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1 " Kurdistan won’t be free until women are "
― Ava Homa , Daughters of Smoke and Fire
2 " Was engaging with world issues a defense mechanism to trivialize personal pain, or was I doing it to be aware and responsible? "
3 " 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. "
4 " 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! "
5 " 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. "
6 " Nor did we know if the tight, dark days of hanging upside down was the onset of death or a necessary part of an incredible transformation. "
7 " 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. "
8 " 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. "
9 " 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? "
10 " 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? "
11 " 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. "
12 " 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. "
13 " 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. "
14 " 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. "
15 " If I could pack my unhappiness into snowballs, I would throw them at these people. "
16 " 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? "
17 " 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. "
18 " No. People do not suffer equally in this or any country. Talking about our reality is not spreading hate. It’s inviting understanding. "
19 " 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? "
20 " Women came in only two types: whores or dutiful slaves to their families. Good girls would not go to a park alone. Good girls would be content with having men breathe the fresh air on their behalf, take in all the oxygen one required to keep women at bay. "
