face of disappearance? The answer in Bekas’s work lies in language itself. Poetry becomes a place where what is threatened with extinction can continue to exist.

Jacques Derrida’s reflections on testimony offer a useful perspective here. For Derrida, testimony is not merely the recording of an event; it is an act of responsibility toward a truth that may otherwise disappear.

The witness does not simply describe the past; the witness carries it into the future.
In this sense, Sherko Bekas’s poetry can be understood as a form of testimony. His poems do not function as historical documents in the traditional sense. Rather, they preserve the lived experience of individuals and communities — their memories, their losses, their hopes, and their desire for freedom.

Poetry, for Bekas, becomes a form of survival beyond history. It keeps alive what violence, censorship, and forgetting attempt to erase. Through the act of writing, memory becomes not a monument to the past, but a living presence in the present.

Freedom as the Essence of Poetry

One of Sherko Bekas’s most powerful poems reveals his understanding of freedom with remarkable simplicity:

“If they take the flower from my songs,one season will die.
If they take love away,
two seasons will die.
And if they take bread, three seasons will die.
But if they take freedom
from my songs,
the whole year will die.”

The strength of this poem lies precisely in its clarity. Bekas does not rely on complex metaphors or intellectual abstraction. Instead, he creates a profound hierarchy of human necessities through four simple images: the flower, love, bread, and freedom.

The flower represents beauty and the human need for imagination; love represents emotional connection and the possibility of intimacy; bread represents physical survival and the basic conditions of life. Yet freedom stands above them all, because without freedom, beauty loses its meaning, love becomes fragile, and life itself is reduced to mere existence.

The final image of the poem is especially significant: if freedom disappears, it is not one season that dies, but the entire year. This is not simply a metaphor for political oppression. It suggests the collapse of human time itself — the loss of the future, the loss of possibility, and the loss of the ability to create meaning.

In Bekas’s poetry, freedom is therefore not merely a political demand. It is an aesthetic and existential condition. It is what allows language to breathe, imagination to flourish, and human beings to remain connected to the world around them. Freedom is the rhythm that keeps the human experience alive.

The Mother Tongue as a Home of Memory

Another central dimension of Sherko Bekas’s poetry is his relationship with language. For him, Kurdish was not simply a tool of communication; it was a living space of memory and identity. Every language carries a particular way of seeing the world, and when a language is silenced or marginalized, a unique dimension of human experience is placed at risk.

Bekas’s commitment to Kurdish was therefore not a retreat into isolation. On the contrary, by deepening the expressive possibilities of his own language, he opened a dialogue with universal human concerns. Great literature often emerges from a specific language and culture while reaching beyond them. The particular becomes a path toward the universal.

Bekas demonstrated that a language does not need political power or global dominance in order to express profound human experiences. Through Kurdish, he explored questions that belong to all humanity: freedom, love, death, memory, loneliness, and hope.

Language in his poetry functions much like nature: it is alive, changing, and carrying traces of the past. Words are not empty signs; they contain the experiences of generations. In this sense, Bekas was not only a poet of Kurdish language; he was a poet of the possibilities contained within language itself.

Paul Ricoeur, in Memory, History, Forgetting, argues that memory is not simply a return to the past but a dynamic relationship between past, present, and future. Bekas’s poetry embodies this idea. His poems preserve historical experiences, yet they do not remain trapped in nostalgia. They transform memory into a creative force.

The past in Bekas’s poetry is not a closed chapter. It continues to speak. It becomes a source of imagination, ethical reflection, and renewal. This is why his poetry reaches beyond a specific historical moment: it addresses the universal human struggle against forgetting.

Poetry Against Forgetting

Throughout human history, poetry has often served as a form of resistance against disappearance. Before written histories preserved the memories of civilizations, poetry carried voices, emotions, and experiences across generations.

Sherko Bekas belongs to this tradition. He does not write history in the conventional sense; instead, he preserves history through images, emotions, and human voices. A tree can become a witness, a mother can become the guardian of collective memory, and a simple word can contain the experience of an entire generation.

His poetry reminds us that forgetting is not a passive process. It is often connected to power, silence, and the disappearance of voices. Against this process, poetry creates another form of memory — one that cannot be easily erased because it lives within language and imagination.

This is why Bekas’s work continues to speak beyond its original context. His poetry is rooted in Kurdish experience, but its questions are universal: How can people preserve dignity in difficult times? How can memory survive violence? How can language remain alive when it is threatened by silence?

Sherko Bekas in the Landscape of World Literature

The significance of Sherko Bekas cannot be measured only by his contribution to Kurdish literature. His importance lies in his ability to transform a particular historical and cultural experience into a poetic language capable of reaching universal human concerns. Great literature often begins from a specific place, a specific language, and a particular memory; yet when it addresses fundamental questions of human existence, it transcends geographical boundaries.

Bekas’s poetry follows this path. It emerges from the mountains, landscapes, and collective memories of Kurdistan, but it moves toward broader questions of freedom, dignity, love, nature, and the human search for meaning. His work demonstrates that a poet does not become universal by abandoning his roots; rather, universality often grows from a profound engagement with one’s own language and cultural experience.

The presence of poets such as Bekas in world literature reminds us that literature is not a collection of identical voices. It is a conversation among differences. Each language preserves unique ways of understanding existence. The survival of diverse poetic traditions is therefore not only a cultural matter; it is a preservation of different possibilities of being human.

Bekas expanded the expressive possibilities of Kurdish poetry. He demonstrated that Kurdish, like every great literary language, possesses the capacity to explore the deepest dimensions of human experience. His achievement was not simply to write poetry in Kurdish, but to reveal the richness and philosophical depth contained within that language.

Poetry, Testimony, and the Life of the Work

The concept of testimony offers another way to understand the lasting power of Bekas’s poetry. For Jacques Derrida, testimony involves a responsibility toward something that cannot be fully preserved except through an act of remembrance. A testimony carries an experience from the fragile space of the present into the uncertain future.

Sherko Bekas’s poetry functions in this way. His poems testify to histories of suffering, but they are not limited to suffering. They testify also to resilience, imagination, beauty, and the human capacity to create meaning despite hardship.

The poet, in this sense, is not merely a recorder of events. The poet becomes a guardian of possibilities. Poetry preserves what cannot be reduced to statistics or historical records: the emotional reality of human beings, their fears, their hopes, and their dreams.

Umberto Eco’s reflections on interpretation are also relevant here. Eco argues that literary works remain open to new readings because their meanings are not exhausted by a single historical moment. A great poem continues to generate interpretations because it contains a depth that exceeds its original context.

Bekas’s poetry possesses precisely this quality. A poem written from the experience of Kurdistan can also speak to anyone who has experienced the threat of silence, the loss of memory, or the struggle for dignity. Its meaning expands because its foundation is not limited to one political moment; it is rooted in fundamental human experiences.

The Legacy of Sherko Bekas

The true legacy of Sherko Bekas is not only found in the number of poems he wrote or in his influence on later generations of Kurdish poets. His deepest legacy lies in his understanding of what poetry can be.

For Bekas, poetry was a way of protecting humanity. It preserved language when language was threatened, memory when memory was endangered, and hope when despair seemed overwhelming. His work reminds us that poetry is not an escape from reality; it is one of the ways through which reality can be understood more deeply.

He showed that a poet can speak from a particular homeland while addressing universal human questions. A poet can defend a language without creating barriers between cultures. A poet can describe suffering without surrendering to hopelessness.

In a world increasingly shaped by rapid forgetting, technological acceleration, and the disappearance of individual voices, Bekas’s poetry remains a reminder of the importance of memory and attention. His work asks us to listen again — to languages, to nature, and to the fragile voices of human experience.

Conclusion: Poetry as a Possibility of Life

Sherko Bekas remains one of the remarkable poetic voices of modern literature because he understood that poetry is ultimately a defense of life itself. His work reveals that freedom is not only a political idea; it is the condition that allows imagination, language, and human dignity to exist.

If freedom disappears from poetry, something more profound than artistic expression is lost. The human ability to dream, to remember, and to imagine another future begins to fade. This is why Bekas’s poetry continues to live: it speaks to the enduring need for freedom as a foundation of human existence.
The anniversary of his death is therefore not only a moment of remembrance. It is an invitation to return to the questions his poetry continues to ask: What protects human beings from forgetting? What keeps language alive? What allows hope to survive?

Sherko Bekas’s answer remains within his poems. As long as his words are read, the rivers, trees, mountains, and voices of his poetic world continue to speak. His poetry reminds us that when language is joined with freedom and truth, it does not disappear. It becomes part of the shared memory of humanity.

References
دیوانی شێرکۆ بێکەس لە ستۆکهۆڵم ١٩٩٠
Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Translated by David Wills. University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Derrida, Jacques. Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Stanford University Press, 2000.
Eco, Umberto. The Limits of Interpretation. Indiana University Press, 1990.
Eco, Umberto. Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press, 1994.
Eagleton, Terry. How to Read a Poem. Blackwell Publishing, 2007.

Ali Ashouri, a contributing writer for iKurd.net based in San Diego, California, U.S.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of iKurd.net or its editorial team.

Copyright © 2026 iKurd.net. All rights reserved.

Hêmin Mukriyanî: Language, Memory, and the Incompleteness of Modernity in Kurdish Poetry

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Ali Ashouri | Exclusive to iKurd.net

Language Beyond Nostalgia

To speak of the mother tongue today is not to invoke a romantic return to origins. It is not merely the language of childhood, intimacy, or memory. In the contemporary world, the mother tongue stands at the intersection of power, technology, sovereignty, and identity. It is not simply a medium of expression; it is a field of struggle.

Modernity transformed language from a primarily local and organic phenomenon into an institutional and political instrument. With the rise of the nation-state, language became standardized, codified, and centralized. What was once a plurality of dialects and living speech forms was reorganized into a national language—disciplined, purified, and regulated. The mother tongue, in this process, was either absorbed into the national imaginary or marginalized as folklore.

The modern state did not merely recognize language; it governed it. Through education systems, print capitalism, bureaucratic documentation, and later mass media, language became a mechanism of symbolic integration and exclusion. A legitimate language was never simply linguistic—it was political.

Language and Symbolic Power

Language operates as a form of symbolic capital. Not all languages circulate equally within fields of power. Some possess institutional legitimacy, global mobility, and economic convertibility. Others remain confined to domestic or regional spaces.

In modern societies, to speak a dominant language fluently is often to possess access to opportunity, authority, and recognition. Conversely, to speak a marginalized mother tongue can be to inhabit a structurally disadvantaged position. This hierarchy is rarely explicit; it operates through institutions, norms, and cultural expectations.

The mother tongue, therefore, is not simply inherited—it is positioned. It exists within networks of valuation and devaluation. The suppression of a language is not only cultural loss; it is a redistribution of symbolic power.

The Digital Condition and Linguistic Transformation

If print modernity centralized language, digital modernity fragments and reconfigures it. The digital sphere does not abolish linguistic hierarchy; it restructures it.

Platforms, algorithms, and data infrastructures privilege certain languages through visibility, translation capacity, monetization, and searchability. Linguistic presence online is uneven. Some languages dominate search results, artificial intelligence models, and global communication channels. Others remain digitally peripheral.

The digital world introduces a new paradox. On the one hand, it offers unprecedented possibilities for linguistic revival. Minority communities can produce content, archive memory, and construct transnational networks in their own languages. On the other hand, digital capitalism consolidates attention around a limited number of globally dominant languages.

Language in the digital age becomes data. It is quantified, indexed, and optimized. What cannot be efficiently processed risks invisibility. Thus, the fate of the mother tongue increasingly depends not only on cultural transmission but also on technological infrastructure.

Mother Tongue as Resistance

In this context, defending the mother tongue is not a conservative gesture. It is a political act.

To insist on linguistic plurality is to resist homogenization. It is to challenge the assumption that communication efficiency must override cultural depth. The mother tongue carries worldviews, metaphors, epistemologies, and forms of memory that cannot be fully translated without remainder.

Modernity sought to unify; digital capitalism seeks to optimize. Both tend toward reduction. The mother tongue interrupts this logic. It reintroduces opacity, singularity, and local knowledge into systems that favor standardization.

Linguistic diversity is not an obstacle to modern life; it is a condition of epistemic richness. A world reduced to a handful of dominant languages risks cognitive and cultural impoverishment.

Beyond Identity Politics

The defense of the mother tongue should not collapse into essentialism. Language is not an immutable essence tied to blood or soil. It is historical, relational, and constantly evolving.

What is at stake is not purity but presence. The question is not whether languages change—they always have—but whether they are permitted to exist as living mediums of thought, education, and creativity.

In plural societies, the recognition of multiple mother tongues is not fragmentation; it is democratic expansion. It signals a redistribution of visibility and legitimacy.

Conclusion: Language, Future, and Responsibility

The future of the mother tongue will not be decided solely in homes or schools. It will be shaped in code, platforms, policies, and global infrastructures.

To think critically about language today requires moving beyond nostalgia and beyond nationalist romanticism. It requires understanding how power operates through linguistic standardization and digital optimization.

The mother tongue is no longer only a matter of memory. It is a matter of justice.

In defending linguistic plurality, we defend not only cultural heritage but the possibility of multiple ways of inhabiting the world. Ali Ashouri.

Resources:

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
Foucault, Michel. The Archeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.

Joseph, John E. Language and Nationalism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.
Stalder, Felix. The Digital Condition. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018.
Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. London: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Ali Ashouri, a contributing writer for iKurd.net based in San Diego, California, U.S.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of iKurd.net or its editorial team.

Copyright © 2026 iKurd.net. All rights reserved.

The post Mother Tongue in the Age of Modernity, Power, and Digital World appeared first on iKurd News.

Ali Ashouri | Exclusive to iKurd.net

Rojava [Syrian Kurdistan, Western Kurdistan] cannot be understood as a political project in the ordinary sense. It does not present itself as a completed model, a finalized system, or a program awaiting recognition. It appears instead as an interruption—an event that unsettles the self-certainty of political history in the Middle East and exposes the fragility of what has long been presented as inevitable.

The violence directed at Rojava is often explained through names, negotiations, and geopolitical calculations. But such explanations miss what is most decisive. What is at stake is not a dispute between actors but a confrontation between two fundamentally different grammars of politics.

One is built on exclusion, normalization, and the management of difference; the other emerges from refusal, plurality, and the insistence that living together does not require erasure.

The Architecture of Erasure

Modern politics in the region has been structured by a persistent fantasy: that society can be stabilized only through sameness. Language, belief, identity, and history must be rendered coherent, unified, and closed. Whatever resists this closure is treated as excess—something to be corrected, absorbed, or eliminated.

This logic does not announce itself as violent. On the contrary, it often speaks in the language of order, security, and unity. Yet its ultimate horizon is always the same: the disappearance of the Other. What is commonly called extremism or authoritarianism is merely the visible surface of this deeper structure. The structure itself is older, more patient, and more resilient.

From within this architecture, annihilation is not a breakdown of politics; it is one of its methods.

Refusal as Political Opening

Rojava enters history not as a counter-sovereignty but as a refusal to accept the terms on which sovereignty has been defined. Its “no” is not reactive; it is generative. It does not simply negate a particular power but suspends the very language through which power demands recognition.

This refusal does something unusual: it leaves space open. It does not rush to replace one authority with another, one center with a new center. Instead, it allows politics to emerge from below, from the undecided, from relations that cannot be fully stabilized or mastered.

What appears here is not a blueprint but a practice—fragile, contested, unfinished. And it is precisely this unfinished character that makes it intolerable to established orders. Systems built on control require closure. They require answers that silence questions. Rojava insists on remaining a question.

The Threat of Difference

The danger Rojava represents has little to do with territory or governance. It lies in the way it exposes difference as something other than a problem to be solved. Difference here is not tolerated; it is constitutive. It is not managed; it is allowed to speak.

This is deeply unsettling for political systems that rely on the fiction of homogeneity. Once difference is no longer framed as a deviation, the entire moral economy of domination begins to unravel. What had appeared natural reveals itself as imposed. What had been normalized becomes visible as violent.
Rojava does not argue against this normalization; it displaces it.

Beyond Betrayal, Beyond Protection

The language of betrayal—so often invoked in discussions of Kurdish politics—presumes a promise that could have been kept. But what if the promise itself was always conditional? What if recognition was offered only insofar as it did not threaten the deeper order?

Rojava unsettles not because it was abandoned, but because it could not be fully appropriated. It resists being translated into the familiar scripts of protection and dependency. It does not ask to be saved in exchange for obedience. This refusal places it outside the moral economy through which domination is rendered acceptable.

What is feared is not instability, but uncontrollability.

Women and the Displacement of Power

Nowhere is this displacement more visible than in the central role of women. This is not a question of inclusion within an existing structure but a transformation of what counts as political action. Power here is no longer imagined solely as command, conquest, or decision imposed from above. It becomes relational, distributed, and accountable.

Such a shift does more than challenge patriarchy; it interrupts the symbolic foundations of authority itself. In a political culture that equates power with domination, this interruption appears as an existential threat.
It is not surprising that it provokes such hostility.

Failure as a Misreading

To ask whether Rojava has failed is to impose a teleology that it never claimed. Failure and success belong to projects that seek completion, recognition, and permanence. Rojava operates in a different register. Its significance lies not in its endurance as an institution but in what it has made thinkable.

Even under attack, even in retreat, it continues to unsettle the assumption that politics must take the form it has always taken. In this sense, its vulnerability is not evidence of weakness but a trace of its force.
Ideas that do not threaten power are rarely met with such persistence.

Existential Risk, Existential Response

The threat facing the Kurds is not episodic. It is woven into a historical order that has repeatedly denied their presence by renaming, partitioning, and deferring it. This denial does not end with agreements; it merely changes its vocabulary.
To confront such a threat requires more than strategic calculation. It requires a response that touches the level at which existence itself is negotiated. Rojava gestures toward such a response—not as a final answer, but as a way of refusing disappearance.

Conclusion: Keeping the Question Open

Rojava does not offer certainty. It offers something far more unsettling: the persistence of an open question. It asks whether politics must always be founded on fear, whether coexistence requires domination, whether history is truly closed.

By refusing to close these questions, Rojava disrupts the comfort of established narratives. It reminds us that what presents itself as natural is often only habitual, and that what appears impossible is frequently only forbidden.

This, perhaps, is its most radical gesture:
to insist that another way of living together remains possible, even when every power demands silence.

Reference:
Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Stanford University Press, 2005.

Ali Ashouri, a contributing writer for iKurd.net based in San Diego, California, U.S.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of iKurd.net or its editorial team.

Copyright © 2026 iKurd.net. All rights reserved.

The post Rojava and the Refusal That Disrupts History appeared first on iKurd News.

Ali Ashouri | Exclusive to iKurd.net

Iran’s political and social situation stands at a critical yet unfinished moment. The signs of crisis are unmistakable, yet the trajectory of developments has not converged toward a stabilized horizon. On the one hand, social struggles are expanding, and diverse forms of protest, strikes, and civil disobedience are visible across cities and provincial towns.

On the other hand, these mobilizations have not yet culminated in the formation of a coherent, reliable democratic alternative. This gap between protest action and political articulation constitutes one of the defining features of the current conjuncture.

Recent protests indicate that social discontent has moved beyond isolated or sectoral demands and has begun to question the totality of the existing order of power. The simultaneous articulation of economic and political demands, alongside the transgression of symbolic red lines, signals a profound erosion of legitimacy. Yet this erosion has not translated into the reconstruction of a viable political horizon. Society is in motion, but this movement has not yet crystallized into a shared language, durable organization, or a clear political vision.

The response of power to this situation reveals the depth of the crisis more clearly than anything else. The Islamic Republic has increasingly resorted to overt violence: street repression, executions, and even attacks on spaces that, in any political order, ought to enjoy a minimum degree of inviolability, such as hospitals (Kurdish area—Ilam).

This level of violence demonstrates that the regime has truly lost its capacity to generate consent and meaning and now relies on the direct application of force upon bodies to preserve itself. Violence here is not a sign of stability; rather, it is a symptom of anxiety and exhaustion within an order that has fundamentally lost its bond with society.

In such a context, the expectation of a ready-made, pre-constructed alternative can itself be a misunderstanding of the logic of politics. In many historical experiences, political alternatives have emerged as products of struggle, not as its preconditions.

Democratic alternatives often take shape through shared experiences of repression, the formation of new solidarities, setbacks, and the continual re-articulation of collective action. From this perspective, the present situation should be understood as one “in the process of becoming,” a situation that has not yet reached its conclusion, and whose very incompleteness carries within it the possibility of transformation.

Within this process, the participation of different regions of the country in the protests is of particular significance. Large parts of Kurdistan, as well as areas of Baluchistan and other marginalized regions, have entered into a nationwide constellation of protest.

Historically positioned at the margins of the center, these regions have long been subjected to specific forms of repression, exclusion, and enforced silence. Their integration into a broader protest dynamic has pushed the movement beyond mere geographical dispersion and toward a more qualitative level—one in which diverse experiences of repression can be translated into a shared language of resistance.

The importance of this development lies in the fact that, if the link between center and periphery continues to deepen, it may lay the groundwork for a more democratic horizon. An alternative that emerges from such a process would necessarily be plural, decentralized, and attentive to difference.

Such an alternative understands power not as a singular, centralized entity, but as a network of unequal relations, and responds by generating new forms of social solidarity and collective organization. In this framework, the regime’s naked violence can paradoxically accelerate this process, as it strips the dominant order of its capacity for concealment and intensifies the imperative to name, confront, and resist it.

The current situation in Iran can thus be conceived as a field of tension among expanding struggles, the unrestrained violence of power, and the still-unrealized possibility of a democratic alternative. None of these forces alone will determine the future. What lies ahead is a suspended condition—one that is simultaneously exhausting and enabling.

This unfinished character should not be read merely as a sign of weakness or failure. Incompleteness itself can function as a configuration of possibility: an opening for rethinking politics, solidarity, and democracy. If a different future is to emerge, it is unlikely to be imposed from outside or constructed according to obsolete models.

Such a future, if it is to exist at all, can only arise from shared experiences of struggle, newly forged connections, and the gradual reconstruction of collective action. The central question, ultimately, is whether the protest movement will be able to generate its own alternative from within—through this historical incompleteness—or not.

Postscript

Analyzing the role of external forces in relation to Iran requires a distinction between two different levels: diasporic activism and geopolitical intervention. Segments of the opposition abroad—particularly currents associated with Reza Pahlavi—have in recent years sought to revive and reframe the discourse of a return to the former political order (monarchy, in various forms and reinterpretations). These efforts have largely relied on media and political support from external actors, including Israel and specific factions within the United States power structure, while simultaneously maintaining connections with certain forces inside the ruling establishment and with segments of Iran’s social base.

At the international level, U.S. policy toward Iran is shaped by competing political forces within its own power structure, oscillating between pressure, negotiation, and balance-of-power calculations. The roles of China, Russia, and regional actors are likewise defined less by democratic concerns than by economic interests and strategic considerations, all of which directly or indirectly affect responses to Iran’s internal developments.

These external forces, in and of themselves, neither generate democratic possibilities nor carry emancipatory projects. On the contrary, in the absence of an alternative rooted in society itself, they may facilitate the substitution of one political order with another whose objectives and functions are different from—and even opposed to—popular demands. As emphasized in the main text, if a genuine alternative does not emerge from within the protest movement, such forces may impose a political arrangement that reflects their own priorities rather than the collective will of society.

Within this framework, Iranian social action continues to unfold amid external interactions and geopolitical balances. Nevertheless, the formation of durable and meaningful political alternatives ultimately rests primarily on internal collective action, social organization, and the strengthening of endogenous social bonds.

Ali Ashouri, a contributing writer for iKurd.net based in San Diego, California, U.S.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of iKurd.net or its editorial team.

Copyright © 2026 iKurd.net. All rights reserved.

The post Reflections on the Current State of Protests in Iran appeared first on iKurd News.

With Greetings, Respect, and Hope For a Better Life

Ali Ashouri | Exclusive to iKurd.net

On the occasion of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, we are reminded that violence against women is not only a series of isolated acts but a persistent structure embedded in language, law, memory, and everyday practices of seeing and hearing.

From subtle, normalized forms of discrimination to the most extreme manifestation—femicide—these acts reveal the fragile boundaries between what is sayable and what is erased, between visibility and systematic invisibility. To confront this violence requires more than condemnation; it demands a critical re-reading of the structures that render women’s bodies and voices controllable, silenced, and predefined, and a reclaiming of spaces for shared mourning, expression, and meaning.

The violence that continues to target women today—from everyday normalized discrimination to femicide in its most exposed and brutal form—never appears as isolated incidents. It emerges within an order that has sedimented itself in language, law, memory, and habitual ways of seeing and hearing.

When we speak of femicide, we are not describing an exception but a moment in which this order loses the cover of its invisibility and briefly reveals itself. Femicide is less an aberration than a reflection of the very rule: a rule that positions the woman’s body as something to be controlled, silenced, or disciplined.

In this sense, violence is not merely a physical act; it is a linguistic operation that precedes any act of harm. It begins in a vocabulary that names the woman not as a subject of meaning but as an object of possession, a site of threat, or a body to be regulated.

What is erased is not only physical life but the possibility of speech—the capacity of a woman to appear as a speaker and articulate her own meaning beyond the frames assigned to her. This erasure operates through naming: through words that seem neutral but quietly reproduce the structures of a male-dominated order. Violence, before it becomes injury, is already a sentence—one that positions the woman in a subordinate place long before any act is carried out.

Looking deeper, the persistence of violence against women unfolds in the gap between what is “sayable” and what must be made to disappear. In that gap, meaning slips: what is erased often returns, reshaped, displaced, haunting the very structures that sought to silence it. Femicide, from this perspective, is not an endpoint but a trace—an overcompressed meaning that bursts outward because the surrounding structures can no longer contain the contradictions they themselves have produced.

Confronting such violence demands more than condemning singular acts. Condemnation alone remains trapped within the same logic that enables the violence in the first place. Real resistance begins when the structures governing naming, seeing, and hearing are disrupted.

Re-reading is required: re-reading law, collective memory, and traditions that have naturalized women’s vulnerability and normalized the erasure of their voices. Such re-reading seeks to pull meaning out of the monopoly of dominant narratives and to recognize alternative possibilities—possibilities that may be fragile and unstable but capable of breaking the chain that binds violence to its linguistic roots.

This disruption does not happen all at once. It begins with small fissures: challenging certain names, refusing vocabularies that fix women’s bodies into predetermined roles, reclaiming denied language. Each time a woman rewrites the meaning of her own presence, the order that has long attempted to define her is unsettled. This rewriting may not be loud; it may even seem imperceptible. Yet it is within these quiet gestures that the space of rupture opens.

Ultimately, the notion of a “life in shared mourning” must be rethought. A society that treats a woman’s death as private, exceptional, or merely a domestic matter is, in fact, depriving her of shared mourning; and the withholding of mourning is itself a form of erasure. Rethinking violence against women means rethinking who is worthy of shared mourning, who is permitted to have a voice, and which lives are admitted into collective memory.

When violence is embedded in language, it can only be confronted through language—through writing, rewriting, and opening fractures in meaning. Perhaps these fractures, fragile as they may be, are the only spaces where resistance can breathe: spaces where the cyclical return of violence may be interrupted, and where life—uncertain, unstable, yet insistently present—can return to the scene.

Ali Ashouri, a contributing writer for iKurd.net based in San Diego, California, U.S.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of iKurd.net or its editorial team.

Copyright © 2025 iKurd.net. All rights reserved.

Hêmin Mukriyanî: Language, Memory, and the Incompleteness of Modernity in Kurdish Poetry

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Ali Ashouri | Exclusive to iKurd.net 

Hêmin Mukriyanî occupies a liminal position in the history of modern Kurdish literature — not merely as a poet, but as a mediator between the oral tradition and the emerging modern written form.

He wrote at a time when Kurdish poetry still hovered between collective memory and individual expression; a time when language was crossing from orality to writing, and the poet stood precariously in-between.

It is precisely this in-betweenness that renders his poetry a threshold text — neither wholly traditional nor entirely modern, but a restless search for a language capable of expressing memory without being confined by it.

Linguistically, Hemin sought to liberate Sorani Kurdish from the rigidity of classical prosody and syntax, bringing it closer to the living rhythm of speech. Yet this liberation was never complete. The resonance of classical diction and metrical cadence remains present in his lines — a voice that desires to move beyond the past while still drawing nourishment from it.

This tension between fidelity and freedom constitutes the core of his aesthetic. Compared with his contemporaries such as Abdullah Goran or Sherko Bekas, Hemin was less preoccupied with political rupture or revolutionary diction and more with rescuing the beauty and integrity of the Kurdish language itself. Instead of deconstructing the historical order of poetry, he sought to heal it from within — transforming the poem into a vessel of cultural memory rather than a field of ideological revolt.

In matters of rhythm and sound, Hemin found a subtle balance between classical meter and spoken cadence. Though he never fully abandoned the traditional structure, his flexible use of rhythm softened its rigidity, creating a more intimate and collective tone.

The music of his poetry is not grand or heroic but human and communal — a sound that belongs to the ear of the people rather than to the palace of tradition. His poems are “audible” in the truest sense: not because of their outer melody, but because they echo the deep, historical listening of a language long denied its voice.

Visually and imagistically, Hemin was among the first Kurdish poets to elevate the image from mere ornament to meaning. Nature in his poetry is not a decorative backdrop but a living text — a symbolic landscape where mountains, rivers, and horses embody a collective existence on the edge of erasure.

Yet his imagery does not reach abstraction or philosophical reflection; it remains sensory rather than conceptual. In this sense, Hemin’s work drifts away from modernism and toward a kind of national romanticism — a poetics of mourning that seeks to preserve rather than reinvent the past. His verse oscillates between remembrance and renewal, awakening and dream.

Historically, however, Hemin’s role in the institutionalization of the Sorani dialect cannot be overstated. As a teacher and scholar at a time when Kurdish lacked formal educational support, he worked tirelessly to make it a language of learning, writing, and thought.

Through editing texts, collecting folklore, and developing linguistic materials, he built a bridge between speech and writing — between the living voice of the people and the emerging discipline of literacy. His cultural project was thus profoundly political: an act of resistance against oblivion.

Yet within this cultural labor lies an inner contradiction. As an educator, Hemin sought standardization; as a poet, he longed for freedom. He stood between grammar and song, between the law of language and the dream of its dissolution. This paradox is the source of his enduring vitality: in his work, language itself becomes a site of struggle — between history and the present, between discipline and imagination.

Hemin Mukriyanî, then, is the poet of continuity amid rupture. He does not break tradition but transforms it from within, keeping alive the voices, idioms, and affections of a people on the verge of silence. His innovation lies precisely in his restraint, in his refusal to forget. He may not have reached the full horizon of Kurdish poetic modernism, yet he illuminated its path — as one lights a lamp without seeing the end of the road.

The true significance of Hemin Mukriyanî lies not in the overthrow of tradition but in making tradition self-aware. He taught the Kurdish language to listen to itself, and in that act of listening, thinking began. He stands, therefore, as a poet between history and dream — one who transformed the incompleteness of Kurdish modernity into a language of persistence and reflection.

1. Hassanpour, Amir. Nationalism and Language in Kurdistan, 1918–1985. Mellen Press, 1992.
2. Blau, Joyce. Manuel de kurde (dialecte Sorani). L’Institut Kurde de Paris, 1999.
3. Omarkhali, Khanna. The Yezidi Religious Textual Tradition: From Oral to Written. Harrassowitz Verlag, 2017.
4. Ali, Haidar. “From Orality to Modernity: The Reconfiguration of Kurdish Literary Identity.” Journal of Kurdish Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, 2021, pp. 45–

Ali Ashouri, a contributing writer for iKurd.net based in San Diego, California, U.S.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of iKurd.net or its editorial team.

Copyright © 2025 iKurd.net. All rights reserved.

The post Hêmin Mukriyanî: Language, Memory, and the Incompleteness of Modernity in Kurdish Poetry appeared first on iKurd News.

Ali Ashouri | Exclusive to iKurd.net

Film review

The documentary Angels of Sinjar** (Hanna Polak, 2022) transcends the boundaries of reportage. It is not only an account of the atrocities committed by ISIS against the Yazidis; it is a reflection on survival, collective memory, and the politics of the female body in a geography long marked by persecution. By following Hanifa, a Yazidi woman searching tirelessly for her abducted sisters, the film links the personal with the collective, the intimate with the historical, and transforms a story of loss into a cinematic meditation on remembrance.

1. The Yazidis and the history of exclusion

The Yazidis have long existed as the “other” in the Middle East. Their history is punctuated by massacres, forced conversions, and repeated waves of displacement: from the Ottoman Empire and early modern empires to twentieth-century Arab and Turkish nationalist projects. Even within Kurdish Muslim communities, Yazidis were frequently branded as impure or heretical.

The 2014 assault by ISIS on Sinjar—marked by mass executions, forced displacement, and systematic enslavement of women—was not an aberration but the culmination of centuries of marginalization. Polak’s film does not deliver this historical backdrop as narration, but the weight of it resonates through the landscapes, testimonies, and silences. The genocide appears as the most recent link in a chain of dispossession.

2. Women as witnesses of history

Yazidi women were doubly targeted: as the objects of sexual violence and as symbols of communal endurance. In ISIS’s perverse logic, women were reduced to commodities of war, stripped of humanity. Angels of Sinjar resists this reduction. Through Hanifa, women appear not as passive victims but as active witnesses.

Her body and voice operate as what might be called a living archive: they carry both trauma and testimony. Feminist theories of war often remind us that the female body is a political battlefield where structures of domination inscribe themselves. Yet here, the same body becomes a medium of resistance—reclaiming memory, demanding justice, and refusing erasure.
3. Space as memory

One of the film’s strongest achievements lies in its portrayal of place. The ruined houses of Sinjar, the barren mountains, and the deserted streets do not serve as mere backdrops. They speak. They testify. Maurice Halbwachs’s notion of collective memory helps illuminate this dimension: memory is embedded in places and objects as much as in people.

Polak’s camera dwells on these landscapes of devastation, reminding us that trauma is written not only in bodies but in the geography itself. In this sense, Sinjar becomes both wound and witness.

4. Cinematic language and temporality

Rather than relying on graphic depictions of violence, Polak constructs a cinematic language of silence, repetition, and slowness:

Space: Every ruin is framed as a marker of loss, a visual archive of genocide.
Body: The camera lingers on faces, gestures, and pauses. The female body, neither fetishized nor silenced, becomes a site where trauma and agency intersect.

Time: The pacing is deliberately slow. The film emphasizes waiting, searching, and enduring. Horror is not confined to the past; it is present in the persistence of grief and the impossibility of closure.

This aesthetic decision shifts the film from the register of news reportage to that of lived experience. It implicates the spectator not as a detached observer, but as someone drawn into the ongoing temporality of loss.

5. Toward a new understanding

The significance of Angels of Sinjar lies in its reframing of the Yazidi experience. It refuses to represent them as voiceless victims. Instead, it emphasizes survivors who act, remember, and rebuild:
The female body emerges as both scarred and resilient, a bearer of memory rather than a mere object of violence.

Place is shown as inscribed with memory; ruins are not silent but narrate what has been endured.
Horror is revealed not only in the massacre itself but in the unending aftermath, in the everyday temporality of survival.

Thus, the film functions as more than a documentary of genocide. It reimagines cinema as a medium capable of making the invisible wounds of history perceptible and unforgettable. By weaving together body, memory, and space, Angels of Sinjar transforms testimony into resistance, and survival into a form of political presence.

** Footnote:

The name of the region known as Şingal in Kurdish and Sinjar in Arabic and Persian has both linguistic and geographical significance. The term Şingal is derived from Kurdish components: şîn (meaning “green” or “blue,” often associated with vegetation and fertility) and gal (meaning “valley,” “place,” or “land”). Together, these elements convey the meaning of “green valley” or “fertile place,” reflecting the region’s lush landscapes and agricultural abundance.

Medieval Islamic sources, such as Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī’s Muʿjam al-Buldān, refer to the area as Sinjar. In this work, Yāqūt describes Sinjar as a prosperous settlement located at the foot of a mountain range with numerous villages and fertile lands, highlighting its agricultural importance.

However, the Arabic form Sinjar does not carry an intrinsic meaning and is a phonetic adaptation of the original Kurdish name. The persistence of the name Şingal in Kurdish oral tradition underscores its indigenous origin. The variation between Şingal and Sinjar exemplifies a broader historical process in which Kurdish toponyms were reshaped under Arabic orthography and pronunciation, while their deeper etymological roots and semantic resonances remained alive in the local vernacular. By :
Ali Ashouri SanDieg

References:
Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Verso, 2009.
Das, Veena. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. University of California Press, 2007.
Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Indiana University Press, 2017.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford University Press, 1985.

Ali Ashouri, a contributing writer for iKurd.net based in San Diego, California, U.S.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of iKurd.net or its editorial team.

Copyright © 2026 iKurd.net. All rights reserved.

“Angels of Sinjar”: Film Screening Review with Q+A

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