"The Mountains We Carry" by Zaid Brifkani

Zaid Brifkani, The Mountains We Carry (Author, 2021). Fiction, based on true stories.

Discussed at our Book Club on October 4, 2022.

Zaid Brifkani, originally from Duhok, now lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife and three children. He is a practicing physician specializing in internal medicine, with a subspecialty in kidney transplants, and runs a dialysis clinic. He is the president of Kurdish Professionals, a nonprofit that that serves the community by empowering youth, encouraging academic achievement, and advancing careers. 

Dr. Brifkani was present for our meeting. The novel is set in northern Iraq in the early 1990s. In 1988 Saddam Hussein’s regime had attacked  Kurdish areas using aerial bombing and chemical weapons, in the campaign known as the Anfal. Three years later Iraqi Kurds, believing the regime had been weakened by the Iran-Iraq War, rose up against it. But the regime crushed the uprising.  Millions of Kurds fled to the Turkish and Iranian borders, seeking refuge. There they encountered new forms of pain, betrayal, dislocation, and trauma. The Mountains We Carry traces the fate of a family whose members make this journey but become separated in the process and encounter different fates. It is fiction but based on  the experiences of real Kurdish people, whom Dr. Brifkani interviewed in Nashville. Nashville is the place in the United States with the largest concentration of Kurds, many of them Iraqi refugees like himself.

Brifkani told the Book Club: “Certain thoughts are very difficult for an author to put into writing, because you want to run away from trauma. But sometimes just talking about things that happened to us, good and bad, can make us feel better—it’s psychology. I was trying to express the feelings of one Kurd while a lot of things were changing rapidly. … So many cultures, civilizations, languages converge in our part of the world, and we have so much history. … And history contains good and bad—it’s part of humanity. To understand present conflicts, you have to go back centuries to find out why things happened. If things are ever going to get better, we have to have the right picture of what happened. … The fact that we are on the run doesn’t mean we have nothing to offer.  We’re not solely victims. We’ve been part of civilization from a long time. We had to leave our land, but we brought our love of the mountains with us. That’s the first part of making things better. If your story is all about loss, you won’t be able to move on. You take your identity with you and rebuild. It’s tragic to leave things behind, but we take the land and love of the mountains with us and rebuild wherever we are.”

The Mountains We Carry is available for purchase on the author’s website.