Kurdish Women's Stories by Houzan Mahmoud

Author:Houzan Mahmoud
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

CHAPTER TWELVE

My Story

Diba Alikhani

Diba Alikhani was born in 1975 in the city of Sanandaj in East Kurdistan (Iran). She has an MA in Psychology. Diba is a psychologist and a women’s rights activist.

Forty-two years ago, I was born into a middle-class family in Eastern Kurdistan. My father’s family was patriarchal, and my father, who was not religious, was thus seen as unworthy of having a son. After the birth of my third sister, my family led me to believe that it was because of my father’s lack of faith and his arguments against religion that he was not able to have a son. My mother’s family was different, however, because of my oldest uncle, who was a left-wing revolutionary of his time. When I look back at the past, I cannot forget the influence my uncle’s unpopular beliefs and my father’s awareness, borne of his continuous reading, had on me. In the same way, I cannot forget my mother’s kindness, graciousness and honesty. She never had a seed of anger or competitiveness, nor did she plant any of it in her children.

I do not remember my mother hating anyone. Although she was only sixteen years older than me, she matured as she raised me. At the age of six, my childhood clashed with patriarchy and injustice, and I became a caretaker for the rest of the children in my family. The only serenity of those bitter days, which made me the person that I am today, came from the books of Samad Behrangi and Ali Ashraf Darweshan. (Samad Behrangi was influential in children’s literature through teaching children discipline and critical thinking. This was different from the usual, oppressive parenting style of the time.)

When I was in elementary school, it was around the time of the Iran-Iraq War, and the Kurds were creating opposition parties against the Islamic regime in Kurdistan. Slowly, the opposition parties were moved to Southern Kurdistan. There was an air of genocide and mass slaughter in Kurdish cities. The families who had Peshmergas were like bullets; people kept away from them, and my mother’s family was no different. We never had any kind of celebration. Every New Year (Nawroz), my mother promised to feast and celebrate but only when the war had ended and there was peace.

My mother’s grandmother had lost two of her children at the age of eighteen, but she still had not lost hope. She sat in front of a spruce tree in the neighbourhood every day, waiting for her children to come home, until she died. I remember around that time I had started working as a doctor’s secretary and began to read novels and philosophy books. I memorised almost all the famous novels of Romain Rolland, Nikos Kazantzakis, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Ateel Lilian and Yinchi. My poetry at the time was highly influenced by Forough, Shamloo, Neruda and Victor Jara.

After I graduated from high school at the age of seventeen, I chose to teach at the distant forgotten villages and returned to the city for my exams.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.