"The Kurdish Bike" by Alesa Lightbourne

Alesa Lightbourne is currently retired from a career as an English professor and teacher in six countries. The Kurdish Bike is a lightly fictionalized account of her own experiences teaching English to Kurdish children at a school in a village in Başur (Iraqi Kurdistan), near Hewlêr. The novel is told from the first-person perspective of a narrator who is clearly herself. The book has won several awards, as our Book Club host Yüksel explained in introducing Lightbourne.

She began with a slideshow presentation, showing images of her cozy life on Whidbey Island, near Seattle. One day when one of her sons asked her what she would most like to do in the world, she replied, “Teach overseas again.” A few weeks later, in January 2010, she was on her way to an international school in rural Kurdistan. The school was one of a network of schools all run according to the same curriculum. The content of the daily lessons, it turned out, was rigidly standardized, and teachers were required to follow it precisely. Those who deviated got demerits. For these and other reasons, teacher turnover was high. Lightbourne, who had trained as a Montessori teacher, was unhappy with this pedagogy—although she enjoyed her students, after only two weeks she wanted to leave.

But instead of leaving, Lightbourne created an alternate life for herself in the surrounding village. While the rest of the school’s faculty remained cloistered in the Fortress, she purchased a bicycle and set out to explore, in bold defiance of local convention—here Kurdish adults and women didn’t ride bikes. Each day, after completing her daily teaching duties, she would head to the village, where over the course of a year she immersed herself in Kurdish lifeways and developed relationships with many of the villagers. For a year, she was part of the community, she explained to us, as she shared photos of the real-life individuals who became characters in the novel.

Among those closest to her was Bezma, a young female college student who was learning English. Bezma was involved in a romance with Hevar, a brash, hotheaded young man. The twosome intended to marry, but Bezma’s mother Ara saw in Hezar a potential for violence and stridently opposed the marriage. “The forbidden romance became a major plotline,” Lighbourne told us.

Another important real-life-based character is Houda, a veritable psychologist who served as the village midwife and also performed “cutting,” or female genital mutilation, on the village females. Lightbourne was shocked and dismayed when she discovered that all Kurdish girls were expected to be “cut,” while the villagers were astonished to learn that Lightbourne wasn’t cut—they thought all women were.

For Lightbourne, the response to cutting presented an ethical problem: having at one time been trained as an anthropologist, she wanted to accept the culture, but she was repelled by cutting. Similarly, she was horrified by honor killings; during her time there, three women were killed, one woman, simply for texting on her phone to a number that her husband didn’t immediately recognize. Sot the husband shot her.  “It’s hard for Westerners to accept,” Lightbourne told us.

It would have been easy to shape the book as a nonfiction memoir, but Lightbourne chose to fictionalize it, however lightly, both to give it structure and to protect the identities of the villagers. With her anthropology training, she knew how to observe lifeways and details. In her discussion with us, she clarified for us which events and characters are nonfiction (most of them) and which are composites or fictional.

Lightbourne’s journey into Kurdish lifeways becomes a similar journey for the reader, delving into the particularities of Kurdish culture. Book club participants said they loved the book. They admired Lightbourne’s bold choice to enter village life, her immersion in the local culture, and her steady handling of situations that arose. They equally admired her writing style and her fond recounting of details.

“I’m from Silêmanî,” one Book Club participant said. “I came to the US in 1996. I loved the book. The details were so accurate, I felt like I was back there. The descriptions were so rich. I couldn’t put it down. It was delicious to read. Thank you for that.”

“After describing a situation that you thought was foolish,” another said to Lightbourne, “you make astute comments. You evaluate things in a mature way.”

“I learned so much,” said another. “It was humbling.“

“You’ve worked all over the world,” another said, referring to Lightbourne’s teaching in Saudi and Singapore and elsewhere. “What did you find unique to the experience in Kurdistan in contrast to other places?”

Lightbourne did not hesitate to respond. “Kurds are the most generous people I’ve ever met,” she said. “Whenever I went to the village, people tried to give me things. They invited me into their homes, invited me for dinner. Yet they didn’t have anything. 

At one point during her time in Kurdistan, she said, she suffered a serious financial setback due to the greed of a predatory ex-husband. “I was made penniless,” said Lightbourne. “Ara [a village woman] offered to house and feed me for the rest of my life. That a woman with nothing could be so generous! Kurdish people were the most welcoming and open-hearted. Kurds are amazing people.”

Lightbourne said she also admires Kurds’ bravery. “What they have endured is mind-boggling. Yet they still love their Kurdishness more than any culture I’ve ever seen. In Saudi, people were proud of their religion. But for Kurds, it was all about Kurdish pride. They wear their local dress, they cook local foods, they prize their language. They don’t wear those colorful outfits only for Newroz, they wear them all the time. Kurds are very special. I wanted to stay there, but I didn’t want to stay at that school, and I couldn’t find a university job.”

We thank Alesa Lightbourne for her book and for visiting our Book Club. For more information about the book, visit the book’s website. It is available for purchase here. Lightbourne encourages those who enjoyed the book to write a review on Amazon, Goodreads, and Audible. She donates the proceeds from book sales to Kurdish refugees.