The Matriarch Matrix

by Maxime Trencavel

  As she tries to remember how to spin correctly, how to articulate the prayers while spinning, she touches the peace she once knew. She wishes she could be with that peace again, forever. And they collapse in each other’s arms, Soran giving her the big bear hug that characterized their close childhood together.

  They reminisce about how he always followed her around until she finally followed him to Syria. Maybe it was possible, he said, that he was no longer a silly little boy standing up on tippy toes even though she still was taller than he. She says that would never be possible. Once silly, always silly. And she gives him a big bear hug back.

  Much to Roza’s relief, most of the house is essentially packed when a phone call from Iraq is received. It’s Aunt Ezna, calling her mother-in-law, Roza, to see if her grandchildren can help them flee Sinjar. She is afraid of the Daesh forces expanding out after their capture of Mosul, and she wants to join Roza’s family in Turkey. And of course Zara is ready to go get them. But she needs Soran to come as well, as he knows the Syrian officer in charge of the border crossing to that part of Iraq.

  As she packs her travel kit, Zara looks through her collection of headscarves. She has not worn one since leaving for the Peshmerga eleven years ago. She certainly was not going to walk a Jesuit college in the middle of Washington, D.C. with one, no matter what her two grandmothers had counseled her. And she has done very well in life without one. Nothing bad has happened because she did not cover her head. But not knowing who they will meet on this trip, she finds the blue headscarf with the pretty pink roses that Rona and Diyar gave her for her sixteenth birthday. She sees the dress that she bought in Hewler and throws it in the bag as well. It will be a girl’s fashion day with Rona and Diyar.

  Zara drives with her not-so-little, but still silly, brother south to the Iraqi border to cross into Sinjar, allowed to pass by the Syrian soldiers, but stopped by the Iraqi soldiers. For four days, they wait at the border while the Iraqi soldiers, knowing they have both fought for the Kurds, the Peshmerga, deny them access. Finally, after Soran contacts Uncle Talan, who uses his seniority in the Peshmerga to pull strings with Baghdad, the Iraqi soldiers allow them to pass, but without any weapons, knives excluded.

  As Zara watches the different Ezidi villages pass, she sees the poverty these people endure. Granted, her own childhood was that of a simple peasant family living off the land, but many of these people make hers and Soran’s lives look simply rich. Their religion is very old; some say it extends back twelve thousand years to the ancient Turkish site, Göbekli Tepe. They influenced the development of the Assyrian, Babylonian and Jewish cultures and beliefs. The Ezidi faith also incorporated elements of Zoroastrianism, one of the world’s oldest religions, dating back to prehistoric Indo-Iranian times, and of Sufism, guided by the great eleventh Sufi master, Sheik Adi. Some say the Kurds were originally Ezidi who converted to Islam centuries ago.

  And like other Kurds, the Ezidi have suffered much persecution over the millennia, with claims of tens of millions having been murdered over the past seven hundred years alone as Islam expanded through the regions. One of the most notable recent acts of genocide was in the 1600s, when the Ottomans surrounded Mount Sinjar and slaughtered forty thousand Ezidis. And again in the late 1800s, the Ottomans killed thousands around Sinjar. More recently, Saddam Hussein declared the Ezidi to be devil worshippers and initiated genocidal attacks; in one, around two hundred and fifty villages between Sinjar and Mosul were eliminated.

  Reaching their cousins’ village, after kisses and hugs between the cousins, Aunt Ezna welcomes them to lunch, a welcomed meal after the travails the Khatum siblings faced in getting there. Afterwards, Soran goes to help his aunt Ezna organize materials they want to move from their outside shed.

  And the “girls” begin to play. Just for a moment, they return to the innocence of their wonderful childhood together. Diyar puts on music from their teen years as Rona shows them memorabilia from their days in Duhok Province. Zara pulls out her Erdil dress for fun. Rona and Diyar get theirs. Can they still fit into these? Reliving the girls that they still are inside, they slip into them, putting on a private miniature fashion show. They laugh about the flesh they are showing, with Zara describing how much more the Americans show on the mildest of summer days.

  The bliss pops as the front door is knocked down. Two heavily armed men have Soran at gunpoint, and another holds Ezna at bloody knifepoint with her dress and undergarments ripped open. Soran is beaten, stabbed, and bleeding, but must have had a great fight with these two as they both sport deep, bleeding cuts on their cheeks. Soran, the veteran soldier, battled in vain to protect his aunt.

  Zara stands defenseless, naked as far as they are concerned, knowing that they are in the wrong place at the wrong time in the wrong dresses.

  Chapter 34

  This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

  —Dalai Lama

  8500 BCE

  Site of modern-day Karahan Tepe

  I, Amanta, high priestess of the Followers of Illyana, am soon to be their last high priestess. As my mother told me, as her mother had told her, our priestess ancestry dates back five thousand generations to the revered and divine Nanshe, who first touched the object and first communed with the voice. I am the great-granddaughter of the fifteenth Nanshe, the great mother. I am granddaughter of the seventh Ki, the great huntress.

  Today I celebrate my thirtieth sun cycle. Like my mother and her mother before her, I decided on my own not to marry until later in my life. Most women of our times first bear children after fourteen to sixteen sun cycles of age. My mother waited until she had twenty-six cycles to give birth to me. Like me, she wanted to find the right partner, not wanting to be forced into the choices of afflicted dreamers prescribed by the Followers of Illyana.

  I remain unmarried, for I do not care for any of the men presented to me who claim to suffer the dreams. These men only want me to use our ancient comforting methods on them. I believe they are only looking for sexual pleasure and do not truly desire our destined contact with the dreams and the voice.

  My grandmother, Ki the seventh, told me that I must produce the purest children with the highest ancient affliction. Children who will show the strongest dreams and possess the strongest touch to the voice. But what does all this make me? No more than a vessel for breeding? To what end? What does it matter anymore?

  The values of Nanshe and Ki are not of worth to today’s generation. They were strong women who led with vision, ethics, and compassion. Today, in the lands away from our temple, women have become little more than farm animals. There are few pairs of one man and one woman. Now only a select few powerful men rule, having secured the most productive farming lands. A woman who wants to prosper will be one of many wives for these few men. And everyone else? They are the desperate, the poor, the people with no champion or hope.

  Yes, those giants of Nanshe and Ki’s time no longer exist as they did then. We are no longer victim to giants rampaging the villages, violating the women and enslaving the men to build their temples. Instead, their descendants settled into the farming life. Their blood is now diluted over generations, but their smaller, tall but not giant, progeny own the most important lands. They now fight over land to raise crops and animals. They fight over water. In essence, the monsters of the past, their villainy, have merely changed into another form.

  The gift of Nanshe’s family, farming, turned out to be no gift to women. In her time, equality existed between man and woman, dividing the tasks of hunting and finding food. In her times, women bore fewer children. Today, the needs of the farm and harvest favor the larger families. Women have been pushed into domestic roles, raising child after child until they can bear no more. The great vision of the matriarchy of Nanshe could not compete with the farming patriarchy, as fathers pass land to sons and women are traded like cattle. The Ki warrior of peace
and faith will never happen again. Not in my lifetime.

  The harvests, the long grass grains, the oilseeds that are now common to our diet, changed us. Women, that is. I studied the statues they made of my ancestors, their bodies much leaner. They bore fewer children. And over time, these statues show how women became rounder and curvier with each passing generation. Something changed in our bodies as we ate more grains and seeds, and we became more fertile. Women of Nanshe’s time bore only two or three children. Today, they are forced to produce as many as they can bear, as many as the richness of the man who owns them can afford.

  And the faith of Nanshe, so wonderful in idea, so beautiful for those who express patience, has waned, save only the last faithful around our temple. Very few today possess the want or will to worship the God of Nanshe, my God, my voice. As they did before she arrived, they want to worship the goddess of fertility, so they can spawn more children to work the farms. They want to worship the goddess mother earth for prosperity of crops. And they want their goddesses to bare their bodies and promote sex, promote having more children to farm and to fight for the men in control.

  I should be happy to be high priestess at this temple. I have heard the stories of a giant of the past who raped one of my ancient ancestors and raised his own lineage of priestesses. But without the object, what were they to become? I cringe, knowing they succumbed to the pressures I face. They had been forced to become conduits to not only the mother earth goddess, the fertility goddess, but the love and sex goddesses. And what some of them were made to do, I do not wish to be forced with such a dilemma, nor should my daughters. I stay faithful to the voice, the God of Nanshe, the one true God.

  Perhaps if our great mother Nanshe had not prescribed we be people of peace—perhaps if her oldest warrior daughter Ki, the obedient and the faithful, had not advocated defense only if attacked—the great mother’s matriarchy might have prevailed across the lands. But I know, my mother knew, and her mother knew, the beauty and purity of our faith, the wisdom and guidance of the voice, would not exist if we had done otherwise. Words of peace.

  I have only heard the voice twice in my thirty cycles. As a child of a family of priestesses following the faith of Illyana, I have heard my mother, her mother, and her mother talk of the voice. They raised me with Ki’s ideals of duty and devotion. I too obediently prayed with them always, until one day, in my fourteenth sun cycle, the day after my first monthly bleed, I heard the voice while praying with my mother at the object. The voice was as beautiful and harmonious as I had been told, and it asked me if I would help. After I said with all my heart I would do anything, the voice said I would not know what I could do until I became one with my other half. The voice thanked my mother for all her efforts and obedience to help our people understand her words. Words of peace.

  And several times each moon cycle, my mother and father would present new men who promised to be my other half. How could they know who is my other half? What if I had no other half? Was I never to hear the voice again? Why did I need to have another half, especially one I did not love?

  The second time I heard the voice was last sun cycle. The voice expressed sadness that I had not united with my other half. I asked why this was so important, and the voice explained that, without uniting with my other half, I could not be as close to the voice as had my mother and my grandmother. I have only eaten an apple a few times. Why are two halves of an apple so important?

  The voice was saddened that, despite my ancestors’ faithful guidance to the people across these lands, the masses no longer heeded, no longer needed the words of the voice. And they continued the old ways—their violence, their wanton lust, their selfishness, their intolerance of our ways. Our people will forever be small, forever be lonely if they will not hear these words. We will not become the people of peace we had the potential to be. And someday, our failure to be so will lead to our demise.

  But what the voice said next surprised me the most. Bury the temples. We should bury the object. Our time was not right for the words of the voice. I thought to myself, this was why I could not find that other apple half. The voice heard me, of course, and said my other half waited out there for me in patience and faith. I simply needed to find him. Generations upon generations from now, there would be born those who might be ready to bring the message forth, during an age in which the words of the voice were needed the most. Ones who could bring peace to the people and beloved children of the voice. And if not, they would possess the means to return the object to the voice.

  Obedient as the words of Ki said we should be, eleven moon cycles ago, I relayed the words of the voice to the faithful at our temple, who began to fill in the temples here. I made the dangerous trip to the ancient temples three days from here. And I saw how the giants of the oral tradition had desecrated the temples of Ki and An. I looked for where it was said my ancestors were buried and kneeled to pray for their forgiveness of our people’s disrespect.

  After Illyana, the daughter of Tallia, the granddaughter of Sarpani, had left the ancient temple with the object, the giants came back to use the faith Nanshe had built for their own purposes. For they had found that faith was more powerful than their spears and arrows. They continued the worship ceremonies the local people had followed, but with their priestesses and to their gods. And they commanded that animal gods, star gods, any god of the local peoples be carved into the stones of the temple.

  But I know the truth about what happened here. They turned the great faith of Nanshe, the great temple of Ki, into a place where they could promote the desecration of women. My distant cousin priestesses were denigrated and defiled in perpetual public demonstration of the power of the giant descendants of the stars. They claimed their sex priestesses to be the rightful ones to reach the gods on the giants’ behalf, the giants who descended from the stars themselves. They used these ceremonies as thinly veiled disguises for their sex orgies, with false shamans and their potions that induced hallucinations. And the people believed these hallucinations the same as the visions of my ancestors. And these shamans abused the priestesses in public as their right given by the gods in name of fertility and crop prosperity. These fake shamans offered the priestesses as sexual gifts to leaders of other lands to gain the alliances the giants sought. And the giants built more temples so they could promote more simultaneous orgies. The more sex, the happier the people. The more sex, the stronger the alliances.

  I stand here today next to the object. We have only known peace at this temple, as most of the giants lived in fear of the object, and of the power the priestesses of the object might wield. Ki and Illyana made sure of that, killing that giant with lightning. I can only hope my prayers could bring forth lightning if we were ever attacked.

  But the influence of the giants found its way into my own temple nonetheless. The people wanted many of the indulgences they found at the other temple. And so, my great, great, many times over, great-grandmothers were forced to emulate the debauched priestesses of the other temples. We have faithfully endeavored to maintain the principles of modesty as taught by Ki. But somehow, for our ceremonies, we succumbed to forces making us disrobe and show our organs of fertility.

  This faith somehow became the Cult of Illyana and the worship of her breasts. As my mother has told me, Orzu’s nightmares, his dreams of his sister Illyana, her heart between her breasts where he needed to shoot his arrow through, became a fixation for the afflicted men who suffered the same dreams. And somehow, men in power distorted and demeaned our faith into a worship of the female breast. That is, my breasts, which I am forced to show in ceremonies. They made statues of my mother, my grandmother, every woman in my matriarchal lineage. Statues unclothed focused on our organs of fertility, focused on our breasts in the name of their worship of Illyana. I say this was all just to satisfy their lurid and ungoverned lusts.

  Today, in my thirtieth cycle, I end this madness. I will not parade my body in front of these people. I will not procreate with their pick
of my other half in public. My body is mine. My life is mine. The temple here is buried. I have made my last prayer at the object. And the last faithful Followers of Illyana, the true followers of Nanshe’s original faith, are burying the object.

  If I had children, I would create an addition to the oral traditions of Orzu, Nanshe, Ki and their descendants.

  The voice is beautiful, but we were not ready for beauty

  When you are once again ready to know beauty

  Not the beauty of the skin, but the beauty of the soul

  The beauty in the collective in all of us

  Then you are ready to seek the object

  It is said it must be man and woman

  But it must be man who loves woman

  Not for her skin, not for her fertility, not for her family

  But for her

  For her inner beauty seeking to be with the voice

  And as we bury the object, I turn away from the tail of the bird star to go away from it. My head covered, my arms covered, my legs covered, I leave here no longer a priestess, but a simple humble woman.

  Chapter 35

  If, for example, tomorrow an expedition of Martians came, and some of them came to us, here … Martians, right? Green, with that long nose and big ears, just like children paint them. … And one says, ‘But I want to be baptized!’ What would happen?

  —Pope Francis

  8:00 p.m. GMT+3, May 26, 2021

  Karahan Tepe, former Turkey, now Anatolian Kurdish State

  She closes her eyes again, only to relive her failure. Failure as a daughter to her mother, who obviously wants her to start a family with this little boy, this man. Failure to her sisters as her carelessness, her poor choice of a moment to let her guard down, her straying from her faith, led Rona and Diyar to a fate worse than death. As those rough hands abused her, defiled her, ripped her womanhood apart, she cried inside not for herself, but for the savagery they committed upon her sisters in front of her. Her heedlessness, her laxness, her recklessness made her and her sisters into slaves, mere torn bodies for these monsters to exert their power over.