Daughters of Smoke and Fire

by Ava Homa

Settle for flying low and feeding on debris, and you’ll live a hundred years. “Chon beji sharta nakou chanda beji,” the eagle refuses. How long you lived was irrelevant; what mattered was how you lived.

The grease on the countertop glistened in the daylight, and cobwebs clung to the corners where the ceiling met the wall.

The writing is folded with many day-to-day life observations, the kind of style I am fond of reading...

I’d noticed that fewer of Baba’s things remained inside the bedroom he used to share with Mama.

Positioning a pillow behind his back, he sat down with a steaming cup of tea in his favorite spot in the house: on the handmade rug, one of the few things of his mother’s he still had. Firm and finely woven, it was made of symmetrical knots of crimson, white, and blue thread over a wool foundation; its many hues tied together our otherwise mismatched cast-off furniture.

The walls of the stall were covered with graffitied curses at Khomeini, Khalkhali, and Rafsanjani, calling them murderers and bloodsuckers. The janitor must have given up painting over them.

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

When they executed someone, they made the families pay for the very bullets that killed them just to get the body back. Kurdistan is full of mass graves, all called La’nat Awa.”

They wanted to stay alive, it seemed to me, not because of anything, but in spite of everything.

Soon I became engrossed in the story of Titanic too, half of which I had to make up to compensate for the language I didn’t understand. He fast-forwarded through all the kissing scenes while I looked down and played with the hem of my skirt.

Watching tv with Asian parents...

One of the recurring images I have of my old man is how he tried to hide a tear while watching Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi’s Turtles Can Fly, which depicted a girl trying to get rid of her infant, conceived when a group of American soldiers raped her. In watching these films, I gained a reason to wake up each morning.

Need to add the film to watchlist

I wanted to feed her in return for her kindness, especially because she’d let me borrow the DVD of Scent of a Woman, our favorite movie, for three whole weeks. I’d kept it hidden between the pages of an English-Persian dictionary that had become my holy book, helping me understand the dialogue I devoured.

Happy to see my favorite movie is liked by people across different regions...

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.

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

Most Persians used our tragedies to say Iranian Kurds had it better than those in Iraq or Turkey in an attempt at whitewashing the crimes of their country and pretending that tragedy could be weighed and measured like so many kilos of potatoes.

The street had a pulse of its own; women walked by us in tight, colorful manteaux and loose headscarves, others covered in black chadors; some men wore suits, and some wore tight jeans, all headed toward some purpose. The smell of car exhaust, kebab, and freshly baked pastry, the calling of peddlers, the laughter of flirtatious young men and women—the thrum of the city bolstered me high.

A walk on an avenue in Tehran

Tehran was divided by an invisible border, but snobbery was wide ranging, either a custom of big cities or part of the ubiquitous, contagious, and unquestioned contempt for whoever was deemed shahrestooni—those who were not from Tehran—who ironically made up the greater part of the city’s population.

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? 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.

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.

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.

Ali forces a laugh. “Does your foot still hurt?” “My entire body does, Ali gian. But this is the pain of a nation . . . and the cure too. So it’s not all that bad.”

No, I will not let them kill me. Not inside. After all, the high walls here can’t stop me from seeing the moon and stars. Being enclosed behind bars cannot stop me from knowing that out there the Zagros Mountain dances slowly to the sound of the tambour. 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.

trying to recall Rumi poems. “In this imaginary plain of nonexistence/I am your spring of eternal life.”

I now understood why she and perhaps other mothers sang lullabies: to prepare children for all the sorrow awaiting us along the way while putting us to sleep.

“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.”

Trees and flowers bloom despite human barbarism. Maybe I can too?

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

A familiar show appeared on the screen: the story of a New York comedian, his pathetic friend, and an intrusive neighbor. Nothing about it seemed funny to me, and I couldn’t believe people in real life slept around so mindlessly, as if having sex were no more intimate than a handshake.

“When your best is no longer enough, when your name is no longer pronounceable, when your identity becomes an obstacle to human connections, you know you are an immigrant,”

“The greatest power parents have is in screwing you up, better than what your worst enemy could manage.”

quoted the legendary poet Ahmad Shamlou: “A mountain begins with its first rocks and a human with the first pain.”