San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
“Daughters of Smoke and Fire” shows the grim realities of Kurdish women.
“Daughters of Smoke and Fire” is a brutally honest chronicle of the problems that thwart the lives of 40 million stateless Kurds.
Ava Homa’s “Daughters of Smoke and Fire” is a heartwrenching narrative about how oppression, political persecution and racism slowly destroy a Kurdish family.
Full of powerful writing and crushing violence that reflects the reality Kurds face every day, this novel is also a literary event that merits attention: It’s the first to be published in English by a female Kurdish writer.
The story is set in Iran and takes readers into the core of a Kurdish family. The narrative focuses on Leila and her younger brother, Chia. Leila, who struggles with her studies and suffers the cultural misogyny that surrounds her, dreams of making films that give a voice to her people and show the world the painful reality of Kurdish existence.
Chia, predisposed to gravitate toward political turmoil and rebellion because of their father’s past imprisonment and torture, is a budding intellectual who is obsessed with pursuing justice and dreams of becoming a lawyer. As the siblings grow, Chia’s activism leads to his arrest and disappearance in Tehran. Leila looks for him desperately until she finds him, and then helps her brother get his writing online, which also puts her in mortal danger.
More than a novel, “Daughters of Smoke and Fire” is an evocative and brutally honest chronicle of the problems that thwart the lives of 40 million stateless Kurds who are forced to speak a different language, can’t aspire to quality education and jobs, and face constant oppression by the government.
They are a people whose identity has been crushed, but who have turned inward to protect themselves and aren’t afraid to look for new paths toward justice despite the constant risk of death.
Homa is a talented storyteller who uses multilayered characters to present the struggles of many people — and she doesn’t mince words, especially when it comes to the way Kurdish women are treated.
“In this country we are subhuman. We’re women, and we’re also Kurdish.” Women are at the center of this novel.
They must cover themselves. They are worth less than men and have almost no protections under the law. Leila feels her shoulders are “heavy beneath the daily cruelties of living as a woman.” However, Homa knows there is also a universal sense of belonging that brings all oppressed people together: “The rain splattered down after a loud thunderclap. I lifted my face and palms to the sky. I wasn’t alone, I saw then. People in Rwanda, Bosnia, plantations, and indigenous residential schools in North America were standing shoulder to shoulder with the Kurds.”
At once a feminist text, a story of survival in the face of adversity and an exploration of cruelty through the eyes of those who are powerless, “Daughters of Smoke and Fire” is a superb narrative that marks the arrival of a new voice in contemporary fiction.