When I was seven years old, I wrote a few fragments in my journal about my large, Kurdish family gatherings. Really my “journal” was just a stack of small square pages taken from my dad’s work stationary. I wrote, “We eated dolma it wus good. And the grownups played cards a lot. The grownups talk a lot.” Growing up in North Carolina, my diasporic connection to my Kurdish culture and identity was through my family, only.
When I began connecting with Kurdish writers and journalists in 2019 with the idea of a translation project, one of these voices, Hoshang, sat with me frequently over coffee. One evening at a local spot, he sighed, crossed his legs, took a sip from his mug, swallowed, and admitted he’s less interested in my translation project and more interested in what he referred to as a journey to [my] roots. “Write about that,” he said.
When I set out to curate a transnational, multi-genre anthology of contemporary Kurdish women and nonbinary writers, I was eager to create something that I wished already existed. I wanted to see a collection in the English language that celebrated the creative work of Kurdish women writing and publishing all over the world. To my surprise, what came together was more than a book. This collection became an embodiment of community. “It has become a vehicle for connectivity. It is a site of togetherness,” I wrote in the book’s introduction.
The relationships I’ve built with Kurdish writers, scholars, feminists, and community over the years of bringing this book into the world has nourished and enriched my life in ways that I didn’t even know I needed. To feel connected to my Kurdish identity, roots, and culture beyond just my family unit has been healing and exhilarating. But beyond the self, the process of curation has allowed the writers in the book to get to know each other, to share opportunities and resources with each other, and to support each other’s work and lives.
Hoshang introduced me to the exiled poet Zhawen Shali. We had our first phone calls when she was living in the Midwest. The first time we met, she held my hands, we cried together, and we became family immediately. Working with Zhawen and her husband, Arash Saleh, to translate and publish her poetry has been a road trip in language exploration and adoration. Those hours poring over her words, I became amazed at the possibilities of poetics, of language, of diction, of articulation.
Take these three stanzas from Shali’s “A Night With No Country” for example:
“Another day” may be only a concept
absconded from the dictionary of deception
into the language of cosmos.
I am devoid of…
I am destiny.
Do you remember those nights?
Hanging in there,
you were just like a backpack on my shoulders.
Through strange ups and downs,
inside the jail,
there existed another jail
that introduced multiple shadows to my being.
Here the poet unpacks the solitude, isolation, and insurmountable weight of displacement. Loss and longing brought us together. Khushkakam, we call each other, my sister. We’ve been through fertility journeys and pregnancies together. We work together in translation and publication. We care for each other in poetics and humanity.
At events for the book, other young Kurdish writers introduce themselves to us, growing the web wider. Kurdish writers have reached out to me digitally as well after finding the book. Kurdish community members attend the events and chat at length with us. In Boston, at Brookline Booksmith, a Kurdish elder with significant life experience, said at the end of the book signing, “I am proud of you, of all of you.” These are the moments that feel most important. I carried a heavy responsibility in putting the book together and felt the weight of it right before the book came out. I wanted—want—this to be a product that Kurds can hold in their hands and feel a sense of pride. That we can feel a togetherness from and around the book.
Around the same time I started working on this collection, I was talking with the president of the Kurdish Student Organization that I advise. When I asked Ala about her goals for the group, she said, among other things, “that she wanted people to know that ‘we aren’t just sitting around eating dolma all the time.’” In making selections for the collection, I worked to show audiences as much variety as possible. I hoped to offer depictions of reality and to push against monolithic stereotypes. Hero Kurda, a poet, essayist, and teacher living in Southern Kurdistan, writes in her essay “Except for Poetry, Nothing Else Shields Me:”
Sometimes people ask me how it was that I could write erotic poems and not encounter trouble, or how I was not stopped from doing it altogether. Poetry inhabits its own strange realm. The impossible becomes possible and it makes one accept that which cannot be accepted and helps one find beauty in it. It is true that Kirkuk is going through its own special circumstances, but it is less influenced by what the mullahs have to say. The city has a centuries-old history of intellectualism and culture. Literature and culture are more dominant than oppression and prohibition.
I end the anthology with this essay because I like the idea of closing on a note about the power and possibilities of poetry and literature. I am grateful for Hero’s dispelling of myths. Hero is now a dear friend of mine, too. We leave each other voice memos which most often end in laughter.
Finally, one of the poems that sits with me the most from the collection, that simultaneously delights and haunts me, is Hiva Panahi’s “Secrets of the Snow.” I’m compelled by the way that the snow blankets the city in blessing but one cannot help but to also see the white dust of genocide. This chilling confluence generates a reading experience that calls me to return to the poem again and again. At the end of the second stanza, she writes:
The night of the heavy snow
My room filled with butterflies and water lilies
Till morning I sat with them in gardens
Snow all day
Snow all night
I’m in love with the magic in the poem. The surreal, the transcendence. Panahi’s lines invite the reader into a world that feels both within and beyond reach. After three more longish stanzas, the poem closes:
It falls ceaselessly
White, white
Life instead of genocide
The snow is a big soul
The snow is generous
Everything has become white
The snow has a soft heart
It covers the bloodstained city
Before I invited Hiva’s work into the collection, we chatted digitally and then met over zoom. She was living in Greece at the time and now resides in Switzerland. Her journey as an exiled writer has been hurdle upon hurdle. She is the epitome of Kurdish resilience (a word unfortunately too often associated with Kurds). Our WhatsApp messages are full of flowers, hearts, and kisses.
Poetry ignites something within us; we ignite something within each other. We carry the torch forward, lighting the path for one another. We keep each other warm. Within this season of Sleeping in the Courtyard, I have felt so embraced and reflected. The writers and community engaging with the book are feeling this, too. These relationships are sacred gifts that I cherish as much as—more than—the book itself.
