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

as an enjoyer of small luxuries, i’m not very quick to judge, but TOOTHPASTE imported from ITALY is CRAZY WORK. sharpay did not sing about this!!! also didn’t know italy was a country of toothpaste connoisseurs bYE im so mad at this line

This turned out waaay longer than I intended, but I had Thoughts™️😭😭 Reading the forum, I saw a lot of people (including me) feel a deep need to understand and find the meaning in the (sometimes) disturbing behavior and thoughts of a man as peculiar as Meursault.

However, as I tried to make sense of this myself, I realized that Camus might have wanted the reader to resist any attempts at understanding Meursault, and in this way make us more inclined to feel the Absurd??

Up until now, the philosophical concept of the Absurd has completely eluded me, and no matter how well I felt I understood it theoretically, it just didn’t connect in practice and while reading this book.

I had done my lil research on absurdism, and so, as I started reading this book, I tried to understand absurdism through what Meursault was saying, thinking and doing.   ☀️ LESSENING CONFUSION THROUGH SARTRE’S COMMENTARY

However, reading Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay about The Stranger (An Explication of The Stranger), I realized I might have been mistaken in this approach.

This part from his essay stood out to me, and made me rethink how I approached the book:

And we ourselves, who, on opening the book are not yet familiar with the feeling of the absurd, vainly try to judge him according to our usual standards. For us, too, he is a stranger.

Sartre then goes on to explain how that famous first sentence is deliberately meant to yeet us right into the feeling of the Absurd.

He goes on about how we probably think and even expect that throughout this work, Meursault’s behavior is going to be explained or clarified in some way, and in that way make our uneasiness about him go away.

But as we all well know by now (without needing Sartre to explain it), trying to make sense of Meursault’s actions and inactions is like grasping at straws.

We can probably try to look for answers about why he reacted to his mother’s death the way he did, why he was friends with Raymond or why he did what he did at the beach, but in my experience this felt way more frustrating than rewarding.

At the end of the day, judging Meursault through my "usual standards" didn’t really help me with comprehending absurdism. And so, once again I turned to Sartre:

The Stranger is not an explanatory book. The absurd man does not explain; he describes. Nor is it a book which proves anything.

Through reading Sartre’s essay, something must have clicked in my brain, because I realized that in reading The Stranger we’re not really supposed to be able to understand the concept of the Absurd yet, like I so desperately have attempted.

As Sartre also mentions, explaining the concept is what Camus’ essay The Myth of Sisyphus, which was written simultaneously with The Stranger was for.

As I interpret it based on Sartre’s essay, Meursault’s descriptions are supposed to introduce us to the feeling of the Absurd.

🌊 THE CONCEPT OF THE ABSURD AND MEURSAULT WITHIN IT

Since we have arrived at that the novel is not trying to explain the Absurd to us, I thought I might give it a try so that it’s easier to understand how the novel tries to capture the feeling rather than the concept.

In addition, maybe by understanding absurdism better intellectually, we will be less tempted to try and understand Meursault in light of it?? That’s at least how it felt for me.

We can start off this explanation with a central idea for Camus. If I understand him correctly, he thought that the best way to face the Absurd is by refusing its resolution.

This refusal constitutes his idea of revolt.

We revolt because everyday we face the confrontation between: [humans who demand clarity] and [a world that stays silent without giving clarity].

This RELATIONSHIP/CONFRONTATION equals [THE ABSURD].

Meaning, the most important thing to know about absurdism is that it names this relationship/confrontation, and not meaninglessness itself.

[The Absurd] doesn’t exist because we want it to exist, but because that’s the tension that’s left if the [clarity-seeking human] chooses not to remove itself from the relation by physical suicide, and we choose not to remove the [the silence of the world] from the relation by filling it with religion or any idea that provides meaning to our existence.

If we intentionally refuse, we get revolt. It “[…] is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it” as Camus described it in The Myth of Sisyphus.

We simultaneously become free, when we are no longer living dictated by a future overtaken by hope or ideas. Now we have "the certainty of crushing fate" to save us from that yay!! Learning about this, I couldn’t help but feel that this highkey sounds awful.

BUT the thing is, refusing resignation when faced with this reality and embracing absurdist freedom looks like passion; we pour ourselves into the present because there is nothing else.

We choose quantity of experience over quality because when there is no inherent meaning, no experience can matter more than the other. From this, what's left is to have as many of them as possible, as consciously as possible.

However, the tension that arises between the concept of the Absurd, Meursault and the reader is that we will struggle to place him within these ideas in a coherent manner.

We can definitely recognize a lot of absurdism within his characterization: he is a man that stays in the present; he’s constantly lingering in the physical sensations of sun, sand, sweat, and noise; he goes along with most experiences; he avoids ascribing meaning to things, or consider them at all.

However, he also never reflects around any of these things. There is no moment-to-moment consciousness around “the certainty of a crushing fate”, or a choice to not be resigned when faced with it. As Sartre explained Meursault:

[...] this lucid, indifferent, taciturn man is not entirely constructed to serve a cause. Once the character had been sketched in, he probably completed himself; he certainly had a real weight of his own. Still, his absurdity seems to have been given rather than achieved; that's how he is, and that's that.

🏜️ FAVORING STAYING IN MEURSAULT’S CURRENT DESCRIPTIONS AS OPPOSED TO INTERPRETING THEIR MEANING

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus writes:

The present and the succession of presents before a constantly conscious soul is the ideal of the absurd man.

As readers, I think we understand more of The Stranger and the feeling of the Absurd, if we also attempt to stay in Meursault’s sensuous present.

Personally, I came to favor this approach to the looking back at what he might have thought or felt about his mom, Marie or whom- or whatever else in his life, and how that might connect to either absurdism or some other concept.

I think it’s precisely our expectations of the novel and Meursault to represent something that can make for a frustrating reading experience.

Camus never wrote Meursault as the perfect embodiment of the absurd man, and I think we become less frustrated with our own lack of understanding of him (and absurdism) when we recognize this fact.

From the way this novel is written (especially noticeable in its original French due to the untranslatable effect of the language’s present perfect tense), it’s clear that we are supposed to stay in this space of "the present and the succession of presents" with Meursault. Once again, in the words of Sartre:

The sentences in The Stranger are islands. We bounce from sentence to sentence, from void to void. It was in order to emphasize the isolation of each sentence unit that Camus chose to tell his story in the present perfect tense. […] Instead of acting as a bridge between past and future, it (the sentence) is merely a small, isolated, self-sufficient substance.

This is how we experience the Absurd—not by interpreting Meursault’s weird actions, inactions and thoughts, but rather by taking in the full experience of language, grammar, structure, character and plot coming together. We experience it by letting ourselves bounce from island to island.

I think that someone who refrains from analyzing Meursault and who has minimal prior knowledge of absurdism might be very likely to spontaneously describe this novel absurd. Maybe that also constitutes its ideal reader??

I also think that captures how well it does what it’s meant to do. It captures the feeling of the Absurd without making demands of the reader to conceptually understand absurdism.

In conclusion!! Refrain from understanding Meursault, and relish in the feeling of absurdity🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️

🧡 DISCLAIMER AND QUESTION FOR THOSE THAT MADE IT THROUGH

Maybe I have deeply misunderstood some of Camus’ philosophy; I’m honestly just thinking aloud.

I’m also not well-versed in philosophy, so if any of my philosophical interpretations make no sense or are flat out wrong, don’t be shy to call it out in the comments!!! I’m very keen on learning more.

I would also love to hear other people’s thoughts on the reading experience, and if anyone else found the novel made more sense in terms of absurdism by looking LESS for the meaning of whatever Meursault was saying or doing.b