By Ava Homa
Special to The Dialog
My name is Ava Homa and I am the Pen Lecturer-in-Residence. I am Kurdish. We are the world’s largest ethnic group without a state, divided between Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria. We have routinely been denied our basic human rights. In Syria, Kurds have been denied birth certificates because of their ethnicity. In Iran, Kurds have been sent to the fire squads after five-minutes-or-shorter trials. In Turkey, a Kurdish Leader: Leila Zana’s punishment for speaking one sentence in Kurdish was eleven years of imprisonment. Kurdish villages in Turkey have been destroyed and victims were buried in mass graves. In Iraq, 180,000 Kurds lost their lives in a genocide campaign
Photo courtesy Ava Homa.
I grew up seeing lash scars on my father’s back who was incarcerated and tortured for being Kurdish and for not approving of the nefarious Iranian government. When I was a graduate student, I became a correspondent for Asia Daily Newspaper which was shut down and employees were arrested. I fled the town and lived in hiding and horror. Literature, music and art were my haven and shelter, my hope and my salve. Although most of my work stayed unpublished due to censorship, I managed to publish a book and some short stories. My writing, ethnicity, gender and family background had made me a nuisance to IRI and I knew I had to leave to avoid my father’s destiny.
Living in a condition of censorship and suffocation, trapped in an abusive relationship where I had no rights as a woman, being harassed socially, politically and emotionally, living with the inevitable horrors of arrest, torture and the perpetually threatened invasion by the United States which had already attacked our neighbours: Iraq and Afghanistan, I fled the country in which I was born and raised.
I entered Canada on a student visa and after two years, I defended my master’s thesis in English and Creative Writing from University of Windsor. Echoes from the Other Land, my collection of short stories on modern Iranian women—the generation born and raised after the 1979 Islamic Revolution—was published in 2010 by TSAR Publications. Echoes from the Other Land was nominated for the 2011 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and brought me joy and pride. Canada, my treasured country, generously allowed me to experience what it means to be terror-free, to breathe, to write freely, to laugh, to let my scalp feel the breeze … to live.
Pen Canada is an international organization that helps free writers who are persecuted, imprisoned and tortured. Pen fights censorship and documents contemporary international violation of freedom of expression. My role in GBC as the Pen lecturer is to educate Canadian students about the importance of freedom of expression, to engage all students –sheltered or persecuted– in discussions regarding the atrocities happening around the world, to raise awareness, and to encourage critical thinking. The long-term goal of GBC and Pen Canada is to try to stand in the way of injustice. Hopefully, one day human won’t stay silent witnessing slaughters in Syria, Somalia and other places because “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Ava Homa is the author of the critically acclaimed Echoes from the Other Land. Her writings have appeared in Toronto Quartely, Toronto Star, Literary Review of Canada, Rabble, Windsor Review. For more information visit www.AvaHoma.com
