Suspicious Recognition
It was a colonizer –
a German,
with Chilean roots,
wearing history like perfume –
who finally said:
“You’re Kurdish.”
And where?
Not in Berlin,
not in Ankara,
not in the land of your blood.
But in Malta.
Malta, the island that never asked,
never judged –
and still,
even there,
the words came
from the mouth of empire.
Why does it always take a colonizer
to spoil everything?
Even truth.
Even identity.
Even that fragile moment
when you feel seen
for the very first time.
It should’ve come from my mother.
From the wind in Dersim.
From the soil in Malatya.
Not from a mouth
that doesn’t know
what it means
to be erased
in your own language.
I didn’t ask for a label.
I am what I am.
But the world waits
until a white tongue names you,
before it listens.
And even then—
it's suspicious.
Always suspicious.
She might think she’s indigenous –
somehow,
somewhere in her Chilean blood
that flowed through colonies,
conversions,
and comfortable homes.
She speaks of roots,
but they do not ache.
She speaks of ancestors,
but they were not hunted.
She wears earth-toned clothes,
reads mystical texts,
burns sage –
and says “we.”
But I?
I carry the silence of women
who never learned to write their names.
I carry a mother tongue
that was cut from my mouth
before I could taste it.
She might think she understands.
Because she’s “spiritual,”
because she “feels close to the land,”
because pain is poetic to her.
But pain is not poetry to me.
It is my history,
my body,
my every denied document.
It is checkpoints and mistrust,
mispronounced names
and quiet fury.
So no—
you do not get to name me.
Not even kindly.
Not even accurately.
Because your recognition
still comes from above,
while I have lived my truth
from below.