In Sijîn, nothing happens to be without bias except for the story. Halmat is a Kurdish activist with ties to a political organization, torn between his love for Elham and fighting for his occupied homeland. Hiwa has chosen to play in the field of pleasure. The two main characters are the same person at different points in time.
The intersection of these two altered lives and their inamoratas uncovers scores of scuffs and scrapes between their ideals and expectations. Halmat is disappointed in Hiwa whereas, Hiwa compassionately regards him as immature. As Kurds, both characters' awareness of their cultural and linguistic challenges adds more colour to the story's texture. The narrator, who seems to be a sardonic persona of the main characters, attempts to digest everyone's fate based on life choices and pokes into their existence and the world's absurdities.
Such a complex collage surprisingly frames a sharp image of the Kurdish realities outside of their language and space. Written on the margins of multiple societies in Sweden, Iran, and Kurdistan, this fragmented narrative questions more fragmented journeys coping with the hierarchy of love.
Sijîn is Anwar Abasi's authorial move that persuades the contemporary Kurdish Novel to engage with text that reads the language of today's Kurdistan. A sceptical call for understanding the diaspora's anxieties invoking irony and sarcasm to pick at unhealed wounds.