Resistance through Joy : Woman, Life, Freedom in the Kurdish Mountains

Women at Nowruz, Kurdistan. The will to be, the life bursting forth in every form, overflowing the frame, left with no choice but to disobey in order to exist. A struggle through joy and life, for the freedom and equality.

March 21st —Nowruz— the first day of the Persian calendar, celebrating the dawn of a new cycle, the spring renewal, the regeneration of all living beings, of the triumph of light over darkness.

On this day, life is celebrated in an abundance of colors, of dances, of songs, of poems, of fire, of food, of smiles and of joy.

On this particular March 21st, celebrating meant, above all, hiding. Pushed to the fringes of the festivities, far from the men, at the risk of being arrested by the morality police for indecency and disturbing public order. It was on a rooftop, further away, that the dances resumed, that the bodies could breathe.

On this day, we hope a little more than yesterday, that joyful dances may swirl again without fear.

That shadows may take the place of the sun.

At the edge of the visible, in the heart of the unknown,

we hope that the cycle of rebirth may find its meaning again.

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These photographs was taken in the heart of Nowruz, the Persian New Year, in a village in the Kurdish mountains of Iran, alongside its women. It reveals this will to be, this life bursting forth in every form, overflowing the frame, left with no choice but to disobey in order to exist. A struggle through joy and life, for the freedom and equality of women, and the fuel of a broader movement uplifting a people against its regime.

Gender equality , and above all the liberation of women's bodies from social control, remains everywhere a long struggle, cultural, political, legal. But the scale of the oppression, as here in Iran, is such that there is no other choice but to disobey in order to exist.

Not to dance, not to sing, not to make great expressive 'feminine' gestures, to cover oneself from head to toe, veiling the shapes of our bodies, of our hair. Only the eyes which cannot be concealed. Relegated to the passive observation of a world that should turn without us, without our own choices and our own will to be.

But pushed into the shadows, pressed into narrowness, these glimmers end by forming a beam of light of immense density, an energy radiating all around.

This struggle is embodied by the Kurdish feminist slogan 'Woman, Life, Freedom' ('Jin, Jîyan, Azadî' in Kurdish), now known the world over since the protest movements of women and of a part of Iran in 2022, after the death of the Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini for having worn her veil incorrectly.

While equality is a long struggle, never entirely won, history shows us that the most egalitarian societies are also the most peaceful. The cultural resistance of women in the countries where they are most oppressed is a source of inspiration for all, to resist, and to keep making equality a priority.

While the few freedoms won by Iranian Kurdish women came at the cost of thousands of lives, and elsewhere in Kurdistan the struggle of the Syrian Kurdish women of Rojava, who resisted by arms against ISIS, has brought advances for their rights, the path towards freedom and peace is endlessly called into question.

These photographs show us how resistance through joy and self expression must be part of that path.