Christiane Bird, A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts: Journeys in Kurdistan (Random House, 2004)
Kevin McKiernan, The Kurds: A People in Search of Their Homeland (St. Martin's Press, 2006)
If you pay any attention to the situation in Iraq or to Turkey's efforts to enter the European Union, you've surely heard about the Kurds, if only in passing. Regular readers of the Green Man Review may have noticed that we don't ordinarily review books that deal with current events. I think the antiquity of our office building has an effect on our consciousness, causing us to think of historical roots rather than their current manifestations. Fortunately, both of these books about the Kurds provide at least a modicum of information about those historical roots. We received a copy of McKiernan's book from the publisher at about the same time we found a copy of Bird's (no relation to me, thank you) on the remainder table at our favorite independent local bookstore. It made sense to me to include them both in this review.
Bird is one of those free-lance writers/reporters who seem to gravitate toward genres that enable her to travel and talk to people about their lives. During a trip to Iran (which resulted in an earlier book, Neither East Nor West: One Woman's Journey through the Islamic Republic of Iran), she got a hankering to learn more about the Kurds. A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts is the product of her travels in the predominantly Kurdish regions of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey after the 09/11/01 terrorist attacks on the U.S. and before the U.S. invaded Iraq some eighteen months later. Like a travel book (which it is, at least in part), this is written in the first person. Yet Bird is very careful to stay on topic. She doesn't spend much narrative time engaged in personal reflection or telling the reader what she ate or how she felt. Most of the narrative is description of people and places or her re-telling of information she learns from her informants or from reading background. She uses language quite well to convey her impressions. Here's an example:
Before me sat an astonishing array of faces, heads and bodies, most well worn with age and the elements, and clothed in striking costumes. There were turbans of red and white, black and white, pale pink, and solid white; some were piled high on the head in a double spiral, some just a modest ring, and some draping down around the shoulders. There were flowing white gowns of the kind usually worn by Arabs, bulky woolen jackets, and hand woven shal u shapik with wide brown-and-white stripes. One younger man was in starched, pale green khak with an electric green shirt and burnt orange sash. Another older man was entirely in white, from his socks to his turban, except for a richly textured black cape. [p. 134]
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts is organized around geographic areas, with the section on Iraq leading and taking by far the most pages (nearly 250 out of 375). Bird doesn't often refer to the passing of time and only occasionally makes seasonal references, so it's difficult to keep track of her movements, unless she provides a narrative bridge, such as describing her journey from one town to the next. So, for example, I can't tell whether she obtained all her information on the Iraqi Kurds during one visit to the so-called semi-autonomous zone, or whether she actually visited the different parts of this region during different forays separated by time spent in one of the other nation-states.
Bird spent time in numerous parts of all four nation-states in an effort to understand the culture and history of the Kurds. For the most part, she traveled alone and stayed with host families she identified through networking. It sounds as though she had some contacts before she started this project, and used those to establish contacts with other people as she made her way around so-called Kurdistan. Although she had learned a little Persian during her time in Iran, she neither spoke nor understood any of the Kurdish dialects, so her entire enterprise was dependent on finding reliable translators along the way. For the most part, all these apparently tenuous and largely spontaneous connections worked. Remarkable!
This is not to say that Bird didn't occasionally find herself in some pretty uncomfortable situations. She learned fairly early on that in some of the cities she needed to travel with a bodyguard. She discovered that women, especially solo or in the company of other women, were not commonly seen or welcomed in many of the restaurants or clubs she visited; in fact, in most of the places, women didn't go out of their homes at all after dark. More than once, she asked questions her informants didn't really want to answer, or answered evasively. Like any good reporter or field researcher, Bird wanted to get behind the surface impressions! A couple of her contacts admitted to her that they didn't want to be seen with her because they didn't want to get in trouble with the authorities for talking to the American press.
I found A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts very absorbing albeit at times quite grim. Bird pulled no punches in re-telling her informants' stories about their cruel treatment at the hands of the Baathist Iraqis, the Turks, the Syrians, the Iranians, and their own warring factions. Her descriptions of the destruction that befell many of the places she visited were truly appalling. If you ever wondered why you should be concerned about chemical weapons, consider their immediate and long-term effects on humans, other animals, even plants. Not even remotely pretty.
I greatly appreciated the map in the front of this book, the black and white photos thoughtfully laid out in immediate proximity to the narrative that referred to them, the endnotes, the excellent bibliography (probably everything that has been published about the Kurds since the beginning of the twentieth century), and the detailed index. Bird did a good job of providing explanations for common nouns that she rendered in phonetic English, like shal u shapik (traditional men's clothing--loose pants, cinched with a cummerbund, and a jacket), nane tanik (flat bread), and peshmerga (a guerilla fighter-literally, one who faces death-although some Kurds apparently use the word to characterize anyone who fled into the mountains to avoid capture).
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts was going to be a tough act to follow, no doubt about it. Yet, as I began Kevin McKiernan's The Kurds, I was prepared to be impressed. I recognized him as the writer/director of Good Kurds, Bad Kurds, a documentary film to which Christiane Bird referred with great admiration several times in her book. McKiernan's credentials are simply extraordinary. A dual American-Irish citizen, his career as a journalist began in the 1970s when he covered the conflicts between the U.S. government and residents of the Pine Ridge Reservation in Wounded Knee, South Dakota and took him to locations in Central America and Africa before he arrived in the Middle East in the early 1990s as an ABC News correspondent.
The Kurds is a chronicle of his experiences in so-called Kurdistan (primarily Iran and Iraq) from 1991 to 2005, told in roughly chronological order, with occasional movements back and forth in time to tie pieces together and a few instances of straight history. While the story of The Kurds is embedded in this tale (I recognized the names of places, people, and political parties that I had already encountered in Bird's book), it often fades into the shadows well behind McKiernan's larger-than-life presence. It's obvious that the man is vastly proud of his own accomplishments, and I don't begrudge him that. It's just that, if he wanted to publish his memoirs, he (or his editor) might have chosen a different title for the book.
I had a feeling I was in trouble when I saw a reference in the Acknowledgements to Studs Terkel as someone who had provided McKiernan with advice on sections of the book. In a similar act of name-dropping, McKiernan makes reference later on to private conversations with Senator Joe Biden. My favorite of bit of braggadocio, though, is his elaborate description of the steps he had to take to score an exclusive interview for Ed Bradley of 'Sixty Minutes' with Abdullah 'Apo' Ocalan, notorious leader of the PKK, the Marxist-inspired Kurdistan Workers' Party. Again, I am not suggesting that these accomplishments are anything less than impressive. My problem is that they tell me a lot more about McKiernan than they do about the Kurds.
One of the book's recurring narrative threads concerns McKiernan's ultimately successful efforts to have a Kurdish associate (he refers to the man as his driver) badly wounded in an assassination attempt brought to the U.S. for reconstructive surgery. The description of the assassination attempt itself is quite remarkable, although it's based entirely on third-party accounts. And I felt compassion for the difficulties faced by the driver, Karzan Mahmoud. Nonetheless, McKiernan's role was simply that of a very effective and persuasive go-between (the significant financial and time commitments came from elsewhere). And both accounts of the Kurds make it clear that Mahmoud's horrific injuries are all too commonplace among Kurdish men, women and children.
From McKiernan, I gained a better understanding of some of the corporate interests involved in the conflicts that plague the nexus of Iran, Iraq and Turkey, not to mention the reasons for the U.S. to maintain its alliance with Turkey regardless of that country's unfortunate policies and practices vis à vis the Kurds. While I still can't quite keep the names and ideologies of all of the Kurdish political parties (read: warring factions) straight, McKiernan's constant references to them, typically with the leaders' names juxtaposed as modifiers, e.g., Massoud Barzani's KDP, certainly made them a little easier to recall.
As a seasoned traveler in hazardous places, McKiernan was more likely than Bird to rely on cunning when his access was challenged. I appreciated his references to using his Irish passport and various letters of introduction to obtain safe passage. On an expense account and with less need to commune with local families, McKiernan typically stays in hotels rather than people's homes. He never mentions traveling with a bodyguard or worrying about going out at night. But then he never mentions the lack of women in the places he frequents, at all. It's apparently not something he noticed. Along the same line, whereas Bird returns again and again to the persistent problem of honor killing especially among the more traditional rural Kurds, McKiernan mentions it in one brief, rather dismissive paragraph.
Which isn't to say that he is entirely oblivious. When he forgets about himself and pays attention to his surroundings, McKiernan can write quite acceptable thick description. Here's an example I especially liked, from page 249:
In late November I moved to the Ashti, a small, refurbished hotel located a couple of blocks from the Palace [another hotel]. I had stayed there in 1991, just after the abortive Kurdish uprising, when the hotel was known as the Salam (peace). Despite the passage of time, my memories of the place were still fresh. In those days the lobby was dark and cold, the reception area heated by a single kerosene stove that gave off more fumes than warmth. Men wearing overcoats sat on couches, drinking sweetened tea and fingering their AK-47s. The hotel electricity seldom worked, and the only light in the lobby came from the steamed-up windows, where old making tape-precautions against shattering glass during shelling by the Iraqi army-still stuck to the glass.
No doubt because of his early experiences with the Sioux in South Dakota, McKiernan has a tendency to make analogies between the Kurds and the Sioux, or more broadly, the various Native American peoples. Like many sweeping analogies, this one is both useful and problematic. It's useful, especially for readers unfamilia with the Kurds, in providing some connection to a more familiar story that has some similar elements. It is problematic because there are just as many dissimilar elements that the analogy makes easier to overlook. For example, it's difficult to think of the Kurds as First Folk, since for centuries, the Arabs and the Ottoman Turks have claimed parts of the region the Kurds claim as their homeland. And, while it's true that The Kurds are organized in tribes that are as likely to fight against each other as they are any common enemy, I'm not sure that tribes mean quite the same thing in Kurdistan as they do in the U.S., especially in contemporary parlance. It's also true that the semi-autonomous region of northern Iraq that is the closest approximation of a place called Kurdistan isn't exactly the equivalent of an Indian reservation.
Like A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts, The Kurds includes endnotes and a decent index. The bibliography (called 'Sources') is somewhat shorter than Bird's and comprised primarily of printed and Web-based materials published no earlier than the 1980s, with a smattering of earlier references that McKiernan no doubt used to fill in historical background. Unlike Bird's book, The Kurds has no maps, and the photographs are all in one of those glossy inserts tucked into the center of the book. They mostly depict men during wartime, and are not explicitly mentioned in the narrative. Most are uncredited, leading me to believe that they come from McKiernan's personal collection. Regular references to dates help the reader keep track of time. McKiernan's use of chapter subheadings is probably helpful to someone reading the book in short sittings, although I found their frequency occasionally annoying (up to three or four to a two-page spread) and the titles not always descriptive of the narrative that followed.
Do I need to tell you which one of these accounts of the Kurds is becoming part of the library, which is being cast out in hopes of finding another, more appreciative owner? I think not!
