Ava Homa
Opening remarks
I would like to start by talking about the fact that two contradictory images of Kurdish women float in both Iranian media and international media. On one hand, Kurdish women are the unveiled women of the middle East that just put on colorful dresses. They dance hand in hand with men. They are comfortably associated with men at war, at work, at home, family, but on the other side of the spectrum, Kurdish women have been battered than even killed in the name of honor. They being victims of FGM and most strikingly specifically within the Iranian border, we have alarmingly high rates of suicides by a Kurdish woman. A lot of it is self-immolation. Suicide itself is a huge cry for help, but using fire and gas is a whole different level of screaming, how unjust and unfair the situation is. But to understand this paradox, on both sides of the spectrum, it’s important to look at the historical context. No matter which country the Kurds found themselves within, we’ve always been perceived and understood, not as human, but as threats. Threats to territorial integrity, threats to dictatorship and all of that. We have been reduced to risks and threats and sub-humans. We have been dealt with through annihilation to elimination, and that can be gassing in Iran, arbitrary, detentions, executions, a lot of executions all in the name of what they call ‘Moharaba’ which mean enmity against God’ which is a completely make-believe charge. Worse than that though, the idea of assimilation, where they destroy your language and culture and your identity, and they would allow a few is more of a shell of the human than someone who understands who they are and where they come from and what they’re fighting for.
But this fight borders that have separated Kurds across these different countries. It’s important to understand that our common language and culture, but also most importantly, the tragedies that we go through specifically because of our ethnicity has created really deep bonds between Kurdish women, regardless of which city they live in. So I grew up in Sanandaj (Sina) the Iranian part of Kurdistan but what happens to women in Diyarbakir, women in Kobani, affects me as much, if not more than what the decisions that are made by her. So understanding that affinity is very important understanding Kurdish women’s situation in general. In terms of rulers and governors, Western travelers have all those marvels about the fact that Kurdish people were the only people who had women as rulers and governors when their Turkish and Persian neighbors had never heard of such a thing. In fact, it was still common for Kurdish women to become rulers and governors that in Shahrazad’s ‘Qarar Nama’ is mentioned. Now, I’m not trying to say this idea exactly matches our today’s idea of feminism, where women are seen as independent individuals, that these were powerful, wealthy women who were married to, or were born into wealthy, powerful families, but it’s still for the time, it was unheard of. If you look at history in Kurdistan again, in Rojhelat we have had a lot of examples of powerful women. One of them is Adela Khatoun who created her own course of justice after she married Osman Pasha and moved to Halabja. She exercised her own influence over that until her death in 1924. In Bashur, in 1920 Habsa Khan was one of the powerful women who greatly emphasized women literacy and fought for it.
So where we are today and what we have achieved as Ozelm pointed out, it really signifies the shoulder of giants. And it’s been generations of resistance to the fight that got us here today. Even though the first woman organization was established in Istanbul in 1919, imagine 1919, American women got the right to vote only a hundred years ago, and that included only white women. Black women waited so much longer. By 1919 the Kurds had the first woman organization. In fact, in 1946, when we had the Mehabad Republic of Kurdistan Republic in Rojhelat, chapter four of article 21the constitution specifically stated that Kurdish women should enjoy equalizing, all political, economic and social affairs. Two of the 16 leaders who spoke on that day were women and their names were Khadeja SEdiqi and Esmat Qazi, and both of them called for women’s education.
So that’s our history in terms of present day Iranian Kurdistan, as it was obviously mentioned, in Iran that laws are specifically misogynistic and those lessons affected women, all different ethnic groups, regardless of their religion, their class or their sexual orientation, but obviously oppression is multilayer. So even though no woman in Iran can get married, get divorced, have custody of their children without a male permission via their father or their husband, they cant travel or even leave the country without husband’s permission. For most cases, there are some exceptional cases, but in general, women are obviously treated as sub-humans because you can’t make some simple, small decisions about your own jobs and traveling without having the man’s consent. But on the other hand, Kurdish women have experienced a variety of levels of oppression. So the national chauvinism of the ruling state, the male chauvinism of the rule extent and our own culture and misogyny of Islamic groups, and the continuing war in Rojhelat, we have a lot of economic problems. Poverty is a huge issue, unemployment. So, then outside of Rojhelat our statelessness means we have been ignored and excluded in both Middle Eastern studies and Western studies. Today, the Kurdish women of Iran have really strong and extremely amazing inspiring activists and feminists who have done a lot of work. And they have been successful in cutting down and things like FGM and kind of honor killing. They have been successful at raising awareness, but we cannot mention their names because their lives can be at risk. So they have to stay anonymous for their own safety, at least for now. And in my work , my focus is mostly on suicide prevention. I have worked with most of the women that I mentioned. First of all, those women who are risking their lives, risking the family’s safety in order to be able to work against these oppressions. On the other hand, the devastated women’s up attempt to suicide. And every time I look at this woman and hear their stories and extreme pressure and pain that they go through, I keep telling myself that if they were somewhere else, if they were in Kobani today, their situation would be different. So instead of turning on against themselves, they would be able to turn on all the suppression against their oppressors. And that was a problem in Iran. Iran has a lot of strong women has a very strong feminist group, but unfortunately the mainstream feminist are extremely ethnocentric. So they’re not capable of understanding nature, sectionality. They’re afraid of diversity, and they do not acknowledge that Kurdish women have a course in general, as a nation have legitimate rights and therefore the ethnically oppressive policies of the government that affects traditional men for their agenda, as well as the intensity is completely denied and overlooked by the mainstream feminist.
Obviously there are exceptions to that, but in general, women feminists who are afraid of admitting the national rights of the Kurds, have become unwitting agents of patriarchy themselves by denying the pressure and oppression that Kurdish women bear because of their ethnicity. When it comes to my own personal experience, I work with activists to suicide prevention workshop. like I said, this is the loudest cry for help. This is the loudest process, but is this also the biggest sign of how unhealthy that Iranian society is. When it comes to my writing and literature, I write about both groups of women.In fact, my protagonist and my novel, Daughters of smoke and Fire, Layla is a woman who starts by believing that her life is not worth living and that there is no way out of repression except ending it. She ends up becoming an artist and a filmmaker. So she is a person who goes through this entire spectrum. As a child, when I was coming of age I understood what Ozlem comes from and pointed out that on one hand, yes, I belong to one person. I belong to people who have been subjected to annihilation repeatedly, but on the other hand, just being alive, just breathing was the version in itself because there are so many forces at hand trying to take away even the right to raise you. So I grew up with these hush stories. They were hushed stories. They wouldn’t be said out loud because this was our parents and grandparents idea protecting us. But you hear these hush stories, massacre, how the soldiers came for us, how we survived them, how they came to kill us. They came to more than kill, lost how they torched our villages, raped our women, shot up father before the bright eyes of theri children, and so much more. The problem is those of us will survive the physical embrasure and in Iran, physical embrasure has not been as prominent as cultural embrasure. And the States that ruled over us in Iran, Kurds were denied. ‘You’re not, you’re just Iranian and you don’t have an independence identity.’ And if you do, then we were labeled ‘Mofsed-e-filarz’ the corruptors on earth, that’s what Khomeini called us. And obviously anyone who fights back is labeled a terrorist. So state terrorism is completely accepted, resisting is not! As Kurdish parents try to protect their children under the stimulus policy, we gradually lose part of our heritage and develop this cognitive dissonance between the generations where a grandchild may not be able to really communicate with their grandparents because of having lost their language.
So our language and history were banned. We were denied. We were defined by our oppressors reduced to subhumans, but I want to end on this note that in spite of, or maybe exactly because of all this, we became masters of rising from our own ashes. And the fact that that’s ‘Barxudan Zyana’ meaning resistance is life, is our model is not just a pretty thing to say. It’s actually literally what all of us have thought, including the woman here, the three of us who were working with you. We have seen the end of the world a few times before. And so my life works sense on this empowering intersection of literature and activism. I believe in the power of stories to evoke compassion and understanding. And I believe that with a little bit of guidance, the compassion can be turned into action.