| Hawzheen Mohammad’s ‘The Land of Blood’ – A Personal Story
It’s no surprise that the Kurds have been called “the orphans of the universe”. The Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world without their own country and centuries of living surrounded by enemies.
Some time after the war, in the evening where light leaves the sorrowful windows of my room, I sit down, reflected in the dark and misty glass counting the raindrops one by one, as they strike and slowly fall away. The sky has become a dark dim shadow. There isn’t the space of a flower in it. It weighs down on me oppressing me, suffocating me. Memories kindle my eye and I see the earth has become a blood coloured veil, providing no room for the freedom of my heart. I know and I am certain about what will ensue on this sad evening.
Memories keep flooding my brain, replaying in front of my eyes. I know that tonight all my dreams will hang from the gallows of this city. My aspiration and desires will wither like old leaves on the walls of houses and museums. So that they appear dried by the prehistoric sunrays.
I wonder in what city what village the armies might have arrested the people, flogging the children and clubbing them to death. I wonder at this time, in which home, which room on which bed, a lovely young girl is offering her body, to save her family. I wonder now, at what place, there is someone, an unknown, unnamed someone, who cannot find their way, no one knows about them.
And the heavens do not receive their voice. I wonder how many parents are sacrificing their lives to save their children and how an amputee can escape from the danger of aerial bombardment. I remember the open eyes of the dead children, the bodies of young and old in every street and house. I ponder for how long the Kurdish nation has to pay five thousand dead.
As year has followed year, times have changed and people have changed too. The Kurds have been ruled by other governments and being Kurdish, a sense of one’s culture and identity has disappeared.
My thoughts are like a stray migrating flock of birds travelling from one country to another, from one forest to another. It will be now, or a little later, they will sit on the electric cable and stop chirping taking refuge in a long nightly dream.
Contemplating, I reflect on the heart of my thoughts, then on the horizon of my hopes and dreams. I’m returning to my roots, setting foot inside the region of blood and death. I’m a gypsy, heeding not the boundaries between one season and another. I do not know the limits of life’s abode; the whereabouts of the gates of deaths, day and nights are the same for me. I sit at the threshold of night’s window, through the tunnel of darkness and look towards a chink of light and call to it “O! Kurdistan. Cradle of pain, glory and love, land of blood, earth of wounds.”
The next day, I sit at night’s window and look down the long road of darkness. Perhaps a breeze carrying my fragrance will blow in. Perhaps tonight an angel has gone astray and found its way to this region carrying a white torch, whose glimmer resembles the sparkling of the stars of my homeland’s skies.
I dream and I wish tonight there was such a rainfall as would let all the trees blossom. Let all the birds learn how to sing night and day. Perhaps in my lonely heart a bud, a cloud, would open too. I sit and think my heart would turn into a lofty cloud pouring down over rosy summits mingling with the evening twilight. I desire no more girls have to give their bodies to rescue their family. No more parents have to see their children dying in front of their eyes; no more children have to live without their parents, and walk road-to-road, knock door to door for food.
I know their lips are sealed in the photograph but I hear their words in my ears enough to fill a book with poems expressing the agony of those children. But by filling a book with poems on them doesn’t stop the youngsters dying in front of their parent’s eyes, doesn’t stop the orphans from starving. Yes, I can gather all the children and fill their stomach with food, but I can’t give them the love that they get from their parents, I can’t pause their tears from dropping from their eyes, where I can see thousands of questions without any answers.
I still ask myself till when children and parents have to suffer from those who do the harm and the innocents get the blame. If I was an angel, I would spray the magic of peace everywhere to make peace everywhere, ever after.
Hawsheen Mohammad 18 years old (Year 12 student)
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