Daughters of Smoke and Fire

Time passed. I wasn’t sure how long I lay there among the flowers, behind a huge stone on the hill, fantasizing about a serene nonexistence.

Little by little, we began to understand that our mother tongue wasn’t the language of power and prosperity. At a young age, our alienation from Kurdish history and literature – from our roots, identity, and inevitably our parents – began, escalating with each year that passed.

I could answer that question. Women who lost all reason to live wanted their internalized burning rage to manifest on the outside too. A dramatic death testified to an agonizing life.

Sitting across the dinner table was a man who had paid a massive price for hoping and trying for a just world, who had fathered and then neglected me, who wasn’t aware that the rage he harbored had killed all other impulses in him […] And here I was, sliding down a similar inevitable path.

In the meantime, a massive and frightening bleakness inside me kept expanding and rattling. Sometimes I wrote about it in my diary, sensing that if I didn’t somehow fill the hollowness, it would swallow my heart and spit out my core. Other times I wished for the emptiness to scrape me off, a permanent erasure. I was terrified that I was supposed to be living and I wasn’t, that I must have some prospect and I didn’t.

It's dark comedy, the way tiny tyrants demand democracy.

The moral of the story is a large group of people should be deprived of one basic right so they won’t ask for their other rights?

No. People do not suffer equally in this or any country. Talking about our reality is not spreading hate. It’s inviting understanding.

Rich inner life, Chia had said. Rich inner life. One’s only reliable investment and the most loyal companion. I was slowly building one too.

Why fire? Why? Did you know that our region has the world’s highest rate of female self-immolation? There. We hold one international record. Despite our long tradition of having female rulers and governors, we’ve become a nation of burned women. I ask again, why fire?

In this country we are subhuman. We’re women, and we’re also Kurdish. I need some dignity, something to hope for.

So ridiculous that the battles fought by wealthy countries are called ‘World War’ and poor countries’ fights are ‘tribal war!

If I could pack my unhappiness into snowballs, I would throw them at these people.

Some of the customers would ask me, “Why are Kurds so hated in Turkey and Iraq?” As if I were responsible for dissecting idiocy and ignorance, as if cruelty and racism had a philosophical theory I was supposed to recite because I belonged to its victimized group. No one ever asked, “How does it feel to be a Kurd in a hateful world?

Was engaging with world issues a defense mechanism to trivialize personal pain, or was I doing it to be aware and responsible?

I want to be talked to. The world needs to accept us as people with strengths and weaknesses. For generations of Kurds, life has begun and ended in violence. I hope that time has passed.

The rage I’d kept bottled up inside of me boiled over, made me brave. I screamed at the guard who told me to fuck off. “International interventions will soon put a stop to your brutality!

Kurdistan won’t be free until women are

How long could I continue like this, crushed as I was beneath the daily cruelties faced by my people? Denied our language and history, policed and imprisoned, tortured and executed – when combined with my personal failures it was too much to bear.

I swallowed, wanting to say something, but I didn’t know what. That he was a gifted storyteller? That I understood him well because I also suffered, even though my exposure to genocide and incarceration was secondhand? In fact, that was the problem. My imprisonment and motherlessness was figurative, his literal.

My lullaby passes through the concrete walls. Other prisoners, political and nonpolitical, are quiet. My lullaby soothes them even though not everyone speaks my language. Some sob like infants. “Ly-ly-ly-ly . . . Kazhollei chaw kazhallem . . . ly-ly-ly . . .

what—one of my cellmates knows a lot of poems. I’ve been memorizing most of what he has recited for us. His poetry reminds me of the songs you used to hum. It’s such a joy, Leila. I never knew. Poetry is such a cure for loneliness. You see, if you’re stuck on an island all alone, somewhere deserted, you can recite poetry and lo and behold, poof! Loneliness fades away. When I am out, we will see which of us knows

Joanna, it’s so hard to love parents who don’t know how to love. It’s even harder to love yourself when your parents didn’t love you.

Mama’s tenacity and unmatched skills at getting on people’s nerves made the authorities promise to return the body under the condition that the deceased’s family signed documents under oath, guaranteeing that they would neither hold a funeral nor bury him during daylight. Even after all this, it took them days to deliver the body they claimed was Chia’s.

The truth is that they don’t really want to kill us all. How else are they going to get people to vote for them if there isn’t some ‘enemy’ out there? I see it so clearly now.

Arguing with the rules, complaining about your bad hand . . . none of that works. Shift your focus on playing your hand the best you can and notice the difference,

If the walls of Iranian prisons testified to what they had witnessed firsthand, God’s heart would shatter into a million pieces.

Dreams matter, Leila gian.” He nodded, stood behind me, and whispered, “Desires matter. Take them seriously.

I looked at his serious face as he rubbed my shoulder affectionately. He looked down at me reassuringly, and my anger and fear evaporated. Life is perhaps that enclosed moment when my gaze destroys itself in the pupils of your eyes. Indeed.

I wondered what made one a Kurd and what made one half of that.