Kurdish Novelist Aims to Reframe Middle East
By Joshua Thaisen, published @Rudaw
LOS ANGELES—Emerging Kurdish novelist Goran Sabah Ghafour hopes his words will help bridge cultural divisions between the Middle East and the west. Ghafour’s 2014 release “The Statues” portrays the real face of daily life amidst conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa.
Ghafour was born and raised in Erbil, where he began his career as a novelist and a journalist. After self-publishing his first book “President Artery” in 2005, Ghafour won the prestigious Fulbright scholarship to the University of Kansas, where he’s now completing a PhD in international communications.
After gaining an acute insight into American culture he published his second book, “Iraqi Fulbrighter” which discusses cultural divisions and misunderstanding between east and west.
Ghafour’s socio-political novels harshly criticize many aspects of religion, culture and governance in the Middle East.
“We don’t have charismatic leaders in those countries. We have riches and resources but we don’t have leaders to run a country and make it prosperous. I am criticizing all those men of religion who export Islam for their own interests. They interpret the beautiful words of the Koran for their own interest, for money. They have been blinding people from the true face of Islam — not only from our own people, but the whole world,” Ghafour said.
Ghafour hopes to attract a young adult audience in both the English speaking world and in the Middle East and North Africa. He is attempting to mobilize youth around socio-political issues, hoping to cultivate a rich and compassionate understanding of everyday people caught up in conflict.
Al-Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center caused deep fissures between the United States and the Islamic world. Ghafour believes the West has developed very powerful narratives of fear around Islam, while the Islamic world has cultivated hatred toward the west for meddling in their issues.
Ghafour suggests that fear and hatred felt by the west and east is faceless because they don’t understand each other on a fundamental level.
“There is a big misunderstanding between Middle Eastern people and western people. If you take a normal American family there is not much difference in their issues with Iranian, Turkish, Kurdish or Iraqi families. They all want good hospitals, good roads, a safe home, good job. That’s what they want — the same thing,” Ghafour explained.
A key motivation for Ghafour is his disappointment with the western media’s depiction of the Middle East, where the propagation of negative stereotypes continues to inculcate fear.
“There are many unanswered questions about the Middle East in the minds of westerners, and they are deeply and madly looking for answers. They are not finding their answers in the media because each group shapes the news according to their interests. In my novels I think I can answer those secret questions for the public,” Ghafour said.
“Hopefully I will remove the fear. You can only understand a society by reading their novels. If you want to understand a country, go pick up a book,” he added.
Ghafour’s endeavor to portray a well-rounded depiction of the Middle East and North Africa forces him to address highly sensitive issues that has put his life in danger. He received a death threat in January and the perpetrator also threatened to kill his family.
“But I will not stop writing; my responsibly is to write more and more,” Ghafour said.
Ghafour equates his own struggle as a writer with that of the Kurdish battle for voice within the global community.
“We are small and hidden in the mouth of many lions, cruel animals like Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria, you name it. We can be eaten very easily. I’m writing to amuse people about a hidden world, but I’m also hidden,” Ghafour explained.
Ghafour, who publishes on Amazon, said because he writes in English on the Middle East it “is very hard for me to find publishers. I’m a new voice, I’m a different voice, I’m new to the scene. It is very hard for me to reach out to publishers to pick up my book,” he said.
Ghafour believes the mainstream media’s limited coverage of the Middle East is encouraging for the future of his niche genre of writing that blends fiction and journalism. Ghafour is currently in the research phase of his next novel that will focus on women’s empowerment in the Middle East.
