On Expatriatism, writing and “Brief Shining Moments”: An Interview with Alesa Lightbourne, author of The Kurdish Bike.

Alesa Lightbourne is the author of The Kurdish Bike: A Novel (2016), a novel based on her experiences teaching English in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2010 and her ensuing friendship with a family of women from a Kurdish village. It is an engrossing, sometimes disturbing, but more often joyful and optimistic read as she struggles to understand this new world and make a difference to her new Kurdish friends’ lives. The novel has won international awards while becoming a favourite with American book clubs and it has been translated into several languages. Her website has more information, see https://kurdishbike.com/. Dr. Alan Ali Saeed, the interviewer, lectures in Modern English Literature at Sulaimani University, Iraqi Kurdistan. His website is here .

Page numbers in the text refer to the original English edition of The Kurdish Bike: A Novel, 2016. ISBN: 978-0-692-75810-6.

SAEED: Hello.  I know that you studied Anthropology (University of California Santa Cruz) as an undergraduate and then took an MA in Creative Writing and English Literature (University of Washington). Then you worked as a corporate writer. Were you someone who always wrote creatively from a young age and so the experiences of teaching English in Iraqi Kurdistan were just further grist to the mill? Or, did these experiences somehow help propel you into writing a first novel? In addition, I wondered did your background in anthropology affect how you viewed your task as a writer – as presumably, you knew all about the ethnographic theories and difficulties of being a participant observer of different cultures?  

LIGHTBOURNE:  My training in, and fascination with, cultural anthropology has been central to all of my endeavors. So has my love of literature. Reading Colin Turnbull’s The Forest People propelled me into anthropology, and gave me a lifelong dream of doing something similar, namely conveying the cross-cultural experience with a heartfelt story that could be easily accessed by the general public. During my decades as a corporate writer and professor, this dream remained strong. After living amongst the Kurds, albeit briefly, I wanted to generate compassion and understanding for these brave, generous people.

SAEED:   If you don’t mind me asking, who are your biggest literary influences? Are they from the world of fiction or travel writing or some other genre? 

LIGHTBOURNE: I am a voracious reader of expatriate literature. Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, Isak Dinesen, Paul Theroux, Paul Scott, and Graham Greene have been important influences. I also admire works that nurture an inner transformation in the reader, such as Hesse’s Siddhartha. Christiane Bird’s A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts is the gold standard for understanding modern Kurdish culture.

SAEED: I am sure many an expatriate English language teacher dreams of finding experiences to help them write a novel and it seems a common enough occupation amongst young writers. However, I cannot think of any novels apart from yours that feature an EFL teacher as a protagonist. The various EFL staff and the power structures of the school itself (which Theresa dubs ‘the Fortress’) are very integral to The Kurdish Bike. The teachers are even forced into ‘bending the rules’ in a somewhat unethical manner to help their students. Why did you choose this unusual setting and what do you think it contributes to the novel? Is it a way of talking about power and authoritarianism for example?

LIGHTBOURNE: I did not go to Kurdistan to write a book. I was a writer who took a job there in order to help rebuild a war-torn country and to learn about another culture. Although the Fortress may be a symbol of regional rigidity, it is also an accurate depiction of conditions at some elite international schools, based on my own experiences and those of my colleagues. 

SAEED:  I am afraid the problems of a kind of Gradgrindian education (Dickens’ Hard Times), based on learning facts by rote under the authoritarian eye of a teacher is not confined to language schools in Kurdistan. It is an inheritance from the Iraqi system of education which is obsessively bureaucratic and determined by years of Ba’ath party Soviet-style socialism. Too many people are afraid to change their ways. We joke that in Kurdistan you must fill out a form to be allowed to take a stone out of your shoe! Did Theresa feel that her more humanist, student-centered model of education succeeded? Or, did the fact that the EFL teachers ended up in a disaster suggest that it doesn’t work?

LIGHTBOURNE: Being the product of a very liberal education in California, I felt stifled by the pedagogical mandates at the Fortress. At the same time, I was aware of being an interloper. An internal dilemma arose from wanting to respect the existing educational culture and simultaneously chafing against it. I suffered the same difficulties regarding female genital mutilation. This tension between the roles of participant/observer and educator/reformer became one of the key themes in the book.

SAEED: I know The Kurdish Bike started as a memoir and then became fiction. Perhaps these two genres often overlap. What are the advantages of the novel form in this particular case do you think? For example, does a novel offer a kind of distance from the material which a memoir cannot do so well? Does it avoid the criticism of presenting material too subjectively? 

LIGHTBOURNE: The memoir format proved to be too limiting. It did not allow for a narrative arc, for example. The memoir ended up with too many characters. Also, real-life rarely has a climax or satisfying conclusion. But most importantly, I worried that sticking to the truth and using real names, would expose my Kurdish friends to possible humiliation -- or even physical danger, in the case of honour killings and mutilation. So, you could say that my primary motivation was protection.

SAEED: I wanted to ask you a little about the process of your writing. Did you plan everything very meticulously in advance or are you someone who just writes and lets the characters take over?

LIGHTBOURNE: That’s a funny question. I do plan everything at first. But then the characters just bust out on their own, leaving me shaking my head. This is one of the most gratifying things about writing – the amazement you feel when the book takes off in its own direction.

SAEED: I liked the title because it reminded me that bicycles played such a prominent role in early female empowerment. One of the authors I read for my Ph.D., Dorothy Richardson (1873 – 1957), often wrote about riding them in her novel sequence Pilgrimage and in the early 20th century, cycling, led to important public debate about Victorian and Edwardian female dress codes. In terms of your novel are bicycles still liberating for women? Is this particularly true in the middle east?

LIGHTBOURNE: I never met another women on a bicycle in Kurdistan. The same was true during my years in Saudi Arabia, where it would have been illegal to ride outside of an expatriate camp. But you’re right. Bicycles are incredibly liberating for women. They let you go places you could never reach otherwise. They truly give you wings of freedom. Families having picnics out on the Kurdish hillsides where I rode were so astounded by my presence that they inevitably invited me to join them like long-lost friends. The bike thus gave me a unique portal into Kurdish culture. However, this was an unintended result. I bought the bike mainly to escape the Fortress.

SAEED: One thing that strikes me was how naïve your protagonist and narrator Theresa seems at the beginning. I am sure you weren’t as unknowing as her! However, this naivete does makes her journey through the novel as well as that of Bezma, Ara and the other Kurdish women all the more striking. They seem to be learning together. Could you say something about the emotional and intellectual journey of these main characters in the novel, please? 

LIGHTBOURNE: I try my best to cultivate a Zen “beginner’s mind,” coming to new situations with as few preconceived notions as possible. So, I take your comment about naivete as a compliment. On the other hand, my sons would laugh at your question, because they often accuse me of being way too credulous.

The Kurdish women and I did learn together, to our great joy. After all, isn’t learning one of the most exhilarating experiences in life? In fact, we are still learning together, as we are in contact every week or two.

SAEED: Your novel is a first-person narrative, largely told from the narrator Theresa’s point of view. I wondered did you think about writing it any other way? Say, in third-person omniscient narration? The narrative strategy you used seemed very natural though.

LIGHTBOURNE: I experimented with several different formats, including third-person and past-tense narration. They felt clunky and strained. When I tried first-person present tense, the book took flight on its own. 

SAEED:  There are a number of ‘bright shining moments’ that punctuate Theresa’s relationship with her Kurdish village friends in those sections of the novel. They seem a bit like modernist epiphanies (although the text is generally realist), but in this case, they occur when Theresa connects with the Kurdish village women or is just by herself in the countryside. In contrast, when Theresa is in the school, either teaching or with the other teachers, everything is dialogue rich and dramatic. Could you say something more about this apparent contrast and the novel’s style in more general terms?

LIGHTBOURNE: My most cherished memories of Kurdistan are these epiphanies; I wanted Western readers to taste how one’s moral make-up can be altered through cross-cultural experience. For instance, Ara really did offer to feed and house me for the rest of my life when I became penniless. No one else did this, not even my family members back in the U.S. Similarly, I had never known the bittersweet power of shared grief until surrounded by keening Kurdish village women after a death. Describing transcendental moments like these required me to experiment with style, as I really had no idea how to convey such intense feelings.

Also, my lack of fluency in Sorani Kurdish prevented me from accurately depicting conversations in that language. It would have been presumptuous to pretend otherwise. 

SAEED: The entrenched ill-treatment of women and practices like FGM and honour-killing that you show in the portrayal of Kurdish village life are very shocking for the reader, how did you go about representing village life without making it seem distinctly ‘primitive’ in cultural terms, which is different from saying it is impoverished from years of conflict? Were you worried about being accused of ‘Orientalism’ in your portrayal of Kurdish women? It seems nowadays there are any number of post-colonial apologists for patriarchy – particularly in western countries like the U.S. – who use Said’s theories to attack feminism when it is applied outside of the west. Thankfully, that is not usually the case here in Iraqi Kurdistan.

LIGHTBOURNE: Rather than portraying Kurdish villagers as primitive or impoverished, I hoped to show how rich their emotional life was. The village women had collective resources in their families and community that far surpassed anything I had seen in the West. I respect Said a great deal but am conflicted about the issues of patriarchy and feminism. That’s because I didn’t hear village women demanding more legal rights. Rather, they seemed to accept their lot; what they longed for was more kindness and empathy from their men.

On a practical level, it would be fantastic if rural Kurdish women had the same liberties as their urban counterparts. And why don’t they? Tradition, not legal structures! Furthermore, are they chafing for these liberties? I’m not so sure. It’s a complicated question. Village women might want more power if they had more role models, or were better educated, especially about the rights they already have. In fact, I’d hoped that just seeing me on a bicycle might give them ideas. But I never felt it would be appropriate to disparage or try to change their culture. After all, pride in their Kurdishness is one of the very few positives in their lives.

SAEED: I wondered what you knew about the traditions of Kurdish feminism when you wrote the novel? Sadly, so much of our Kurdish heritage remains untranslated. People often cite Hapsa Khan (1892-1953)  and nowadays, of course, there are prominent figures like the poet and academic, Choman Hardi, who started the Centre for Gender and Development Studies at the American University in Sulaimani  Feminism is increasingly on the agenda in Iraqi Kurdistan I am glad to say.

LIGHTBOURNE: Although I tried to read everything I could find before going to Kurdistan, very little was available in English. Yes, I had heard about Hapsa Khan, and later learned of the Kurdish women fighting ISIS. It was therefore hard to understand the intractability of village women in their traditional mentality. I still struggle with this, as I support some of the book’s characters to this day. My offers to help start various businesses, and other ideas for financial independence, are always met with, “But the village headman would say it looks bad…”  Very frustrating.

SAEED:  I must admit I found it hard to sympathise with the majority of male characters, they often seem rather brutish, or if not, then thoughtless and not thinking about the bigger picture.  Hevar, for example, seems bereft of any ability to empathise with anyone beyond the horizon of his pride. Am I being too hard on them? Do you see them also as being trapped as victims of patriarchy in a certain kind of way just as the women are?

LIGHTBOURNE: I did not have close male friends there, and thus cannot speak to a man’s outlook. The men in the book are based on real people, though. Hevar really did abandon Bezma and his children (three in real life) with her. He hasn’t sent her a penny in all these years. The honour killing was real. The suicide didn’t happen exactly as portrayed in the book, but it was true too. Perhaps you’re right, that the men are victims. I just didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to venture there. I had my hands full trying to understand the women. And when Ara said that “All bad things come from men” – well, that was an actual quote.

SAEED: What about Houda, the midwife who carries out the ‘cutting’ of the girls. Is she also a victim of sorts? Is her change of heart by the end of the novel an indication that she has learnt and grown as a person?

LIGHTBOURNE: The change-of-heart scene is fictional, but it’s something I really wish had happened. Of anyone in the village, Houda would have been the one with sufficient courage to challenge an age-old tradition. The real Bezma, on the other hand, answers vaguely when I ask her to promise not to cut her daughters. Bezma lacks the depth (or perhaps mature outlook) of Houda and is thus less able to think outside the tribal box. I wish my Kurdish was better, to find out whether my pleas to stop cutting have had any effect at all. It’s not exactly something you can discuss over Skype, though.

SAEED:  Pat seems like as a kind of devil’s advocate or foil for Theresa wild optimism. But I also found her a sad person – all the natural joy and optimism towards life seems to have been squashed out of her by her years of EFL teaching. Although, she certainly is kind and caring to Theresa. Could you say something about her role and character in the novel?

LIGHTBOURNE: Pat was intended to be realistic, not sad. Still, every one of the expat teachers at the Fortress felt joyless most of the time. That’s why turnover was close to 100% each year. Pat survived better than most, emotionally, because of her practical nature. She had no illusions about the Fortress. This prevented her from being too disappointed. Sometimes cynicism can be a very helpful trait. By the way, Pat and I remain very close friends. I actually hired her when I became the dean of a college later on.

SAEED: What do you think Theresa learns in the novel: Is this a kind of self-discovery and personal renewal for her, even though she ends up leaving Hawler (Erbil)  rather than staying another year? And what about the Kurdish characters such as Ara and Bezma? It seems to me that there is growth and self-development, but the text is equivocal about this. 

LIGHTBOURNE: Self-development is very important in the novel. Theresa becomes stronger and willing to take a stand. She realizes that Western women are still constrained by patriarchy too. Ara and Bezma learn more about the world beyond their village. For example, the scene where they are shocked to learn that Theresa is not cut, and neither are most women in the world, was based on a true incident, and hopefully illustrates the impact of cross-cultural exposure.

SAEED:  I know very little Kurdish literature has been translated into English, but I wonder if you have read any and if so, what you thought of it? It struck me that your novel has a similar eye for the beauties of our often harsh landscape, particularly the mountains and valleys. Is landscape and nature an important feature in your novel for those sections where Theresa is outside of the school?

LIGHTBOURNE: The Kurdish landscape, in both its starkness and magnificence, is an ever-present influence on any person of sensitivity. So is the region’s history as the birthplace of human civilization. One can’t help but feel chills to stand where Abraham and Alexander roamed. I kept wanting to absorb something like mystic vibrations from the centuries of wisdom that must be stored in the rocky hillsides themselves.

SAEED: The novel demonstrates an unusually positive view on cross-cultural communication and the possibilities of solidarity between women from different backgrounds, an American female teacher nearing retirement, and a young woman from a Kurdish village. Did you see this as an explicitly feminist strategy in the novel and do you see the novel as feminist?  Do you think there is a ‘natural’, shared sympathy between women in different cultures as it seems to be the success of the relationship in your novel depends on this?

LIGHTBOURNE: Having lived in six countries, and traveled to scores more, I have discovered a shared global sisterhood amongst women. We all go through the same agonies of childbirth. Almost all of us shoulder the bulk of responsibilities for tending to families, with fewer resources than a man. When asked about family, even through sign language, most women around the world beam and start chattering immediately. They open up even more when you reciprocate and share pictures. And women feel safer confiding in another woman, making it easier to achieve conversational intimacy than with a man. Are these observations feminist? I don’t know. I would merely call them humbling.

SAEED Towards the conclusion of the novel, Pat claims Theresa wants to save the world and assume long-term responsibility for her Kurdish friends (pp. 312-313). I can understand that this criticism makes sense from a western mindset concerned about the potentially disabling consequences of charity in the developing world, but it still looks odd to my Kurdish eyes.  Kurds are famous for the excessive generosity and hospitality and in the middle east that is really a compliment. The Peshmerga (including women) who fought Daesh (Islamic State) saw themselves as literally willing to lay down their lives to save the world from death. 

To me, this moment marks out the novel as being a western novel in the final analysis, which cannot avoid exteriority to Kurdish culture. Theresa cannot, in the end, belong to the village or her new Kurdish ‘family’– which is really quite sad – it reminded me of the moment at the end of Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier when Orwell contemplates the solidarity of working-class life through a window and realises, he is forever on the outside.

Is this a fair comment do you think?

LIGHTBOURNE: You are right. This is an unabashedly Western novel because I am a Westerner. However much I might want to “be” more Kurdish, it cannot happen.

Concerning generosity and charity, though, I am torn. I continue to support the village women through book sales and reader donations but on a modest scale. That’s because I want them to take the initiative for improving their own lives through education, employment, or starting businesses. They were there for me in my own hour of need; now I must do the same for them. However, it would be a disservice to make them dependent on my assistance. If the book becomes a huge commercial success or is turned into a Hollywood movie, my goal is to expand my efforts and fund a women’s clinic or daycare center, or improve the girl’s school in the village.

SAEED: The novel ends with a poignant and memorable image in the epilogue of Seema learning to ride a bicycle and being able to do so independently, (‘Soon, Seema will be riding on her own. / Any minute now, it will happen’ p. 315) that refers us back to the image of Theresa and her two Kurdish friends dancing joyfully together to traditional Kurdish music in the prologue. Is this a sign of hope for the future or just misplaced optimism?

LIGHTBOURNE: Definitely a sign of hope. Imagine the joy of little Kurdish girls riding freely on bicycles some day in the future! In sh’allah (smile).

SAEED:  Did you think about your audience at all when writing the novel? What kind of readership did you have in mind and did that help in the creative process?

LIGHTBOURNE: I thought constantly about the audience being Westerners who knew little about the Kurds. I also thought a lot about Kurdish readers, hoping to avoid offending them or endangering my friends.

SAEED:  Much has changed in Iraqi Kurdistan since 2010 when your book was set, often at bewildering speed. I wondered if you had been back to Hawler and surrounding villages to see the changes since you wrote The Kurdish Bike? While there has certainly been progress, for example, in the very welcome prominence of women’s rights on the national agenda and strong action against gender-based violence; some would also say that the greater prosperity (until Covid-19) has led to materialism and an erosion of traditional Kurdish values, such as social egalitarianism and our traditional ‘all for one and one for all attitude’. Perhaps, due to the influx of villagers to the big cities for better-paid jobs, the traditional ways and rhythms of Kurdish village life may be dying (much as happened in the west during industrialisation). What do you think? Is your novel set in a disappearing (Kurdish) world?

LIGHTBOURNE: I returned to Hawler briefly in 2012 and 2013, and each time could hardly believe the changes. Tall buildings and malls were sprouting up everywhere. But I did not observe changes in the village. Urban prosperity had not reached my friends. Then oil prices dropped, the government stopped paying salaries and pensions, ISIS came frighteningly close to Hawler, and COVID hit. From what my village friends tell me, things are actually much worse than when I was there. Yet patriotism is as strong as ever. I believe that the Kurdish culture is very resilient, and will outlast the many forms of modernization/Westernization that might encroach.

SAEED: I was pleased to hear your novel has been translated into Soranj Kurdish by Chiman O. Salih (Aras Publishing) and is available in Hawler and Sulaimani. I am also glad to know it is being translated into Kurmanji Kurdish (Shiler Publishing, Syria), and Arabic by Omar Rasoul (Naqesh Publishing), 

However, I was surprised to discover that the Farsi translation was banned by the Iranian regime. Do you have any idea why that is – as the book is not even about Iran?

LIGHTBOURNE: The authorities deemed it unflattering to Islam. They gave us a long list of things to change to make it publishable, which would have gutted the entire book. I decided to wait.

SAEED: Gosh, those Iranian censors sound much more sophisticated than I imagined. I thought they just banned books outright! This is an invitation to collude in your own censorship.

SAEED: I know The Kurdish Bike was independently published. Have you been surprised at its success without a mainstream publisher? Were the sales due to word of mouth in the internet age? Did the various awards help sales?

LIGHTBOURNE: Winning three international gold medals certainly helped. But sales really took off once it became a “book club favorite.” Book clubs are really common in the US; they are typically made up of women over the age of 50 who enjoy literary fiction, care about social causes around the world, and appreciate discussing serious topics like FGM, feminism, and modernism. They also like to be armchair travellers alongside an older female adventurer. In other words, they are an audience tailor-made for The Kurdish Bike.

SAEED: I wanted to close by thanking you very sincerely for sparing the time to do this interview. It is important that people choose to write books about Kurdistan, not least because Iraqi Kurdistan aspires to be a western-style, democratic, pluralist society and that cannot happen without being in a critical, but constructive conversation with the outside world. Whether that means NGOs or supportive foreign governments, or individuals who choose to travel here, it is all of value. Our aspirations also cannot happen without the struggle for true equality between men and women in Kurdish society and I think, your novel makes that broad argument with considerable acumen.

However, I just wondered if there is anything you would have liked me to ask you about the novel or your writing career, which I have not done so already?

LIGHTBOURNE: My only comment is to thank the Kurdish people from the bottom of my heart for teaching me so much about generosity, fortitude, and nobility. I have been transformed forever by the affection we’ve shared.