A captain's voice finally heard: translating the memoir of a Kurdish freedom fighter
What happens to history when the people who lived it couldn't write it down? For Captain Hamad Mawludi, the answer was a box of notebooks that sat, unread, for generations.
Mawludi was a peshmerga, a freedom fighter, in the Kurdistan Republic of 1946—a short-lived independent state that collapsed under pressure from Iranian forces. He was a working-class man, not a politician or a man in politics. He only learned to read and write around age 40, in prison, and he spent the rest of his life in exile where he filled four notebooks with everything he had witnessed: the daily rhythms of peshmerga fighters, the ethnic and religious tensions tearing through the region, the shadow of Soviet influence, the devastating Great Persian Famine, and the final unraveling of the Iranian monarchy.
Those notebooks are now a book.
Hero of the Kurdistan Republic: Memoir of a Revolutionary Captain, forthcoming from McFarland Publishers, brings Mawludi's account to English-speaking readers for the first time. The translation was carried out by Hewa S. Khalid, a visiting lecturer in Hamilton Lugar's Department of Central Eurasian Studies, and Nasim T. Stone, a Ph.D. student at Hamilton Lugar focusing on Kurdish language, literature, and folk belief.
The project began, in a way, with a photograph. Mawludi's daughter, Roonak, had inherited a box of her father's belongings—binoculars, a pistol, a pipe, and those four notebooks—but she couldn't read them. Her father's native Kurdish language was different from her own Azerbaijani. It wasn't until her son sent a photo of a page to a relative that the family began to understand what had been sitting in that box all along.
For Khalid, bringing that voice into English is an extension of work he has devoted his career to in expanding access to Kurdish language and ensuring that Kurdish perspectives are heard beyond the communities where the language is spoken natively. Khalid's research within Kurdish studies spans across language pedagogy and the sociopolitical dimensions of how Kurdish is used and preserved throughout the divided parts of Kurdistan in Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran.
Stone's collaboration on the project reflects the kind of faculty-student partnership that Hamilton Lugar actively cultivates. Ph.D. students here aren't just studying the region from the outside—they are contributing original scholarly and creative work alongside their mentors.
The memoir itself is a document unlike almost anything else in the historical record of the Kurdish independence movement. Most accounts of the 1946 Kurdistan Republic focus on its political leadership. Mawludi's notebooks offer something rarer: the experience of an ordinary person caught in extraordinary events, written with the directness of a man who came to literacy late and had no reason to perform for a scholarly audience.
Hero of the Kurdistan Republic is available for pre-order now through McFarland Publishers.