Lessons from Rojava: An Interview with Pamster
Below is an interview of Pamster conducted by Capybarbara, a member of NEAG and Northumbria IWW. Thanks is given to the transcriber of this interview, a close friend of Capybarbara.
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Hello! Who are you?
My name’s Pamster, I use she/they pronouns, and I’ve been active in anarcha-feminist organising, as well as women’s groups. I recently went to North and East Syria, as part of a women’s delegation from Scottish Solidarity With Kurdistan to meet the women’s groups and structures over there and specifically to learn about the autonomous women’s structures. I wanted to go because it’s relevant to my organising and the context here – I wanted to figure out how to resist capitalism and neoliberalism, and the patriarchy, and also fascism, all at once. This is what’s been happening in Rojava since the revolution started in 2012, and is still ongoing. The region is now under the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. They fought off ISIS in most territories and ever since then, they’ve been implementing an experiment in self-organising, self-determination and autonomy through the system of democratic confederalism. There are three key pillars, which are direct grassroots democracy, ecology, and the women’s revolution. I was particularly interested in the women’s liberation side of it, because even though it might be talked about as part of the revolution in Rojava, it’s not often focused on in the amount of depth that I think it deserves. That is the main thing that I actually wanted to learn about, and I haven’t found a way to do so from the UK, so it was amazing to go and just speak to women directly.
You mentioned it was an experiment. Do they see it as an experiment?
Yes, that was the word that they used – across the board – to highlight how it wasn’t ever finished. There was no endpoint where you could say, “I’ve done it, now it’s perfect, it’s great”. Everything needs to be questioned and negotiated, but also, it just hasn’t really been done before. They want to tackle problems at the root, which includes very deep reflection and long-term processes of change. I think it’s also important to acknowledge that it’s not even going to happen within one lifetime, and that’s okay, but we can all participate in the trying and the effort and the struggle.
It seems to mirror this idea of changing yourself as an individual, and the ongoing process of trying to overcome learnt biases on that level. Is that a fair comparison?
Yes, that’s a very, very central concept as well in the Kurdish freedom movement and the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria in general. When I was there, there were so many points where I was thinking, “It’s incredible that you arrived at that conclusion, because I have too, in a different corner of the world, working with different theories, different concepts, but somehow, we’re both actually thinking about freedom in a similar way”. Even though I always felt like the ideology there is far more developed, concrete, practical, put into action, and also more intellectually thought-through compared with what I was trying to piece together from bits of anarchist and feminist theory that I know from a mostly Western context, which just never felt close to approximating the notion of freedom that I intuitively felt like I wanted. Here, when I say something, I often feel like I have to always be ready to defend it immediately, even within leftist circles, because maybe I’m in a room that is full of…
Men.
Men, and what I’m saying is too feminist for them. But then, with feminists, sometimes they can be quite liberal, and not the kind of radical and anarchist and revolutionary feminism that I believe in. So I feel like they might not want to talk about capitalism in the way that I want to. When I was in Rojava, I had that feeling far less. I would say things that, here, would be so controversial, and people would just nod and go, “Of course. Of course we believe this. Of course the oppressions are interconnected, the only question is, how? Of course we want a revolution”. Then, you can just focus your time on figuring out the methods.
Instead of getting caught up in constant theoretical fighting, all the time.
Yes. And this internal change is a huge concept. They actually see the change as an individual to be really foundational to changing society. There’s a saying that’s something like, “98% of the change is within yourself”. People would often say that 98% or 99% of the struggle is within yourself, and if you can figure that out, then you can go into interactions in a determined way, and change people’s minds, and create a movement. It’s the idea of personal self-development, which includes developing a militant, revolutionary personality.
Is that connected to the “kill the dominant male” quote you mentioned to me?
Yes, that booklet is really good, it’s titled ‘Killing and Transforming the Dominant Man’[1].
I was going to ask about religion. How does that come into play? Is that seen as something to be overcome?
I think, at least from what I saw, it’s part of the project. It’s part of the society that they want to build, or not build, but still part of the process. One of their key values is ethnic plurality, and also plurality of religion, and people living harmoniously together on the land that they might have had cause to be divided on. The divisions are all created by the state, to suit its purposes and create its power, but they’re artificial, and there’s nothing inherently contradictory between the Muslim people and the Assyrian Christians who also live in North and East Syria. The goal is for them is to live together in peace. The goal is peace in general; nobody wants war, and women especially will never want war, because they are disproportionately affected by it due to misogyny, and also due to their children dying and all of that associated pain.
And what did you and your delegation learn about feminist solidarity while you were over?
I think that people’s openness and determination in their own vision and identity and comradeship was really incredible to see. They had a united ideology that they would come back to. We went from city to city, from Qamishli to Raqqa, and Kobane, we traveled around so much in a very short period of time, and everywhere, people would say the same thing; they would have the same goals, they would have the same methods. Obviously, that’s because there’s a line, but it’s also because people are very educated about their own history, and about history in general. We would often be told that the “21st century is the century of the women’s revolution”, and they would see women as a united group across the world. It was the sense of, “We’re doing this here, and that’s great, but ultimately, this is what we want for every woman in the entire world. We want every woman to be liberated”. I remember when we were in Raqqa, we would ask what kind of message the women’s groups we met would like us to bring back. We met with this group called Zenobiya Women’s Community that was recently set up. And we asked them, “What kind of message would you like us to bring back?” Most groups when asked this would talk about the need for international help, in terms of the very practical problems they’re dealing with. Those are directly linked to the arms trade worldwide, and to government officials not recognizing the region as an autonomous region of Syria. But in Raqqa, they actually said, “Our message to you is that we have solidarity with your struggle”. And we’re sitting in a room for that meeting where pictures of the martyrs from the same organisation are on the wall. A few months ago, some of them died, and there’s somebody in the room that filled in that role, despite the huge danger of falling themselves. But it’s worth it, because your life is a struggle, and that’s a common slogan there too: Berxwedan Jiyane. Resistance is Life.
That’s beautiful.
They think of it so internationally, and everything is connected. In a way it’s so simple, and less fragmented.
Yes. It’s simple, but that’s the heart of what solidarity is. It’s meant to be mutual, isn’t it? It’s not about Westerners hopping onto a cause with a “white saviour complex”. Another thing I wanted to ask about the aesthetics of the revolution. When we discussed it, you mentioned that they put a lot of thought into these aesthetics. Is that something that you’ve ever experienced elsewhere? My impression is that it’s not something that’s discussed over here.
I think Northumbria IWW is truly carrying on the spirit with the capybara memes. But overall I think it is lacking in our movements, apart from your heroic contributions, of course. I do think that we are lacking not just the aesthetics, but the culture. The Kurdish women’s movement focuses on both. There is a women’s culture, an entire commission for that, and they’re looking at what women’s history has been erased or not covered enough. What is women’s music, what is the heritage of women in Mesopotamia? Also, what is the culture of the revolution, of the movement? They have so much amazing Kurdish folk music, groups, circle dances, guerrilla dances, and they’re always thinking about this idea of, “How do we keep morale up? How do we keep our hopes up?”.
I was thinking about riot grrrl a lot when I was there: I’m in a riot grrrl band, and it’s perhaps a bit niche, but it’s very close to my heart and to my journey through life. It’s feminist punk that focuses on women, nonbinary people, queer people and trans people, and other people that have been oppressed on the basis of their gender, and might not have felt like they could be musicians, who then find a home in riot grrrl culture.
Yes, it’s the same principle. That’s an interesting link.
That’s how I felt, and it’s also not based on skill. “Just try it”, it’s very DIY. They have a whole TV channel that’s just about reporting on women’s organising, and other channels reporting on the Autonomous Administration in general. We went to a mixed TV station, but 70% of the workers were still women, and they were all sharing the roles; so they would rotate who’s the presenter, who’s doing the montage, who’s doing the sound tech side. They would all learn the skills and then teach them to each other. That’s very similar to my riot grrrl, queer punk, feminist community, where we do have classes where we teach each other how to play bass from scratch, and then we form different bands in different configurations, and the ultimate goal is for the sound engineer to also not be a man’s job.
Obviously this trip only being open to women obviously was a big plus for you.
Yes, I think it’s also about: what opportunities are you not afforded because of patriarchy? Men who go to North and East Syria would not be in the same autonomous women’s spaces we visited in the same way, or at all. There was a clear link that I had with so many of the women, about us both being women’s organisers. That was the link. The link wasn’t even my anti-capitalist organising or my anarchist organising, it was actually our shared identity and our shared oppression experiences. That’s part of the reason why those autonomous spaces exist, because you can get a different kind of conversation and comradeship when the Man is not in the room. But also, you can then start to work on your own militant personality, and try and transform the dominant man in your own head, and the patriarchal aspects that we’ve all internalised – without it being used against you in some kind of power struggle with men.
Are the men in the movement challenged to overcome their own prejudices about women, and if so, who’s doing that challenging? Is it other men telling them, “Overcome your misogyny”?
So they see this as the role of the women, to educate the men about women’s oppression. Ideally, men would also challenge each other, and we actually saw one of the men’s educations, where they have mini-lectures that are led by women from the movement. The one we saw was actually a teenage girl, I think as young as 14, along with adult women from the movement, and they were at the front of the class, and they were showing a video that’s essentially about feminism and the history of women. Then they have a discussion with the men around the ideas of “What does it mean to be a free man? What does it mean to support women in organising?” It’s difficult to say what real impact it’s having, because, again, it’s about that long-term social change that’s not going to happen immediately anyway. It’s difficult to quantify what is going on after the educations, but that is the strategy that they’re going for. When we were there, the men were asked, “Do you have anything to say to our delegation?”, and one man rose from his chair and said, “Yes. I would like to say that women’s liberation is key to the liberation of all society”. It was quite emotional.
My personal stance as an activist was always, “It’s absolutely not my job to teach men”, but listening to you, it seems to be about the result. I’d be a lot more inclined to teach men if they were actually learning.
Yes. I think the key difference between the way in which we might have been interacting with leftist men and trying to teach them about being more anti-patriarchal in their organising, and the way in which the Kurdish women’s movement does it, is that their approach is always collective. It’s never a woman just speaking to one of her friends, or even two women trying to get a whole group of a few dozen people to change their activities. It’s always based in a group identity, and in collective action, so those younger women that might be leading the educations, they might not have power within their home, to stand up to their dad, but their dad might be at the education, and has to listen to them in that context, even if it’s just for a few hours, because they have the strength of the whole women’s movement behind them, and that’s very, very different. Even if they might be saying the same things over and over again, and they might not change the behaviour of the men immediately, they do build their own power, and they do make the point that the only way the men can learn what it’s actually like to be oppressed as a woman is from the people that are oppressed.
It’s like the basic principle behind trade union organising, isn’t it? The idea that you can’t stand up to your boss as an individual, but if we have a lot of individuals, they make up a union.
Actually, the IWW was another organisation that I was reminded of while I was there, because of their focus on one big union for all workers.
I wanted to ask about restorative justice. I struggle with the idea of restorative justice sometimes, because if the perpetrator doesn’t acknowledge that they’ve done real damage, you’ve fallen at the first hurdle. In my experience, that’s happened all of the time, and it’s really, really dispiriting and made me consider leaving activism.
I’ve had the same experience of trying to deal with injustices with movements here, in terms of people not listening and getting very disillusioned in the capacity of leftist men to change. But this is where I think making each other stay hopeful and developing culture and aesthetics actually is an answer to this too. Firstly, a big thing in Rojava is that they even believe in the rehabilitation of ISIS fighters. The resources are really, really tight and that’s why it’s a very dangerous place, but then the ideological tensions are so strong that there’s politically motivated violence too. Their approach was that they needed work with society, and that includes everybody that is still under the ISIS ideology – all of the women that are still oppressed within ISIS families. But they don’t see them as disposable or inherently bad.
They’re trying to find ways to work with them, to rehabilitate, even in the case of people who have been instrumental in really inhumane crimes. When we were in Raqqa, we passed a central square where they used to display beheaded bodies. Now, the square has been rebuilt with a sign saying Jin, Jiyan, Azadi or Women, Life, Freedom which is obviously a very symbolic, amazing gesture. Again, the change doesn’t happen just because you rename the square. Change happens at a level of all society. The way the Autonomous Administration deals with ISIS basically shows their approach to justice as not being about punishment, and while they still have prisons, these are seen as a last resort. The first resort is always the community. They have a commission, the Women’s House or Mala Jin [2], and they deal with all kinds of domestic issues, always keeping the interests of the woman in mind.
Another point was that the approach very much just moves at the speed at which people can move at. It’s never going to work to impose any kind of ideas on people, so if they liberate a place, they’re not going to ban the use of the niqab, which was mandatory in places that ISIS occupied. They’re not going to then respond to that by saying, “Now it’s banned, because that’s how we’ll liberate women”. It’s about slowly figuring out ways to bring them into organising, and show them how they can self-organise, how they can organise their own community. That’s a very different approach from sitting somebody down and saying, “Liberation means that you, right now, tell me explicitly that women are equal, and they’re good organisers, and they’re just as good comrades as men, and then we’ll work together”. That’s not the first step. The first step is working with contradictions, and having really uncomfortable conversations.
Nobody changes their mind overnight, do they? It’s a process, and I suppose that comes back to the “resistance is life” concept.
Also, it’s a process that works only if you have a real collective, and a real community, because you can always go back to that, even after a tough conversation, and get reassurance, solidarity, and a sense of belonging or direction. Whereas I feel like, often, when I’m trying to have these conversations with people and they don’t go well, I have nowhere to recharge, necessarily. It still feels quite like a solitary, individual pursuit.
I was thinking about the Western discourse around ISIS brides, and the level of vitriol and hatred people have for 15-year-old girls who were groomed, essentially; clearly a very carceral mentality. Then again, saying that I’ve sometimes wanted to give up activism because of men has made me realise that I have the luxury of that option. I can opt out, whereas there’s a lot more reasons for a community to want restorative justice when they can’t opt out, they can’t just have a normal life like I can. I can also understand why I want to resort to a catapult for some leftist men, but…
I understand why you want a catapult too.
But I also completely agree with you about how it can be really isolating when you don’t have a women’s collective behind you, because you have nobody to go to, and it’s very easy for concerns to just be brushed off, and then you feel like you’re the angry feminist the whole time, you’re the only one, even if a lot of people agree with you. For some reason, we don’t have that same collective spirit. Maybe the difference is because, in their case, it was born out of war.
No, I think the difference is that we are very entrenched in liberal capitalist mentality. Even if you disagree with capitalism at a systemic level, we may not be dealing with the ways in which it’s impacted our mentality. It’s always going to be individualising us and moving us further into our own little groups and pitting us against each other. That’s how misogyny works as well, pitting women against each other, even sometimes across the world, who actually have the same interests and same values, and the same oppression, to some extent. I think that’s also why the context of crisis and of not being able to have a comfortable life helps having the sense of community, but it’s also born out of decades of organising from the Kurdish freedom movement, against the colonisation of the fascist Turkish state, and other fascist forces. Even though our oppression may not be that visible, in terms of having a war, that war is related to our context, because it’s just an outsourcing of the tensions and the realities that we live in, which is, these huge organisations and NGOs and states that are consolidating their own power through exploiting people and disregarding human life. I think the bribe of the system, for us, is that we can have a comfortable life, get a job, maybe even have some sense of romantic achievement, and then that being it, and that being fulfilling. But that’s an illusion, and this is why I believe that struggle is life, even if, maybe, it makes my life more difficult in a superficial sense, because that’s also what makes my life worth living.
It was so amazing and inspiring to see that they have so many forces against them all at the same time, and instead of saying, “I guess we’ll make society better later. Right now, we don’t have time, we have to focus on only physical self-defence”, they say, “No, we’ll do it all at once now. We might have to put some things on pause, some things will be really slow, but we’re not going to give up any part of these values, because we do not want to repeat the logic of the oppressor, because we know what it’s like to be oppressed. Why would we do it to somebody else?”.
Even within an anarchist context, you can get the same kind of rhetoric. “We need to focus on the real issues”, and, of course, the macho culture that you get in a lot of anti-fascist circles. You’re often made to feel like you’re not good enough, or that you’re a side issue because you’re a woman. I’ve heard anarchists talk about idpol in disparaging terms and always think, “That’s easy enough for you to say, if you’re not one of the identities that’s under attack”.
A lot of people there would say, “When I’m organising, my identity as a woman always comes first. That’s my first identity. Secondly, I’m part of this group, or I’m part of this party, or this is my political ideology, but firstly, I’m always a woman, and that’s why, whatever happens, I will always stand with any woman that is oppressed here, beyond anything else”. That just changes the dynamic, so much, and this is where the identities can become a source of fragmentation in our own movements, where it becomes too much about the specifics of everybody’s individual position, rather than what we have in common. We don’t focus on what we have in common, or even who our common enemy is. We need to define that, and then we can, I think, more efficiently organise against this enemy.
The only group I’ve personally comes across who has this idea of, “Oh, but we’re all women, and everything else is secondary”, is unfortunately, feminism-appropriating transphobes. Obviously, I’m not saying that this is an inherently transphobic belief, this is just that that’s only time I’ve ever heard that.
Do you think that’s really what brings them together?
In reality? No. I think it’s a middle-class moral panic. I don’t think it’s actual solidarity with women by any means, but that is the line that they use all the time, and that’s how they justify letting Nazis in, because it’s all, “Oh, I just don’t know about your politics. I don’t care”.
I think the transphobe movement is a huge danger to feminist solidarity in the UK. It’s a big wedge, and it’s something I was reflecting on when I was in Rojava too, because it’s just such a big problem that this is the centre of our debates all the time. Of course we need to give an answer to right-wing, fascist women using feminism to hide their bigotry and transphobia, but then we also need to organise as feminists, and as trans feminists and as queer feminists, for a feminist revolution. Instead of having that conversation about, “What is the positive, alternative, counter-oppressive world that we want to see about, and how do we get there?”, we’re pushed into a corner by transphobes to just talk about how we counter them. That’s a lot of energy and time, and it makes me question whether it’s well spent, and how we centre our solidarity first. If that’s strong enough, then that’s also a way to counter the transphobes, but I just feel like they’re taking up too much space in our own minds. Yes, they’re very loud in the media, in ways that we can’t always control, because the media is corrupt and right-wing, but there are always the parts that you can control, like how you come together to organise in DIY and grassroots ways. The transphobic ideology has hijacked even our thinking about womanhood itself, and about women’s solidarity. Trans women are not a threat to that. Radical trans feminists have been at the front of every feminist struggle.
I agree with you, but I also think, from the standpoint of solidarity, that’s why the transphobes take up so much space in my head, because as I see it, trans people are under attack, and it’s our duty to stand with them against this growing movement that is also incorporating fascists quite happily. When I join a new feminist group, my first thought is, “I need to make sure they’re not transphobic”, and that’s not a good way of thinking, but also, you do have to think it.
I just genuinely feel a lot of pain around the way that the potentiality of coming together under the feminist banner, or under the banner of being all oppressed by the same system of patriarchy, and being at the bottom of that oppression, is being hijacked and taken away from us by transphobes. I saw what this potential looks like when it’s pursued, and it’s so strong. I really believe this is why a lot of revolutions fail, or movements fail, because they are really patriarchal and really sexist, and women are often the strongest, the bravest, the most knowledgeable organisers, with all of the barriers that are in their way. Why not centre them in any kind of movement? Those who benefit from the Posie Parker protests that have been happening are ultimately the state and the patriarchy. The transphobes themselves are not really winning at this. They’re very clearly not creating a community of feminists and of women supporting each other. They’re also partaking in forms of oppression. They’re not creating a better world.
The mutual aid networks that suddenly became a thing when Covid-19 started gave me some hope. My group still exists, but organisationally it was only ever me, and I don’t know to what extent these groups born out of crisis ever did work along lines that we can be uncritical of. They were a piecemeal solution at best, but I think it’s still significant that this happened here, straight away, and that we drew on the same principle.
Yes, I think moments of crisis can be moments of opportunity, though. I think, if there’s a vacuum of power and you already have an organised movement, you can seize it. The pandemic could’ve been one of those moments, if we had been organised. In the Kurdish freedom movement, for example, they have cadres whose full-time activity is to organise the revolution. They get supported by the movement in that they don’t have any other job, they don’t have romantic relationships, their entire life is just dedicated to service. The reality is, we don’t have that role in our movements here, in any meaningful sense. I think it’s an interesting question for us. What would it look like to have that space for people to dedicate their lives to organising? It’s going to be different, but is it possible? Is it necessary? I do think it’s necessary, because they just support people to organise without everybody having to learn from scratch every time. They can come into a community and already have knowledge, and just be there to answer questions, to give advice. It’s not an unproblematic position. They’re not supposed to be in positions of power, for example. They wouldn’t actually chair the commune, but they just don’t have to think of anything else and it frees up their time too. And the historical narrative I’ve been told about how Rojava became so politically organised is that, for decades, cadres from the Kurdish freedom movement went literally door-to-door and spoke to people, and found out what they cared about, what their lives were like, and offered this perspective of a better society and a free society. Also, it’s different because, in Syria, it’s not uncommon to have an uninvited guest, and the culture of hospitality is so great that you would just take people in and chat to them. Here, we barely say hi on the street, so that’s another contextual difference to consider, but because of that, they managed to have real human connection and conversation, and it’s about convincing people as well. It’s a whole art of bringing people in. It was through decades of that that the movement that exists there now exists.
I’ve experienced the door-to-door organising tactic in tenants’ unions in the UK. But I don’t know what kind of knock-on effect that has, because it’s not really a dialogue. We were told what to say to people when we were door-knocking. There was a whole script, and that’s not the same as a dialogue.
I think it’s that balance between having a script, agreeing on some principles, being able to basically give the same answer across different geographical locations, but also, holding a debate, holding a conversation, seeing people in their full, human selves, their full lives, genuinely caring about finding out what they care about, and establishing a genuine connection, genuine care, and also comradeship. It’s about a balance between those two. Actually, I will mention somebody called Sakine Cansiz [3]. Sara was one of the founders of the Kurdish women’s movement. She was assassinated in Paris in 2013, a targeted shooting of her and two other Kurdish organisers. In the autobiography she talks about how she was politicised by somebody coming into her home and talking to her. She was really impressed by how she wasn’t being recruited. The person wouldn’t say, “And now you come to a meeting”. They wouldn’t even name-drop any organisation. They would just talk. And she thought, “I didn’t know I had a Kurdish identity. I didn’t know my own history. I didn’t know about my language. I didn’t realise it was repressed”. She went on to organise a reading group with some of her classmates, and they would take it really seriously, sit down and find out about different political ideologies and stuff like that. These conversations you have, they’re not instrumental. They’re not with a goal of making somebody come to a meeting. They’re genuinely about changing people’s perspectives in a holistic sense. That’s what’s different even from something like the door-knocking of a tenants’ union, where I don’t think the problem is having a script, but instead maybe the deeper foundations of the group itself. Is the goal really revolutionary? Is everybody on the same page? All of this is just not dealing with the real roots of issues, and the real conversations that we need to have with real people. Especially face-to-face. I think that could make such a big difference. I think the internet also plays a very important role in organising. The internet’s an amazing tool for coming together, but when it comes to those conversations where people change their minds, I think it’s so difficult online.
Yes, I would agree with that, definitely. One of the reasons that I ended up joining the North-East Anarchist Group was because they didn’t want anything from me, they were just nice to me. Their attitude wasn’t, “Now you have to join our group, now you have to come to a meeting”, but ironically, and to their continued horror, that was the group I ended up joining.
Yes, I think that’s such a good example. Just how much it pays to care for each other. I think that comes back to the idea of comradeship, actually.
My idea of the distinction between a comrade and a friend was, “A friend’s concerned about you if you’re arrested on a protest, but a comrade comes to meet you at the police station”. You can be both a friend and a comrade, but if somebody is in your group, that is your comrade, even if you don’t like them, even if you don’t know them. If they’re experiencing misogyny, you should stick up for them, whether or not you even like that person. You mentioned that there’s a word for both ‘comrade’ and ‘friend’, so everybody gets addressed as ‘comrade’. Could you explain how this works?
The important thing is their concept of hevalti [4]. The political allegiance you have to each other, and the bonds of trust, are really, really strong and important. The idea is not that you have to get along even when you don’t like each other, the idea is that you have to radically love all your comrades. Also, they have a concept of Tekmil [5], which is the critique and self-critique process. You hold each other accountable, and basically help each other’s personal development of a militant personality, through criticising each other in constructive ways. As people that are in the movement, it’s also your role to model the kind of society you want to see, so you have to be a role model to people. Your actions have to align with what you believe in, so it’s a process of figuring that out. In general, the concept of hevalti was just mind-blowing to me, because it was so sincere and beautiful. There was so much affection and love, and it was clear that you absolutely would treat somebody in a certain way, because they were a heval, that you wouldn’t otherwise. It was a very specific relationship. Whereas I feel like the way that we use comradeship, it’s not quite like that. I wish it was. I think the way we use comradeship, it’s unclear to me, because I might have said the word, but I don’t know if I could define it in such a deep sense as they do, as the Kurdish freedom movement does. I think our comradeship circles are basically just friendship circles.
I feel it’s become almost meaningless in the context that I’ve experienced it in. Personally if I call somebody a comrade, I mean it very sincerely, but I feel more broadly in the activist scene I’m more familiar with, it’s almost a leftist parody word at this point, almost Soviet. I love that sincerity that you’re talking about, and the genuine love and care for one another, because that’s what it comes down to, I think, or it should do, within activism. Do you have any final thoughts?
If you’re in the UK, you can get involved with Kurdish Community Centres in London or Edinburgh. The Kurdish Red Moon (Heyva Sor) always need donations [6] – including for earthquake relief in affected areas. I think that everybody could benefit from engaging with the ideas of the Kurdish freedom movement, but also, I think it’s intrinsically important for anybody that calls themselves an anarchist or a feminist to engage with global solidarity. We don’t believe in borders anyway, so we should be reaching out and providing solidarity, and learning from each other. We should all be organising in autonomous spaces, as people oppressed by the patriarchy, as women, non-binary people, and trans people. All of us, together, speaking to each other without interference from men. I’ve already completely expanded my understanding of life itself, and definitely of the struggle, and of comradeship. I can only wish that for everybody else.
Thanks very much to Pamster for her time and dedication, and also to the long-suffering transcriber of this interview!
REFERENCES
[1]: https://jineoloji.org/en/2021/01/20/booklet-killing-and-transforming-the-dominant-man/
[2]: https://womendefendrojava.net/en/2022/02/03/mala-jin-empowering-women-and-strengthening-society/
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Triple_murder_of_Kurdish_activists_in_Paris
[4]: https://performingborders.live/ejournal/hevalti-revolutionary-friendship-as-radical-care/