By Jamie Watt
Years ago, in a small town with a mountain filling the kitchen window, I sat at a table covered in household objects and could not tell a fork from a spoon.
Not in English. In Behdini. Çetel û kevçî. I had gathered the items myself: cups, plates, a teapot, the fork, the spoon. Across the table sat a young Kurdish man about my age. I will call him Bêwar. Every time I mixed up the fork and the spoon, and I mixed them up constantly, he encouraged me and started again. He was proud that a foreigner wanted to learn Behdini. He never made me feel foolish. He just pointed at the spoon again.
I thought I was learning words. I was learning a world.
Take one word. Serçava. I heard it everywhere in that town. When I asked for directions, for a favor, for anything at all, the word came back to me. For weeks I did not know what it meant. It means, literally, on my eyes: your request rests on my eyes. The answer to a stranger’s request is not “sure” or “no problem.” It is a vow. That one word taught me more about how Kurds honor a guest than anything I ever read.
That is what those months at Bêwar’s table gave me. Not vocabulary. Eyes. Mistake by mistake, I began to understand how my neighbors see the world. Their view of politics, which runs deeper than any news cycle. Their view of culture, where hospitality is not a custom but an identity. More than ten years in Erbil have been built on what a patient young man laid down one fork and one spoon at a time.
I thought about Bêwar this month when I read the news from China.
This September, Beijing Foreign Studies University opens China’s first formal Kurdish language program, approved by the Ministry of Education. Students will study Sorani for three years and add Kurmanji in the fourth. Dr. Barzan Jaafar of Salahaddin University, where more than one hundred Kurdish students already study Chinese, calls it the start of a genuine two-way relationship, and something more: a signal of China’s recognition of the Kurdistan Region as a distinct cultural and linguistic entity.
A great power on the other side of the world just told its brightest students that Kurdish is worth four years of their lives.
China does not do these things sentimentally. China is Iraq’s largest trading partner, Iraqi oil flows east in enormous volumes, and Chinese companies are building across this country under the Belt and Road Initiative. Beijing has spent a decade adding languages like Kurdish to its universities for a simple strategic reason: you cannot do business with people you cannot understand. When a country starts teaching its young people your mother tongue, it is not planning to visit. It is planning to stay.
The most commercially minded project on earth looked at the map and reached the conclusion I reached at a kitchen table: the way into Kurdistan is through Kurdish.
This was a hard year for the Region. Yet this summer, professors in Beijing were finalizing a curriculum in Sorani.
So this column is for my Kurdish readers. I have heard young people in Erbil say English matters more, that Kurdish is only for home. Hear this from a foreigner who has spent years inside your language: it is worth crossing the world for. I found in it a way of seeing, and a people who answer a stranger’s request with their eyes. Students in Beijing will spend four years looking for what Bêwar handed me across a kitchen table.
Bêwar, wherever you are, I hope you hear this news. The classroom you ran at that table has a branch campus now. It is in Beijing. And the language you were so proud to teach one slow American is on its syllabus.