Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 10/9/2016 (1473 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In The Lord of the Rings, the half-elven lord Elrond counsels the destruction of Sauron’s ring by sending it to Mordor. "Now at this last we must take a hard road, a road unforeseen. There lies our hope, if hope it be."

Author Meredith Tax uses this scene to set her fourth book: "Only by destroying that metaphorical ring of power called the state... do members of the Syrian and Turkish Kurdish liberation movement believe they can create societies based on equality, democracy, ecology and mutual respect."

Tax, an important American feminist beginning with her 1970 essay Woman and Her Mind: The Story of Everyday Life, has written books of historical fiction, as well as The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–1917. In 1994, she founded Women’s World, a writers’ network dedicated to free speech.

A Road Unforeseen’s subtitle, cover art and half of the book’s photographs refer to the "smiling rifle-toting girls in uniform" defending Kobane in northern Syria from a savage attack by Daesh (the Islamic State) in 2014.

Tax discovered these soldiers belonged to the Democratic Union Party (PYD) of the Syrian Kurds, which had liberated Rojava, an autonomous part of Syria bordering Turkey. Tax notes that in Rojava, "people make decisions through local councils and women hold 40 per cent of all leadership positions."

However, those coming to this book to find out much about female militias will be disappointed, as there are no specifics about who they are, or how they held out heroically against IS with little support from the West and opposition from Turkey, Syria and some other Kurdish groups.

Instead, Tax describes in overwhelming detail the struggles of Kurds of Iraq and Turkey. Motivating their resistance is Abdullah Ocalan, imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Tax asserts that he has transformed that party from violence (Turkey and the U.S. still consider the PKK a terrorist group) to a movement of local, bottom-up "democratic confederalism."

Tax finds this system promising. Less comforting is her admission that Ocalan is referred to as "leadership" and appears everywhere in posters recalling Big Brother, or her frequent impersonal reference to individuals in the movement as a "cadre."

The people of Rojava have shown admirable resistance to the depredations of IS, and to governments in Turkey, Syria and farther abroad who opposed or dismissed them. However, Tax spends far more time describing these oppressive powers than the people who resisted them.

Also disappointing is the book’s turgid prose. Tax quotes copiously from interviews, articles, polemics and manifestos, documented to a fault. For much of the book, most paragraphs consist primarily of quotations, exhaustively footnoted. As a result, no particular voice or flow develops in this account; reading it is a difficult chore.

Adding to the reader’s confusion is an alphabet soup of parties and organizations. Western media often lump various Kurdish resistance groups together as peshmerga, but remembering differences between YDG-H, YDG-K, YPG-YPJ and the YRK-HPJ is exhausting. A list helps, but many unlisted initialisms are not noted with the organizations they stand for.

Maps and timelines would also help; the account skips around in time and space trying to explain the incredibly complicated histories, philosophies and motivations of various Kurdish groups. The one map in the book does not identify the city of Kobane, or the area of Rojava.

The Lord of the Rings succeeds as fiction by engagingly chronicling the figuratively and literally small resistance which destroys Sauron’s power. This history concentrates too much on the powers to be overcome, slighting humanizing stories of the resistance to those powers.

Assertions of hope, if hope it be, are not enough.

Bill Rambo teaches at the Laureate Academy in St. Norbert.