Books Over Birthright
Hewraman Village, Kurdistan, Iran. Photo by Farzad Mohsenvand
How Rumi, Orwell, and Montgomery Helped One Kurdish Writer to Transcend Borders
I was an unwanted child of a country that perceived me as a living crime. To the theocratic fundamentalists ruling Iran, women and minorities were threats to be subjugated. But on top of being a Kurdish woman, I was also a secular writer whose characters employed agency in the face of oppression, a journalist who believed in gender and ethnic equality, an avid reader with a burning curiosity to explore everything life had to offer. Such transgressions were punishable by imprisonment and execution. To this day, countless thousands of dissidents and intellectuals have been hanged or are languishing on death rows, convicted of “Moharebeh,” the make-believe crime of “enmity against God.”
I yearned for freedom as I looked for ways to extricate myself from a state that was never mine. Having a passport issued by Iran meant I could travel almost nowhere. Applying for visas meant asking the world to consider me as a person, not as the subject of a government that could, at a whim, turn parts of the planet into mushroom clouds. Even with a visa, my hard-earned salary could barely buy me a plane ticket to Europe.
I managed to travel within Iran; attend graduate school in the metropolitan capital, Tehran; see the beautiful north and south coasts and the ancient sites around the country. But traveling only made me more aware of how the Kurdistan region was deliberately left to flounder with poor infrastructure; a crippling or non-existing job market; deficient medical and educational facilities, and a disproportionate number of political prisoners.
What was abundant in Kurdistan were intelligence agencies dedicated to keeping the restive population disempowered and disenfranchised.
Inevitably, my life felt like a suffocating dead end, a tight cage for a wild bird.
Traveling through books
To overstep the confines imposed on me by the accident of birth, to understand how people living elsewhere were similar and different from me and those I knew, I had one option: Traveling through books.
Kurds say we have no friends but the mountains. I found a friend in books. From a young age I had sheltered in the mystical writings of classical Rumi and Hafez, the rebellious modern poetry of Forough Farrokhzad and Ahmad Shamlou, the enchanting fiction of Sadeq Hedayat and Houshang Golshiri, and so many other marvelous Iranian authors. But at eighteen and before the age of the world wide web, I longed to learn more about life in free countries. What did they fear more than the country that had held me hostage? What forms and thrills would love take in countries where dating was legal?
To access world literature beyond what was translated and censored in the Islamic Republic, I had to improve my English and enter the world of banned books which were smuggled in alongside alcohol, Western film, and music. Limited and expensive, but accessible through the right contacts.
Reading books from across the world was a turning point in my life. Emily Dickinson was right that, “There is no Frigate like a Book/To take us Lands away.” Like Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, I learned that I could rise above my alienations and “live for a cause.” Ann of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery allowed me to imagine a redemptive world. George Orwell’s Animal Farm helped me realize how revolutions like Iran’s can be hijacked. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was a mirror reflecting my realities. Writing had always been a haven and a therapy. But after finding a community in books, writing became my dialogue with authors I admired. Writing gave meaning to my deprived existence, and so it became my malady and my cure.
Receiving admission and a scholarship to the University of Windsor in Canada to study my second Master’s Degree, this time in Creative Writing, I left the country where—in James Joyce’s words—“the old sow eats her farrow.” I was finally free!
Xenophobia is a prison
A few years into my life in exile, shedding my initial naiveties, facing loud and subtle racism, I realized that when it comes to the inner lives of individuals, the rules wouldn’t guarantee anyone’s true entrapment or emancipation. I saw many who could be free but who were chained by their hatred and fear.
Learning more about human nature through reading, traveling, and observing, I realized that curiosity, community-building, and the desire to understand the nuances and diversity of our universe is part of our conditioning.
But we are also by default tribal and conservative; content to categorize humans and events into “good” and “bad,” and get busy paying bills and reproducing. We rarely question assumptions. Individuals vary, not based on race, class, religion, sexual orientation, nationality, class, etc., but based on which side of this inherent contradiction they chose to nourish—and that choice was not strictly shaped by the environment.
No matter how much I embraced my new home and wished to belong, I remained an outsider with an accent—difficult to trust, easy to overlook. I have been called a terrorist and a spy; been told to "go home," as if such a thing ever existed for me; been asked to please not "bomb” their children, as if I had not been a kid whose childhood memories were tinged by gunpowder and violence.
The depth of awareness we invite into our lives plays a vital role in shaping us. We can nourish connections by traveling, or we can read powerful fiction set in foreign countries. If we instead fear those who don’t look or sound like us, we create a solitary confinement and rot in it.
The limits of international travel
Traveling can save us from the restrictions of our minds and assumptions about the rest of the world. The trouble with traveling is its limitations. After all, most of the misunderstood countries are unsafe or difficult to access.
When a group of people remains unknown or wrongfully depicted in media and pop culture, they don’t become enigmas others are curious to decode. They are easily, sometimes unwittingly, dehumanized. For instance, the stateless Kurds have been betrayed by the United States at least eight times—so far. The sense of abandonment gave rise to the proverb of “no friends but the mountains.”
Brutalities are rampant in the human world, but assuming that the perpetrators are always “them,” not “us,” is a delusion. The truth is that compassion and cruelty are so intertwined in the human world that it’s often impossible to neatly draw a border between the two. Here’s an example: Traumatized and vulnerable Yazidi Kurds were grateful to receive aid, only to be asked to “come to Christ” first.
To avoid the pitfalls of “othering,” to comprehend the universe within and outside us, we have a powerful tool: traveling through fiction.
Novels can transform
Powerful literary or genre-bending fiction, set in foreign places and written by people we don’t know well, can offer a depth and breadth of experience far beyond traveling. Traveling does not necessarily take us outside of our minds. We still perceive the new places based on our own terms, not theirs. We may not be able to read between the lines or to understand why people express themselves differently, what vital historical events or influential intellectuals shaped the psyche of the nation we are trying to meet.
While traveling through books, our minds can dodge presuppositions and safely open up to new experiences. As numerous studies, such as the Princeton Social Neuroscience lab, have demonstrated, people who read fiction have better social cognition, a skill that helps with relationships, careers, and self-perception. When sympathizing or empathizing with foreign characters, we get to become someone else for a while. That’s how transformation and transcendence happen, when we slip out of our head and heart and wear someone else’s.
Novels don’t simply inform and educate. According to the Theory of Mind, they can transform us. It’s because of Tommy Orange, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jennifer Steil, and other writers that I have some understanding of the plight of the Native Americans, Blacks, and Jews. An excellent way for me to understand East Africa has been through reading M. G. Vassanji’s novels.
When our humanity is reflected back to us through literary fiction set in hard-to-access places, we understand and accept ourselves better. Reading can liberate people stuck in oppressed countries and save democracies that are threatened today by demagogues who tap into fear to gather votes.
Ava Homa’s debut novel Daughters of Smoke and Fire weaves together fifty years of modern Kurdish history. It won the inaugural PEN Canada–Humber School Writers-in-Exile scholarship. Her collection of short stories Echoes from the Other Land was nominated for the Frank O’Connor short story prize. She has an MA in English and Creative Writing and is a journalist and activist. See more at www.AvaHoma.com.
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