The freedom to live as we choose, unconstrained by the tyrannical whims of the few, is humanity's deepest desire. Food may satiate our hunger and water quench our thirst, but only liberty can satisfy our souls. For notwithstanding the unproven promises of religion, we each have but one life to spend in this world of varied treasures. TO waste that gift in political bondage, forced to labor at the behest of others, is a crime against us all.
Many of us understand this truth intellectually, having had its wisdom handed down to us from the visionaries who fought for and enshrined our freedom, but we do not truly understand it. We cannot taste it for we have not had it ripped from us. No, to truly understand freedom, we must look to those who have lived and toiled beyond the protection of liberty's shadow. Who better to teach us then the Kurds, masters of living at the behest of abusive powers greater than they. Ms. Bird elucidates.
A land of mountains and deserts, tribes and rebellions, Kurdistan is home to the largest population of stateless citizens in the world and is, consequently, one of its most cursed regions. Surrounded by Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, it is beset on all sides by strife, quarrelsome nations who have, at various times, slaughtered its people, coveted its oil, suppressed its language and pilloried its culture, all in the name of self-interest. Not all of these attacks have been malevolent in nature. Some have arisen out of earnest desires to forge new national identities and modernize the region. However, though these assaults may forego the warlike depravities of other attacks, they are nonetheless destructive, tearing at the fabric of Kurdish life unto extinction.
Far from suffering these attacks meekly, the Kurds have violently resisted the efforts of their neighbors to claim their lands and steal their resources. Many of their sons and daughters have built strongholds in these mountains from which reprisals can be launched in the name of Kurdistan which, for decades now, has been nothing more than an idea, a region without a nation, a people without a home. It is into this churning sea of conflicting forces that Ms. Bird plunges her readers headlong. Over many trips and many months, she absorbs Kurdish culture, immerses herself in Kurdish life and is hosted by Kurdish people eager for their stories of love and betrayal to be heard by the broader world. Beginning with Kurdish-controlled cities which preserve the purest form of Kurdish culture, she soon travels to the Turkish, Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian controlled fragments of Kurdistan, documenting the various ways in which these nations have received and treated their Kurdish minorities. What emerges is a diary of 21st century Kurdish life that is, in every respect, unforgettable.
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts is a mesmerizing documentation of a people scarred by war and poisoned by tyranny. Ms. Bird, a western journalist, largely foregoes grizzly reconstructions of the various atrocities the Kurds have suffered. Instead, like a photographer of culture, she takes snapshots of the Kurdish people, allowing their tortured faces and their resilient souls to speak for themselves. Through these faces, these lives, we come to comprehend the rhythm of life in fractured Kurdistan: the burdens of the past they bear, the political challenges they face, and the fear of an uncertain future they confront. All this is made painfully and vividly clear while Ms. Bird's narrative introduces us to to the people, the culture, the language, the religion and the society of a civilization at risk of being ground to dust by the powerful, conflicting forces surrounding it.
Though A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts is not precisely a history of the Kurds, it serves the same purpose. For it introduces us to a beautiful and beleaguered people who have been betrayed so many times, by so many different nations, that it's a wonder they have the will to carry on. And yet, these experts in suffering are revealed, here, to have the endurance of saints and the industriousness of builders, proving, once and for all, that, though the strong body can be broken, the strong spirit cannot be made to wither.
Exceptional work that is outshined only by the amazing souls it uncovers... (5/5 Stars)
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