War-torn bookworm
This story was sent to Sand Journal on december 2021 but it did not got published. Sand is a nice looking journal but obviously not suitable for my zine style writings.
Anyways, here is a book nerd strory from last december and a photo from May 2022 from a nice little park in Qamishlo city. There are lot of flowers, some trees, statues of famous kurdish authors and poets and building which is used to hosts forexample book publishing events. Really nice place to sit and read!
(picture of Mûsa Enter – Apê Mûsa)
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War-torn bookworm
Leaving my book collection was one of the hardest parts when traveling to another side of the world. It might sound a bit strange since I had to leave most of my friends, comrades, hobbies, house, most of my life behind. I could not fit more than three books into the two backpacks that needed to be enough light to carry around. Possibly for really long distances and under the burning sun. Traveling to another side of the world and voluntary entering a war-torn area from where millions of people have fled around the world. I headed to North East Syria.
After some time being in here, Rojava, as we mostly call it, I realized that I took a lot of wrong things with me. One those wrong decisions was books. I should have taken more. Even few light and small ones would have made a difference. Or think more carefully which books to take. Now I just took a few randomly from the pile of books that i hadn’t yet finished, but had started and they seemed enough interesting. And they are the sort that is not sold out from publisher. So that I could more easily abandon them if needed. Without heart aches. As I really am a book collector also. I don’t even know how many books I own. More than thousand. Hopefully less than two thousand.
Language is something I miss the most. I love my first language and hardly learned any of those new languages that would be useful here. English is not one of the useful ones here as I’ve come to notice. However here are some books available in print format in English. Very few but still some. I’ve managed to get a hold of a few older books some internationals (voluntary fighters for the revolution of Rojava) have left here and they have been giving little comfort for my endless hunger of books.
I did manage to attend on a local bookfair. And as always at bookfairs tend to happen, I bought some books. Sadly not enough. At that point I hadn’t yet been here long enough to realize the amount needed. Back then I didn’t understand what it does to state of mind and way of thinking when there is no paper books to read. I do have an ebook reader. It gives a little comfort but it sure isn’t the same as reading books, zines and journals printed on paper. Not for me. Not for book loving bookworm.
This of course should be just a minor thing, after all I am in a war-torn country. There should be some bigger concerns. And sure I didn’t think of books when trying to hide from enemy drones, and often in the evenings the possible scorpions under my mattress appear to my mind than books before falling a sleep. But still. I cannot help it. I think of those books almost daily. And it hasn’t changed at all during the first 6 months.
Cirok Ecnebi,
Rojava
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Cover letter:
The short non-fiction story written to Sand Journal is about my travel to North East Syria to volunteer for the ongoing revolution. The story focuses on the unexpected side which I faced as a person who has a passion for reading and for which I was not at all prepared – the lust for (printed) books. I have not been writing earlier in English. In my native language I write and publish zines and pamphlets regularly. My pen name (the Kurdish name) was given here by some comrades. Cirok roughly translates as “novel”. Here we do not use our official names and some times not even nationalities as it is some sort of a security protocol inside the apoist movement.
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Third person bio:
Cirok is working class based anarchist from Europe. He has not managed to get any degrees from schools during his life but as a dreamer still wishes one day to achieve one. To Rojava Cirok went to see and learn from the revolution and about Democratic confederalism. Three books traveling with him are Miguel de Unamuno’s “The Tragic Sense of Life”, “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells and Pierre Rosanvallon’s “Democratic Legitimacy”.
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