“I Am Kurdish”
I am Kurdish.
Not diluted, not hyphenated.
Not waiting for history to notice me.
You—
you hide behind borrowed scripts,
your tongue wrapped in someone else’s alphabet,
your anthem humming another empire’s song.
You are just an Iranian Kurd.
Bound in margins,
coded, silenced, system-wrapped.
And they call me Turkish.
As if erasure is identity,
as if proximity to the colonizer
is a badge I ever asked for.
Maybe you aren’t as Kurdish as I am.
If your Kurdishness needs a footnote,
if you serve it with apology,
if the word “Kurd” in your mouth
still waits for permission.
I don’t see your calloused feet
on the Zagros trails.
I don’t see your grief
etched into the stone homes they burned.
I am Kurdish.
Raw.
Unmoved.
My blood does not ask for permission
to remember itself.
I am Kurdish.
You are an Iranian Kurd.
You are a Syrian Kurd.
You are an Anatolian Kurd.
You are a Yazidi.
I am Kurdish.