Stateless Democracy

ody nor her weapon to the enemy when she threw herself
off the mountain cliffs in 1992. It is the reason why YPJ
fighter Arîn Mîrxan made a mountain wind blow through
a desert town when she detonated herself rather than surrendering
to ISIS, in order to cover her retreating comrades
in Kobanê this October. In the hearts of the Yezidi women,
who take up arms against the men with the black flag, is
the homesickness of Binevs Agal, a Yezidi woman who
joined the guerilla from Germany in the 1980s, crossing
continents to return to her country. In the words of Ayşe
Efendî, the co-president of the Kobanê People’s Assembly,
“I will die in my homeland,” is hidden the ode of the rebellious
Zarîfe, who also fought in the Dersîm uprising. In the
smile of the YPJ fighter, who poses with her child while
carrying a rifle, is the hope of Meryem Çolak, a psychologist
who chose to fight in the mountains and who often
shared with us her longing for the daughter she left behind.
Deniz Fırat, a Fırat News journalist who was killed by ISIS
in Mêxmûr in August 2014, learned to search for truth from
Gurbetelli Ersöz, a journalist and guerrilla fighter who died
in clashes in 1997. Sema Yüce (Serhildan), who set herself
on fire in protest in a Turkish prison in 1992, whispered the
secrets of the fire to Leyla Wali Hussein (Viyan Soran), who
self-immolated in 2006 to draw attention to the situation
of Abdullah Öcalan. Those who today wonder about why
the “Girl with the Red Scarf,” a Turkish girl who was disillusioned
by the state after the Gezi Park protests, would
join the mountains, would know the answer if they had
known Ekin Ceren Doğruak (Amara), a Turkish revolutionary
woman in the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) whose
grave stone says “The girl of the sea who fell in love with
the mountains,” and Hüsne Akgül (Mizgin), a Turkish guerrilla
fighter of the PKK who died in 1995. Those surprised
at Americans and Canadians joining the YPG do not know
Andrea Wolf (Ronahî), a German international in the PKK,
who was murdered in 1998 and whose bones were thrown
into a mass grave, and whose memorial could not be tolerated
by the state.
Our calendar did not run parallel to the world’s calendar.
These women’s gazes were focused deep into the
far distance, and their steps were fast. In order to bring
the future closer, they impatiently left not a single bridge
behind. These two reasons kept us apart from the realities
of the world. That is why the world did not know the
women in the mountains — the tens, then hundreds, and
later thousands of them — in the same time frame. Now it’s
time to combine calendars, to set clocks. It is time to tell
these women’s life stories that swung between dream and
reality, their happy moments that sound like fairy tales as
well as the ways in which loss has proven to be our most
egregious teacher in our quest for truth. Now is the perfect
time to entrust what I was able to carry from the past to
this day. In order to join the world’s calendar, I will carry our
past to the present. May my past be your present.
I wake up on a cold spring morning of Cirav in 1997. I
throw the nylon, moist from the frost of the previous night,
off of me and I see a face in front of me, different from
those of the swarthy warriors. It is as if the sun had only
mildly radiated on this face; as if her hands, her smile,
described elegance and nobility. I am happy that a warrior
who is newer than me has arrived, that I have become
a little old. I later find out that I had a fifth-year guerrilla
in front of me. At the time, I knew only her code name,
Zinarîn. Had it not been for the white strings in her hair
or the way sorrow sometimes carried her smile away, you
would not have been able to understand that she had been
a guerrilla for five years. I am unaware of the pains she has
experienced, the sacrifices she has made in her quest for
truth. I am going crazy, curious about what she is writing
in her notebook as she takes refuge under the shadow of a
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