“When my grandfather was a boy, and there was a wedding, the groom rode a beautiful horse into the bride’s village,” Hiwa went on. “He took a small boy with him, so they would have sons, and threw an apple or pomegranate hard, for good luck, which all the children tried to catch. And later they celebrated with horseracing and wrestling . . .
“Not all our lives are about suffering. Our pain is very deep, but our happiness is also very deep. We have suffered much, but we are rich.”
I nodded. For all the horrific stories I’d been hearing in Kurdistan, there was a depth, an inner harmony, and a kind of buoyancy to the Kurdish world that made it seem fuller than many worlds I knew in the West—and not just because of its still-living traditions. Perhaps it came from living closer to the bone.
We had reached the edge of the village, bordered with fields as vibrant with color as the dresses of the rooftop women. Strawberries, apples, tomatoes, and sunflowers were all growing in abundance, along with poplar trees, walnut trees, and puffy purple-red bushes that when gathered and dried would be made into brooms. Irrigation ditches flowed between fields and a group of boys raced by, playing a Kurdish game resembling tag that involved a “stolen” hat. In the distance rose the purple-black Zagros peaks.
We stopped to talk to a farmer, who brought out his farm implements for show-and-tell—a scythe, a hoe, a primitive-looking plow. To create the small paradise around us involved endless, backbreaking work. And the villagers weren’t as removed from the modern world as they at first seemed. The farmer had been to Sweden to visit a brother who’d been forced to flee Iran in the 1980s. Many of the villagers had relatives living in exile, he said.
Back in the village, we stopped to talk to a household of women. All wore deep-colored gowns with short black vests, and some flaunted near-iridescent orange hair, dyed from natural henna. One was working a drop spindle as we came up, while another told us stories about her trip to Sweden. The women invited us into their home, built around a courtyard with a grape arbor overhead, a clay oven to one side, and chickens to another. Traditional Kurdish homes often housed animals and humans in the same dwelling, with the animals usually on the ground floor or in front, humans up above or behind.
The women urged us to stay for tea, but some in our party were becoming restless. Village life was as foreign to them as it was to me—in fact, one of our companions had never been in a village before, she admitted as she checked her cell phone for messages.
Hiwa’s mind was still in village life, reminding me of how unusual he was. “My grandmother is a very brave woman,” he told me. “During the Iran-Iraq War, one of her sons and his wife escaped to Iraq because of politics. They had a baby in the mountains, but they were in a dangerous area, it wasn’t safe, and the baby got sick. So my grandmother went by mule, took the baby, and brought him back to Iran. It took her three days to get back, and it was very cold. But they came back safe, through the snow and the mines, and she raised him until he was six. Now he’s eighteen, and lives in London.
“I had a chance to go outside, too. Everything was ready for me to go to Sweden. But at the last minute I couldn’t go. I couldn’t leave Iran.”
FROM SANANDAJ TO Kermanshah was a two-hour trip from the mountains to the plains, from an isolated all-Kurdish town to a crowded, trafficjammed crossroads inhabited by a mixed population of Kurdish Sunnis, Shiites, and Ahl-e Haqqs, and Lurs and Persians. I had read that Kermanshah boasted a beautiful setting, backing up against a mountain range capped with snow year-round. But although the mountains were there, the snow wasn’t, and the city shimmered with an ugly brown dust, heat, exhaust, and refinery fumes, making me long to return to cool, clear Sanandaj.
The nineteenth-century traveler Isabella Bird had a first impression similar to mine: “[T]he city impresses one as ruinous and decayed; yet it has a large trade, and is regarded as one of the most prosperous places in the Empire.” I thought of those words as I wandered the city’s streets, with its noticeable quotient of opium and heroin addicts—deposited here from all over Iran by the Islamic regime, some said.
Once an important stop on the trade route between Persia and Baghdad, Kermanshah dates back to about the fourth century A.D., when it was home to Sassanian kings, who established Zoroastrianism as the state religion. Later, the town’s vulnerable location made it an easy prey for Arabs in the seventh century, Seljuk Turks in the eleventh century, Mongols in the thirteenth century, and Iraqis in the twentieth century. Kermanshah suffered some of the worst of the heavy bomb and missile attacks during the Iran-Iraq War.
During the nineteenth century, Kermanshah was considered to be the capital of Persian Kurdistan and boasted a robust Persian cavalry, made up mostly of Kurds trained by French officers. Then a walled city with a moat three miles in circumference, Kermanshah was also a stop for pilgrims en route to the holy Shiite sites of Najaf and Karbala, in what is now Iraq. By the late nineteenth century, at least 150,000 pilgrims and 8,000 of their dead relatives annually passed along the Kermanshah road, the latter headed for burial at the holy sites.
Many visitors still pass through Kermanshah, often stopping to see Taq-e Bostan, one of the most famous archaeological sites in Iran, dating back to the A.D. 600s. Built around a dark grotto, red walls carved with fine, giant bas-reliefs depict the Sassanian king Khosrow II on a royal hunt, with men riding horses and elephants, chasing stags and boar. Nearby stands Ardeshir II, receiving a wreath of friendship from the Zoroastrian god Ashura Mazda, while Ahriman, the god of darkness, lies defeated under his feet.
Behind Kermanshah looms Bisotun, a mountain upon which more famed bas-reliefs and inscriptions are carved. In 1838, the British soldier Henry Rawlinson, dangling from the end of a rope, copied down Bisotun’s inscriptions and deciphered the Old Persian words.
The mountain is at least equally known for its connection with Farhad and Shirin, heroes of one of Iran’s most beloved ancient tales, claimed by both Persians and Kurds. In one of the story’s versions, Shirin, the beautiful wife of King Khosrow, falls in love with Farhad, a simple stonecutter. Desperate not to lose his queen, Khosrow consents to give her to Farhad if he can bring the waters of Bisotun to her castle, Qasr-e Shirin—the ruins of which still stood on the outskirts of a city of the same name until the Iran-Iraq War. Farhad’s love gives him great strength, and he rapidly cuts a pathway through the mountains, constructing an aqueduct. He has almost succeeded at his impossible task when the frantic Khosrow sends him a message claiming that Shirin has died. An anguished Farhad jumps to his death, and Shirin dies of a broken heart.
Some Iranian Kurdish scholars attribute the doomed love affair to the tensions between the fierce Kurds of the mountains and the more docile Kurds of the plains, the latter often influenced by outsiders to betray their traditions and culture. In this interpretation, Farhad defaces the mountains, the Kurdish heartland, for his love of Shirin, who is in turn guilty of encouraging him in his task, at times with lies. Betrayal has been a Kurdish theme for centuries.
WHILE IN KERMANSHAH, I at first stayed with Kajal, the married sister of Arash, the physics teacher from Sanandaj. Their siblings, Darya and Askhan, had traveled with me to Kermanshah because they said they wanted to visit their sister. I suspected that the timing of their trip had much less to do with them than it had with me. In the gracious Iranian Kurdish tradition, my every need was subtly being taken care of.
Kajal spoke good English, as did a number of the family’s friends, some of whom helped me find my way around the city. Together we visited the archaeological sites, the central bazaar, an upscale shopping district, a poor quarter, and a boarded-up Sunni mosque, the only major Sunni mosque in the Shiite-dominated city. Its outspoken and prominent cleric, Molla Mohammed Rabi’i, had been killed in December 1996—“in disputed circumstances,” according to Amnesty International—resulting in riots that had left at least several others dead and the mosque permanently closed.
Talking to Kermanshah’s citizens, I learned mor
e. Historically, the relationship between the city’s Sunni and Shiite Kurds has ranged from poor to hostile. The Iranian government has used religion as a wedge between them; religion has proven to be more central to many Kurds’ identity than ethnicity. Both groups have looked down upon one another, and the Sunni Kurds have resented the fact that only Shiites are appointed to positions of power—as is the case all over Iran. The country is officially 94 percent Shiite, with its 5 percent Sunni minority often treated as second-class citizens, so much so that some Sunnis convert to Shiism in order to move up socially and economically.
During and after the Islamic revolution, the Shiite Kurds wanted nothing to do with the struggle for Kurdish autonomy being waged farther north in Sanandaj and Mahabad. Many, in fact, agreed to fight against the Sunni Kurds, while among the most enthusiastic of the Revolutionary Guards during the Iran-Iraq War were Ahl-e Haqq.
All this lulled the Islamic regime into taking the loyalty of its Shiite and Ahl-e Haqq Kurds for granted. But in 1999, a curious thing happened. The arrest of Abdullah Öcalan, leader of Turkey’s PKK, led to huge demonstrations on the Kermanshah streets, with some Kurds, as elsewhere in the world, burning themselves in protest. Even bigger rallies also took place in other Iranian Kurdish cities, with thousands gathering in Sanandaj, for one, but it was Kermanshah that caught the Iranian government completely by surprise. Apparently, Kurdish nationalism was no longer limited to its Sunni Kurds. Apparently, its Shiite Kurds were starting to feel at least as much Kurdish as Shiite. And perhaps the Islamic regime itself had encouraged this development, as Iran had aided and harbored the PKK during Turkey’s civil war, hoping to clip its neighbor’s growing influence in the region.
Just what, if anything, did those pro-Öcalan protests portend for the future of the Iranian Kurdish movement? Many Iranian Kurds I met seemed to feel that although their situation was not good, it was tolerable, at least compared to Turkey and Iraq under Saddam. On the other hand, thousands of Iranian Kurds, recently forced out of their villages by economic desperation, were now living rootless, alienated lives in crowded slums—ripe conditions for ferment.
AMONG THE KURDS I met in Kermanshah was the Najafi family, who invited me to stay with them. The Najafis were Hawraman, and had many relatives living in the isolated, mountainous Hawraman region, one of the most traditional Kurdish areas still left in Iran. They could help me travel to the Hawraman capital of Paveh, and even promised to take me to No Sud, the smugglers’ town on the Iran-Iraq border.
The Najafi parents, Lotfallah and Maliha, were a middle-aged couple with three grown sons. Lotfallah, a gruff and hearty man of many opinions, dressed in Western clothes outside the home, but wore baggy Kurdish pants around the house, as did many Iranian Kurdish men. Maliha, who was often silent, wore traditional dresses both indoors and out. The couple’s youngest son, Asoo, spoke moderately good English and often served as my translator. Tensile and intense, Asoo was studying for the nationwide university entrance exams, hoping to become a civil engineer.
One morning at daybreak, Lotfallah, Asoo, and I left Kermanshah for the Hawraman mountains. The plan was for Lotfallah to drop Asoo and me off in Paveh and then return to Kermanshah in time to go to work. In Paveh, Asoo and I would look up one of their relatives, who would drive us through the rest of the province.
We headed west down the still-dark streets and out past an oil refinery, Lotfallah already pontificating, while disconcertingly breaking off now and again to burst into song—a constant habit. Initially, I had thought it indicative of a poetic side to his blustery character, but as time went on, I realized that it had more to do with frustration, as he often started singing after a diatribe against his low salary or the government. And he wasn’t singing just anything. His husky, mournful snatches of song, laden with mystery, were an exclusively Hawraman form of music called siachamana, meaning “black eyes,” dating back to the Zoroastrians, though the significance of its name has been lost. Traditionally, the music was performed with the singer cupping his hands behind his ears, as if listening to the gods, and its heart-wrenching sound was unforgettable. I’d heard it only once before, in Halabja, where a man with a cancerous growth disfiguring his face had welcomed my companions and me into his rose-filled garden with a song as heavy with longing as an echoing call to prayer.
The land outside Kermanshah was rich agricultural territory, sprinkled with ancient combines and tractors, and the occasional village or dairy farm. Small rocky peaks poked up dead ahead, higher peaks behind, and, as we dove into them, Lotfallah broke off his talking and singing to ask me about the “red Americans”—a favorite topic among the Kurds, who see the Native Americans as a people much like themselves. In Turkey, especially, I met Kurds who knew an enormous amount about Native Americans, with large collections of their literature and music.
We plunged into an ocean of tan triangular mountains, bobbing around us as our battered car groaned its way along. Women and schoolchildren waited for buses all along the roadside. Nearer Kermanshah, they had been dressed in dour chadors, but now bright traditional Kurdish clothes flashed by.
Villages built of clay homes with sleepy window lids climbed up steep mountainsides. Many had blue window frames and doors; some had balconies and ladders; and the roofs of one row often served as patios for the next, as the tiers receded, as evenly as a wedding cake.
Arriving in Paveh, we stopped at the home of a man I’d met at the Sanandaj conference, a well-educated professional who was an expert on the region. I didn’t have his address, but Lotfallah knew where he lived. We knocked on his door at about seven-thirty A.M.—much too early to be calling upon a stranger, in my opinion, but considered the norm among some Iranians, who usually rise at dawn to say morning prayers.
As soon as the door opened, I realized that I had made a mistake. My erstwhile host had been cordial at the conference and on the phone when I called to confirm my visit, but I had sensed some hesitation in his manner. Seeing his sagging face, I now realized that, like Mr. K in Sanandaj, he really wanted nothing to do with me. He hadn’t expected me to take him up on his invitation.
Nevertheless, he invited us in and bustled around for the next forty minutes or so as he got his children up and prepared breakfast, while his wife dressed for work. He talked mostly to Lotfallah and Asoo the whole time, barely acknowledging me, while I shifted uncomfortably, wondering how I should handle things when the activity quieted down.
To my surprise and relief, my host broached the subject of my presence himself immediately after his wife and Lotfallah left for work. “I am sorry, but I can’t talk to you long, and I can only talk about the environment. This is a troubled area. The authorities will ask me later why you are here.”
“But I’m not here to talk about politics,” I said. “I’m mostly interested in the Hawraman culture.”
“It doesn’t matter. Last year, after a Japanese lady researcher was here, I was arrested.”
My heart sank. How could I go bungling around so naively, putting others at risk?
And yet, how could I have known? He’d invited me to visit him—twice. The Iranian authorities knew what I was doing in Kurdistan. I’d stated the purpose of my visit on my visa application. Many Iranian Kurds had also strongly urged me to visit the Hawraman area, saying that as long as I stuck to people and culture, and avoided politics, everything would be fine. But since when do theory and reality coincide?
“But you are here now,” our host said, “and the authorities didn’t keep me long. Ask your questions.”
In fits and starts, I began, starting with queries about the environment, as he had requested. But as we quickly exhausted that subject and branched out into others, he didn’t object, and he began talking more and more freely, with little urging on my part.
Iran’s Hawraman region encompassed about fifty villages and, together with the Hawraman region of Iraq, had been a “field of war” ever since the days of the Safavids and Ottomans, he said. Because of the regio
n’s isolation, extreme even for Kurdistan, the Hawraman people had maintained their independence for many decades after most Kurds. During the reign of Reza Shah (1923 to 1941), one Hawraman leader, Jafar Soltan, fiercely fought off the Iranian government for fourteen years. And during the 1970s and early 1980s, the area served as the clandestine headquarters for the Kurdish political parties. That changed by the middle of the Iran-Iraq War, when the Revolutionary Guards overran the district, but the region was still regarded with great suspicion by the regime.
Because of the Hawramans’ isolation, they had always been exceedingly self-sufficient, growing and making everything they needed, including their own hand-woven clothes and shoes, known as klash, which they now sold throughout Kurdistan. And the Hawramans’ self-sufficiency had also gone far beyond the physical, to encompass the creation of a rich repository of unique folktales, folk remedies, songs, games, and ceremonies. Some of the greatest of the latter celebrated the life of Pir-e Shahriyar, a holy Zoroastrian linked with Mythra, the ancient god of light and the sun. On the anniversary of the Pir’s death, hundreds converged on his mountain slope grave, playing the daf and chanting. And though the Hawraman were Muslim, they still honored Mythra on the fortieth day of winter, with sacrificial blood spilled at the first light of dawn, and hundreds of men dancing ecstatically in circles to the beating of the daf.
When our host was growing up in the 1960s, many Hawraman traditions were still flourishing, but over the past few decades, their prevalence had steadily diminished. The villages were no longer self-sufficient; few told stories anymore, and even the festivals were not as well attended as before.
The Hawraman culture also had its dark side. Life for women was especially hard. They worked long hours and had few rights, with families often forbidding girls to go to school. Honor killings still took place, usually in secret, with many villagers believing that the victims deserved what they got.
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 36