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By Houzan Mahmoud
This is a new initiative of Culture Project is intended to work on women’s power to tell their own stories or stories of other women through writing. The women of Kurdistan, and their dreams, encounters and experiences with patriarchy, tribalism, gender based violence and Islamism. These are exposed and told through narrating their own experiences.
This project aims to bring women to hold a pen, to think, to remember, and to write stories of their own life, work, success, danger, exile, war, conflict, oppression, and resistance. Kurdistan’s society is dominated by patriarchy as well as its norms and values, which reinforce a world whereby the male is the centre of the universe; and male privileges disempower women and their creative willpower.
Women’s Self Writing is a telling genre, or an attempt to account for memories, encounters, and women’s worldview. It undermines and challenges masculine and patriarchal laws, religion, and tribal mind-sets.
Above all this project aims to support women to understand their own lives and being, then to create a worldview that stems from female power in telling and narrating untold stories of life, struggle, pain, suffering yet, joy, resistance, and willpower to challenge the status quo.
Culture Project will support women, guide them, and provide support in terms of guidance by people who have a wealth of knowledge and expertise in writing and story-telling.
Each writing will be reviewed and proofread to give it a format that is both of high standard and literary value. Following this, it will be published. Culture Project will aim to accumulate these stories and publish them in a book both in Kurdish and English.
This will become the first collection of women’s self-writing; and through this narrating of own stories, women can master a language, style, and format to represent them and their narratives.
We are calling on women from Kurdistan to write about their own life, to send us their stories.
If you are interested please get in touch with me: houzan@gmail.com