Daughters of Smoke and Fire

by Ava Homa

My father needed nursing just as much as the helpless Kurds in Iran, the homeless ones in Iraq, the hopeless ones in Turkey, and the stateless ones in Syria.

I catch a glimpse of a stranger trudging inside me, in rare moments when the persistent fog evaporates, I wrote. In lightning flashes, I notice a tormentor at work when external persecutors are asleep. The wound is said to be the place where the Light enters you, but the Dark can sneak in from the same place.

“Kurdistan is the land of bravery and betrayal; it asks to be embraced but bites you when in your arms.”

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.

Bahman Ghobadi’s Turtles Can Fly,

Yilmaz Güney’s Yol,

The snow on the high mountaintops had not yet given up to the spring sun, but the hill was dotted with patches of flowers. Among them, I came across a shiler, the crown imperial lily, a rare beauty. The petals faced downward, and a crown of small leaves sat proudly on top of each stem. Red poppies burned bright under the sun and danced with the breeze. They urged me to hold on a little longer.

When I opened my eyes, I watched as butterflies flew overhead, spreading their dotted wings of orange, brown, and black as they moved from red poppies to the yellow bushes of wildflowers, to hawthorns and jasmines, whose fragrance overpowered all the other fresh scents. Almond and wild pear trees were still and serene. The wheateaters, serins, and other birds were singing in a majestic orchestra.

my occupied homeland was a birthplace of death.

At the top of the hill, Bapir sobbed with such force that his wails shook the earth, Alan felt. He clutched Bapir’s hunched shoulders and felt impossibly small. A sunburnt man and a neighbor with shrunken features hugged Bapir, then placed the old man’s trembling arms around their shoulders and walked him down the hill. “Where are my other sons?” Bapir gasped for air. “Let’s get you home,” the neighbors told him.

Alan was a popular name, meaning “flag bearer.” It testified to what was expected of the children of a stateless nation, who had to fight against nonexistence.

Before Karo, men’s eyes on me had always felt predatory, but yesterday it had felt as if his eyes were caressing me like hands, tender and pleasing.

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?”

But you can’t speak a word of our language, right?” I wondered what made one a Kurd and what made one half of that. Having only one Kurdish parent, or was it more about resisting ethnocide, going the extra mile to learn the language, to understand the history?

I hope you know that deceptions like that are not part of Kurdish culture. In fact, it’s usually the opposite: We’re straightforward to a fault. What bothers me is that you barely acknowledge the prejudice at the heart of your story and in the dilemma you now face. Would you have hesitated to declare it to the world if you had discovered you were half German or English, despite their histories with Nazism and colonialism? You know that embracing your Kurdishness comes at a price, a huge price.”

Life is perhaps that enclosed moment when my gaze destroys itself in the pupils of your eyes.

In 1988 all the gods watched the villagers’ bodies burning and spitting. But they inclined their heads toward those fires only to light the cigarettes on their lips.

Perhaps trauma was a Kurdish heritage, passed down through generations.

“Why it is that Kurds had female rulers and governors in the eighteenth century, at a time when that was unheard of among Persians and Turks, but now we have such high rates of suicide by fire. What happened to Kurdish women?”

We are denied our identity, and when we protest, we are denied life.”

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.

Until coming face-to-face with death, I had taken cruelty personally, overlooking how that kind of ruthlessness had roots deep in the history of humankind. It didn’t matter if my name was Leila or Njorge, if I spoke Hebrew or Navajo—it was most certainly not about me.

“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,”

The end of racism and other fears will be the end of dictators. Our weapons may look like toys before their artillery, but what we stand for scares the hell out of them. So they’re more focused on distorting our image than actually killing us, and they can do that. They control the masses through media.”

Poetry is such a cure for loneliness.

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.

My dear students, my pen gallops. All I was able to do was teach you our alphabet, our literature, and our history. Please, children, pass it on. Dear little ones, never allow this knowledge to steal from you the joy of childhood. May you keep the memories of youth in your minds forever. It may be the one and only investment you can use later when the agony of earning your bread and butter dominates you, my sons, and the sin of being “the second sex” overpowers you, my daughters.

Remember not to turn your backs on your dreams, loves, music, poetry, and Kurdistan’s magical nature. Join together and recite folk songs as we used to do.

I have seen a child’s birth. Cries and struggles are the first signs of life, not of weakness. “A mountain begins with its first rocks and a human with the first pain.”

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 . . .”