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It was utterly shocking to read the headlines: Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clintons new production company HiddenLight has acquired the rights to Gayle Tzemach Lemmons forthcoming book Daughters of Kobani, a nonfiction work about female Kurdish fighters written by a white American woman.

During the Clinton administration, the U.S. sent Turkey weapons that it used with U.S. knowledge to slaughter tens of thousands of Kurds and destroy their villages. Where was Ms. Clinton all these years? Will her movie shed light on how America has treated Kurds? Will she stay loyal to Kurdish feminism, which is far removed from Corporate Feminism? Will she include Kurdish writers, actors and filmmakers or will she exclude Kurdish women from a TV drama about Kurdish women?

As the author of the recently published Daughters of Smoke and Fire, which weaves fifty years of modern Kurdish history, and the first Kurdish woman to publish a novel in English, I carry the heavy burden of both representation and education. Ever since my debut novel was released in May, I have heard from numerous audience readers and interviewers that the only thing readers really know about Kurds is that Americans have betrayed you.

Stateless Kurds have been overlooked in the mainstream media, except for when represented as victims of the Iraqi dictators genocide in the 90s and as girls with guns in the past few years, the all-female militia defeating one of the most vicious forces of our time, the Islamic State group (also known ISIS or ISIL). Its true that America has backstabbed the Kurds repeatedly over the past century, most recently in Oct. 2019 when former president Trump ordered American troops to withdraw from Rojava, the Kurdish region of northern Syria, and leave Kurds at the mercy of Turkey. Trump did this after Kurds globally hailed as the most effective ground forces against ISIS sacrificed over 11,000 lives to fight ISIS.

In 2007, the U.S. allowed Turkey to carry out a heavy bombing campaign against Iraqi Kurds. In the 1970s, Henry Kissinger first armed the Kurds to rise against Saddam Hussein and then let 40,000 of them die as he made a deal with the Shah of Iran and withdrew his support. The Treaty of Lausanne, which the U.S. supported in 1923, denied Kurds a country what the 1920 Treaty of Svres had promised. The treaty subjected us to a century of unimaginable suffering at the hands of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, from gassing and genocide to mass incarcerations, systemic suppressions and cultural genocide.

When speaking to readers about the Kurds, I have to explain too much: why were no longer on the map, why our voices are mutilated, why our women have to fight in the 21st century and dont get a chance to allow their creativity to flourish. My book is dedicated to Kurdish women for everything we have been fighting national chauvinism of the states ruling us, male chauvinism, war, poverty, displacement and more.

Yes, America has betrayed the Kurds eight times, but theres much more to us than that. We are masters of rising from our ashes. We know how to be resilient, and a world ravaged by a pandemic has much to learn from us. Read our stories not only the ones written about us, but also, and more importantly, those written by us.

Thats not to say I dont value allies. If someone with a large platform tells our stories with enough sensitivity and responsibility, public awareness may reduce the number of attacks on us. They can do a lot of good for Kurds, for minorities, for humanity. But please dont talk about minorities as if we arent here; as if we can only be talked about, never talked to; as if movies made by us are not as valuable as those made about us; as if we can only be third person, and never first person.

Ava Homa is an activist, a journalist and the critically acclaimed author of Daughters of Smoke and Fire (HarperCollins, 2020).

Continued here:
Will Hillary Clinton tell the whole truth in her TV drama about Kurds? - Toronto Star