Why Should I Believe My Fate Is Tied to Red Kurdistan?
They say it belongs to me,
this brief flicker on an old map—
Red Kurdistan,
born in Soviet silence,
died before it could speak my name.
But why should I claim it?
Why should I bleed for a ghost
built by those who crushed
my great-great-grandfather’s bones
on someone else’s warfront?
They say it was a seed.
I say it was a scar.
They say it was hope.
I say it was strategy.
I never saw it.
It never saw me.
And now—look at the world.
A “new order,” they call it.
But the hands haven’t changed,
only the gloves.
Same hunger.
Same empires.
Just quieter voices
and shinier screens.
They smile behind digital masks,
sell silence in global tongues,
and praise “progress”
while the names of the erased
rot quietly beneath their applause.
They talk about Red Kurdistan
as if it is a home I must return to.
But where is it?
Where does Kurdistan begin?
Where does it end?
No map has ever answered me.
They’ve cut it so many times,
I can only find it in the ache in my chest,
in the shape of my breath,
in the words no one lets me speak.
They point to Shanidar Cave in “Iraq”
and say: this is your beginning.
But I am not from a fossil.
I am not a relic for your museum.
I am not born of a cave
in a country drawn with colonial ink
on a desk that never knew me.
So tell me—why should I believe
my fate is tied to it?
And yet…
There’s something in the way
my heart twists
when I hear its name—
like a song I’ve never heard,
but somehow already know.
Maybe my fate isn’t tied to it.
Maybe it’s tied to me.
Maybe I carry it
not because I owe it,
but because I remember
what could have been.
Because I still want a place
that almost was.
And maybe—
in a world that never meant to remember us—
that longing is enough.