High school students Larissa Fekry (17) and Perjean Sangar (18) are typical teenage girls with a love for hip-hop. But living in Iraq, embracing western culture can be complicated.
“Of course it’s a bit weird in Kurdistan to see a girl dance but it’s not impossible, you just have to fight for it,” says Larissa.
They’re part of the multiethnic dance troupe Kroniclez Crew. Other members fled the civil war in Syria, the war against ISIS in Mosul, and political persecution in Iran. They’ve made a new home for themselves in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, and are making a name for themselves dancing in parks, malls, and displacement camps.
While the dancing is an escape, it also has a serious side – challenging social norms in a place like Kurdistan comes with backlash. While the region has received positive media coverage in the west for being a relatively moderate and democratic corner of the Middle East, Iraqi Kurdish culture is still strongly conservative and patriarchal. It’s the kind of place where posting a video of yourself twerking in your bedroom could result in an honor killing. Both girls have been subjected to online bullying and real-life restrictions for posting videos of themselves dancing.
Kids in Kurdistan are into things like hip-hop because they have recently become connected to the world. It’s the positive side to being glued to their smartphones all the time. There’s nothing to do in Erbil, the kids are bored, and they spend all day online. But this opens them up to new worlds, and being young people filled with energy, they take what they’ve learned in the digital space and try to recreate it in Erbil. Unfortunately, the conservative backlash also plays out in the digital space.
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