Currently, events and demonstrations are taking place throughout Rojava calling for the recognition of the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) and their integration into the Syrian armed forces. The women’s cultural movement Hîlala Zêrîn (“Golden Crescent”) is also calling for actions and organizing theater, music, and art events to support the YPJ in this struggle. But what is the connection between self-defense, art, and culture? We met with Mizgîn Çolaq and Şêrîn Reşîd from the leadership of the women’s cultural movement Hîlala Zêrîn in Rojava to explore this question.
To understand the importance of art and culture in Rojava, we must understand the history of the region, its people, and their resistance. Culture is something people collectively create from within themselves. Every community and every society produces its own culture. This is a natural human process.
If we look at the earliest rituals or forms of art, we can see how they have always brought people together and connected them with the environment, the universe, matter, and life. Whether music, cave paintings, or film: art expresses human thought and emotion, while culture gathers together human experience.
Throughout history, people have gathered to tell stories from everyday and communal life in order to pass on experiences, values, and knowledge. This practice itself creates culture and gives it its particular form. Culture is therefore deeply intertwined with language, as well as with the needs and systems of care within a community. It connects communal life, shared values, mentality, and aesthetics. Fairy tales, for example, often convey a certain moral, while cultural customs are often shaped by material necessities and practical ways of living.
Our stories shape our existence. They create connection and understanding regarding our behavior, our expression, and our thinking. When we know the path our ancestors walked, the struggles they fought, and the resistance they carried out, we can understand our own emotions and draw immense strength from them. This knowledge of one’s own history and culture forms the foundation of resistance.
The Emergence of the Women’s Cultural Movement Hîlala Zêrîn in Rojava
Mizgîn Çolaq speaks about the origins of artistic and cultural work in Rojava. She herself is Kurdish and comes from Afrîn. She grew up especially with the Kurdish dance tradition of Govend and later became professionally involved in it. She says that society creates culture. Every time people come together, culture is created. We are therefore always active creators of our own culture. Art has a stronger ideological character and thereby creates a particular aesthetic in collective life. In artistic work, we orient ourselves according to our ethics and remain consciously aware of the process of communication and transmission.
Throughout their history, Kurds have been colonized by various states and empires. In northern and eastern Syria, Kurdish culture was banned until the revolution in 2012 and had to survive underground. Kurdish existence and language, as well as singing songs, performing theater, and making music, were prohibited. Kurdish artists were persecuted, tortured, and murdered simply for living, showing their identity, wearing their traditional clothing, and practicing their culture, music, and art.
In this history of oppression, women carried out the greatest resistance. Since the beginnings of history, they have been oppressed through the emergence of patriarchy, and during periods of colonization they experienced an overlap of both forms of oppression. They defended themselves against conservative family structures, male domination, and the exploitation and appropriation carried out by colonial powers.
As early as the 1980s, cultural work was an essential means of organizing and mobilizing the population for the liberation struggle. People gathered in private homes in villages and began forming groups for theater, dance, and music. With the revolution beginning in 2011, the art and cultural movement Tevgera Azadî was established. Its mission was to publicly express and live Kurdish art and culture. To this day, Tevgera Azadî continues struggling in different ways to close the gap created by decades of repression of Kurdish language and culture, as well as the persecution, torture, and murder of Kurdish artists.
Since 2016, Hîlala Zêrîn has established the first autonomous art and cultural centers throughout North and East Syria. These spaces created opportunities for women to express and organize themselves according to their own visions for the first time. The women’s cultural movement Hîlala Zêrîn gives women the chance to discover their own artistic identity and collectively build a women’s culture.
The Resistance of Women Artists — Between Becoming Oneself and Creating Culture
Şêrîn Reşîd tells us how she discovered the beauty of art. When she was a child, relatives and friends often visited her family. During these gatherings, people especially made music together. She says there were many instruments in their home. The sounds and her observations of the instruments sparked her interest. She occasionally played around with them, but as a woman she was not given the opportunity to properly learn them.
Under the Assad regime (1970–2024), Kurdish culture could only be practiced at home because it was banned in public spaces. Women, in general, were not allowed to play instruments at that time — especially not publicly. At most, women could make music at weddings or during Newroz celebrations.
With a serious tone, Şêrîn says:
“I want to tell you something: the mentality in the Middle East is very dogmatic and nationalist. Women were not allowed to play instruments, sing their own songs, or recite their own poems.”
We must first grasp the significance of this: if women are not allowed to create art, then the culture, stories, ethics, and aesthetics of society remain trapped within patriarchal and state-centered ways of thinking.
She continues: a performance by Ş. Hozan Mizgîn (Gurbet Aydın) in 1996 changed much within Kurdish society and within art and culture. She became a source of strength for many women to dare to work artistically and thereby influence society. She was also one of the reasons why many people joined the Kurdish freedom movement in the 1990s. Her songs deeply moved many women.
As one of the first Kurdish women, she publicly fought against the oppression of women in the Middle East through the means of art. Already in the 1990s, she was among the very few women playing musical instruments and singing in Kurdish at public events. She became a pioneer of artistic resistance against assimilation by the Turkish and Syrian states and against patriarchy.
“If you do not understand the pain of women, you cannot create culture.” — Şêrîn Reşîd
These stories demonstrate how deep-rooted and far-reaching the oppression of women has been. Looking at everyday life today, we can see that these forms of oppression against women and minorities still continue. Even now, we face major challenges in defending women’s rights and a humane culture.
In conclusion, Şêrîn Reşîd says:
“The struggle has become a political one. We must fulfill our role in defending the people. We must carry out the struggle for language and democratic thinking. We must defend women’s rights through the methods of art and culture.”
Read the next text to learn how different artists from Hîlala Zêrîn are carrying out resistance in the name of the YPJ.
