Teresa Thornhill's book Sweet Tea with Cardamon recalls the brief flowering of Kurdish democracy towards the end of Saddam Hussein's rule. Through visits in May and September 1993, Teresa meets the survivors from thirty years of military strife. The heart of the book is in the conversations that Teresa has recorded with the precision unique to a lawyer and advocate of women's rights. The reported dialogue is both convincingly transcribed and conveys the powerful empathy that the author feels toward the people, especially the women she meets.
There is respite from accounts of arrest and torture with evocative descriptions of the landscape entering Iraqi Kurdistan at Cizre [above], visiting Ashawa and especially a pomegranate orchard in Shaqlawa [below].
The author meets spirited survivors and women activists and explores the battle for equal rights. Contradictions of dress code and legal systems emerge among the Kurds: the largest people without a state in the world' according to the back cover.
Sweet Tea is a scholarly and moving portrait of the Kurdish Iraq, a valuable resource for historians and a telling testimony to the instinct for survival of the Kurdish people.
The book is available here
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