Kamal Soleimani

Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies | El Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios de Asia y África

Published online by TISHK Center for Kurdistan Studies: Bonn, Germany: 19 January 2026

I came to know myself outside textbooks, for my nation was never narrated in them

 Childhood, Kurdishness, and the Grammar of Loss

Almost all of my childhood memories are tied  ̶  directly or obliquely  ̶   not simply to being Kurdish, but to the sadness, pain, and quiet suffering that accompanied it. Kurdishness, as I first encountered it, was never an abstraction, never a celebration. It did not arrive as fascistic pride, patiently inculcated by the state in tender minds, nor as inheritance. Not from textbooks. Not from the morning recitals of national anthems in the schoolyard. It arrived as loss. As fear. As something learned slowly, through silences more than words, through tears withheld, through the long discipline of endurance.

In my earliest understanding, identity was not something one claimed. It was something one carried.

Our village was entirely Kurdish. Its rhythms, its speech, its customs, even its grief were Kurdish. And yet two presences disturbed that fragile homogeneity. Two frightening foreign institutions stood deliberately at the edge of our lives to instill fear and awe, and to teach us  ̶   quietly but relentlessly  ̶  to forget who we were: the school and the military base, the pasgāh in Farsi, the observing post, the village Panopticon, for in Iran it was only Kurdish villages that were required to have such a post, and the absence of a pasgāh often meant that a village was not Kurdish at all.

They were not neutral.

They were not merely buildings.

They were instruments.

The school was the gentler of the two, the place where we first learned the foreign language, the language of the state. It worked patiently, through language and curriculum, and sometimes through seduction: they rewarded us when we imitated their speech, when we repeated their words with the right accent, when we learned to sound less like ourselves. They gave us food and snacks, to entice us into forgetting who we were. It taught us to abandon our mother tongue, to replace our stories with those of the state, to cultivate certain feelings and loyalties, so that we would no longer recognize ourselves as Kurds but as Iranians. Assimilation was its method, education its mask. It both punish and persuaded. It did not threaten; it erased.

The military base existed for those whom persuasion could no longer reach or never would, for they were already beyond the age of Persianizing acculturation techniques. When soft power failed, hard power arrived. Intimidation. Beatings. Gunfire in the night. Punishment was not delayed, not hidden. It was exemplary. It announced itself so that others might learn.

Between these two forces  ̶   one more patient, one more brutal  ̶  our lives unfolded.

One memory remains especially vivid.

One evening, I woke from sleep while one of my older sisters was carrying me on her shoulder. Many people were hiding in a garden at the edge of the village. When I looked up at the sky, I saw fire raining down from above. It was the strangest and most terrifying sight a child could witness young enough to be carried on a sister’s back, yet suddenly awake in the middle of fear: bodies gathered together in silence, hiding, whispering, terrified, while the sky itself seemed to be breaking open.

At the time, I did not understand what I was seeing. Only later did I learn that these were anti-aircraft gunshots or timed missiles, often called Doshka, bursting in the air after traveling a certain distance, or exploding according to a delayed fuse. The scene did not end there. It was followed by other nights, other alarms: villages bombed, fear becoming habitual, terror settling quietly into everyday life.

It was around that time that I began to hear people say that both Saddam Hussein and the Iranian state had problems with the Kurds, that we were Kurds. I remember my parents listening intently to the radio, straining to catch fragments of news. Much of it remained unclear to me then, blurred and broken, but even in early childhood I understood one thing with unsettling clarity: we were different, and we were under attack. We were not wanted. We were not loved by any state.

Living so close to these artificial borders, I also knew that on the other side there were Kurds like us. Even as a child, I sensed that our people were divided, scattered, and trapped between states that denied our existence, yet bound together by a shared fate.

It was within this landscape that my mother told me a story she herself had heard only after the revolution, when silence began, cautiously, to loosen its grip. It concerned a woman who had once been our neighbor in the village, known to everyone as Khanum Kuhi, the wife of the driver stationed at the military base.

She lived beside us. She shared our paths, our wells, our small daily rhythms. She was not Kurdish. Yet she had learned Kurdish remarkably well.

She had no choice.

There were no non-Kurds in the village with whom she could speak. Kurdish, there, was not a preference; it was a condition of communication, a condition of human association itself. To live among us, she had to borrow our words, our cadences, our hesitations. My mother remembered how this woman would often sit with her, and perhaps with other women too, in the ordinary intimacy of neighborly life, conversations exchanged while working, while waiting, while enduring.

And again and again, she repeated a sentence that lodged itself in my mother’s memory and later in mine:

“The Kurds had one father, and that was Mullah Mustafa. But the Kurdish father is dead.”

The cruelty of this sentence did not lie merely in the fact of death, nor in a meditation on human mortality. At the time, Barzani was still physically alive. It lay in what the death was made to signify.

To Kurds and even to Khanum Kuhi, though for a very different reason, Mullah Mustafa Barzani was not simply a leader. He had come to be imagined as a father, a guardian, a figure in whom a people had entrusted its dream, its dignity, its protection, and the still imaginable possibility of collective freedom. In that figurative pronouncement, his death summoned something far deeper and more devastating than the loss of a man: it summoned the trauma of 1975, the crushing defeat, the sudden abandonment, the moment when Kurdish hope itself seemed to have been severed from history.

What wounded my mother most was not only the loss, but the intimacy of the messenger.

This reminder did not come from a total stranger. It came from a Kurdified Persian neighbor. From a woman who lived beside us. And yet, in mind and in allegiance, still an enemy, whose life, whose marriage, whose presence in the village was bound  ̶  quietly but unmistakably  ̶  to the machinery of the state.

Again and again, Kurdish women were being told  ̶  softly, persistently, almost conversationally that the dream had ended, that protection had vanished  ̶  that the future had already been foreclosed.

It was not mockery.

It was something colder.

It was instruction.

Even after the revolution, these stories circulated only in fragments, cautiously, as if still listening for footsteps at the door. Before it, I am certain, they could not have been spoken at all, not even within the family, not even at night.

Silence, we had learned, was not emptiness.

Silence was survival.

The Sentence That Never Left Me

There is another memory, perhaps even more painful, that returns to me with relentless persistence. I was very young. I did not understand what I was witnessing. Yet the scene never faded.

It was during the early days of what would later be remembered in Rojhelat as the Three-Month War (Şerî sê mang). One afternoon, beyond the edge of the village, I saw two young men standing in conversation. I did not know either of them. Even as a child, in a village of five or six hundred souls, one learned quickly who belonged and who did not.

One of them was tall, strikingly handsome. I never saw him again. Yet from their conversation I understood that he had been a peshmerga, a Kurdish fighter who had laid down his weapon that very day.

What remains with me is not their exchange, but a single sentence. Spoken with extraordinary sadness, almost with disbelief:

Aren’t you sad about what happened to Kurdistan?

He asked his friend this, and yet, despite the sentiment, he had laid down his arms that very same day.

That sentence lodged itself inside me as if engraved in stone.

For years, I could not reconcile what it contained. How could someone mourn so deeply for the fate of his nation and, on that very day, abandon his weapon? How could grief and capitulation inhabit the same breath?

Even as a child, I sensed a contradiction I could not yet name.

A Morning of Tears

To understand that moment, I must return to that morning.

Around that time, the Iranian army had begun occupying villages along the road between Piranshahr and Sardasht, and our village lay close to Piranshahr. When I woke up that morning, both of my parents were crying. In the deeply patriarchal world in which I was raised, seeing my father  ̶  the mullah of the village  ̶  cry was almost unthinkable. It announced catastrophe more clearly than any words.

One of my parents said that Dr. Qasemlu and Mamosta Sheikh ʿEzzeddin, the two legendary Kurdish leaders, had passed through our village. I do not know whether the report was accurate. But the veracity of the story scarcely mattered. What mattered was the meaning that traveled with the news: the passage of leaders no longer signaled protection. It signaled the collapse of a nation’s hope, if only for a moment. Their movement through the village was read not as reassurance, but as an omen.

That morning of tears, followed by that late-afternoon encounter in the pale autumn light, etched something permanent into me. It taught me that the defeat of a nation  ̶  or even the mere anticipation of defeat  ̶  leaves deposits in the soul that time does not dissolve.

Years later, I would recognize in that young fighter not cowardice, but helplessness and disorientation: the moment when one discovers that power acknowledges no limits in crushing, when the horizon of a nation darkens, when, before the inhumanity of force, one falls into destitution and is overcome by the feeling of victimhood, and yet, after destruction, must watch power calmly rewrite the story, while resilience and the honor of never losing the hope of freedom struggle to endure.

Memory, Nation, and Becoming Human

Much later, when I encountered theories of nationalism, I often returned to Ernest Renan’s observation that nations are built not only on shared joys, but on shared suffering, and that painful memories are often the strongest bond of all. For me, this was never theory. It was biography.

Again and again, I have witnessed the same pattern: hope interrupted, futures deferred, defeat rehearsed in advance. What draws me back to these memories  ̶  sometimes with overwhelming force  ̶  is not nostalgia, but the persistence of breakdown: the perpetual uncertainty surrounding the fate of a people condemned to live between erasure and survival. Even in recent years, this pattern has returned with devastating clarity. In 2014, I witnessed the genocide of Shingal, the looting and depopulation of Afrin, the breaking of my people’s back in Kirkuk, the Arabization of Rojava, the massacre of the defenders of Jina, and once again the barbaric jihad unleashed against Rojava.

I did not learn the narrative of my nation in textbooks. I lived it. It shaped me, formed me, claimed me before I could name it. I was not learning history; I was witnessing it. I hear it, live it, and feel it in the whispered stories of daily existence, in tears before dawn, in a single sentence spoken by a defeated fighter, in the diabolical voices that rise in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish; announcing the death of the nation each day, and the next day watching, astonished, as Kurds sing, dance, and rise again, more alive, more defiant, more unbroken than before.

And so I arrived, slowly, at a difficult clarity.

Despite fear.

Despite defeat.

Despite loss.

It was only by owning my nation, my identity, and my history  ̶  collective and personal  ̶   that I came into being as who I am. Owning these stories is beyond my choice; it is what defines me as a human being: to resist what others want me to be.

Owning it.

Defending it.

Remembering it.

That, finally, is what makes me human.

For I find nothing that grants me more agency, nothing that makes me feel more free, than carrying  ̶    without freedom  ̶    the collective story of a nation still struggling to become free, still struggling to end its suffering.