Arez Khalid
Republic of Dreams is a newly published book that follows ordinary Kurdish families through their struggles from 1988 to 2022. The book sheds light on how these people have coped with struggles like genocide, displacement, protest, and civil war. The author told Rudaw that she wanted to pen a book that generates hope.
“I wrote this book in part because I wanted to share some of the stories of these very ordinary people whom I was meeting, people who were working class. But I really wanted to write a book that could provide hope,” Nicole Watts, professor of political science at San Francisco University told Rudaw’s Arez Khalid earlier this week.
She wanted this book to be something she could share with American people, including her family who do not know much about the Kurds, hoping it would change the biases they have towards the Kurdish region.
“I felt that if they could get to know the people in this book, that it would help them think much more warmly about this area and these people,” she said.
Watts explained that “the book begins with 1988 and the genocide and the Iran-Iraq war, but it moves all the way forward to 2022,” adding, “so there's a lot that we track through the book, but it's done through the lives and through the perspectives of this family, this boy and his family from Halabja.”
Watts has spent a lot of time in the Kurdistan Region where she has interviewed over 100 people including, ordinary people, officials, governors, and members of parliament to write her book.
Regarding the title of the book, she said “Kurdistan, the Kurdistan region of Iraq in particular, is so much a product of so many people's dreams and they fought so hard to create what we have here today.” [1]