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In my head, God was a smiling moon who loved Chia and me.
Little by little, we began to understand that our mother tongue wasn’t the language of power and prosperity.
I catch a glimpse of a stranger trudging inside me,
If I could pack my unhappiness into snowballs, I would throw them at these people.
I saw in her the rapture of being alive.
“Kurdistan is the land of bravery and betrayal; it asks to be embraced but bites you when in your arms.”
the rage he harbored had killed all other impulses in him, chewing at the core of his compassion before spitting it back out.
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.
pretending that tragedy could be weighed and measured like so many kilos of potatoes.
Scattered snowflakes danced down, indifferent to the disquiet lurking in the city.
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.
“Our three decades of resistance against the Islamic Republic was dismissed as separatism or violence because it was a poor man’s fight.”
Whatever name the dates bore—July, August, September—they were identical purgatories for me.
I was borne on a pendulum between faith and terror, between agitation and paralysis.
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.”
The cricket is my witness. She knows that, despite the injustice inside the prison, the day and night do not steal each other’s turn in their freedom.
Dictators are nourished by fear, hostility among the citizenry, and above all, apathy.”
“No. People do not suffer equally in this or any country. Talking about our reality is not spreading hate. It’s inviting understanding.”
News to me is history to you.”
I rocked in the water and felt like I was part of infinity, a relative to the sun and the sky.
Our experiences piled up, broke down into a rich soil, and in the heat of life, some seeds buried in the dark began to sprout.
