A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts: Journeys in Kurdistan (Paperback)

~ (Author) "THE MALTAI FAMILY LIVED IN A BIG AIRY HOUSE ON THE outskirts of Dohuk in northern Iraq..." (more)
Key Phrases: thousand revolts, thousand sighs, chemical bombing, United States, Iraqi Kurdistan, Iraqi Kurds (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Travel writer Bird (Neither East nor West: One Woman's Journey Through the Islamic Republic of Iran) provides a compelling glimpse of Kurds and the difficulties they face with this blend of travelogue and history lesson. The book's title comes from a Kurdish poem about the Kurds' determination to be masters of their own lands, an effort that brings about "a thousand sighs, a thousand tears, a thousand revolts, a thousand hopes." Bird deftly describes each of those aspects of Kurdistani culture, from the sighs and tears of women who offer Bird both flavorful dinners and wrenching stories of loss, to the hopes of Kurdish artists who believe their ethnic group's artistic traditions can survive beyond war. Where Bird focuses most, however, is the revolts that have plagued the Kurds for decades. The largest ethnic group in the world without a state of their own, the Kurds number between 25 and 30 million, and live in an arc of land that stretches through Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and parts of the former Soviet Union. As Bird travels through Kurdistan (a country that isn't on any map), she meets an array of people, from scholars to bus drivers. Each story of conflict, poverty, homelessness and suffering is like a brushstroke in a larger portrait of the Kurdish experience. Bird's talent for blending reportage with illuminating tales from individuals makes this a notable and much needed work. B&w photos, map.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

Shades of Freya Stark, Gertrude Bell and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu! A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts evokes those intrepid Englishwomen who ventured into the exotic Middle East many decades ago. But this time it is an American, Christiane Bird, who follows in their footsteps with an informative and altogether fascinating account of her recent travels throughout Kurdistan.

No book could be more timely. The centuries-long struggle of the Kurds to be masters of their own land -- summed up in a line from an old Kurdish poem, "A thousand sighs, a thousand tears, a thousand revolts, a thousand hopes" -- is a critical factor today in the establishment of a new Iraqi state. Bird has brought keen observation, great personal courage, and an obviously empathetic personality to the story of her adventures among the Kurds of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria.

Bird, New York-born and Yale-educated, is the author of the 1988 memoir Neither East Nor West: One Woman's Journey Through the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the spring of 2002, she spent three months exploring Iraqi Kurdistan, returning in the fall of that year to travel in the Kurdish lands of Iran, Turkey and Syria. "From the moment I arrived in Kurdistan, I felt as if I had fallen through the back door of the world and into a tragic magic kingdom," she writes.

A lone American woman, traveling mostly by bus, she was offered hospitality in various Kurdish homes -- some comfortable, some primitive, but always warm and welcoming. She frequently slept on the floor. More often than not, she ate with her hosts from a meal spread on a cloth on the floor, where she was usually the only woman eating with the men. She was invited to weddings, festivals and obscure religious ceremonies and attended an environmental conference in Sananjad, the capital of Iran's Kurdish province. She interviewed Kurdish writers, poets, journalists, artists and musicians about their struggle to preserve their rich cultural heritage, and she spoke with women about sexual mores and "honor killings" -- which, while rare, still occur.

Bird's narrative sheds much light on one of the world's oldest yet least-known cultures. Numbering some 25 to 30 million, the Kurds constitute the largest ethnic group in the world without a state of their own. Ethnically close to Iranians -- being of Aryan, as opposed to Semitic, origin -- they are believed to descend from the ancient Medes, and historians seem to agree that they were the Kharduchoi, the fierce warriors described by the Greek general Xenophon. The Arabs, who converted the Kurds to Islam in the 7th century, found them as difficult to control as do modern governments today. Their greatest hero is Saladin, a Kurd from Tikrit (coincidentally, the home of Saddam Hussein), who created an empire and drove out the Crusaders.

Today, 90 percent of the Kurds are Muslims, mostly Sunni, and they view themselves as Islamic moderates. Bird was particularly impressed with their achievements in the "no-fly zone" that the United States enforced in Iraq after the 1991 war, which gave Kurds an unprecedented opportunity for self-government. Freed from fear and repression, the Kurds created a major university, an Institute of Fine Arts, a technical school and 12 secondary schools. They built thousands of new housing units and hundreds of miles of roads -- all since 1992.

But what the Kurds suffered before achieving this is almost beyond imagination. The author describes the Anfal, the Baath regime's genocidal attack on the Kurds begun in 1988: "During the Anfal Campaign, about twelve hundred Kurdish villages were systematically destroyed by the Iraqi military through bombing and burning, mass evacuation and execution . . . tens of thousands of Kurds -- perhaps as many as one hundred eighty thousand -- were murdered or disappeared. Ruined villages were bulldozed, wells capped with concrete, fields poisoned and tens of thousands of civilians placed in refugee centers that were, in effect, concentration camps." The ultimate atrocity was the chemical bombing of Halabja, which killed 5,000 villagers instantly and sent another 5,000 fleeing over the mountains to Iran, many dying along the way. Anfal was Saddam Hussein's final solution, his plan to make the Iraqi Kurds and their rural way of life disappear forever. (Even today, some 12-15 million land mines still riddle Iraqi Kurdistan.)

Despite all this, the Kurds reserve their fiercest resentment for the Turks, who since the time of Ataturk had outlawed the speaking or teaching of the Kurdish language and waged a civil war against their Kurdish minority that did not end until 1999, leaving 37,000 people killed, 3,000 Kurdish villages destroyed and at least a million Kurds homeless. (Interestingly, she writes, Istanbul is "the world's largest Kurdish city, as it is home to about 2 million Kurds, out of a city population of 12 million." Most of them manage to live there unharmed by denying their Kurdish identity and integrating into the fabric of Turkish society.)

Bird observes that the Syrian Kurds have not suffered as much extreme persecution as those in other countries, but those in Iran are better integrated: "Kurds and Persians share a similar language, a similar tolerance, a similar independence of spirit, and a similar outlook toward the Arabs, who conquered both their lands in the name of Islam in A.D. 637." She attributes some of the Kurds' notable courage and determination to the mountains amid which they live. "Mountain people all over the world . . . are a notoriously independent, stubborn, rebellious and proud lot. Isolated in their craggy fortresses, they are accustomed to taking care of themselves, and don't cotton well to being told what to do." But, she adds, the extraordinary repressions they have faced -- and survived -- have also contributed to their strength.

Bird learned much on her journey, and she returns with the realization that the Kurds are central to the future of Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria, and hence to the whole Middle East. She enlightens us and also gives us a great gift -- a sense of the humanity and pride of a beguiling people.

Reviewed by Selwa Roosevelt

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks (June 14, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345469399
• ISBN-13: 978-0345469397
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #515,864 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A THOUSAND SIGHS, A THOUSAND REVOLTS, May 26, 2004

By	Robert A, Lincoln (McLean, VA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts: Journeys in Kurdistan (Hardcover)

Reviewed by
Robert A. Lincoln
"Once again, just business as usual in the wild and woolly world of Kurdish politics."
So writes Christiane Bird two-thirds of the way through A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts as she describes an event in the relationship among Iranians, Iraqis, and Kurds in the early 1970s. In a sense she was denying what she announced at the start: "This is a not a book about Kurdish politics. This is a book about the Kurdish people."
Like any good travel book, however, A Thousand Sighs is also a political study, which is especially important today when the Kurds are suddenly in the forefront of the news. Ms. Bird is a reactor, not an analyst. As she states early on, the Kurds are the world's largest ethnic group without a state of their own, despite their longstanding claim of a country called Kurdistan. Several times, they have almost but not quite made it and at least once held the senior position in someone else's empire (the Seljuk, for Saladin was a Kurd), but have never been truly absorbed into or taken control of another political culture.
Today, the Kurds are a sizeable percentage of the populations of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. On unofficial maps, Kurdistan extends from the middle of the Anatolian plain to the mountains of Iran. The Kurds probably number between 25 and 30 million.
Ms. Bird found them today extremely sympathetic, perhaps dangerously so in the long run, toward the United States. They hope at least to hold a federated piece of real estate, rich in oil, in Iraq. Centuries ago the Kurds converted to Islam, and she does not mention much about the conventional saying in the Middle East that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Kurds Ms. Bird contacted rate Turks as their most fearsome enemy. Her personal interactions were mainly in English. It was Ataturk after World War I, when the French, British, and Greeks threatened to take over Turkey from Izmir in the west across Lake Van in the east, who held off the threatening troops and somehow kept Turkey together; the Kurds considered Diyarbakir in the east the traditional capital of Kurdistan and continue to resist integration. Here, again, politics strongly enters in. Turkey, the only Muslim member of NATO, hopes for European Union membership and EU powers rate her treatment of the Kurds as an important issue.
At one point toward the end of A Thousand Sighs, Ms. Bird likens mainstream Turkish attitudes toward Kurds to white mainstream attitudes toward black Americans, but it is impossible to agree. Kurds have an entirely different cultural and political tradition. The Kurdish question, colorful as the Kurds may be, demands a healthy dose of but more than the cultural-personal study A Thousand Sighs is able to provide.

Robert Lincoln, a retired Foreign Service officer who lives in northern Virginia, spent a dozen years in or directly connected with programs in the Middle East.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, but..., November 28, 2007

By	P. Ammar (Cleveland, OH) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts : Journeys in Kurdistan (Hardcover)

It was hard for me to read the book objectively, as I have spent considerable time in South Kurdistan (Iraq) doing humanitarian aid work. In Bird's journey through Iraqi Kurdistan, every town she visited and every person she met reminded me of just how much I miss and love the Kurdish country and people. Bird's analysis is not deep nor is it political for the most part. What politics are mentioned, it seems are designed to pull out and investigate the Kurdish culture and psyche. Having lived among the Kurds, her interactions with them ring true and accurate.

All this being said, and what is keeping this book from getting a five star review, is that I found the author's semi frequent (once or twice a chapter) pot shots at American politics leading up to the invasion of 2003 to be somewhat tiresome. If you are reading this book, it is because you want to find out what the Kurds think and do, not what the author thinks about American foreign policy.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Too scholarly for the average reader, March 19, 2005

By	James "Curtis" (Ohio) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts: Journeys in Kurdistan (Hardcover)

I read this book when it first came out and it is very well researched, yet there are so many different characters in the book that the reader loses his or her way and it is very confusing. I would have enjoyed the book more if the author had stuck with two or three characters to tell the story. The average book lover will not finish this book but will set it aside after a few chapters. What a pity. Still, it is a worthwhile project.