One thing I'm learning from leaving Pagebound forum posts is that consistent regional dialect is really important to me! I understand using 'plaid' in place of tartan, and we have 'bairns' (although I don't think we have the much used 'wee bairns', correct me if I'm wrong, I'm audiobooking) but every time I hear a 'yes' in place of 'aye' and a 'mummy' in place of 'mammy' I feel a pang. Despite the strong accent of the narrator, the lack of dialect and the use of the word 'breacon' (read: Breacon Beacons) had me thinking about Wales, not Scotland. Why not change all the parts if you'll erase some? Regardless of my little niggles, I think the story is tying together quite brilliantly and I do think we have some good characters

Upon completing this book I primarily felt relieved. Why?? Bc I could read this novel without turning full-on hater lmfao. Cuz honestly, I did come into this book with certain worries, and even prejudices.

It’s been a while since I finished this novel, and I needed some time to cook up this text. I hope people will give this a read despite its length because this is such an important topic to know about.

My worries and prejudices towards this book (and subsequent relief) came from my experiences with reading scholarly articles written by mostly Iranian diaspora scholars about the Women, Life, Freedom (WLF) movement back when I studied Middle Eastern Studies in 2022.

A heavily recurring pattern that I noticed was the complete erasure of the instrumental role of Kurdish women in this movement.

Additionally, I witnessed how the organizers of events in support of WLF in my home country actively silenced Kurdish voices.

I also saw videos from other WLF solidarity demonstrations in countries across Europe, where people who wanted to show solidarity with Kurdish women specifically, were denied from carrying Kurdish flags.

For me, this contributed to a general impression that there was a collective aversion in the Iranian diaspora towards mentioning the Kurdish roots of the movement under an argument of unity.

We also saw this movement go viral and being endorsed by many influential people in the West. This lead to the erasure truly spiralling out of control, heavily facilitated by Western mainstream media.

Unfortunately, I found that my general impression was to a great extent justified because this active erasure was later confirmed in both scholarly works and expert commentary.

In an article published in Jadaliyya in 2022, Farangis Ghaderi (Kurdish Studies Lecturer) and Ozlem Goner (Middle Eastern Studies Associate Professor) wrote:

[…] as two Kurdish women, we have been deeply disappointed to see Jîna’s Kurdish background routinely ignored by mainstream media and among allies in diasporic solidarity rallies and in expressions of international solidarity.

However, in The Lion Women of Tehran (transcribed from the audiobook) there is that important and explicit recognition:

For the past week and a half, Leyli’s entire family has been glued to the screen to see updates from Iran. A young woman named Mahsa Amini, her Kurdish name was Jîna Amini, was arrested in Tehran by the morality police for improper hijab and brutally beaten. She went into a coma and died.

[…] The death of this young woman has sparked protests that are spreading around the country like wildfire. […] Their slogan, born of a Kurdish fighting slogan, is “Women, Life, Freedom”; in Kurdish, “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî”; in Persian, “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi”.

This explicit naming of the Kurdish roots of both Jîna and the slogan, is precisely the reason I’m relieved that I didn’t have to come on here and write a very angry post. It was also an important touch to give the slogan’s Kurdish words before its Persian counterpart.

But why is all of this so damn important?

EVERYONE who cares about women’s rights needs to know that Mahsa was only Jîna’s state-mandated name which she had to carry because of the oppressive policies targeting minority languages dating back to the first Shah in 1925.

Yet, she was made an icon of the movement under this name instead of her actual one. There is something so unfathomably cruel about this.

The naming and crediting done by Kamali is truly a bare minimum, but it is also explicit, and that is a very important step in the right direction.

Imagine, I have read several professors (!) of Iranian Studies give highly inaccurate and vague presentations of the origins of this slogan, refusing to associate anything Kurdish with it!

Kamali is not free of criticism though. She should have done more to incorporate the Kurdish origins of the movement into the actual narrative. Reducing the Kurdishness of this movement to a subordinate clause, is to undermine it.

Because the thing about the WLF movement is that it’s not “only” Jîna being Kurdish, or “only” the co-opting of a Kurdish slogan that removes it from its context, and hence, everything that it stands for.

People also need to know that it did not start in Tehran or Isfahan. It started in Iranian Kurdistan (Rojhelat), during Jîna Amini’s funeral, with the chants of Jin, Jiyan, Azadî (the Kurdish one) being heard all over town.

She wasn’t made the icon of this movement in spite of her being Kurdish, but because of it. It happened at the intersection of her identity as a Kurd and as a woman.

It was social media content from Jîna’s funeral combined with solidarity demonstrations in all of Rojhelat that set the foundation of the Iran-wide movement that later spread to the entire world and had Western women cutting their hair in front of their phone cameras.

However, the reactions to Jîna’s funeral for sure did not come out of nowhere.

It was the culmination of decades of Kurdish women’s active resistance to the oppressive Islamic Regime which obviously did not only oppress them because of their gender, but also because of their identity, ethnicity and culture.

This oppression is so disproportionate, it’s insane.

While Kurds make out only 10-12% of the population, half of the political prisoners are Kurds and the number of Kurds being executed is also disproportionally high.

In this disproportionally high number of executions, one can find hundreds of Kurdish women, just like Jîna, who were executed in silence.

As Ghafur Mauludi, the son of a martyr from the 2022 uprising in Rojhelat, noted during his father’s funeral ceremony:

In Tehran, the regime beats people with batons; in Kurdistan, it shoots. Because if it is fascist in the capital, it is an occupying force here in Kurdistan

One of the premises for this book was how awfully Homa (as a lower class woman) was treated for her tireless fight for the rights of the oppressed, and how she never really had much of a choice in the matter.

If you then add the dimension of being from a minority that the state violently attempts to assimilate into the Iranian identity, one cannot even begin to imagine how much the activism of Kurdish women costs them.

Iranian identity was never constructed as something neutral. It is built on Persian domination at the detriment of the country’s minorities, depending on active and violent erasure of minority identities.

Therefore, using Jîna’s state-mandated name instead of her given one is an act of violence in and by itself because it contributes to legitimize the violent erasure of Kurdish identity in Iran.

The song Bo (For) by Chia Madani* addresses this erasure beautifully and painfully:

for the Jînas who are not allowed neither in life nor after death to be called with their own names nor referred in history with that

Therefore, I urge everyone to use Jîna’s actual name when we talk about her and the WLF movement.

We should do our part so that Jîna Amini is not denied her identity in her death as she so brutally was in her life. Not her, nor any other minority woman in Iran.

* = This was written as a response to the song Baraye by Shervin Hajipour, which was the de facto anthem of the WLF movement

well shit, now i'm attached to every single character and knowing m.l. wang, nobody is gonna be safe in the next books so...