If Destroyed Still True #6: Iraqi Kurdistan edition

I’ve been to ten or so countries since 2011 began. When people ask, I recite the list, but there’s one place that cancels out all the others. Their eyebrows shoot up when they hear the name. “Iraq! What was Iraq like?”

I have trouble answering this question. I don’t know what exactly they want to hear about, and maybe they don’t know either. I can’t fit all my experiences into a sentence. I think about the mountains and the call to prayer and the food. I think about walking in Dohuk at night, about getting lost in the park in Erbil, about the goatherds in the Zagros mountains, about the central square in Sulaimany, about the checkpoint in Kirkuk, about how my senses sharpened when we realised we needed to get out of that car, about the kindness of the family that hosted me, about the protests and about the friend who I feared might be dead.

Usually I just say “It was good”, or sometimes “It was mostly good.”

So I wrote If Destroyed Still True #6: Iraqi Kurdistan edition. It tells of hitch-hiking experiences good and bad, encounters with Kurdish and American soldiers, the kindness of strangers, being stranded, death threats, and the demonstrations in the region that have been largely unreported in the western press. At 28 A5 pages it’s the longest issue I’ve produced. It’s entirely handwritten, but fear not! My handwriting has frequently been mistaken for a font.

“sometimes charming, sometimes terrifying” – Sticky Institute

“has something to say and is perfectly astute in saying it. A must read” – Fulsome Prism

“beautiful, thoughtful, a testimony of feelings felt and questions asked” – Said The Gramophone

review in Fahrenheit C3100 podcast · review by Said The Gramophone

Okay, so, here’s the deal. I’m pinballing around the world on a low income, which on one hand is a very luxurious thing to be able to do at all, and on the other hand makes for a fairly precarious existence and uncertainty as to how long I’ll be able to do this. Due to the noble tradition of people making zines at a financial loss, I feel weird asking for more money than I shelled out at the copy shop, and yet, hell, I put a lot of work into it and could seriously do with some funds. I don’t tend to spend money on anything beyond food, drink and transport, and making any profit on my zine won’t change that: it’ll just enable me to keep living this way for a bit longer. But I don’t want people on low budgets (people like me!) to feel that they can’t afford a copy, so it’s up to you to decide how much you can spare, if anything. I’m currently asking £3 as a bottom line price, which should cover production costs and postage to anywhere (I’m country-hopping too frequently at the moment to calculate it any more precisely); anything extra is greatly appreciated but absolutely not expected; there is no need to explain your decision.

If you’re someone I already know and you have a UK bank account and you want to make a transfer, that’d be cool with me and we could knock a bit off the price as a result. Otherwise, we’re looking at PayPal.

Bottom line: £3.

Here’s a handy PayPal button. (Any questions? Email me: nine at jinxremoving dot org.)

If you feel like telling other people about my zine, I won’t mind at all. Thanks for reading.

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