NEWS

Kurd on a mission to preserve her culture

Ariana Maia Sawyer
USA TODAY NETWORK – Tennessee
Chimen Mayi is an ethnobotanist, gardening professional, plant biology student and former refugee.

The Nashville Kurds have been living green since before it was cool.

And Chimen Mayi, an ethnobotanist, gardening professional, plant biology student and former refugee, hopes to show the world how it's done.

Like many other Kurdish families, Mayi's parents used gardening as a sort of outdoor pantry when they fled war in Iraq for Nashville in the early 1990s. She was 13 years old when she arrived.

“When we first moved here, we were immigrants,” she said. “And we didn’t have a lot of money so we had to grow a lot of our own food."

Bright eyed and smiling in the way people do when they talk about their passions, Mayi explains:

Grapevines produce the leaves used to wrap rice and seasoned meat into tasty dolmas. Stinging nettles turn into a nutritious soup, cooked with gloves up to the elbows and knee-high boots to avoid their syringe-like poison needles. And purslane, capable of growing even through sidewalk cracks, is a breakfast favorite when sauteed with eggs or mixed with yogurt and eaten with naan.

These and other traditional Kurdish foods also have medicinal properties, the knowledge of which has been passed from generation to generation in an oral tradition that dates back to antiquity.

Living in a country that spent little money on roads made getting to a doctor very difficult for village families whose primary means of transportation was a mule, Mayi said.

"In our history, Iraq is always at war with someone. Infrastructure became something of a pastime," she said. "We can’t go to the doctor and get antibiotics or an IV drip obviously, so you have to figure out what to do."

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That's how Mayi knows that grape leaves are also used for their antiseptic properties, nettles for good health and purslane for its diuretic benefits.

Chimen Mayi stands in the garden at her Nashville home May 10, 2017. An ethnobotanist, Mayi is on a mission to preserve the oral history of Kurdish agricultural practices.

"Like, you’re walking down the street with your grandparents or your parents and they stop and look at the plant and say, 'Oh, if you have an infection, take one of these leaves and (crush it) and wrap it around the infection and the swelling will go down,' " she said, using her hands to pulverize imaginary plants. "It’s ingrained in our heads from a really young age."

Kurdish people have historically occupied large swaths of the Fertile Crescent where plants and animals were first domesticated and farmers used complex techniques such as automated irrigation and grafting to produce genetic variability.

Mayi remembers spending time as a child on her grandparents' farm outside the Mosul area, between the northeastern mountains and hilly deserts where they grew a sundry of fruits, vegetables and grains, including pomegranates, plums, apricots, cereals, wheat and grapes.

Her farming education was interrupted by chemical weapons, bombs and genocide.

"Ironically, (the Fertile Crescent) is probably right now one of the most infertile places on the planet,” she said.

Since Kurdish families were forced to migrate inward to larger cities while forces led by Saddam Hussein demolished thousands of their villages in the late 1980s, killing tens of thousands of Kurds, according to the Human Rights Watch, younger generations born into a more cosmopolitan lifestyle have had less use for information about ancient farming techniques or the curative power of certain plants, Mayi said.

Others, like Mayi's family, were forced to flee, hiding in the mountains, living for years in transit or placed in refugee camps and eventually settling abroad.

Sumac fruit from the collection of Chimen Mayi at her home in Nashville on Feb. 13, 2017

Kurdish millennials are at risk of losing the long thread of farming knowledge as a result, she said. Even she forgot a lot of what her grandparents told her, until she began studying plant biology at Middle Tennessee State University. It came rushing back.

An ethnobotanist now, Mayi is on a mission to preserve the oral history of Kurdish agricultural practices.

"The plan is to go back and to really capture it in writing and bring it back," she said.

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In the meantime, she wants to help low-income families and even businesses grow their own food.

At The Renaissance, a restaurant and hotel downtown where she works as a server, she's responsible for tending the rooftop garden. In the winter, she was trying to grow whole pineapples from the leftover tops of the fruit.

"I think moving into the future this is something I’d really like to do, to teach people how to harvest all of — not their trash — but all of their items that they could potentially recycle and move them into growing new food," she said.

She wants to teach families how to give their pantries a "green face-lift," so that, instead of spending money at the grocery store, they can go outside and harvest their own food.

"The thing that makes me smile from my heart all the way to my face is knowing that, down the road, I can teach something that my family did to put food on our table because we didn’t have a lot of money," Mayi said. "You know, whether or not you have money, you can always appreciate a fresh salad grown nearby."