Thursday, July 18, 2013

Our man in Kurdistan

From PANZ News - 17 July 2013
  


Peter Janssen is a former publisher at Reed and a previous sales manager at Hachette, and has published non-fiction with both New Holland and Hachette. He left New Zealand to work for a charity that assists Kurdish refugees, and divides his time between Turkey and Kurdistan, when not back in NZ updating his locally published work. He wrote to Kevin Chapman about literature in the adjoining areas.

Today I met with the Slemani City Librarian Ari Baban. My expectations were low, especially since Baban is a major family in this area and my experience so far is that most people in senior positions in Kurdistan are there by patronage and not ability.

I had difficulty finding Kak Ari (Kak = Mr or Sir and is used with the first name) and to my surprise and pleasure found him in a modest office, untidily stacked with books and looking puzzled as to why I wanted to meet him. His English was faltering and my Sorani Kurdish extremely limited, so it took a while to establish the point of the meeting. When he understood my project is to produce a Kurdish encyclopedia, Kak Ari became very excited as it transpires that they are desperate for any books in Kurdish, let alone an encyclopedia.

Next he took me to meet a colleague, jammed in an even smaller windowless office which he shared with a very beautiful young woman. Kak Khalid is a small, sparkly eyed man in his mid-40s and he is on a mission translating books from Farsi and Arabic into Kurdish. While they would like original books in Kurdish, translating is the quickest way to increase the volume of locally published books. The issue of copyright remained unspoken (ISBN numbers were introduced to Iraq last year).

Then they took me on a tour. Like most buildings here, the library is shabby and dusty, though the design did aspire to greatness at one stage in its short life (the old library was destroyed in air attacks in the early 1990s). With enormous pride I was shown several large rooms, crammed full of neatly arranged books all of which were so old. Proudly pointing to a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica I felt obliged to admire the set, only to see that it was published in 1978.

Another room was packed with Kurdish books, all very cheaply produced and many falling apart from overuse, despite the care and constant repair. In pride of place were old and very basic school books produced on manual printers in mountain caves during the Saddam Hussein years.

There are three publishing houses in the city but even the cheapest mass-produced paperback is a work of art compared to the books printed here. However, that matters little, as while they would like better quality books, to these people content is everything.

In these difficult times for the publishing industry, it is easy to forget the power of the written word in book form. These Kurdish books are poorly designed, printed on the cheapest paper and bound in the crudest manner, but here the readers look past all that. They revel in the expression of their own language and take enormous pride in protecting a culture assaulted for centuries from all sides. Just to publish in their own language is a triumph in itself.

Lying close to the Iranian border, books are constantly smuggled across the border as books in Kurdish are banned in Iran. While it is easy to conceal one or two books when travelling by car, the most effective way to take books into Iran is by foot across the mountains. To avoid detection books are bundled up and then carried by pairs of men on remote mountain trails into Iran.

Just imagine a Christchurch rep strapping a pack of books on his or her back and walking across the Southern Alps to take books to Greymouth and if caught thrown in prison!!

Have faith, the printed book reigns, rules and lives on in the mountains of Kurdistan!


Peter Janssen

Note: for the geographically and culturally confused, Kurdistan is a region divided between Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Slemani City, formerly known as Sulaymaniyah, is the centre of Kurdish culture and is part of Iraq.

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