16 Quotes by Ava Homa

Kurdistan won’t be free until women are

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.

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.

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

I was terrified that I was supposed to be living and I wasn’t, that I must have some prospect and I didn’t.

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.

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.

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?