As war and dispossession causes people to lose their homes and their beloved ones, on top of the trauma, it tends to leave people with strong feelings of nostalgia and melancholy. Perhaps it is this longing for the past that empowers those people and inspires them with their never-ending narratives. When their stories of tolerance, famine and prosecution are interwoven across generations, for the most part, many of them will be lost or forgotten. However, in male dominant cultures stories of women’s sufferings and tyranny are at greater risk of loss.

1. Posttraumatic Growth:
Liberating Women’s Voices in
Post-Conflict Kurdistan
by:
Sarwa Azeez

2. Outline
 Background
 About the project
 The Process
 Women’s Narratives
 Art and Performance
 Outcomes

3. Background: Who Are Kurds?
Kurds are known as the largest ethnic group without a state of
their own.
The majority of them
live in parts of Iraq,
Iran, Turkey and Syria.

4. Issues…
Kurdish women had to fight to determine their identity both as a
Kurd and as a female.
Kurdish women have always been the victim of cultural and
patriarchal practices

5. Rhetorical listening can be seen as “a way of making
meaning with/ in language”
Listening trope for Interpretive invention
Krista Ratcliff

6. Project Focus
Within conflict zones around the world, women are
often depicted as victims, when they are discussed
at all. There is something about protecting the
motherland and by default, women, that makes
conflict about men. What if women were to tell
their own narratives about their traumas? Would
the stories be different? To what degree they have
an impact on the recovery process?

7. “The discourses of healing can be
defined as the numerous dialogues
pertaining to trauma and recovery
that are entered into and acted
within” (Riki Thompson, 2014, 654)

8. About the Project
Many Women, Many Words: a collaborative research project between
Soran University and Lancaster University which took place in Iraqi
Kurdistan .
Aims:
 Collect women’s narratives of their traumatic experiences under
Saddam Hussain’s Al-Anfal campaign (genocide)
 Liberating suppressed voices
 Transferring narratives of extraordinary bravery and resistance to
public

9. The Process
 Recording the stories
 Transcribing the recording
 Translating into English
 Creative output

10. Why turning real narratives into creative
project?

11. Process…
Producing a piece of performance poetry by poets Graham Mort
and Muli Amaye

12. Process..
 Performing and transforming by younger females

14. Interviewees

15. Interviewees

16. Outcomes
 Dissemination
 Website www.kurdishwomenswords.world
 Performance piece Someday I will Make Rings From Them –
performed in South Africa and Kurdistan
 Conferences Kurdistan, Florida, UK, South Africa, Paris, France
and now Lincoln
 Articles