Revolution in Rojava

This book by Michael Knapp, Anja Flach and Ercan Ayboga, is one I would recommend incredibly highly to anyone interested in feminism, democracy, liberation movements, and politics in the contemporary Middle East - as it is the most comprehensively detailed single book currently available on the astonishing revolutionary developments that have taken place in northern Syria since 2011 (and as the book was published in mid-2016 these developments only became more astonishing and revolutionary since, see). The authors provide some helpful sociopolitical and geohistorical context for the events, and then walk through how the revolution unfolded, remaining formally unaffiliated with either opposition or regime amid a popular uprising that collapsed into civil war, and expanding in the power vacuum, cooperative and democratic grassroots institutions establishing themselves with remarkable speed and organisation to continue fulfilling the functions (producing economic resources, managing regional security, governing, etc) previously performed by the defunct Syrian state. The developments that have taken place there in my view constitute possible the most morally-legitimate popular revolution that has taken place in modern history, and demands to be more widely-known and supported, as its longevity depends in large part on whether established powerful nation-states will formally recognise its autonomy - but more on that in my actual dissertation.

Biji Rojava!

the Roadmap to Negotiations

This book, the third volume of prison writings* by Abdullah Öcalan, was produced as a negotiation document between himself and the Turkish state's military intelligence tasked with talking through ceasefire options with him. It comprises a concise explanation of his ideological system (see other posts about his books) couched in a critical discussion of the history of Turkey's (admittedly very patchy) democratization, and thus generates proactive and reasonable compromises for the Kurdish question in Turkey in the context of the PKK's shifting away from militant separatism toward grassroots autonomy.

   Unlike the majority of other dissertation research books I've done minimal posts for, this one wasn't from the university libraries - I found a super cheap copy at the last anarchist book fair in Sheffield, and have only just noticed having held it at a funny angle against a sunbeam that there is the imprint of some biro writing on the front cover from where someone (a previous owner?) had written an address in Leeds: this is almost certainly meaningless but I like noticing little details like that on books.

   For some reason (and yes I am sure of this I've just tried fixing it like nine times) this post is refusing to justify its text body, which is annoying, but I'm assuming you don't mind having a jiggly-edged paragraph for just one post. For some even more inscrutable reason, this very paragraph has now decided that it is going to justify the text body anyway! Urgh. I don't know.

* He has been in solitary imprisonment on Imrali, an island just off the Turkish coast, since 1999, for being the founder and leader of the PKK - while there, he has written extensively trying to change the wider dialogue around the Kurdish struggle away from separatism toward democratization and peaceful compromise.

the PKK and the Kurdish Question in the 21st Century

This book, the second volume of prison writings* by Abdullah Öcalan, is probably (given its author's personal experience at the origin and around the centre of developments) the best book one could read to learn about the PKK in broader geopolitical, social, and historical context. It introduces the theoretical frameworks of Öcalan's ideas clearly, then tracing a cogent and clear overview of how existing dynamic power structures originated in ancient societies (from the Neolithic up to capitalist nationalism), and also presents his ideology of 'democratic confederalism' as a cohesive response to the historical critique: the arguments he makes are interesting, if not compelling, certainly moreso in light of adherents of Öcalan's ideas working to implement them in Turkey and Syria - and these practical activities are the core focus ultimately, as the rethinking of the PKK could never be merely academic, as the PKK existed as an organisation at war with the Turkish state: its rethinking was a pragmatic as well as moral decision to reformulate strategy to best and most peaceably work toward a resolution to the Kurdish question in Turkey, which (on their side, at least - Turkey still seems happy violently suppressing the crap out of pretty much every Kurdish political organisation, PKK-affiliated or not) is an enormously positive step. Most interesting from this book I think though are Öcalan's first-hand accounts of several major events and developments - these obviously include the international plots surrounding his abduction and illegitimate trial, but also go into relatively detailed discussion of how the PKK suffered severe internal power struggles, from loss of control over tribalist and ethnonationalist elements prevalent among its large and disparate militant body, which corrupted its liberation mission and saw leaders exploiting their positions to effectively conduct organised crime or petty warlording - which exacerbated militant and civilian death rates and attracted enormous military reactions from the Turkish state; conspiracies and fear dominated the party's leadership in those years as betrayals, subversions, infiltrations by the authorities, and such, came to swamp Öcalan's day-to-day concerns while the PKK itself devolved into a disorganised terrorist gang. Interestingly this seems to have changed a great deal for the better since his imprisonment, as the programme of democratization as opposed to separatist struggle came increasingly to characterise the wider party's leadership and was heavily promoted among the guerrillas too. If you read one book about the Kurdish question, it should probably be this one.

* He has been in solitary imprisonment on Imrali, an island just off the Turkish coast, since 1999, for being the founder and leader of the PKK - while there, he has written extensively trying to change the wider dialogue around the Kurdish struggle away from separatism toward democratization and peaceful compromise.

Waiting for Godot

This book, a play by Samuel Beckett, was, to be honest, pretty weird and I didn't overly enjoy it. It's about two men called Estragon and Vladimir who occupy the stage with what is obviously-concocted filler and fluff while they purportedly await the arrival of their acquaintance Godot, in some minimalistic subversion of what constitutes a 'play'. In an artistic sense, no doubt, it is a phenomenal work, one that when it was written shattered so many boundaries and expected conventional norms of play-writing that it can hardly not be called genius - but at the same time, it simply isn't very entertaining. It's like having a big dead fish called Nihilism rubbed slowly against your face for half an hour or so. The dialogue is extremely clever and philosophical, the use of language and expectation as playful as can be expected - but because the play as a whole is essentially an exercise in subverting the very form of itself, you end up with a relatively long thing in which nothing particularly interesting develops and nothing particularly engaging or thought-provoking happens apart from in schizophrenic little outbursts,* like sparks burped out of a fireplace, and if you are used to cultural-creative conceptual subversion of the thing itself by minimising the form of it, then even what made the play so special when it first came out is nothing mindblowing - I live in a generation surrounded by reflexive self-aware forms of media, and so a bit of metacommentary or poking the fourth-wall, sorry Samuel Beckett, just doesn't automatically make something great (c.f. Dan Harmon). Don't misunderstand, I cannot highly enough describe the artistic significance of Waiting for Godot in the history of western theatre, but even plays that didn't come out too long after it - for example, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, did very similar things, and far more (in my opinion) successfully, because the self-subverting form was tied to character and plot that enhanced these elements and made them funny and engaging instead of just an on-and-on display of experimental novelty.



* Lucky's absurdist monologue springs to mind. Moments like that do give the play something of a glimmering substance, but for the most part, as I've said, its content is just emptiness and futility circling themselves in a timeless and poignant and ultimately unentertaining (and not even overly edgy or interesting anymore) manner.

the bricks that built the houses

This book, the debut novel from Kae Tempest (you know, that poet who wrote this), was - well, I'd like to say the best novel I've read in ages, but truthfully I've read loads of incredible novels this year, but seriously, this one is a stand-out fresh one. I acquired it at a hippy-run bookstall at Glastonbury and basically read most of it in two big sittings over a family holiday in a hippy-run cottage in the Forest of Bowland in North Yorkshire - sat with a brew and the dog and a thousand midges on an impossibly comfy armchair on a wooden porch overlooking a small lawn which past a rickety fence is a sheer drop through dense brackeny foresty areas down to a river which I could hear all the while; yes, it was a very nice holiday, even though I had to do loads of dissertation reading during it (and also leave halfway through for a job interview), and this book comprised my recreational reading for it. You don't need to care about my holiday, I'm just adding a little texture as this post will be in the middle of all the super-brief academic backlog ones.
   Anyway - it's a novel about young Londoners: gregarious dancer Becky and her jealous boyfriend Pete and his coke-dealing sister Harry and her partner-in-crime Leon; it's about the adults peopling the families and communities constraining and defining who they have and can become, the deep-running fragility of human need for connection; all characters whose roles have emotional impacts on the main four are explored in bleak and beautiful portrait with astonishing depth and clarity; Kae Tempest has a knack for conveying huge and tiny shades of feeling with a linguistic deftness that will make you laugh and cry and catch your breath in your gullet and sit back slowly with your hand rubbing the back of your neck as you softly murmur 'fuck', and the London that they paints is alive, is dismally brutally gloriously random and messy and gentrified and alienating and home and you get a tangible sense of place and community (or lack of) for the characters throughout: honestly, the plot may be pretty straightforward but it is pulled off with a dazzling, cinematic, heartbreaking and life-affirming prose, and a cast whom you'll know like real acquaintances by the time you finish - all of which add up to make this a bingeable (one up from readable) and supremely rewarding novel.
   Read this if you like Very Good fiction.

Liberating Life: Women's Revolution

This book (available from that link as a free pdf, how good is that) by Abdullah Öcalan is an exploration of the centrality of women's liberation to any complete and internally-cohesive system of revolutionary practice or ideology. Feminist elements have been present in the PKK since its inception, and through the involvement of many women in it and its affiliated organisations as well as the overt commitments of the leadership toward this end, gender equality has become a defining core characteristic of the Kurdish liberation movement, and in this book Öcalan outlines the importance of this in general as well as specifically-Kurdish-related terms. This would be a very highly-recommended read for anyone interested in gender in revolutionary sociopolitical settings and gender in Middle Eastern societies.

War and Peace in Kurdistan

This book (available from that link as a free pdf, how good is that) by Abdullah Öcalan is an overview of the hugely-damaging war between the Turkish state and the Kurdish liberation movement - chiefly the PKK, led by Öcalan himself. He outlines the history, the costs, and the sheer futility of this war, and reignites a call for a democratic and peaceful solution as he tries to explain is workable through mere extension of human rights and liberties to the Kurds of Turkey - this is couched in the development of democratically autonomous structures to safeguard Kurdish communities until such a time. Overall this booklet would be an interesting introduction to the Kurds' struggle and where it currently stands in context for readers whose interest I may have piqued but who may know nothing about Kurdistan and don't know where to start. Probably start here, if that's you.

Democratic Confederalism

This book (available from that link as a free pdf, how good is that) by Abdullah Öcalan is an outline of the core of his political philosophy - essentially the development of post-nationalist democratic structures that do not seek to overthrow or secede from existing states but to operate with complete autonomy to provide security and liberty for those living within their bounds. It has yielded some pretty interesting results in Syria. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested in sociopolitical options of pursuing peace in the Middle East, or generally revolutionary pragmatic ideas.

the Kurds of Iraq

This book by Mahir Aziz is a really interesting (and helpful for me academically) in-depth study of ethnonationalism in the semi-autonomous* Kurdish region of Iraq, exploring it in both geopolitical and historical contexts as well as going through a massive amount of data from a survey of university students on their views toward Kurdishness, Iraq, the predominant political parties, tribal culture, and so on.

* I'm writing this before September 25th, so the referendum on Kexit hasn't happened yet.

the Kurds & the State: Evolving National Identity in Iraq, Turkey & Iran

This book by Denise Natali was incredibly helpful to me academically and would probably be interesting to people super-keen on Kurdishness and deconstructions of nationalism. It traces the Kurds' nascent national identity from subordination under the Persian and Ottoman empires to how the colonial powers' establishment of Arab puppet states Iraq and Syria impacted them as a regional ethnic group, fragmenting their nationalism across borders, and thereafter she traces the development of Kurdish nationalism in Iran, Iraq and Turkey, couched in interested discussion of Kurdistan as an inherently transnational space and thereby contextualising the identity of Kurdishness as something that, even as a relatively straightforward ethno-nationalist movement, defies pre-existing nation-states.

A Modern History of the Kurds

This book by David McDowall is pretty much what it says on the tin, and probably the best single source I've yet used in my dissertation research when it comes to comprehensive overviews of Kurdish history across the twentieth century. Would recommend if you want a single book to provide that. For other, juicier or more contemporary, aspects of the Kurdish question, there are indubitably better books out there (as you've probably gathered from this spewage of backlog posts).

the PKK: Coming Down from the Mountains

This book by Paul White was another that played a huge role in informing key historical developments relevant to my dissertation - particularly, as the title suggests, the context for the origins and militant escalation of the PKK, and the impacts this had on the Turkish state and Kurdish region. White also tracks the attempts from the PKK to seek peaceful constructive options, and the failure of these efforts in light of a movement corrupted by ethnonationalist warlordism and widespread repression; alongside the ceasefires, the PKK's efforts to develop democratic, essentially feminist and inarguably post-nationalist strings to its bow for a more legitimate (and hopefully more winnable) struggle are given scrutiny as what started out as a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla cell seems to have undergone a deep and incontrovertible paradigm shift. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in the modern history of the Kurdish struggle, or more generally in the nature of terrorism and violent 'freedom' movements and how they constitute themselves.

Good Omens

This book, a novel co-written by none other than two of the biggest cleverest funniest most inventive authors in modern British pop-fantasy comedy - Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett - is, if you know who they are, exactly as good (if not better) as you'd expect such a collaborative work to be. It's a decently-long novel but I steamed through it in three days (of evening reading, as daytime-reading is still given over to dissertation non-fiction, as you may have gathered from the fact that this blog has basically become just about Kurdistan lately) because it's just so flipping excellent.
   To sum up what it's about - the end of the world is nigh, but the Antichrist becomes misplaced, and so an angel called Aziraphale, a demon called Crowley, the last living descendant of Agnes Nutter (a witch who predicted very nice-and-accurately all the things that would happen in the runup to all of this) and the last living descendant of the witch-finder who burned Agnes Nutter at the stake, all find themselves trying to prevent a cockup of literally apocalyptic dimensions. To say this novel is irreverent would be both completely technically true and a gross misjudgement of the value of being able to laugh at stuff - literally using the eschatological framework of the Biblical account from the prophesy of Revelation, adapted by Gaiman-Pratchett imagination to real-world workings that are as hilarious as they are commonsense and as through-provoking as they are almost throwaway; this novel is just jam-packed with incredibly clever and incredibly funny characters, plot elements, turns of phrase, and just generally ridiculously well-concocted fictional happenings set against the backdrop of Christian world-endingness.
   I don't really have any strong thoughts or reactions to it - apart from that it's brilliant and you would probably love it, given a particular sense of humour. Like, if the idea that the apocalyptic horseman Famine would have spent most of the later-twentieth century developing middle-class hyper-health-conscious diet schemes and supplements to stave off boredom while waiting for the show to begin strikes you as funny, then this is the book for you.



Edit [August 16th]: I don't flipping believe it. I literally finished this book, that's been out for over a quarter of a century, less than a fortnight ago, and then something incredible like this happens... hopefully it will be a better screen-adaptation than Neverwhere.

[edit - July 2019]: I just had to sign up for a free Amazon Prime account to be able to see this, which much like the book I binged in a sitting or two. They did it justice. Still not as good as the book as these things almost never are but it comes closer than most.