Tales From the Dead: Women and Health in a Kurdish Women’s Prison

Abstract

We conducted interviews with nine women incarcerated in the Sulaimani prison for women. We asked them about their past and present lives, and about their physical and mental health. Neither the prison itself nor the women’s lives bear any resemblance to the way in which prisons, especially Middle Eastern prisons, are portrayed in popular culture and in the media: the inmates had only praise for the prison food, housing, grounds, staff, and policies, they suffered deeply from their severance from kinship; many expressed their suffering somatically. The importance of one’s family role and family identity in Kurdish tradition cannot be overstated, and stripped this identity, the women live in a state of resigned limbo. Relationships between inmates were civil but shallow, and no interviewee revealed any sense of individualism or self-determination that would allow her to start over, remake herself, or build a new life.