Ava Homa > Quotes

“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.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“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.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“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.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and 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.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“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.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“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?”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“It's dark comedy, the way tiny tyrants demand democracy.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“If I could pack my unhappiness into snowballs, I would throw them at these people.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“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!”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“So ridiculous that the battles fought by wealthy countries are called ‘World War’ and poor countries’ fights are ‘tribal war!”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“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?”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“Was engaging with world issues a defense mechanism to trivialize personal pain, or was I doing it to be aware and responsible?”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“Kurdistan won’t be free until women are”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“In this country we are subhuman. We’re women, and we’re also Kurdish. I need some dignity, something to hope for.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“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.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“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.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“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.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“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.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“No. People do not suffer equally in this or any country. Talking about our reality is not spreading hate. It’s inviting understanding.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“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?”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“As I ran, a wail escaped my chest. I was headed toward the main road, toward the world of men. The streets belonged to them. Judgmental men. Hypocritical men. Their-honor-depended-on-women men.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“The truth is that they don’t really want to kill us all. How else are they going to get people to vote for them if there isn’t some ‘enemy’ out there? I see it so clearly now.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“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.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“I bit the insides of my cheeks to swallow down my tears. 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, chewing at the core of his compassion before spitting it back out. And here I was, sliding down a similar inevitable path.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“Dreams matter, Leila gian.” He nodded, stood behind me, and whispered, “Desires matter. Take them seriously.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“Peshmerga: those who face death. What a brave girl. An educated dreamer at a time when women weren’t supposed to be either.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“If the walls of Iranian prisons testified to what they had witnessed firsthand, God’s heart would shatter into a million pieces.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“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.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“Why don’t you ask your darling son to make himself useful?” “He has to study.” “So do I!” I yelled, and my voice reverberated through the house. “Don’t kid yourself. With or without a degree, you’ll have to do what all women do. You might as well get good at it.”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire

“My lullaby passes through the concrete walls. Other prisoners, political and nonpolitical, are quiet. My lullaby soothes them even though not everyone speaks my language. Some sob like infants. “Ly-ly-ly-ly . . . Kazhollei chaw kazhallem . . . ly-ly-ly . . .”
― Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire