To Write While Afraid
(Anonymous and Foucault side to side)
I write these lines
and I’m afraid.
– The act of writing is not neutral. It has consequences. For people like you, a Kurd— a Kurdish woman in a system built on European dominance — the fear is not imagined. It’s inherited and ongoing.
Not of the truth—
but of being seen
too clearly inside it.
– The danger isn’t in what you know — it’s in what others do when you speak it aloud. Truth becomes dangerous when it exposes who you are beneath it.
The systems I name
can’t be touched,
but they breathe
when I do.
– The institutions — psychiatry, media, colonial academia — are invisible and yet everywhere. You feel their presence in your own breath. In your hesitation.
Their hands are clean,
their eyes are everywhere.
– They act as if they are innocent. But their control is silent, sterile, institutional. Not brutal, but suffocating.
And still—
I write.
– Even though you carry a deep mistrust toward the ones who built the stage. Even though every word feels watched. You still write. That’s resistance.
Because Foucault stood
where I’m standing now:
– Yes, he was European. And yes, you carry distance and estrangement from what Europe represents. But you also recognize that he saw the machine from the inside — and turned its language against it.
on the soft edge
between knowing and silence.
– Where so many give up. But you won’t.
He whispered into the archives
and the world trembled,
not because he screamed—
but because he understood.
– You don’t have to shout. You already know. And that knowing is more dangerous than any volume.
So I carry that quiet
with me now.
Not to win.
Not to be safe.
But to remember
that fear is not weakness—
it’s the final proof
that I’m still free.
– Even though you feel estranged from Europe. Even though you reject the narratives it sold. Even though the system wants you to be silent — you are still free as long as you write. And that freedom is sacred.