What the World Will Become
Welcome to What the World Will Become, a podcast about the humans who dedicate their lives to building a more free and just world. Over the course of this season, you’ll hear from women-identified and gender non-conforming activists from around the world who are carving out spaces for creative resistance and new possibilities in the context of profound difficulty.
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What the World Will Become
Episode 7: Exploring War, Women's Rights, and the Power of Poetry with Choman Hardi
How can activism play out on the page, as well as on the ground? Can poetry give us a deeper understanding of the horrors of war and genocide? These thought-provoking questions rest at the core of our conversation with Choman Hardi, a respected educator, poet, and scholar hailing from the Kurdistan region of Iraq. We journey through Choman's experiences of displacement and discuss the vital role of poetry in humanizing tragic stories that are often silenced or overlooked. We also explore the struggles, triumphs, and remarkable resilience of Kurdish women navigating through a society marked by patriarchal norms. Choman's writing brings into focus the dynamic women's rights activists in the field and the ongoing legal reforms that are gradually empowering Iraqi women. We revel in the stories of these courageous women, showing us that change, though slow, is indeed possible.
You can find the full, live event with Choman here.
Music playing. Welcome to what the World Will Become, a podcast about the humans who dedicate their lives to building a more free and just world. My name is Marie Berry. I'm a feminist researcher and writer, and I've spent the better part of the past 20 years researching and thinking about how women experience war and its aftermath. I've done research in places like Rwanda, bosnia, kenya, nepal and Colombia, and I've interviewed hundreds of women whose lives have been shaped by violence. Along the way, I have been repeatedly struck by two simultaneous truths the first is that violence is devastating, leaving those who survive it with trauma and grief that can last for years and even generations. But the second is that even in the most bleak and impossible of situations, there is often a great beauty, a way that those who suffer from violence find love, joy and resilience that can creatively forge new paths forward, paths that offer us profound hope and possibility for building a more just and free world. Welcome to this episode of what the World Will Become, which features a live conversation between me and Choman Hardy.
Marie Berry:Choman is an educator, poet and scholar known for her pioneering work on issues of gender and education in the Kurdistan region of Iraq and beyond. After 26 years of living in exile, choman returned home to Iraq in 2014 to teach English and found the Center for Gender and Development Studies at the American University of Iraq. Zulamani Choman was also the driving force behind initiating the first interdisciplinary gender studies minor in Iraq in 2017, which I think is pretty cool. I met Choman several years ago as part of our work on the Gender Justice and Security Hub, based at the London School of Economics, where I was introduced to her remarkably powerful writing and poetry. The conversation that you are about to hear was recorded live in January 2023 in Denver, colorado, while Choman was an eager practitioner in residence at the Corbell School. We focus our conversation on how activism happens on the page as well as in the streets. You can find the link to the full video of that event in the episode description. We will begin the conversation with Choman reading from one of her poetry collections.
Choman Hardi :Some of the poems I'm going to read is, in particular, in relation to the 1988 genocide. This was called El Enfal. It happened between February and September 1988. I think you probably heard about the gassing of Halabja. The gassing of Halabja was a separate incident because Halabja was a town of 65,000 people. The Enfal campaign targeted villages on the borders of Turkey and Iran because that's where the Kurdish revolution was functioning from. In a way, the Iraqi government destroyed the base for the revolution. In order to defeat the revolution, it targeted six geographical regions, destroyed more than 2,000 villages, 281 locations were gassed during this campaign, more than 100,000 civilians ended up either in mass graves or casualties of gassing, bombardment and so on.
Choman Hardi :The research I did, my post-doc research about Enfal fieldwork was done between 2005 and 2010. The book came out in 2011,. An academic book Gendered Experiences of Genocide. Academic books are not read by many, let's face it, especially things that have gender or genocide on them. I was very keen to sort of because I interviewed many survivors, men and women, mostly women. I was very keen to get the voices out. I decided to write a series of poems about them. This is the second collection, considering the woman from which I read today. It has a sequence at the center of the book, sequence of poems called Enfal. It is 13 poems. It starts and ends with the voice of the researcher.
Choman Hardi :My aim was to show those of us who go and engage in dark, very dark and tragic fieldwork. Most of us think that we are up for it and we can do it and we can manage it, but we are not prepared for what we learn and what we find out. It starts naively, with the voice of the researcher innocently thinking she is bulletproof, and it ends with the voice of the researcher completely devastated. In between the two, the stories of 11 survivors are told. I was very keen to give not give voice. Amplify the voices of the people who are telling these stories. Because many of these women get interviewed regularly by government officials, by journalists, by researchers, but their story gets edited and many aspects of their stories are just left out. So when I was interviewing the woman, many of them kept saying to me make sure this part of my story is in your book, Do not cut it out. So I tried to do that. I tried to be as truthful as possible. Of course there is a difference between facts and poetic truth. We know that right, it may not be factually correct but it's emotionally correct. Of all the people who have been interviewed and sometimes it's a combination of different women who went through the same experiences. So this particular one, called the gas survivor, is about a woman who I interviewed who, unfortunately, few years later I realized she had died and she had been. Many survivors of chemical weapons were severely ill, those who were very close to the gas, and some of them had repeated chronic disease and some of them died of cancer. So this woman died of the uterus cancer.
Choman Hardi :The gas survivor. My body is blooming every night, Leaking flowers. I turn my mattress into a bed of roses Black, cherry, red, pink and gold. By day. I hand wash the towels, Recall the stillborn after the gassing. Who would have thought that there were weapons which turn every part of your body against you? Every bruise, cough or nose bleed, seeming like the final betrayal. Weapons that turn you into a despised being in your own village, no one daring to visit you, thinking you are contagious. Weapons that kill you years after being exposed, leaving you unable to blame anyone for your death.
Choman Hardi :Another thing about survivors was the search for closure. As you know, many other places in the world where there has been mass graves and victims may be returned the corpses, but they are not identified because it's very expensive. Dna testing is very expensive. Sometimes the graves are not even uncovered. So this poem is about two women arguing over the remains of a 15-year-old boy, Dispute over a mass grave.
Choman Hardi :The one you have finished examining is my son. That is the milky-colored Kurdish suit his father tailored for him, the blue shirt his uncle gave to him. Your findings prove that it is him. He was a tall 15-year-old. It was left-handed, had broken a rib. I know she too had been looking for her son, but you have to tell her that this is not him. Yes, the two of them were playmates and fought the year before, but it was my son who broke a rib. Hers only feigned to escape trouble. That one is mine. Please give him back to me. I will bury him on the verge of my garden. The mulberry tree will offer him its thick shadow, the flowers will earnestly guard his grave, the hens will peck on his gravestone and the beehive will hum above his head.
Choman Hardi :I shall read one more from this, and this is called Divis Cam, the woman's prison. One of the things that I found was how political violence and trauma like that disconnects people from the rest of the community to an extent that even their own children cannot relate to them. And this powerlessness and the fact that you alone live this trauma and everybody else asks you to move on when you cannot and you find it difficult. This woman had lost her husband to the mass grave and she lost a daughter and a son in prison before the amnesty. The rest of her children survived.
Choman Hardi :You do not die, not when you want to. Not when you see your strong husband, the big brother in his own family, kicked bloody by a group of men equipped with loaded guns and hatred. Not when your beautiful teenage daughter is handpicked by soldiers and never comes back. And for the rest of your life you are left to wonder was she sold to prostitution? Does she still live? Not when your son withers in your lap and he cries until he can no more, when the last thing he asks of you is cucumber and you give him a green slipper to suckle on because he's beyond knowing the difference. No, not even when the rest of your children grow fed up with your black garments, your secret tears, your headaches. When you smell cucumber you do not die.
Marie Berry:Shaman, thank you for those poems which were, I mean, gutting and heavy, and I think my own.
Marie Berry:Hearing you read them I've read your work, but hearing you read them out loud is giving me a different sense of the stories behind the words on the page.
Marie Berry:And I think just one of my quick reflections after that is so astounded by the way that I hear those words and feel the horror of the violence that so many experienced in this region that you're speaking to, but of course that resonates in far too many contexts around the world. But also in the words and the stories that you do tell, the deep and fierce love, the association with the cucumber, I mean this deep love of a mother to a child that sings through that horror on the page. And I just want to perhaps ask you to start us off in this conversation to talk about what is the role of poetry and in your writing, in bringing a more full, complex humanity, you know, in terms of understanding for those of us who are absorbing and reading this, what is the role of poetry in deepening all of our understandings of what it means to experience the horrors of war and genocide, and how do you navigate that tension between the horror and the beauty that is clearly present in so many of the stories that you've captured.
Choman Hardi :Well, thank you for that. I think that's a very important question, because I can't remember the name, unfortunately, but Holocaust survivor who said poetry is dead after the Holocaust? Because you also feel that these horrific events, poetry is a beautiful construction in language and, no matter how tragic it is, we also still drive pleasure from the way the words are aligned and the structure of the words and the sounds and in a way, sometimes you feel that it's not appropriate to tell tragedy or a genocide story through poetry, because it's also an aesthetic production. I think poetry can play a very important role in creating empathy. I think journalism fails to do that, history books fail to do that, judiciary system fails to do that. People become desensitized to this overload of information and numbers and statistics. I think that why I wrote this sort of sequence.
Choman Hardi :There's a very good artist, a Kurdish artist, called Osman Ahmad. He had a series of drawings about the Anfal genocide in the Imperial War Museum in London. It's one of the best, and the drawings were. It was just a pencil drawing of a figure, a few figures and a mountain, and then in the next drawing the figures were further away and there were more of them and the mountain was still there. And then there were more and still further away, and more and further away, and at the end the last drawing was just this black hole. And that's what genocide victims do. They end up losing their individuality. They become this black hole in our mind. We forget that they lived, they had dreams, they had hopes, they loved, they desired, they were angry, they were disappointed. So I tried to, through the poetry, in a way, bring them back from that black hole of anonymity, of lack of individuality, of not having a story, of just being a number in a genocide campaign. I wanted to bring back those individuals and give them their life back, their stories back. And I also think, you know, sometimes we shun maybe not here because many people are here, academics working on heavy things but generally the public shuns bad news and tragedy and people want to live. I understand that people want to be happy, but they can handle a story like that through poetry.
Choman Hardi :A few years ago, I think three years ago, before the pandemic, I had a poetry reading in the public library in my city. I was accompanied by music and I decided to read some of my toughest poems in Kurdish and you know everybody had turned out looking very nice and some. You know, throughout the reading, which lasted about an hour and a half, sort of, somewhere in the middle, quite a few people, including some of the tough men, were crying and later they came and said you've ruined the evening for us. You know, we came for an evening of romantic poetry, but I think it's our duty as artists and writers and poets to ruin this normality, this status quo, which seems to be everything seems to be okay. Whenever bad news comes on TV, we change it. It's our duty to remember, to feel, to empathize, and I think poetry is a very good vehicle for doing that.
Marie Berry:I think that's beautifully put.
Marie Berry:I, in my own, so much of my own work on women and war, there's been this pattern, which scholars have called weeping women ringing hands, that sort of flat depiction of somebody suffering in a refugee camp, and that flatness reduces the complexity, the beauty, the humanity of these individuals and of the communities that they come from and represent, and so I really admire and appreciate the kind of the deepening that happens through your work and I want to ask you about. You know, so much of this is about the stories that come out, and I'd love to spend a few minutes with your story. Of course, you did mention that you are from the region that experienced the unfalled genocide and that you, I believe, left Iraq during the middle of it, but just a month before it ended, and then spent many years as a refugee both in Iran and in the United Kingdom, and I'd love to know, I mean, how that experience has shaped the work that you do today and what it meant to have that sort of early experience of such kind of of such difficulty and such displacement.
Choman Hardi :Thank you. I actually arrived in my late teens. First we went to Iran for four years and then I arrived in the UK in 93. And you know, I lived in Iran and wore the hijab and studied in Persian and did the whole thing and we had morality Sisters of Zainab who once told me up very badly and gave me very bad grades for my ethics marks, which meant that I could never go to university if I stayed there. But then when I came, I arrived in London and I had lost a couple of years of education and I was a very keen student. You know, I had always been the top in my class and to me it was a disaster that I couldn't go to school for a couple of years. So when I arrived and didn't speak English, I wanted very much to focus on learning English, catching up with my education, going to university and so on, which is what I did. I did my A-levels and then I went and studied philosophy in Oxford and then I did an MA in philosophy in UCL and then I got a scholarship for my PhD gender and migration and so on.
Choman Hardi :So for those early years when I was trying to adapt and trying to learn the language and trying to catch up with my education and trying to settle down. I completely dissociated from my background and I felt I just couldn't cope with it. The trauma, the tragedy, the stories, the conflicts, the continuous division, the arguments, heated arguments and I really just wanted to focus on moving on. And I did. I have a sequence of poems in my second collection called my English Years. Those were years where I celebrated Christmas and Easter and did lots of British and English things. I had an English family at the time and probably they were the most productive years of my life.
Choman Hardi :But you know, homeland is like a beast. You know it sleeps and then suddenly it wakes up and it sort of besorts you, it captures you and calls you back. And for me, this beast woke up when I did my postdoc research about the genocide survivors, because between 2005 to 2010, I spent long stretches of time in these Kurdish villages and towns and housing complexes where the majority of the survivors live, many of them in very deprived communities, isolated, living in poverty, children working because they can't go to school, they can't afford it, and those engagements. I cried a lot, with everyone who cried. I cried and I think many people tell us that we shouldn't do that, but I disagree. I think it's only human to respond to tragedy with emotion and sensitivity.
Choman Hardi :But those engagements, my encounter with women activists who were working on the ground in very difficult circumstances, and also I delivered a few workshops on gender for young people at the time and this was a very new topic between 2007 and 2008.
Choman Hardi :I went to several towns and had these discussions and I realized, just within the space of three hours of working with young people, some things were dislodged. You know, it felt like some ideas that were completely foreign were being considered and to me, I felt that if I really want to be more effective, I need to go home and I need to, in particular, engage in the education sector and I need to help develop this alternative discourse, because one of the major obstacles to women's rights as we have it back home is this very conservative, cultural, religious discourse which sort of portrays women's situation and roles and everything as natural, normal, there's no problem. If there is a problem, it's nature's fault, it's not our fault. And the idea of social construction, of roles and characteristics and so on was completely foreign. So I really wanted to provide this alternative view of looking at things. So I'd been looking at opportunities to move back until, fortunately, this thing came up in the American University and I started teaching there in the English department.
Marie Berry:So you've been back in Iraq now for eight years, is that right? So when you did return, can you tell us a little bit about what you learned, about what women in particular were experiencing? I mean, we can kind of make assumptions and guesses, but let's hear it from you. What were the major challenges facing women, what were some of the biggest barriers to their empowerment and leadership and growth, and in what ways did you notice a need for work towards those ends?
Choman Hardi :So the good thing about the Kurdistan region is there's been a Kurdistan regional government and parliament since 1992. Because, if you remember, after the first Gulf War in 1991, because of fear of chemical attacks and the mass exodus of the Kurds at the time I think it was on TV, some of you may remember the no-fly zone was set up and this provided the opportunity to you know, to found the Kurdish government. It's a little bit like Scotland. Within Britain, we have our own parliament and we have purview of some of the laws, or some laws regarding women's rights have been reformed. What I saw, even when I was doing my research, was very vibrant women's rights activists who were working in the field, providing services, shelters, protection, legal representation, training for women, skills development this kind of area was working very well and also campaigning together. Initially, the women's organizations were divided along political lines, so it was very difficult for them to work together. But after 10 years into it, these networks of collaboration started and they pushed for legal change and they actually managed to achieve many things. So we've had 2002, when the provisions for honour killing that if a man kills a woman for honour then he gets a reduced sentence that was annulled in the Kurdistan region. And then there were reforms in the civil status law. There was this quota system, you know, for women's representation in the parliament and, more importantly, the law regarding combating violence within the family. That was 2011. So these changes were very fantastic.
Choman Hardi :What was lacking, I thought, was the academic side. So you know, feminism has two wings, right that you have the theory and research and analysis and that, and you also have the practical field work of women helping other women and providing shelter and protection. So I felt that our activist side was very strong. Our academic side was quite weak, so I saw it as my role to sort of try to develop that. Of course, there was a gender studies center in another university. It's established in 2001, 2011. I established mine, as you mentioned, in 2015. But of course, we study in English in the American university, so we had access to everything that any other university has access to. But I was very keen to make sure that the public universities that may want to teach gender studies have resources in Kurdish and Arabic. So we were fortunate to secure funding from the European Union and then we translated four UG courses with online training for professors who may want to teach them.
Choman Hardi :But, of course, all these achievements come also with risks and dangers, and one of the problems with this has been the backlash that we experience. So every change comes with resistance and that the backlash has seen many forms. So, for example, the rise in violence against women, and many conservative men blame the women's movement and they say women in the past used to accept their situation, be good wives and even if they were abused, they made the best of it and they raised their families and they were silent and good women. You know God-fearing women. And now, because you say that they have this and that right, they want divorce and they fight and they complain to the court and these are private matters. That shouldn't be and divorce is not right, and so on. So, in a way, women who have become more aware of their rights and have asked for their rights are facing more violence. So that's one of the forms.
Choman Hardi :If you see the data from the directorates of combating violence against women, honor killing has decreased because of the legal changes, but suicide has gone up, domestic violence has gone up, sexual harassment has gone up. So sometimes people believe that men who now know that killing a woman may end up in prison. They make her life hell so that she kills herself. So they find ways to deal with that. The other backlash is the men's rights movements. Now we have men's rights organizations who claim that now women are oppressing them and they're the victims and they're the providers and they have a lot of pressure. And the third backlash has been through a lot of defamation campaigns and smear campaigns against activists to erode community trust in our work and to basically discredit us and sometimes to intimidate us to leave and be silenced and, hand in hand, it's a very difficult situation. At times. There have been women who had to fled because of their work. There have been women who have given up working in the field because their families have put pressure on them to stop and it's not. You know, there's always movement and sometimes pushback and even with the legal changes, implementation has been problematic. So theoretically the law has changed but in practice the courts and the trials get influenced and sometimes you know patriarch values in the judiciary system. Or even you know you have the quota system in order to represent women.
Choman Hardi :But the political parties usually nominate women who are loyal to the party. They're not necessarily feminists or capable of achieving women's rights. They mostly come from well-connected tribal or political families. Some of them have done very well, but many have been seen as ineffective. But even you know, they established gender studies. There was a decree from the Ministry of Higher Education in the Kurdistan region and now we have 30 gender studies centers, which is fantastic. But these people who've become directors of these centers do not have a background in the area, they do not have any training, they do not have any resources. So they've sort of been given this title and left alone to deal with a situation without any support. So in a way, systems do that, don't they? They want to appear to be open and democratic and progressive, but in practice they don't really provide the support to make it a meaningful change.
Marie Berry:I mean what you just described about the progress that gets made and the laws that get passed and the powerful and strong people that then end up asserting those rights, and then that kind of meeting that with backlash, with violence, with new kind of a resurgence of patriarchal backlash, as people have said, is a story that stretches so much further than the context you're speaking about. I mean, this is a global trend that we're seeing in so many ways and I'm curious if you could think about where the movement is that you're a part of and that you're a leader in Iraq and in Kurdistan. Where does that movement have synergies and similarities with similar kind of feminist and gender sensitive movements around the world?
Choman Hardi :So if we just even compare it with Kurdish women's movements in other countries, like in Iran and Turkey and Syria, there's a huge difference and we are worse off than many other places, even though we are the only place where we have our own parliament, a Kurdish parliament and government. We are in many ways worse, for example, the Kurds in Turkey and the Kurds in Syria. You've heard about the women fighters in Rojava, northeast Syria the Kurdish women. The army was established in 2012 to fight ISIS. A third of the army is women, so there are women's battalions and women's units. It's called women's protection units, sharvan in Kurdish, and how it's worked in the Kurdish community in Syria, in Rojava, is the women's struggle, or the struggle for women's rights, is very closely integrated into the right of ethnic rights and class issues. All of it is integrated together and I think, because the revolution or the uprising has integrated social justice and, in particular, women's rights, it has become more vibrant. It has become much stronger, because imagine if half of the population are not part of it. You know their creativity and power and energy is missing, but they have also been able to make big strides, take big strides in achieving, like you know, the cantons that were established in northeast Syria, the Kurdish cantons. They had a constitution. They had the institutions to go with it. It was direct democracy. So, for example, the Kurds in Iraq still see an independent state for Kurdistan as the solution, whereas the Kurds in Syria and Kurds in Turkey think that nation state is part of the problem because it's the backbone of patriarchy and capitalism. What they have tried to establish is direct democracy. You know democratic confederalism and what they do is you have these councils and neighborhoods who are sort of they are managing themselves, they are making decisions together. It's they call it democracy without a state, and it has been probably one of the few places in the world where this has been tried out and it's been an amazing experiment. Unfortunately threatened by Turkish attacks from 2019. And we worry that it may be snubbed at all together. That's an example of how.
Choman Hardi :What is a revolutionary? I mean, I kept asking myself this when I was researching about the Kurdish Revolution in Iraq, because what they did was our leaders, who were all men. They were fighting against dictatorship, right, but they did not integrate women's rights or other groups, minorities, rights into it Because they actually, for their survival, they depended on the tribal structure and village community and religious leaders, and because of that they were continuously trying to please them and in that process, sacrificing women's rights. And women who were part of the revolution were regularly told let us gain independence or let us obtain freedom and liberation, and then men and women will be equal. But we know from history this is from Algeria, all the other countries in the region If you do not integrate women's rights into a revolution, you cannot do it later.
Choman Hardi :So in Iran we see a similar thing, where women are leading. In fact, there was a fantastic slogan a couple of months ago. A young man had written on the wall if you are a man, be a woman. So generally when in Kurdish we say to each other be a man, similar to English right. So be decisive, be powerful, be step up to responsibility. But because women are leading, be brave like women, be leader like women, be strong like women. So many of these stereotypes are changing through the revolution with the integration of women's rights, whereas I think that Iraqi Kurdish leadership was much more conservative and, as a result of that, the steps we have taken have been jeopardized on every of the ground.
Marie Berry:What has been the effect, then, of this uprising in Iran and the kind of resurgence of this appreciation for women's leadership in this way? What has that meant in your area, in your region? Has it changed things?
Choman Hardi :So for us in the women's movement it has created a lot of hope and, of course, we have a lot of solidarity and we were campaigning. We created a group immediately. We organized a couple of demonstrations, individuals Facebook page quickly to share the stories and give it voice and amplify the voices. And the problem is, just as we're excited about these changes and how it will affect our region, the conservative sides are panicking about these changes and they have become quite aggressive in fighting women back.
Choman Hardi :So at this moment, actually in Iraqi Kurdistan, we're experiencing a major backlash from the very conservative religious groups and radicalized groups that see if Iran collapses, they see that as a threat to their power in the region and they are very firmly trying to establish their power by attacking women and other minorities' rights. And unfortunately, because elections are close in eight months' time, the Kurdish authorities are trying to please them because they don't want to lose votes and so on. So it's a very complex situation. Again, we as women in the region feel that we're being compromised, but it's a very interesting place, this place. It's full of radical changes that happen overnight and we try to remind each other. This is not the end, but it is, at this moment, a very depressing moment, because we feel that once again, very conservative voices are rising and the political parties are trying to please them, and again bypassing women's rights and ignoring the achievements.
Marie Berry:So it strikes me that this is the moment, then, in which a multifaceted, multi-pronged approach to thinking about social change is not only a good idea, but is just desperately important. And I'm curious, then, for you personally, how do you go about your work and your activism in a context in which the stakes are high, the backlash is real, the conditions are difficult, and you have been pushing forward a very brave, a very important, a very powerful agenda now for a long time. What is, how do you do that work and what is your strategy?
Choman Hardi :Well, thank you. I think the word that you mentioned, multifaceted, is essential. I think we cannot just fight patriarchy through academia and activism. It's not gonna happen. We really need to engage all the tools that we have, and I think arts have been a very good tool. I think what the arts can do is because, I mean, feminists have long argued, haven't they? We cannot be what we cannot see. Right, if you don't see a woman in power, you don't think woman can be in power. But arts can imagine a different reality, challenge the status quo, make the inequality and injustice visible, create empathy for the oppressions that we usually just shy away from, but also to imagine a different world, an alternative world where things would be different. And I think, if we can just imagine that, yeah.
Choman Hardi :We can also work for it. So one of the things I have been trying to do is maybe working in an American university and pushing for gender studies and providing training and doing research and getting funding is confrontational. Maybe alongside that, we also need to engage. Artists and activists are also being attacked a lot, so how can we find new ways of? Sometimes a song plays a very important role, right? A poem can do that, a novel, an installation, any of these things. So one of my own projects recently I have just I'm working on establishing well, I've got license for it spectra for creativity and development. So we're hoping to have an artist in residence space and a space for a woman's rest and archive, because in our community in particular, housewives never have a day off. So men go on holiday, men go to parks, men go to swimming pool, to the tea house, to the mosque, they go to private gardens, they drink, but women, even when they go visit someone else, they end up washing the dishes and they always have childcare.
Choman Hardi :So the idea was it also came from. You know, with research, you know we go and interview people, we go to them, we disrupt their life, we interview them and we leave and it sort of sometimes feels like theft right, and I've had women telling me I'd rather not talk. I'm planting cucumbers. Can you leave me alone please? I'd rather not retraumatize myself. You're gonna leave, you're gonna turn off your recorder and I'm left alone to deal with these feelings. Who's gonna help me?
Choman Hardi :And I have struggled with these ideas. Yes, we need to have these stories documented, but at what cost? So the idea is if we can bring small groups of women, in particular housewives. I think one of the problems of the woman's movement in our area is that it's very middle class. It's usually graduates. Their life is very different from the ordinary woman on the ground who are, you know, maybe didn't complete their education housewives and their experience of patriarchy, how they cope, what are their strategies, how they have they survived, what networks have they formed it's something that we don't really understand well and I think if we really need to, if we want to understand patriarchy, we need to understand those groups experiences. So the idea is to bring small groups of women for a few days for rest. Their children will be safe and looked after and, if they agree at the end of their stay, maybe we can record their story.
Choman Hardi :So in a way, they get something back and they give by choice. So this is the idea, and I am thinking this is less confrontational, but it also gives us the grounds, the knowledge and the data that we need in order to really understand what patriarchy does to women and how we can challenge it.
Marie Berry:I love that and my students will have heard me, you know, herald the Adron Marie Brown's phrase that small is all as kind of the real bedrock of social change, and what you just described to me sounds like that, right, it's not a revolution that topples something, but it's in a home and it's in a place, and it's in people and it's in a relationship that one builds and it's in a prioritization of rest, right, which is a radical idea in a world consumed with exhaustion and productivity and all of that all the time, right. So I think that's such a beautiful component of your activism and I wanna just what is your lesson, what walks and travels from what you just shared with us, right, what is? How do we, as people that care about building a world that is more free for more people, how do we go about doing that? And what is your experience kind of in your context and in your place? What lessons perhaps would you offer those of us who are invested in this work wherever oppression exists around the globe?
Choman Hardi :First of all, I think you, you know, sometimes we tend to research communities that we don't know very well and sometimes we don't know the nuanced. You know where the borders are, where the red lines are, where I think it's very important to know the community we work in and work very sensitively, and I had for a long time, you know they have been there, have been many people who sort of closely have been watching my work and trying to find faults with it, trying. You know, feminists are usually portrayed as anti-religion, anti-god, anti-family, anti-men, all these things despite the fact that many of us are married, right, and many of us actually have children and we love our families and quite a few of the women, for example, who work in the field, are religious. But these ideas of You're radical, radical, radical. So it is sometimes about biting your tongue, hanging in there, continuing the conversation with those who are willing to talk, those who obviously their minds are made up. But sometimes I've found that, even in class, with students who say the most clumsy things, I just need to bite my tongue, have more patience, provide more examples for the next class, continue the conversation, continue pursuing that and I think for us, I find that very conservative people and radical people are very good at working together. We're not very good at working together. I don't know why women are divided along lines of class and education and ethnicity and race and religion and politics and all of that. If we could just work together. I know we've said that many times before, but I see it, I see in our surrounding. Every time something has happened it's because the women from the different sides have come together and pushed together the different leaders from the different sides.
Choman Hardi :But I really don't know. I think I feel that I'm continuously learning still, that I'm still a student here. I do feel like an imposter sometimes. I sometimes walk into a minefield, I think I know something and suddenly somebody says something and I'm completely like whoof. I've never thought about that. Give me a few days and let me think about it. And to be open to be challenged, to be open to learn, to be open to be corrected. Even if your pride doesn't allow you at that moment, maybe think about it later.
Choman Hardi :And I do that a lot. I do a lot of self-reflection, a lot of self-criticism. Many times when something explodes, I always ask what could I have done differently? Of course, there are times when it's not about you. You haven't done anything, but it's a good process to do anyway. To just say, if I was to do this again, how could I do it? And I also have this habit of always, before I publish anything or before I make a decision about anything, I talk to many people, many people who think very differently from me, and I want to understand it from as many dimensions as possible, then finish this article or make that decision or whatever. Sometimes that means being indecisive, but I'd rather that than making decisions quickly and then making huge mistakes. I don't know if that's helpful. These are things that I am doing myself.
Marie Berry:No, I think it's helpful for all of us and a lot of that resonates very much.
